Lucy Williams, 100, a homemaker, was known throughout her Park Manor neighborhood as ”Sweet Lucy.”
Services for Mrs. Williams will be held at 8 p.m. Wednesday in Commonwealth Community Church, 140 W. 81st St. She died at home Saturday.
”It was not unusual for neighbors to bring their small children to sit at her knee and, in the African tradition, to listen to history from an elder,” her daughter, Eva Jackson, said.
Mrs. Williams spoke of the hardships endured by herself and those around her in the South when she was a child.
”Just a week ago she was still agonizing over having missed going to school as a child,” her daughter said. ”Education was always an obsession with her. . . . When her children were in school, she took classes herself and received a GED certificate. When I went to college and got a bachelor`s degree, she was proud, proud, proud.”
Mrs. Williams and her late husband, Henry, came to Chicago in 1923. She worked first as a domestic, but principally as a mother. She reared her own nine children; two grandchildren, after her daughter died; and two children of a sister, under similar circumstances.
Survivors, besides her daughter, include two other daughters, Murdell Benson and Mayola Hammond; a son, John; 25 grandchildren; 45 great-
grandchildren; three great-great-grandchildren; a sister; and two brothers.
