McLaurin, Virginia, 1909?-2022

Virginia McLaurin, a daughter of Black sharecroppers who, as a centenarian, became an internet celebrity with her exuberant dance upon meeting Barack and Michelle Obama in 2016. Virginia Campbell was born in Cheraw, S.C. South Carolina had no official record of her birth, but Ms. McLaurin said she believed her birth date to have been recorded in a family Bible as March 12, 1909. Government documents later issued to her recorded the year of her birth as 1916 or 1917. She was widowed twice, and she got her surname from one of her husbands, Marshall McLaurin. Ms. McLaurin moved to Washington around 1939 as part of the Great Migration of millions of Black people from the American South to Northern, Midwestern and Western states that had begun in the 1910s. She worked in a laundry and at a shipyard, among other places. In retirement, she devoted much of her time to volunteering in local schools.