First female NAACP president honored

“Every year at the [National Association for the Advancement for Colored People] convention, she was given a suite,” Tiffany McMillan, the oldest of four grandchildren, told The Examiner.

“So she always invited local branch members and people on hard times to stay in the suite with us. It was like a mini-camp.”

Family and former students — some in their 80s — visited March Funeral Home West in Baltimore City on Sunday to pay tribute to the 102-year-old who taught for more than four decades before becoming one of the most respected trailblazers in civil rights history.

Enolia McMillan, who died Tuesday of natural causes, was both a trend-setter and a traditional matriarch, said McMillan, director of student retention at Morgan State University.

In 1933, she earned her master’s degree at Columbia University at a time when most women and blacks didn’t go to college.

But she still loved cooking and would bake birthday cakes for her grandchildren well into her 90s.

She was instrumental in relocating the national NAACP headquarters from New York to Baltimore.

But she insisted on ironing the sheets herself.

Baltimore sisters and former students Josephine Ball and Delores Scott remembered McMillan as a junior high school history teacher who was strict but also inspiring.

In the beginning of the struggle for racial equality, “men were at the forefront, but women were always the backbone of the NAACP,” Ball said.

A slide show of photographs — rolling to Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable” — weaved McMillan’s personal and professional lives: family Christmases and birthdays mixed with her gracing magazine covers and shaking hands with presidents.

“She’s going to be hard to replace. She was a legacy,” said Isazetta Spikes, who worked with her at the NAACP.

“They don’t make them like her anymore.”

Funeral

Enolia McMillan’s funeral is 11 a.m. today at Calvary Baptist Church, 3911 Garrison Blvd., Baltimore.