Jeffrey inducted into hall

Sharon Jeffrey, center, with her nephew, Thomas, and niece, Erica, who are Mildred Jeffrey’s grandchildren.

When you’re born into a family that overcomes adversity by achieving, chances are you’re going to live a life of accomplishment if you take that legacy seriously.

Mildred “Millie” Jeffrey (1910-2004) knew adversity and achievement, and met both with tenacity and grace thanks to her driving spirit and early examples set by her grandmother and mother. Her grandmother was widowed with 16 children to raise while running a family farm. One of those children, Millie’s mother, went on to become Iowa’s first female registered pharmacist.

Millie Jeffrey came from the stock of highly accomplished women.

Jeffrey used that foundation and her own drive to create a life of unparalled, pioneering accomplishment during a turbulent 20th century of groundbreaking battles for workers’ rights, civil rights and women’s rights.

Jeffrey’s role in those battles earned her an induction into Labor’s International Hall of Fame at the UAW-General Motors Center for Human Resources (CHR) in Detroit on May 20.

Jeffrey’s legacy set an example for her daughter even before she knew it.

“When (my mother) was seven months pregnant with me, she was arrested for picketing,” said Sharon Jeffrey. “My mother was the most important person in my life. She would take me to union meetings when I was 5 years old. My courage and convictions were inspired by my mother and the UAW,” Jeffrey said.

Her social activism began when she joined the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom while a student at the University of Minnesota.

Shortly after in the 1930s, Millie Jeffrey became a union organizer in the textile mills and got her first taste of the power of organizing to create positive change.

During World War II, she met the Reuther brothers while working for the War Labor Board, and UAW President Walter P. Reuther named Jeffrey director of the newly formed equal rights advocacy department – the UAW Women’s Bureau.

A longtime civil rights activist and loyal Democratic Party member, she co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus and became one of the most influential women for female public office candidates. She would later lead the campaign to nominate Geraldine Ferraro as the Democratic candidate for vice president in 1984.

In the 1950s and ‘60s, she marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and helped register voters in Mississippi. She served as a Democratic Party precinct delegate, state central committee member and national committeewoman, and worked on the presidential campaigns of John and Robert Kennedy.

In the 1970s she began a 16-year run as a member of Wayne State University’s board of governors while continuing her tireless efforts for the Equal Rights Amendment, support for troubled youth, civil rights, child care for working parents, health care and many more issues important to the least fortunate in society.

Although small in stature, she was larger than life for so many.

In a tribute to Jeffrey when she died in 2004, Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson said “Mildred McWilliams Jeffrey, who died last week at a Detroit nursing home at age 93, was – among many other things – the great, behind-the-scenes strategist of modern American feminism. ‘I’ll retire when I die,’ Millie frequently said.”

Jeffrey may have “retired” in 2004, but her spirit and the causes she struggled for live on.

Joan Silvi