Author Dies Who Got Fame At 100

Bessie Delany, who with her sister found fame after age 100 as co-author of a best-selling memoir on growing up black before the Civil Rights era, died Monday. She was 104.

Delany died at home in her sleep, said Amy Hill Hearth, who helped her and her surviving sister, 106-year-old Sarah, write “Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years.”

The reminiscence, by turns poignant and playful, has become a high school and college text as well as a play titled “Having Our Say,” which is currently on Broadway.

A. Elizabeth Delany was one of 10 children who grew up in Raleigh, N.C., where her father, freed from slavery at age 7, became a school vice principal and the nation’s first elected black Episcopal bishop.

All of the Delany children worked their way through college.