Jessie Mae Beavers; Human Relations Commissioner, Sentinel Editor, Activist

Jessie Mae Beavers, who as a girl spent her summers in segregated camps but grew up to become a quiet yet forceful activist in one of the nation’s most integrated cities, died Wednesday of cancer.

The 16-year member of Los Angeles’ Human Relations Commission who edited the family section of the Los Angeles Sentinel, a black-oriented newspaper, for many years was 68 when she died at Good Samaritan Hospital.

Mrs. Beavers, who wrote for the Sentinel under her maiden name of Brown, came to maturity in this city when the YWCA scheduled separate weeks at camp for its black members. When she enrolled at UCLA a few years later, blacks were not allowed to live on campus.

Yet she said those experiences left her not bitter but determined.

“I was just glad I’d been accepted (at UCLA),” she said in an interview four years ago. After UCLA, where she majored in sociology, she went to work for the state’s then premier black newspaper, the California Eagle, moving to the Sentinel in 1948 where she remained until her death. She was an unsuccessful candidate for the 10th District City Council seat in 1987.

She helped organize the local chapter of the National Assn. of Media Women and the Black Women’s Forum, worked for the Children’s Home Society, the NAACP, conducted workshops at the request of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, served in Maureen Reagan’s delegation to the International Conference of Women in Africa and interviewed nearly all of the black and many of the white political leaders of her day.

Mayor Tom Bradley named her to the city Human Relations Commission early in his Administration, and on Thursday the mayor remembered her as “one of the thousand points of light in Los Angeles.”

Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, who had appointed her to the Los Angeles Music and Performing Arts Commission, said Mrs. Beavers “not only cared about her community, but she got involved in making Los Angeles a better place for all people.”

Survivors include her husband, Leroy Beavers Sr., a son and two daughters.

A funeral service is scheduled Monday at 10 a.m. at the Second Baptist Church, 2412 Griffith Ave.

* ADDITIONAL OBITUARIES: Other obituaries on Page 28.