Jean Entine, activist and ally for Boston’s women of color, dies at 79 – The Boston Globe

Ms. Entine grew up within the South as a white girl of privilege and ended up dwelling in Cambridge, the place she grew to become an early ally for girls of coloration — a founding father of the Boston Girls’s Fund and a tireless advocate for girls of coloration having access to management roles.

She was 79 when she died Could 17 in her Cambridge house of issues from hypertension and cerebral amyloid angiopathy.

“After I take into consideration white allies, I take into consideration how Jean stood up for girls of coloration, understanding simply when to take the again seat, step apart, or quit her place on the desk as a result of different voices have been wanted extra,” Natanja Craig-Oquendo, the present government director of the Boston Girls’s Fund, stated in an e-mail to these related to the group.

The activist and author Angela Davis was a longtime good friend of Ms. Entine.

“Each time I take into consideration the devoted individuals who by no means quit on the dream of radical justice — for folks on this nation, in Palestine, and all through the world — Jean Entine looms massive,” Davis stated in an e-mail. “She taught us the best way to outline our lives by way of strong commitments to justice for folks we might in all probability by no means know as people. On the identical time she at all times insisted on appreciating the enjoyment and fantastic thing about this world and the one to return.”

After transferring from Lengthy Island, N.Y., to Cambridge in 1978, Ms. Entine spent the remainder of her life social justice causes.

Together with the Boston Girls’s Fund, the place she previously was government director, Ms. Entine’s work included previously serving as government director of Girls for Financial Justice, as a program officer for The Boston Basis, and as a marketing consultant to numerous organizations.

“Jean used all of her abilities and persuasion to persuade philanthropists and company leaders to do their half in supporting ladies’s rights and financial independence,” Connie S. Chan, a professor emerita on the College of Massachusetts Boston’s McCormack Graduate College of Coverage and International Research, wrote in an e-mail to the Globe.

“Jean was artistic, resourceful, and fascinating, with an excellent humorousness,” stated Chan, who previously served on the Boston Girls’s Fund’s board. “As a girl of coloration, I used to be at all times grateful for Jean’s potential to uplift and help women and girls of coloration by means of empowerment. She was instrumental in shaping the progressive way forward for the Boston Girls’s Fund, main it in direction of racial equality and all ladies’s rights, inclusive of all sexual orientations and identities.”

Ms. Entine expressed these values in private conversations, too, such ones she had along with her late-in-life shut good friend Sandy Middleton of Cambridge, who additionally grew up within the South.

“I’m African American, Jean is white. We talked about how totally different our Southern girl-woman experiences have been,” stated Middleton, who previously served on the Boston Girls’s Fund board.

“We beloved to stroll round Cambridge, cease in and get a chew right here and there, and simply discuss — discuss in regards to the South, speak about racial points, discuss in regards to the want for justice within the present world and what have been we going to do about it,” stated Middleton, an ESL trainer on the Cambridge Middle for Grownup Schooling and the Group Studying Middle.

“Jean requested quite a lot of onerous questions of herself, and had nice expectations of herself as a privileged white girl,” she stated. “I used to be proud to know her and benefited from having lengthy conversations with Jean and speaking about what we had in frequent, and the way that was a lot extra vital than our variations.”

Ms. Entine “was a unprecedented visionary and he or she was additionally not afraid to leap into the unknown,” stated Hayat Imam, a former Boston Girls’s Fund government director.

“She was maybe one of the vital profound white allies to folks of coloration,” Imam stated. “She did this by means of lifelong attachments to folks and teams — by offering folks with help and philanthropy, and likewise with recommendation and by being there for them.”

Born in Memphis on Could 21, 1942, Jean Goldsmith Marks was one in all two sisters.

Their father was Edwin Marks and their mom was Sylvia Doris Goldsmith, whose household had began what grew to become a division retailer that ultimately was bought to Federated Division Shops.

As a lady, Jean, who was Jewish, wasn’t invited to play at a good friend’s home due to that household’s antisemitism. Seeing how racism and sexism dictated the paths of many Memphis lives prompted her to go away the South.

She graduated from the College of Wisconsin in 1964 with a bachelor’s diploma in social work and from Fordham College in New York Metropolis in 1967 with a grasp’s in social work.

That very same yr she married Alan Entine. Earlier than their marriage resulted in divorce, they’d two daughters — Jennifer, who died of pancreatic most cancers in 2014, and Sarah, a documentary filmmaker in Berkeley, Calif.

“Her politics and her values actually formed a lot of our expertise,” Sarah stated of a childhood that included attending demonstrations along with her mom. “Her favourite chant was: ‘The folks united won’t ever be defeated.’ That was the drumbeat in our lives.”

Sarah added that her mom, who additionally leaves her sister, Nancy Marks of Irvine, Calif., and three grandchildren, “actually, actually beloved being a grandmother.”

A memorial gathering shall be held at 2 p.m. Oct. 29 in First Church in Cambridge and shall be dwell streamed.

Steve Schnapp, who previously labored for the Boston-based group United for a Truthful Economic system and was a good friend of Ms. Entine, stated that “earlier than the notion of intersectionality grew to become standard, she was somebody who related the dots. She was at all times arising with these artistic notions.”

Among the many Boston Girls’s Fund endeavors she labored on was the two,000 Membership. Within the Nineties, Ms. Entine was amongst these on the group who inspired tons of of small-amount donors to turn out to be financially and personally invested within the Boston Girls’s Fund by pledging $100 a yr for 5 years.

“We have now two backside traces,” she instructed the Globe. “We gained’t achieve success if we’re solely rich in {dollars} and never additionally rich in contributors.”

Ms. Entine additionally didn’t hesitate to hunt out massive donors.

“She was completely fearless in asking folks for cash,” stated Brinton Lykes, a Boston Girls’s Fund cofounder and a Boston School professor of group and cultural psychology. “She noticed fund-raising, I feel, as political motion. Her persuasive methods have been heartfelt. They have been yoked to the problems.”

In her e-mail, Davis wrote that she “was extremely impressed” by Ms. Entine’s efforts “to introduce structural grow to be the philanthropic group. Jean actually believed in dismantling the hierarchies that have been usually reproduced even by those that thought they have been bringing justice to marginalized communities.”

Ms. Entine, Davis stated, “was a type of extraordinary activists who made the work of preventing for social justice seem completely regular and unexceptional, even because it was absolutely able to producing earth-shattering transformations. She was a sister comrade for the lengthy haul.”

Bryan Marquard could be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.