Eva Hester Martin is the granddaughter of Matilda "Mama Tildy" Brown, who had been enslaved on the Fort Hill Plantation.
Eva Martin's great-grandfather Sharper had chosen the surname Brown to replace the Calhoun name they had been given by their owners. Mama Tildy frequently talked about Sharper's intelligence and enjoyment of telling stories and reading to his grandchildren. Her daughter Anna, Eva Martin's mother, believed that her grandfather may have once lived in the South Carolina Low Country, where enslaved African laborers had perfected the process of cultivating rice, because he also knew how to grow the crop. Anna kept the new family name, Brown, rather than her father's last name, Williams, in honor of her grandparents, who had raised her.
After completing high school, Eva Martin earned a degree in Chemistry from the Colored Normal Industrial and Mechanical College of South Carolina (now South Carolina State University), married her sweetheart John Martin, and enjoyed a distinguished career as a medical laboratory technician in Chicago and Los Angeles before retiring and moving to Greenville in the early 1970s.
