CHAPEL HILL - Rebecca Clark's life spanned the year slave-turned-integrationist-hero Booker T. Washington died to the year Barack Obama becomes president.

Orphaned at 11, she had to drop out of her senior year of high school during the Great Depression. Working university-related jobs that paid as little as $7 a week, she spent more than 70 years urging local black residents to vote -- even driving them to the polls herself.

By the time she died Saturday at age 93, Clark was for many a heroine in her own right. Today, her name adorns the UNC laundry facility on Cameron Avenue and a local NAACP award for political service. In 2006, the Chapel Hill Town Council proclaimed her birthday "Rebecca Clark Day."

"We will not see another of her ilk because of her history, someone who was born in the darkest hours of segregation and having great personal tragedy to befall her," said UNC professor Reginald Hildebrand, who got his job in the 1980s in part because Clark recommended him to former vice chancellor Harold Wallace.

"To have someone overcome the kind of obstacles that she overcame to achieve the kind of influence, respect -- almost reverence -- that she had in this community ... that would be hard to match."

Born Rebecca Sellers in Chatham County in 1915, Clark moved with her parents to a log cabin off Jones Ferry Road when she was six months old.

Her mother died when she was 8 years old, her father when she was 11, so she and her four younger siblings were placed out as orphans in the homes of family members.

She and her little sister went to live with some of her father's relatives in Greensboro. After four years there, she moved in with family in Chapel Hill and started attending the segregated Orange County Training School in the black Northside neighborhood.

During the school year and in the summer months, she worked as a maid at UNC's Old East dormitory for a dollar a day. Before she could finish high school, she went to live with and work for a university professor and his wife.

She married John Clark in 1933. and they had their first child, also named John. Later their second son, Doug, was born. The two sons made the Clarks name famous with their touring R&B band the Hot Nuts.

In 1937, Clark went to work as a maid at the Carolina Inn. During the war years, she worked at the UNC laundry building that now bears her name.

After that she began working as a baby nurse, going into homes to care for newborns for six to eight weeks at a stretch. In 1953, at a time when N.C. Memorial Hospital did not welcome black nurses, the doctors and nurses in the OB-GYN department there helped her train and prepare for the state board. She passed three years later and worked at UNC Hospitals as a licensed practical nurse until she retired in 1979.

The Clarks raised their sons in the Pine Knolls neighborhood, which Mrs. Clark had encouraged university leaders to develop near the Carrboro town line as housing for black university workers. Next door, bandleader Doug Clark built his "mansion" with a huge glass window overlooking Crest Street.

Clark was politically active through all those years. Hers was an important endorsement for political candidates seeking support from the local black community.

"You could count on her for compassion, but she would not hesitate to let someone know when she thought they had crossed a line," said Anita Badrock, a local human resources executive who served with Clark on the town's Personnel Appeals Committee. "She had a great sense of what was right and decent."

And, despite her failing health, she made sure house-bound voters filled out their absentee ballots and turned them in.

"She had a right to be tired and worn-out even though she never gave that impression," Hildebrand said. "She was a woman of such strength."

jesse.deconto@newsobserver.com or 932-8760.