Enolia McMillan, first female NAACP president, dies at age 102

BALTIMORE — Enolia P. McMillan, the first female president of the NAACP and an educator whose career spanned 42 years, died of an undisclosed cause Tuesday at her home in Stevenson, Md. She was 102.

Mrs. McMillan, whose father was born a slave, became a teacher in 1927 and quickly became a crusader for equal pay for black teachers and better schools for black students. In 1935, she helped to reactivate the Baltimore chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and remained an active force in it for more than 50 years.

Kweisi Mfume, former president and chief executive of the NAACP and a close friend of the McMillan family, called Mrs. McMillan a "pillar of the civil-rights movement."

"She was very much the matriarch of the NAACP," he said. "She was a fighter who was relentless in pursuing justice."

Mfume credited Mrs. McMillan and former NAACP Executive Director Benjamin Hooks with orchestrating the NAACP's move from New York to Baltimore. While Hooks and others helped craft a financial package to initiate the move, Mrs. McMillan's on-the-ground efforts made it a reality, Mfume said.

"It was Mrs. McMillan who went out and sold pies and sold commemorative bricks and held raffles and cajoled the members of that board to think about finally owning a building of their own," he said.

The eldest of four children, she was born Oct. 20, 1904, in Willow Grove, Pa., to John Pettigen, who was born a slave in Virginia, and Elizabeth Fortune Pettigen, a domestic worker. The family moved to Baltimore when she was about 8. In 1922, she graduated from Douglass High School in Baltimore.

She wanted to be a doctor — a pediatrician because she liked children — but heeding the realities of a black woman's opportunity in that day, she decided to become a teacher, said her eldest granddaughter, Tiffany Beth McMillan.

She spent five hours a day commuting from Baltimore to Washington, D.C., by train to attend Howard University, where she received a bachelor's degree in education in 1927.

In 1933, she earned her master's degree from Columbia University and then returned to Baltimore to teach.

Her experience in the schools put her in direct contact with the pernicious effects of segregation. When she worked in Charles County, Md., there was only one secondary institution for blacks while there were five high schools for whites even though the populations of blacks and whites were about the same, she recalled in a 1986 interview in The Baltimore Sun.

On Dec. 26, 1935, she married Betha McMillan. They had a son, Betha D. McMillan Jr., in 1940. Her husband died of cancer in 1984 at age 76.

Her role as a mother and wife — in which she held lavish holiday dinners complete with roasted turkey and sweet potatoes topped with marshmallows, and ironed and cleaned as did most women in her day — didn't slow her activism.

"She was a very independent woman and a feminist and a forerunner in terms of civil rights," Tiffany Beth McMillan said. "But she was so old-fashioned when it came to homemaking, cooking, and ironing and cleaning."

In 1969, Mrs. McMillan was elected president of the Baltimore chapter of the NAACP.

In addition to leading the Baltimore branch and the Maryland state conference of the NAACP, Mrs. McMillan held the title of NAACP national president for many years. The role at the time was largely ceremonial, but she wielded considerable influence over the organization's national policy and its daily operations.

On the block of 26th Street where the NAACP's Baltimore branch headquarters is located, a street sign reads "Enolia P. McMillan Way." The city headquarters was named after her in 2000.

In addition to her son and granddaughter, both of Stevenson, Mrs. McMillan is survived by three other grandchildren, Angela McMillan Howell of Yeadon, Pa.; David Betha McMillan of Providence, R.I.; and Sally Camille McMillan of Stevenson.

Baltimore Sun researcher Paul McCardell contributed to this report.