Enolia P. McMillan

BALTIMORE (AP) - Enolia P. McMillan, the first female president of the NAACP and a figure in the civil rights movement, died Tuesday of natural causes. She was 102.

McMillan, an educator whose career spanned 42 years, died at her home in Stevenson, the organization said.

She became a teacher in 1927 and crusaded for equal pay for black teachers and better schools for black students. She helped to reactivate the city chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1935 and was active in the organization for more than five decades.

McMillan also held the title of NAACP national president for many years. The role at the time was largely ceremonial, but she had considerable influence over the group's agenda and daily operations. She also played a key role in persuading the NAACP to move its national headquarters from New York to Baltimore in 1986.

Kweisi Mfume, former president and CEO of the NAACP and a close friend of the McMillan family, said she was a "pillar of the civil rights movement."

"She was very much the matriarch of the NAACP," Mfume told The (Baltimore) Sun. "She was a fighter who was relentless in pursuing justice."

The eldest of four children, she was born Oct. 20, 1904, in Willow Grove, Pa., to a father who was born a slave in Virginia and a mother who was a domestic worker.

McMillan received a bachelor's degree in education from Howard University in 1927 and a master's from Columbia University in 1933.
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