Lillian Roberts, a crusading labor leader hailed as a “tiger” — and briefly jailed — during her fiery tenure at the nation’s largest municipal workers union, which now represents more than 150,000 nurses, pothole fillers, zookeepers and other New York City employees, died on July 9 in Manhattan. She was 98.
Her death, at a nursing facility, was from cardiac arrest, said Ivan Smith, her sister’s son, whom Ms. Roberts raised as her own after her sister’s death.
Starting in the 1960s, Ms. Roberts established a reputation as a firebrand, working for — and, eventually, as a de facto partner of — Victor H. Gotbaum, the notoriously combative executive director of District Council 37.
The district council — part of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, or AFSCME — has long been considered the nation’s most powerful public employees union, representing more than 1,000 job titles and nearly a third of the city’s municipal workers.
Rising to prominence at a time when labor leadership was dominated by white men, Ms. Roberts, a Black woman, spent nearly 14 years as the associate director of District Council 37, which roughly quadrupled in membership during that period. Her biggest coup was unionizing 20,000 workers at the city’s public hospitals, in what The New York Times later called one of the largest organizing drives in American history.
After a lengthy absence, she returned to District Council 37 as executive director in 2002, when she was 74, and served for 12 years.
“I always felt that I had a job to do,” she said in an interview for the 2005 reference book “Black Women in America.” “It transcends whether I am male or female.”
She added: “I never thought about not doing the job and not being aggressive.”
In her quieter moments, she came across as the “embodiment of serenity,” The Times observed in 2002. But Ms. Roberts was often pugnacious.
In 1968, she spent two weeks behind bars after leading a strike against three New York State mental hospitals, thus violating the state’s Public Employees’ Fair Employment Act, or Taylor Law, which bans public sector strikes. In the 1970s, she decried Mayor Abraham D. Beame’s plans to shutter several public hospitals, insisting that city residents would die as a result.
“When Lillian’s angry, she can really blow her head off at people — those from her own side of the table as well as the other,” Deputy Mayor Basil A. Paterson, the city’s chief labor negotiator, told The Times in 1978. “But never in a meeting — she will always take them into another room to let them have it.”
Lillian Davis was born on Jan. 2, 1928, in Chicago, the second of five children of Henry Davis, a janitor and barber, and Lillian (Henry) Davis.
The couple, who were transplants from rural Mississippi, struggled to survive during the Great Depression, and Lillian spent hours over a washboard helping her mother keep the household running.
“I never really had a childhood,” she was quoted as saying in “Black Women in America.” “I had to be an old lady at a very young age.”
An honors student in high school, she earned a scholarship to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. But unable to afford room and board, she dropped out after less than two years.
“I was so angry at society that here I was on welfare,” she recalled. “I did not want welfare, I was humiliated by it, and they were doing absolutely nothing to get me out of that situation.”
Instead of receiving a diploma, she became the first Black nurse’s aide at the University of Chicago’s hospital, although she lacked the money to go on to nursing school. She remained in the aide job for more than a decade, eventually becoming active with her AFSCME local as a shop steward and secretary.
She was taken under the wing of Mr. Gotbaum, then in charge of the Chicago district council of the AFSCME, who “noticed that I was aggressive, that I was responsible,” Ms. Roberts later said. In 1965, she followed Mr. Gotbaum to New York when he took over District Council 37.
Ms. Roberts burnished her credentials as a labor hero by flouting Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller and the Taylor Law during the 1968 hospital strikes. On her way into the 19th-century Civil Jail on West 37th Street, she was greeted with the chant, “Rocky in, Roberts out!”
Sentenced to a month in jail, she was released after two weeks following a public outcry.
In 1981, Ms. Roberts became the first Black woman to be appointed New York State labor commissioner, then known as the industrial commissioner, and she fought for improving workplace safety, for fair wages and for stronger unemployment insurance programs. After resigning in 1987, she joined the private sector as an executive at a health management organization.
In addition to Mr. Smith, Ms. Roberts is survived by his brothers, Carl and Ralonzo Smith, whom she also raised as sons after her sister’s death. Her marriages to William Roberts and Enoch Jenkins ended in divorce.
When she returned in 2002 to lead District Council 37, the union had “Cinderella-like, suffered through its own midnight,” The Times observed, “and turned into a squalid outfit in which officials embezzled millions of dollars and stuffed ballot boxes.”
In essence, The Times wrote, she was coming back as a “fairy godmother.” But it was not all magic wands and glass slippers. Ms. Roberts clashed with the union’s board, as well as with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, a conflict that included sharp-tongued attacks over planned city layoffs in 2011.
“The relationship between the mayor and Ms. Roberts,” The Times noted that year, “is far worse than that between previous mayors and leaders of District Council 37.”
But she remained in her post until 2014, when she retired at 86. “This union,” she once said, “was my life’s work.”
The post Lillian Roberts, Crusading New York Labor Leader, Dies at 98 appeared first on New York Times.
