From her LA Times obituary:
Evelyn Smith Munro, a longtime activist who fought for sharecroppers’ rights in one of the nation’s first racially integrated labor unions, died of natural causes Feb. 16 at her Laguna Beach home. She was 92.
Munro provided crucial early support to the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, formed in 1934 to improve working conditions for sharecroppers and tenant farmers in the South.
Although often overlooked in history books, the union helped set the stage for the civil rights movement three decades later as a model for social action that united blacks and whites behind a common cause of economic justice. It embraced nonviolence, gave leadership roles to women and blacks and won wage increases for its workers. …… When she was in her 60s, she went back to college and earned a bachelor’s degree in social ecology from UC Irvine in 1977. She worked for the university’s extension program for 11 years as an editor and writer and retired in 1979.
In Laguna Beach, her home for more than 50 years, she was a well-known community activist who fed the homeless at local parks once a week. A skilled photographer whose brother Bradley Smith had been a noted photographer for Life, Time and other magazines, she often donated her work to local charities.
She also became a lover of all things French who made annual trips to Paris for years. Her family plans a memorial service for Bastille Day, July 14.
Read the entire obituary here. Via Patrick S. O’Donnell.
Munro and the STFU certainly deserve to be better-known. She was a remarkable woman, and the world could use more people like her.