Willie Mae Hart

Since she joined the NAACP in the late 1940’s, Willie Mae Hart has been building bridges in the struggle for civil rights. Growing up in Mississippi, she wanted to go to medical school, but instead had to settle for “on-the-job” training as a nurse. She arrived in Portland in 1939 and when war broke out, got a job in the shipyards. After the war, African Americans who had come to work in the shipyards were being pressured to leave the area. Working with the NAACP, Willie Mae Hart traveled with twenty-four carloads of people to Salem and lobbied the state legislature for full rights of Oregon citizenship for African Americans. No longer welcome in the shipyards, Hart found employment at the Physicians and Surgeons hospital, becoming the first African American to hold a job there. Eventually she got a nursing degree from Oregon Health Sciences University. In the 1960s she helped establish a Portland chapter of the Council of Negro Women and organized the first telethon in Oregon to raise money for the Oregon Negro College fund. The event raised $50,000 and Ms. Hart went on to serve as chairperson of the telethon for two additional years. She has served on the boards of Ecumenical Ministries and Church Women United and is a member of Mt. Olivet Baptist Church.