Peggy Cooper Cafritz, grande dame of the Washington arts/education scene, 70

WASHINGTON — Peggy Cooper Cafritz, a doyenne of Washington, D.C., arts and education, who tried to mend many of the city’s social and racial wounds, created one of the nation’s leading arts-intensive high schools, and capped her civic involvement with a divisive six-year tenure as D.C. school board president, died Feb. 18 at a hospital in Washington. She was 70.

The cause was complications from pneumonia, said her son Zach Cafritz. She had severe health problems in recent years, including back surgeries and a gallbladder operation that left her in a coma for more than a week.

Cooper Cafritz came from a prosperous black business family in Mobile, Alabama, but the family’s standing in the community did not insulate them from bitter indignities of the Jim Crow South. Galvanized by the burgeoning civil rights movement, Cooper Cafritz arrived in Washington in 1964 to attend George Washington University, where she was determined to end the vestiges of racial segregation on campus.

The school, modeled on New York City’s High School of Performing Arts, was a breakthrough for D.C. students gifted in dance, painting, music and theater but ill-suited to traditional schools. Since Duke Ellington opened in 1974, generations of graduates, among them comedian Dave Chappelle and operatic mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves, have gone on to noted careers. Over five decades, Cooper Cafritz became a fixture of Washington’s educational, cultural and charitable firmament, as much a socialite as a social activist as she married into and bitterly divorced out of the Cafritz real estate and philanthropic fortune. Her social orbit included Bill Clinton, Gloria Steinem, Quincy Jones, Vernon Jordan and Alma Powell.