LISTEN: Miriam Center's wit and irrepressible personality saw her through decades of change in the Hostess City of the South. GPB's Orlando Montoya brings this brief retrospective.
Savannah icon, author, real estate agent, civic activist and spiritual guide Miriam Center has died.
A liberal white Jewish woman, she stood out in Savannah’s conservative white male-dominated social and political scenes in the '60s, '70s and '80s.
She broke down racial barriers to home ownership, selling a home in downtown Savannah to jazz bassist Ben Tucker, a Black man, in the early 1970s.
She befriended the legendary songwriter Johnny Mercer and the infamous antiques dealer Jim Williams, leading to stories that became books and plays.
In 2015, she told this reporter that her outsider identities in the Hostess City never bothered her.
"I don’t give a damn what other people think," she said. "I think if you are who you are, it doesn’t make a difference what other people think, if you’re just true to yourself. And most people aren’t. Most people in Savannah, the thing you’re talking about is everybody is putting on a show of how polite they can be, how accepting they can be. And then they go home and live behind their lace curtains."
The divorced wife of a Savannah alderman, she ran unsuccessfully for public office twice.
But among her many roles and identities, the one that she cherished most was that of daughter and mother, she said.
For a 2025 story, she talked about the homes where she grew up and the homes where she raised her children.
"I remember the first time I walked down the street — [my son] Henry must’ve been around 4 — and one of the little children said, 'That’s Henry’s mother,'" Center said. "And I must have been 28 and I thought 'God, I’m not just me anymore. I’m somebody’s mother.' I had a totally different identity."
Her obituary lists many prominent Savannahians as pall bearers and honorary pall bearers.
Center was 99 years old.
