By The Editors

Margaret Bush Wilson, the former Chair of the Board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, died August 11 in St. Louis. Missouri. She was 90 years old.

Mrs. Bush Wilson led the NAACP Board from 1975 to 1984. Julian Bond, the organization’s current Chairman, said in a statement that “The NAACP has lost a champion and the world has lost a pioneer.” Benjamin Todd Jealous, NAACP president and chief executive officer, described her as “the consummate NAACP leader (whose) steadfast commitment to the Association was unparalleled.”

In many ways, Margaret Bush Wilson, who was born and lived all her life in St. Louis, embodied the indomitable will and determination that characterized the black freedom struggle of the twentieth century.

She was born in 1919 to parents who were both deeply involved in local civil rights activism. Her mother, Margaret Berenicy Casey Bush, was a leader of the St. Louis NAACP. Her father, James T. Bush, a real estate agent, financially supported many civil rights causes throughout his life. He was also instrumental in organizing the St. Louis law suit that became part of the landmark Shelley v Kraemer Supreme Court case. That 1947 decision declared the use of restrictive covenants to bar blacks from buying homes in previously all-white neighborhoods unconstitutional.

After college and law school, Margaret Bush Wilson became the second African-American woman admitted to practice law in Missouri. In the mid-1940s she and her husband, Robert E. Wilson, a law school classmate, opened a joint practice and devoted much of their time and energy to civil rights work. Mrs. Bush Wilson herself was on the Thurgood Marshall-led legal team that prepared and argued Shelley v Kraemer. A decade later she became president of the St. Louis NAACP branch and became more involved in the national work of the organization.

Mrs. Bush Wilson continued practicing law the rest of her life and drove herself to work at her office every day until falling ill earlier this year.