"Henrietta was born as Loretta Pleasant in 1920, in a small shack, on a dead-end road, overlooking a train depot in Roanoke, Virginia. When her mother died in childbirth four years later, Henrietta's father sent her, along with her eight siblings back to Clover, Virginia, where his family still farmed the tobacco fields on which their ancestors had worked as slaves- and on which, one might argue, Henrietta's legacy began a hundred years before her birth. She lived a common and difficult life, working in those tobacco fields, cooking and cleaning for her family, and worrying about what would happen to her children when she was gone"(Gabbay)."She was described as a warm, glamorous woman with painted red nails who loved to dance. She also had a philandering husband and one of her five children Elise was sent to the Hospital for the Negro Insane"(Rosamund).
Her family had lived in poverty for as long as she could speak, yet on any given day you could find more than five people in her house, three of them could have been complete strangers. She helped everyone equally. Her leadership, although it was small, had impacted many people in her community greatly. She helped many of those in situations like hers. Henrietta would allow people she had never talked to into her home and give them a decent meal. She would provide a warm place to sleep for the night, and give those in her community a small bit of hope and safety that they needed.