Enolia McMillan, the first female president of the NAACP and an educator whose career spanned 42 years, died Tuesday at her home in Stevenson. She was 102.
Ms. McMillan, whose father was born a slave, became a teacher in 1927 and quickly became a crusader for equal pay for black teachers and better schools for black students. In 1935, she helped to reactivate the Baltimore chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and remained an active force in it for more than 50 years. She 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, called Ms. McMillan a “pillar of the civil rights movement.”
“She was very much the matriarch of the NAACP,” he said. “She was a fighter who was relentless in pursuing justice.”
The eldest of four children, Ms. McMillan was born Oct. 20, 1904, in Willow Grove, Pa., to John Pettigen, who was born a slave in Virginia, and Elizabeth Fortune Pettigen, a domestic worker.
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The family settled in Baltimore when she was about 8. She graduated from high school in 1922.
Her eldest granddaughter, Tiffany Beth McMillan, said Ms. McMillan wanted to be a doctor–a pediatrician because she liked children–but, heeding the realities of a black woman’s opportunity in that day, she decided to become a teacher, commuting by train to Washington to attend Howard University. She received a bachelor’s degree in education in 1927.
In 1933, she earned her master’s degree from Columbia University. Her thesis was “The Factors Affecting Secondary Education for Negroes in Maryland Counties.”
In 1935, she returned to Baltimore to teach. That same year, she played a key role in reactivating the city chapter of the NAACP.
Ms. McMillan was elected president of the Baltimore chapter of the NAACP in 1969.
In addition to leading the Baltimore branch and the Maryland state conference of the NAACP, she held the title of NAACP national president for many years. The role at the time was largely ceremonial, but Ms. McMillan wielded much influence over the organization’s national policy and its daily operations.
Ms. McMillan stayed active in civil rights well into her golden years. In 1985, she led a protest against South Africa’s apartheid system in front of the country’s embassy in Washington. In 1998, she joined NAACP leaders in Atlanta for the group’s annual convention.