Born in Martin County, North Carolina, Georgina Smallwood grew up on a farm. Her father was a sharecropper, and she and her siblings helped to work the fields. It wasn’t an easy life, but they always got by. Her father made sure that she and her other sisters would be able to attend college, which they did. Smallwood went on to become a school teacher, where she taught in white schools, where she experienced segregation and racism firsthand. She credits her parents with providing her with the life skills to be able to understand and deal with those situations, then and now.