Sylvester Magee’s headstone says that he was born on May 29, 1841, in North Carolina, and died on October 21, 1971, in Mississippi. That’s right… that would make him 130 years old at the time of his death. Magee’s obituary also claimed that he was the “last American slave.” According to stories he told, he was sold at Enterprise, Mississippi, and served as a gravedigger throughout the Vicksburg siege.
On his 124th birthday, Sylvester Magee was sent a congratulatory letter from President Lyndon B. Johnson, and he was named by President Nixon as the oldest citizen in the United States in the 1960s. To this day, it remains a mystery as to whether or not Magee was, in fact, born in the 1840s and raised as a slave, or if parts of his story are just that—a story.