Jane Robinson Gillespie filled her 90 years with community service, guided by her unwavering commitment to peacemaking and social justice.
Cleveland citizen Jane Robinson Gillespie filled her 90 years with community service, “guided by her unwavering commitment to peacemaking and social justice,” according to an obituary the family published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
The family wrote:
“From the late 1950’s until 1985, she served in many different capacities at Garden Valley Neighborhood House, one of Cleveland’s original settlement houses in a chronically blighted section known as The Forgotten Triangle.”
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Gillespie volunteered to help identify instances of intentional racial discrimination by realtors in Cleveland’s southeast suburbs. She visited real estate offices, posing “as an interested house hunter, followed by an African-American volunteer on a similar mission, determining afterward if they had received conflicting information. This tactic, and the resulting embarrassing publicity for local realtors, was helpful in breaking down discriminatory barriers in all-white suburbs.”
From the late 1970s to the late 1990s, she volunteered to help former prison inmates find satisfactory living quarters and meaningful employment as they re-entered society.
“Jane’s motto for living was taken from a Bible passage: ‘What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.’”
***
This post was contributed by Alana Baranick, a freelance obituary writer. She is director of the Society of Professional Obituary Writers and chief author of Life on the Death Beat: A Handbook for Obituary Writers.
