By Janet Singleton

After Juanita Goggins’ neighbor noticed that her house lights had been off for a week or more, someone in her Columbus, S.C., community called police, and the once-famous civil rights trailblazer was found in her home—frozen to death.

The former state representative had wrapped herself in multiple layers of clothing, but that did not save her from the cold front that moved through the area in late February. Though police found ample money in the house, the heat had been discontinued for lack of payment. The coroner found evidence that former Rep. Goggins, 75, struggled with dementia. She had been dead an estimated two weeks before she was found. Despite the isolation of her last days, headlines across the nation and world, from The New York Times to London’s Guardian, lamented her passing.

The accomplishments of her life added sad irony to her death. Born the youngest child of 10 to a family of sharecroppers, Goggins became the first in her family to earn a college degree. With that certificate, initially, she took one of the few paths open to black women in the 50s: She became a teacher. But beneath her primness and proper hairstyle lurked the sort of perceptive tough-minded schoolmarm not to be underestimated. The funding inequities and discrimination she saw in the education system propelled her toward the state capitol. In 1974, she defeated a white man to become the first black woman elected to the South Carolina Legislature, representing the state’s Rock Hill area. And it likely did not make everybody happy to hear her say: “I am going to Columbia to be a legislator, not just a black spot in the House chambers.”

Indeed, Goggins championed better funding and student-teacher ratios and became a guiding figure in passing legislation that continued to shape South Carolina’s school budgets and class sizes. She positioned herself in the powerful budgetary committee and pushed through funding to battle sickle cell anemia, a disease primarily affecting blacks. The South Carolina Democrat became the first black woman appointed to the United States Civil Rights Commission; and she was twice called to the White House during the Carter Administration.

After serving three terms in the legislature, she stepped down from politics, citing health reasons. She never specified her medical condition, and no one asked, according to colleagues.

Goggins eventually became a recluse; and in the mid-90s moved to a rented home, in a neighborhood of largely older black residents, where she spent her final years. She reportedly banned visitors and seldom talked to neighbors, who in the aftermath of her death, were surprised to hear of her fame.

In 2009, a stretch of South Carolina Highway 5 in Rock Hill., S.C. was named after Goggins. The same year, after being mugged near her home, she changed her locks, and became even more isolated. In the aftermath of Goggins’ death, neighbors told reporters they regretted not being more aggressive in efforts to make contact with the elderly avoidant woman her landlady described as “fragile.”

Yet those who knew her in prior years remember her as vivacious and outspoken. “She liked to talk . . . She could sell ice to an Eskimo,” Ilese Dixon, 88, Goggins’s only surviving sibling, told the Associated Press. “She thought she could fix the world.”

Sources quoting other family members paint a picture of a depressive who increasingly closed herself off from relatives and friends during the last two decades. The reasons why a woman called “a mover and a shaker” ended up as Goggins did may never be fully known. However, internist Dr. James Flowers says that the death likely was preventable.

Flowers’s opinion derives from past experience practicing with the black community in Milwaukee, Wis. “Unfortunately, I know of too many individuals who have died this way—freezing to death, overheating, inadequate nutrition, and certainly inadequate healthcare. For all of them, whose stories are never told or cared about, it remains an indictment upon how we in the United States care for (people).”

A primary care physician should have noted the “red flags” of Goggins’s personality changes early on, he says. A vigilant healthcare system could have interrupted an illness-driven, self-destructive spiral.

He blames also a disappearing sense of kinship in black America. “We have lost the social capital we once had prior to the failed integration,” he says. A crucial safety net has vanished. “This is the ‘neighborhood’ caring and looking out for all…the strong and the weak that existed in the old segregated neighborhoods. “The new segregation of today” did not inherit that humanity, he says. “For dementia, some of the most critical ways to prevent it is to maintain social contact and activities. If a woman with a highway named after her can be discarded, what can we expect for the rest of us?”

Janet Singleton is an award-winning novelist and journalist.