Jean Fairfax

October 20, 1920 - February 12, 2019

American educator, civil rights activist, community organizer, and philanthropist whose efforts have focused on achieving equity in education. She served as Director of Community Services of the NAACP from 1965 to 1984.
Fairfax’s impact was felt in many areas, during the 1960s and 1970s, when she worked for the ACLU’s legal defense fund helping blacks families in the South navigate into desegregated schools while faced with continuing discrimination. In the mid-1980s, she moved to Phoenix to be with her sister, Betty Fairfax, in helping to promote education among minority students in the city. Betty Fairfax died in 2010 after working for over 50 years in the Phoenix Union High School District. Ms. Fairfax spoke of court orders, the Constitution and Brown v. Board of Education, in which the Supreme Court ruled a decade earlier that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.

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