Many friends and former colleagues in our efforts to build a better world have passed away. Click on any of the names below to learn more about them. We welcome personal memories or published obituaries that include some description of their involvement in the movements for change. Submit materials to DCproject60@gmail.com.

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Bruce Baechler (1955-2000) - draft resister [Obituaries]

 

Josephine Butler (1920-1997) -- As an activist involved in community, national and international issues from the late 1930s until her death in 1997, unsung heroine Jo Butler deserves a place as one of the great Washington, D.C. peace and justice fighters of the 20th century. Union organizer, blacklisted federal employee, a co-founder of the D.C. Statehood Party and its chair for 13 years, co-chair of the organization that transformed Meridian Hill/Malcolm X Park into one of the gems of the city, co-founder of the Paul Robeson Friendship Society -- these are just a smattering of her achievements. Her activism on behalf of children was especially notable, as the community newspaper The InTowner put it after her death: In the 1960s, she served as chair of the Morgan Elementary Community School Board (the city's first such community-controlled board) in Adams Morgan, "co-founded the innovative Marie Reed Community Learning Center, led hundreds of educational programs for area school and youth organizations, campaigned successfully for forgotten children's playgrounds, inspired children to make the most of their lives…" [testimonial May 6,1979]

 

Malcolm Davis (1937-2011) - Ecumenical campus chaplain at GWU from 1967 until 1984.  For more information, see the  Personal Recollections and Interviews Conducted to Date pages.

 

J. Brinton "Brint" Dillingham (1943-1990)  -- Known for his wit even in the face of tense situations; for his organizing skills in antiwar, civil rights and social justice campaigns from the mid-1960s on; for his research on behalf of Native Americans and unjustly accused criminal defendants; for his role in overturning two notorious Maryland anti-civil liberties laws, Dillingham in his short life was one of D.C.'s and suburban Maryland's most effective activists -- and, certainly, the funniest. In the 1969-1971 period alone, Brint was arrested more than 70 times for antiwar and anti-racism actions. Brint was one of the key D.C. area organizers of the May Day 1971 antiwar protests, which resulted in some 13,000 arrests over a several-day period in D.C. His investigation in support of a D.C.-area African American man facing execution in Pennsylvania for the murder of a white woman resulted in the death sentence being overturned and in the ultimate exoneration of the prisoner. Deliberately arrested, and then convicted, for selling copies of an underground newspaper deemed "obscene" by Montgomery County, Md. police, Brint's case eventually resulted in his exoneration and the overturning of the Maryland anti-subversion law by the state's high court. He was director of Compeers, Inc., a metropolitan-wide organization that established anti-racism training for suburban teenagers, and that helped to organize locally the grape boycott, antiwar protests and the Poor People's Campaign. He was also co-founder of the People's Law Institute, and organized a coalition that lobbied successfully to overturn key portions of the onerous "indeterminate sentencing" practices at Maryland's Patuxent Institution. [National Lawyer's Guild D.C. Chapter Community Justice Award, Feb. 28, 1985]

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Joseph Forer (1910-1986) -- From the 1940s into the 1970s, National Lawyers Guild attorney Joe Forer and his partner David Rein were the premier civil rights and civil liberties attorneys in the District of Columbia. In the early 1950s, Joe won a landmark case desegregating D.C. restaurants and hotels, and from the 1940s up into the 1970s he and Rein defended against major political witch-hunt cases on both the national and local levels. Here are a few of Forer's notable achievements just in the 1960s and early 1970s alone: As appeals attorney in a highly-publicized case akin to the Scottsboro Boys case of the 1930s, Forer won freedom for three Montgomery County black men wrongly convicted and sentenced to death for the rape of a white woman (known as the Giles Brothers case); won on appeal the overturning of obscenity charges against an activist for selling copies of the Washington Free Press in a case that voided Maryland's notorious anti-subversive Ober Law; 20 years of litigation against the Subversive Activities Control Board by Forer, along with attorney John Abt, resulted in the extinction of the SACB in 1973.[An Evening Honoring Joe Forer, National Lawyers Guild D.C. Chapter, June 9, 1979]

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Ann Hughes Hargrove (dec. 2014) - Washington, D.C. community activist and
leader in historic preservation, land use planning and zoning [Obituary; WAMU 2011 Interview]

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Julius Hobson (1922-1977)  - Progressive D.C. journalist Sam Smith wrote that Julius Hobson was “as important to Washington in his way as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were to the nation.” As president of the D.C. chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (or CORE) from 1960 to 1964, Hobson ran more than 80 picket lines on some 120 downtown retail stores that discriminated in their refusal to hire African American employees. This resulted in the employment of 5,000 Black workers during that 4-year period. Likewise, CORE under Hobson’s leadership got first jobs for blacks as auto sales persons, dairy employees, public utilities worker, bus company drivers and clerks. Hobson initiated -- and won -- the historic Hobson v. Hansen lawsuit, which ended the racially-biased track system in D.C. public schools, and also outlawed teacher racial segregation, differential expenditures per pupil that favored white majority schools, and differential distribution of books and supplies. Hobson was one of the key figures in the successful anti-freeway fight, was a co-founder of the D.C. Statehood Party, and was a member of the first elected D.C. Board of Education (1968) and first elected D.C. Council (1974).  [Julius W. Hobson, Jr. Middle School dedication, May 27, 1982]

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Hilda Mason (1916-2007) and Charles Mason (1911-2006)  -- Hilda and Charlie were Washington, D.C.'s most significant activist couple from the early 1960s to the 2000s. From the time they were married until their deaths 40-some years later, Hilda -- the public school teacher and assistant principal and great granddaughter of a slave -- and Charlie -- the government civil servant, later attorney, and heir to a sizable fortune -- were seldom referred to in the singular; to those in the activist and electoral politics communities, they were always one entity -- Hilda and Charlie. Although both had been active individually in civil rights activities in the 1950s, it was in the 1960s and beyond, as a couple, that they made their greatest impact. Hilda and Charlie during the 1960s -- always behind the scenes and not seeking credit -- worked through CORE and SNCC to help provide food, housing, clothing, medical care and transportation for people who came to Washington to demonstrate and to lobby for civil rights. They quietly provided substantial funding to SNCC during the 1964 Freedom Summer voter registration drive in Mississippi, and over the years belonged to -- and quietly made donations totaling millions of dollars to -- local and national civil rights, civil liberties, antiwar, education, women’s and other social justice organizations.

 

Hilda worked with D.C.‘s preeminent civil rights leader Julius Hobson on a number of matters, including his successful landmark lawsuit (Hobson v. Hansen) over the unequal treatment of African American students in the city's public schools -- and on the formation of the new D.C. Statehood Party. In 1971, Hilda was elected and later reelected to the nonpartisan D.C. Board of Education where she served with Hobson and future Mayor (and ex-SNCC leader) Marion Barry. She succeeded Hobson on the D.C Council as a Statehood Party candidate when he died in 1977, winning reelection several times before being defeated in 1998. Hilda, who held true to her progressive principles while in office, holds the distinction of being the only person ever to defeat Marion Barry in a D.C. election -- in 1990 when "mayor for life" Barry unsuccessfully challenged Hilda, the "grandmother to the world," for her council seat.

 

Probably Hilda's and Charlie's greatest accomplishment on the D.C. Council was to keep alive the University of the District of Columbia Law School -- named the David A. Clarke School of Law (for the deceased council chairman) but seen by most of the institution's supporters as very much Hilda and Charlie Mason's law school, too. The law school was on the brink of being defunded several times by the D.C. Council but, opposed primarily by Clarke and Mason, those termination efforts failed -- and Charlie and Hilda contributed millions of dollars of their own money to build a first-class law library and provide scholarships for students in order to continue accreditation for the law school. Today, it has the most diverse student body of any law school in the nation, and is one of the best -- if not the best -- for public interest law. Throughout Hilda's Council years, Charlie -- who had entered Howard Law School at age 57 to obtain his law degree -- advised Hilda every step of the way, working for free in her council office, serving as Hilda’s number one adviser and helping craft progressive legislation on tenants’ rights, strict condominium conversion measures and other issues. [National Lawyers Guild D.C. Chapter Community Justice Award, February 22, 1986]

 

Natasha Reatig (1941-2019) - Natasha Reatig was an active participant and leader in the Vietnam Moratorium Committee at NIH/NIMH, the Federal Employees for Peace and the League of Federal Voters, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, working to educate federal employees and mobilize them to help end the war in Vietnam. Later, through her weekly salons, she became "a fixture of the ‘80s and ‘90s Washington, D.C. cultural and arts scene." [Obituary in Cape Gazette]

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Selma Rein (1912-1985) - For five decades, almost all of those years in Washington, D.C., Selma Rein was a mainstay in organizations dedicated to civil rights, civil liberties, peace and justice on the local and national levels. Although monitored by the FBI (along with her husband, noted civil rights and civil liberties attorney David Rein and other progressives in their circle), and denounced by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee as a dangerous radical for her progressive politics, Selma let none of that deter her. She was one of the organizers of Women Strike for Peace; she was on the executive board of the National Lawyers Guild; she worked on developing the first platform for the newly-formed D.C. Statehood Party in the early 1970s. From the 1940s until her death, Selma was regularly involved in protests and picket lines -- for the Progressive Party and for desegregating D.C. restaurants early on, against the Vietnam War later, and then to the fights for D.C. statehood and the nuclear freeze and against the apartheid South African regime, and other causes, in the last two decades of her life. [National Lawyer's Guild D.C. Chapter Community Justice Award, Feb. 28, 1985]

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Sydney M. Wolfe (1937-2024) - "Dr. Sidney Wolfe founded the Health Research Group in 1971 with Ralph Nader, part of the enterprise that launched as Public Citizen that same year. Sid invented a new approach of “research-based advocacy” to get dangerous drugs and devices off the market, win new protections for worker health and safety, address doctor misconduct, challenge the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to do its job, and hold pharmaceutical companies accountable.

Sid was brilliant (he won a MacArthur “genius grant”) and fearless in his advocacy. But what was most singular about him professionally was his passion for advancing health justice. There was a distinctive fierceness and fury to his work. Everyone who knew or even encountered Sid — allies and adversaries alike — experienced his intensity." (read full tribute from Robert Weissman, President of Public Citizen)
 

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