Oseola McCarty; Humble Philanthropist

Oseola McCarty, a washerwoman with a sixth-grade education and an enormous generosity that made her a national folk celebrity, has died. She was 91.

She died of colon cancer Sunday at her home.

McCarty accumulated $250,000 over 75 years of laundering and ironing other people’s clothes in her home. She gained fame in 1995 when she gave $150,000 to a scholarship fund for blacks at the University of Southern Mississippi. At the time, she had never even visited the school.

“I had been thinking for a long time . . . since I was in school. . . . I wanted to give it to the college,” she told The Times in 1997. “They used to not let colored people go out there, but now they do, and I think they should have it. . . . I just want the scholarship to go to some child who needs it. I’m too old to get an education, but they can.”

Why the University of Southern Mississippi? Because it was in her hometown.

McCarty’s donation encouraged others to give money to the university for needy students, and the Oseola McCarty Endowed Scholarship Fund was begun. More than $330,000 had been raised at the time of her death.

Nine students have received the scholarships and three have graduated.

McCarty wanted to become a nurse, but quit school after the sixth grade to help support her mother, grandmother and an aunt.

After her donation to the school, McCarty, who never married or learned to drive, received a Presidential Citizen’s Medal from President Clinton in a White House ceremony and was his guest at a dinner of the Congressional Black Caucus. She appeared on television shows with David Letterman, Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters. She was given an honorary degree by Harvard University and another in nursing by Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis. She carried the Olympic torch in the 1996 Olympics, and that New Year’s Eve, she dropped the ball in New York’s Times Square.

McCarty also came to Southern California in 1997 as grand marshal of the San Bernardino Black History Parade and to speak before Long Beach Town Hall.

“I used not to talk too much,” she told The Times. “But now I talk more. And I enjoy traveling and meeting all those people.”

The humble woman who before 1995 had left home only to walk to the grocery store and to go to church also promoted her unpretentious philosophies about life in a 1996 book, “Simple Wisdom for Rich Living.”

“It’s not the ones that make the big money, but the ones who know how to save who get ahead,” she wrote.

“Oseola McCarty is one of those women whose face has ‘wise’ written all over it,” said actor Danny Glover in presenting her with an Essence Award in 1996.

“She is a kind and generous spirit who has taken the biblical adage ‘It’s better to give than receive’ to heart.”