Margaret Moseley, 1901-

A community, peace, and civil rights activist, Margaret Moseley, daughter of Nellie Elizabeth (Hall) and Thomas Buxton Smith, was born in Dedham, Mass., in 1901, and graduated from high school in Dorchester, Mass., in 1919. MM found that she was unable to pursue a career in nursing or business because of racial discrimination. She married Frederick Douglass Lee (ca. 1922); they had three children: Frederick Douglass, Jr., Alice Louise Marie, and Thomas George.

MM was a founding member of Cooperative Way, a consumers' cooperative in Boston in the 1940s, and served on the board of the Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. She was one of the founding members of Freedom House in Roxbury, president of the Community Church in Boston, and Massachusetts legislative chair for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), which established the Margaret Moseley Memorial Peace Education fund in her honor in 1989.

After moving to Cape Cod in 1961, MM helped form local chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and WILPF. She became a founding member of the Community Action Committee of Cape Cod (CAC) and the Fair Housing Committee on Cape Cod (FHC) and was active in the Cape Cod branch of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). She was also active in the Unitarian Church of Barnstable, becoming a founding member of the Social Responsibility Committee and the first woman to chair the Prudential Committee, the governing body of the church. She also served on the board of the Cape Cod Section, Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and the board of Elder Services of the Cape and Islands. She and her second husband, Emerson Moseley, worked on a committee that succeeded in getting an affirmative action contract for the Town of Barnstable.

In 1962, MM was part of a committee formed to meet the "reverse freedom riders" as they arrived on the Cape. Reverse freedom riders were African Americans from Arkansas sent on a free one-way trip to Hyannis by the White Citizens Council to embarrass John F. Kennedy by stirring up racial problems in the town where his family spent their summer vacations. In 1965, MM traveled to Selma, Ala., with six other women from WILPF to work on the voting rights campaign.

MM holds life memberships in the NAACP, WILPF, and FOR, and has been honored by the Cape Cod branches of the NAACP and WILPF, Cape Cod Community College, Town of Barnstable, Cape Cod Council of Doers, the legislature of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1995, she received FOR's Martin Luther King award for lifetime achievement.

From the guide to the Papers, 1943-1997, (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute)