Rita Walters, the first black woman ever elected to the Los Angeles City Council and a former member of the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education, died Thursday at age 89.
Walters, a former teacher, served on the LAUSD board for more than a decade before being elected to the City Council, filling the 9th District seat left vacant by the 1990 death of Councilman Gilbert Lindsay.
She held the City Council seat until 2001, and the next year she was appointed to the city’s Library Commission, on which she served for 15 years.
“She fought hard for justice and peace,” County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, who served with Walters on the City Council in the 1990s, wrote on his Twitter page.
Walters was a graduate of Shaw University in North Carolina and had a master’s degree in business administration from UCLA.
She was also a longtime civil-rights advocate, working with groups including the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP. She taught adult-education courses and English-as-a-second-language classes in Watts before being elected to the LAUSD board in 1980.
John Szabo, Los Angeles’ city librarian who worked with Walters during her time on the Library Commission, told NBC4 he feels “so fortunate to have known her and worked with her here at LAPL. Our libraries benefited significantly from her leadership and her voice.”