Benjamin F. McLaurin: Labor Leader, Political Activist

Benjamin F. McLaurin, 83, a longtime labor leader who helped organize sleeping-car porters in the 1920s and 1930s. A native of Jacksonville, Fla., McLaurin joined the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1926 and later served as a vice president and national secretary for the union. In 1941, he was national secretary for a planned march on Washington to protest discrimination in war plants. The march was called off after President Franklin D. Roosevelt outlawed racial discrimination in the factories. McLaurin was also active in politics and civil rights organizations, and in 1963 he was appointed by New York Mayor Robert F. Wagner to the Board of Higher Education, where he advocated broader admissions policies for the City University of New York. In New York City on Wednesday of cancer.