Daniel Sturkie

From The Guardian's Obituary

Her official birth details were established only in 1997, when she challenged a group of students to find the certificate that records her as having been born Eartha Mae Keith in the town of North, South Carolina. The name she had for her father was William Kitt. He was a white sharecropper who abandoned Eartha's mother. The destitute black-Cherokee young woman persuaded black neighbours to take in Eartha and her younger half-sister Pearl. Pearl was dark-skinned and pretty, but Eartha had bushy red hair, which she later dyed, and lighter skin; she was dubbed "that yella gal".