Miss Anita Stroud’s life of compassion grew from the roots of her early childhood experiences as an abandoned child. She was born on June 26, 1900 in a tenant farmer’s shack on a sharecropping plantation in Chester, South Carolina. Working from dawn until dusk, harvesting peanuts, cotton and sugar cane, she experienced a life of misery from an early age.

Included in this misery was little food for a growing child. “I cried a stomach full of tears in the cotton fields”, she often recalled. “There were nights that I was so hungry that I couldn’t sleep”. Long before she grew up and perhaps during some of her sleepless nights, Anita Stroud had a dream. She shared this dream in many conversations as well as in interviews with reporters for newspapers and magazine articles. The following story of her dream has been told and printed many times.

“When I was a child, I promised God if he would just let me get grown, I’d buy me a big farm with houses with no holes for it to rain in. All the children with no place to go and no food to eat could come and live in my houses. We’d have horses and cows and we’d have shortening in the cornbread and eggs to eat.”

Anita kept the dream alive as she toiled in the fields by day or stayed awake at night wishing for food and a better way of life. She lived each day with the expectation that her dream would someday become a reality. Although her dream was deferred, it did not “dry up like a raisin in the sun”. Because of inspiration which she received from her grandmother, Granny Ann, she was assured that a better day was coming. Granny Ann was born a slave and lived to be over 100 years old. Although Granny Ann couldn’t read, she had learned Bible's truths and scriptures which increased her faith and sustained her during her lifetime as a slave. Granny Ann often shared Bible stories with Anita and other children.