Duira B. Ward

Ward, Duira B.
Rachel Duira Baldinger Ward died of a pulmonary embolis in Branford, Connecticut, on February 23, at the age of 101. The eldest daughter of Reverend and Mrs. Albert Baldinger, "Dewy" Ward was born in 1913 and raised in Butler, Pennsylvania. After attending Oberlin College, she married Dr. F. Champion Ward. She concentrated on the management of her home and the rearing of her daughter and two sons until the Ford Foundation brought her family to India in 1954. There she began to reach beyond hearth and home, joining food and toy drives for local refugees.
In 1959, she moved with her family to Greenwich, Connecticut. Having lived in a nation run by people of color, she was appalled by the violence being visited upon African Americans struggling for their rights. Overcoming a horror of public speaking, she became a politic champion of the disenfranchised: the nagging conscience of the richest township in America.
She was an active and lifelong Democrat; served on the Board of the NAACP of Greenwich; lobbied on behalf of health aides and domestic workers; and served on the board of the Fair Housing Coalition. In 1967 she was a delegate to the "Pacem in Terris" conference in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1968 she persuaded local grocers to donate a truckload of food to the Poor Peoples' Campaign.
In 1969 she began a decade-long tenure on the Greenwich Board of Social Services, and later became the founding President of the reconstituted National Conference on Social Welfare. In 1980 she chaired Connecticut's Income Maintenance delegation to the White House Conference on Children. She became President of the Connecticut Association for Human Services, which presented her with its Director's Award in 1989, one of many awards she received for her activism.
Elected the first female President of the Oberlin Alumni Association, she not only revitalized the Association with her innovations but championed the rights of Oberlin students during a period of turmoil. In 1996 she received Oberlin's Alumni Medal, and in 2010 the Alumni Association named their new center in her honor.
Her family and friends will forever miss her warmth, grace, wisdom, abiding affection, effervescent wit, untiring conscience, and penetrating acuity.
Her husband preceded her in death in 1997. She is survived by her sister, Ruth Baldinger Clark of Longview, Washington; her children Geoffrey C. Ward of New York City; Andrew Ward of Davis, California; and Helen Ward of South Portland, Maine; her grandchildren Nathan, Garrett, and Kelly Ward; Jacob and Casey Ward; and Danny and Katie Lowe; and her great grandchildren Nicholas and Nina Ward, Simon and Everson Ward, Josephine and Juniper Ward, and Lucia and Leila Federico.
The family requests that donations in her name be made to the NAACP, the Southern Poverty Law Center, or the Oberlin College Scholarship Fund.