Willie Grace Campbell, 90; Global Activist for Women’s Rights

When Willie Grace Campbell was working on her master’s degree in sociology at the University of Michigan in the late 1930s, she dreamed of “becoming another Margaret Mead.”

But the times and circumstances prevented her from pursuing that dream. She got married a year before receiving her master’s degree in 1939. World War II began two years later, and before it ended Campbell had given birth to two of her three children. And in those days, she recalled, “you didn’t try to carry both a career and raise children.”

Instead, in 1945, she joined the League of Women Voters, which she described as the best place for an intellectual challenge.

“It was serious volunteer work, and in terms of my life I wanted to do something serious,” Campbell told Los Angeles magazine in 2004.

Campbell, who became an influential social activist over the last half-century, launching voter education projects in American inner cities in the 1960s and promoting women’s rights in Third World countries, died of heart failure Monday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 90.

“She was a mentor to many of the women in politics and the advocacy community,” Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), a longtime friend of Campbell, told The Times. “She was always the youngest [acting] one in the group, with a ready smile, enormous energy and zest and wisdom.”

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) said in a statement: “Willie Campbell was an inspiration to me and many others in her unflagging engagement, in her respect for all points of view, in her commitment to civil rights and justice, in her grace and wit, and in her great gift for enduring friendships.”

In 1954, Campbell went from being a local League of Women Voters board member in Indianapolis to Indiana state president. In 1959, she joined the league’s national board and served intermittently until 1972.

As head of the League of Women Voters Education Fund during the civil rights era in the 1960s, Campbell urged board members “to get into the fray” and help inner cities. Despite initial resistance from community leaders, she launched voter education projects in six cities.

Campbell, who had been a member of the Indiana Advisory Committee of the U.S. Conference on Civil Rights in 1958-59, participated in the first White House Conference on Civil Rights in 1965. She urged the League of Women Voters to use litigation, in addition to legislation, to challenge restrictions on voting rights, and she went on to head the league’s litigation department.

In the mid-1970s, Campbell became involved with the National Women’s Political Caucus and its offshoot, the National Women’s Education Fund, which trained women to become campaign managers and candidates for elected office.

Campbell also served as president and board chairwoman of OEF International (formerly the Overseas Education Fund of the League of Women Voters), an international organization working to empower and advance women in Third World countries.

Nancy Rubin, former head of the U.S. Delegation to the United Nations’ Human Rights Commission who worked with Campbell on the board of OEF International, said Campbell was “an absolute visionary who understood over 30 years ago that women’s equality was not an issue of political correctness but an issue of social justice, enabling the full realization of human potential.

“Throughout the world, she facilitated micro-enterprise development projects and formed the first women, law and development nexus to empower women,” Rubin said.

Campbell went on to serve on the board of Women, Law and Development International, an international organization committed to the defense and promotion of women’s rights.

In the early 1990s, President Clinton appointed her vice chairwoman of the board of directors of the African Development Foundation. The U.S. government agency provides small grants to African communities and African-owned businesses to stimulate economic growth. She remained vice chairwoman until her death.

Ernest Green, managing director of public finance in the Washington office of Lehman Bros. and a former board chairman of the foundation, recalled making trips to southern and eastern Africa with Campbell.

“On all of these trips, Willie had more energy and was able to cover more ground than people who were 30 to 40 years her junior,” Green said. “We were in places where there were not paved sidewalks and in many places not luxury hotels, and yet Willie had a real feel for relating to people.”

Green described Campbell as “outgoing, engaging, knowledgeable and willing to debate a point.”

“She had opinions and ideas, and she had experience under her belt, so she wasn’t just trying to bowl you over with a point but was able to relate it to actual occurrences,” said Green, a member of the Little Rock Nine, the group of black students who integrated Little Rock, Ark.’s, Central High in 1957.

“In almost every arena that she touched, she left a group of people who were inspired by her ideas and her energy.”

The second child of a canned-goods salesman and a homemaker, Campbell was born Willie Grace Dickins on Aug. 26, 1915, in Louisville, Ky., and grew up across the Ohio River in Cincinnati.

While studying sociology at the University of Cincinnati, Campbell told Los Angeles magazine, “the whole big world opened up. It was my religious experience.” That included, she said, discovering that “race has no scientific basis. It’s irrelevant.”

Campbell graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1937. When her fiance, John A. Campbell, a medical student, moved to Detroit to begin an internship and residency, she followed and enrolled in graduate school at the University of Michigan. After they married in 1938, they moved to Indianapolis, where her husband eventually became chairman of the department of radiology at Indiana University.

In 1971, the Campbells moved to Los Angeles, where her husband established the radiology department at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center.

Since the late 1970s, Campbell had divided her time between a condominium on Bunker Hill in Los Angeles and an apartment in Washington. In December 2002, she had surgery for two leaking heart valves.

“It slowed her down a little, but she still traveled to Washington occasionally and really did more of her work by phone,” said her daughter Nancy Duff Campbell, co-president of the National Women’s Law Center in Washington.

“I’ll always be action oriented,” Campbell told Los Angeles magazine. “One thing I’ve also come to see is that it’s almost fortuitous that I ended up doing volunteer work instead of getting a job. I’m not bound by particular obligations. I can follow my own motivations -- which don’t rely on God or anyone but are based on my belief that we really have to resolve our problems ourselves.

“No one else is going to help us. It’s that simple.”

In addition to her daughter and husband, Campbell is survived by her son, Duncan Campbell of Bloomington, Ind.; another daughter, Jamie Campbell of Reno; three grandchildren; five step-grandchildren; and three step-great-grandchildren.

A celebration of Campbell’s life is pending.