She was an influential leader of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
By Harrison Smith Harrison Smith Obituary writer Email Bio Follow March 3 at 9:09 PM One late-summer morning in 1964, when the sun had not yet risen and many schools in Mississippi had still not enrolled black students, Jean Fairfax crisscrossed rural Leake County, bearing a kerosene lamp and a message of integration.
If the children enrolled, the men said, loans would be called in, and their parents would be fired from their jobs or forced from their homes. “She became the most influential single staff member in determining the direction we took on such issues as integration of black colleges and which industries we should target in employment cases,” Jack Greenberg, LDF’s longtime director-counsel, wrote in a 1994 memoir, “Crusaders in the Courts.”Supported by a $300,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1967, she helped black workers submit more than 1,800 discrimination complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Jean Emily Fairfax was born in Cleveland on Oct. 20, 1920. Her father was a water department administrator, and her mother was a social worker; both parents were the first members of their families to be born legally free in the United States, and both graduated from college.
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