Rest in Power: AFSCME family mourns the loss of trailblazing leader Lillian Roberts
Lillian Roberts, the former executive director of AFSCME District Council 37 and a giant of the labor movement, has died.
AFSCME President Lee Saunders announced her passing in a special message to members and honored her legacy as a trailblazer.
“Her leadership at DC 37 and across AFSCME left a lasting mark on this union and on generations of labor leaders who followed her,” Saunders wrote.
Roberts built power for working people at a time when very few Black women held positions of leadership. She helped found the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists and made history as the first Black woman to serve as New York State Industrial Commissioner.
She organized hospital workers in Chicago and later in New York City. In 1969, she went to jail for two weeks for defying New York’s governor and leading a strike of state hospital workers. Roberts believed no fight for working people was too hard or too risky.
Saunders said Roberts led DC 37 in New York with “extraordinary toughness, vision and commitment to working people.”
She spent decades fighting for public service workers, for African American workers, for women in leadership, and for the idea that unions should be a force for justice in every corner of American life.
