Richard Graham, an original member of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission who was moved to help found the National Organization for Women by what he saw as the commission’s intransigence on sex-discrimination issues, died Sept. 24 at his home in Royal Oak, Md. He was 86.
Mr. Graham, a Chicago native, died after suffering a stroke several days earlier, his daughter Nan Graham said.
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At the time a Republican, Graham was one of the inaugural group of five commissioners appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to the EEOC in 1965. Born out of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the commission was created to address workplace discrimination.
As Mr. Graham would later say in interviews, he quickly came to feel that while the commission was willing to tackle issues of race discrimination, it concerned itself far less with those of sex discrimination, despite the inclusion in the Civil Rights Act of Title VII, which specifically prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion or sex.
Among the issues on which Mr. Graham worked in 1965 was an effort to abolish sex-based employment advertisements — the “Help Wanted, Male” and “Help Wanted, Female” notices that were a familiar presence in newspapers of the day. The commission as a whole, however, declined to impose such a ban. (In 1968, the EEOC ruled that sex-segregated job advertising was illegal in most cases.)
NOW was founded in 1966 by more than two dozen people, including Mr. Graham, who was its first vice president.
In news accounts of the founding Mr. Graham was said to have quietly told several of the organization’s founders, among them Betty Friedan, that to truly advance the cause of gender equality, American women would need a political lobby on a par with the NAACP.
Mr. Graham, a Democrat from the late 1960s on, was sometimes publicly critical of NOW in recent years, faulting what he saw as its emphasis on abortion rights and equality for lesbians at the expense of more general issues like child care and health care.
But in 1991, reflecting on the improved status of American women since the 1960s, he told Newsday, “There is pleasure in having been part of the change.”