Virginia Chambers; Was Activist for Labor

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Virginia Derr Chambers, who walked picket lines for young women working in sweatshops and for Chicano miners, has died of cancer at age 72.

Chambers helped establish the Institute for Global Education, a local organization that focuses on social justice and peace issues. She was a draft counselor during the Vietnam War and served as a library commissioner before her resignation last December.

As a teen-ager, Chambers joined a picket line to protest conditions at the “sweatshop” where she and other young women worked.

While living in Silver City, N.M., Chambers and her second husband, union organizer Clinton Jencks, took part in a long and bitter strike of Chicano copper mine workers. They later played themselves in the movie “Salt of the Earth,” a portrayal of that strike.