By T. Rees Shapiro
Washington Post
Saturday, August 8, 2009
Marilyn Clement, 74, a social activist who helped expand black voting rights under the guidance of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s and later was a campaigner for a universal health-care system in the United States, died Aug. 3 in New York. She had multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow.
Mrs. Clement, the daughter of gospel-singing Texas sharecroppers, originally intended to become a missionary. Instead, she settled in Atlanta in the early 1960s to join the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a civil rights organization led by King. She worked directly for King and contributed toward many of the organization’s projects, including a campaign to elect black mayors across the country.
Mrs. Clement made her career in social activism. She served in leading roles for such organizations as the Center for Constitutional Rights, a nonprofit legal and educational group in New York, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in Philadelphia.
After founding the New York-based advocacy organization Healthcare-NOW! in 2004, Mrs. Clement became the foremost voice for passing a single-payer health-care bill now be ing sponsored by Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.). Inspired by Michael Moore’s 2007 documentary about health care, “Sicko,” she urged volunteers to stand outside movie theaters and get people who had just seen the film to sign a petition in favor of single-payer health care.
Marilyn Louise Boydstun was born in Tulia, Tex., on June 30, 1935. She graduated in 1956 from what is now McMurry University in Abilene, Tex.
In 1955, she married Gene G. Clement. The marriage ended in divorce. Survivors include their two children, Scott Clement of Lone Oak, Tex., and Pamela Clement of Wirtz, Va.; a brother; and three granddaughters.
After King’s assassination in 1968, Mrs. Clement moved to New York and was associate director of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization. From 1976 to 1989, she was executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and was heavily involved with the center’s efforts to take legal action against the Ku Klux Klan and against the government in domestic spying cases.
“Marilyn was incredibly courageous putting herself into peoples’ struggles, especially on issues of race,” said Michael Ratner, who worked with Mrs. Clement and is now president of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Ratner added that Mrs. Clement was adept at fundraising, especially in getting donations from the Ford Foundation and religious groups, including churches.
Mrs. Clement moved to Philadelphia in 1994 to lead the U.S. headquarters of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. The next year, in her role with the league, she helped organize hundreds of supporters on a “peace train” that wound through 42 countries and wrapped up in Beijing.
“Being an organizer is an honorable profession,” she said at an event held in her honor June 7 in New York. “For me, spending my life as an organizer, for change in this world, has been a fantastic way to spend a life.”