Oseola McCarty washed other people’s clothes by hand in Hattiesburg, Mississippi for 75 years. In a story retold September 30, 2026, she is the woman who saved $150,000 doing it and gave every dollar away.
She was 87 when she handed her life savings to the University of Southern Mississippi for scholarships. She had not attended the university. She did not know the students who would get the money.
“I can’t do everything,” she said. “But I can do something to help somebody. And what I can do I will do.”
The endowment passed $1 million on March 7, 2025. Twenty students get an award every year, and more than 130 have had one so far, among them Destiny Johnson, who graduated in nursing. In 1998 the university gave McCarty the first honorary doctorate it had ever awarded. She died in September 1999.
Do the arithmetic. Seventy five years of laundry, paid in cash, in Mississippi, is a working life with no raise structure and no pension in it. One hundred fifty thousand dollars out of that is not frugality. It is a decision made several thousand times in a row, by a woman who could have spent any one of those dollars on herself.
“When I leave this world, I can’t carry nothing away from here,” she said. “I don’t regret one single penny.”
A million dollars, built out of singles, by a pair of hands in a washtub.
