Activist sought social justice for 6 decades
The moment 17yearold Margy Wilkinson was washed by a policeoperated fire hose down the grand marble staircase of San Francisco City Hall, she knew this was the life for her.
It was May 1960 and Wilkinson, then known as Margy Lima, was an Oakland Tech high schooler who’d crossed the bay to protest McCarthyism. Three years later, she drove cross country to witness Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech on the Mall in Washington, and a year after that, she was inside Sproul Plaza at UC
Berkeley, proudly being arrested while helping launch the Free Speech Movement.
Wilkinson, who went on to serve as a savior at leftleaning KPFAFM radio in Berkeley, died June 27 at her South Berkeley home of 40 years, across the street from Malcolm X Elementary School and just off Martin Luther King Jr. Way. She was 76 and participated in a Black Lives Matter car rally on the day of her death, of a presumed heart attack, said her husband, Tony Wilkinson. “She was driven by a love for people in her community and in the greater world,” said her son, Jason Wilkinson, a Seattle architect. “For her, the struggle for equity and social justice was an expression of her love. She wanted the world to be a better place.”
Margaret Clara Lima had no choice in the matter. She was born into the struggle July 23, 1943, in Eureka. Her father, Albert J. “Mickie” Lima, was the son of Portuguese immigrants who became a commercial fisherman and union organizer. In 1945, Mickie Lima was hired as chair of the Northern California Communist Party, and the family moved to Richmond, then to North Oakland, where the Limas settled. Wilkinson’s mother, Helen Lima, had been born in China, where her parents were missionaries. She got a job as a kitchen worker at Herrick Hospital and became a union activist in her own right. She was a captain in a threeweek hospital strike in 1958.
When Wilkinson was just 7, she saw her father sentenced to prison for seven years under the
Smith Act, which was intended root out foreign agents, as part of the red scare.
By the time Wilkinson was in high school, she’d already been active in protesting discrimination at department stores in Berkeley, so her mother gave her a note to take to Oakland Tech, saying she would not be in attendance the following day because she would be attending a hearing of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in San Francisco. Her father drove her there, and it probably would have been her first arrest if he hadn’t pulled her out of the pile of bodies at the bottom of the stairs and led her out the door.
“That was a pivotal moment for her,” said Lila Wilkinson, her daughter. “It was just the way she was raised, to stand up for what you believe is right.”
In 1963, she participated in both the March on Washington and the sitin at Mel’s DriveIn in Berkeley, to protest the failure to hire black workers.
After earning her bachelor’s degree in history from UC Berkeley in 1966, Wilkinson landed a job there as a clerical worker in the Department of
Economics and within two years, she was involved in a strike for pay equality for campus service workers. She later became assistant to the director of the University of California Marching Band. “She was like the Cal Band mom,” said Lila Wilkinson, who attended UC Berkeley when her mom was working there. “She loved it.”
The band loved her, too. But her position was eliminated and Wilkinson took a job in the campus library system. When she retired from the university in 2007, after 40 years, the Cal Band crashed her retirement party in the Doe Library, marching right in to serenade her with “Fight for California,” as students who had their studying interrupted joined in.
“She mentored people. She comforted Cal students who were homesick,” said Lila, who teaches special ed at Malcolm X Elementary, where her mother was a volunteer for 15 years. “But she was also bold and fearless.”
This fearlessness came across as soon as she came to work at UC Berkeley. First, she led the drive to organize a local chapter of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME Local 1695), in 1967. Then, she helped create a statewide union for clerical workers in the UC system, the Coalition of University Employees (CUE), with 19,000 in the rank and file. She served as chief negotiator.
“Margy was the driving force in the labor movement at the University of California for over 40 years,” said Elinor Levine of Oakland, who was involved in the CUE movement. “She was always a hero to workers on the Berkeley campus and around the state.”
In 1965, while still an undergraduate, she started dating Tony Wilkinson, then a student at San Francisco State. His brother’s girlfriend was her roommate in Berkeley.
“Margy was so positive and at ease with the world,” Wilkinson said. “I was a nervous person and spent many years trying to get her to embrace the wonders of worrying. I finally had to give it up.”
Their combination somehow worked and they were married in 1970, a lowkey affair at their apartment in Berkeley. They celebrated their wedding night by attending a “Free Huey” rally for Black Panthers leader Huey Newton in Oakland. The newlyweds supported the antiwar and Black Panther causes and at her parents’ dining room table in North Oakland, the defense strategy to free Angela Davis on charges of conspiracy and murder was organized.
“When Margy first took me to her home, it was a totally new experience in how a home could operate,” Wilkinson said. “There was plenty of food and people would show up and everyone was welcome. It was open and loving.”
The Wilkinsons carried on this family tradition in 1980, when they bought a threestory Victorian with seven bedrooms. They afforded it by bringing in four paying roommates, plus three of their kids, to go with their own three kids, Jason, Lila and Matty.
“It was communal living,” said Wilkinson, a retired forklift driver for Local 6 of the ILWU. “We had dinner for 12, at a table we made from the flooring of barracks on Treasure Island.”
Margy did the cooking, and after dinner, the table was cleared off to make way for union and community meetings and progressive campaigns. These ranged from political campaigns in El Salvador to political campaigns in the city of Berkeley. Wilkinson was elected to the Berkeley Labor Commission and served as chair.
After retiring from UC Berkeley, she was active at KPFAFM, the historic listenersponsored radio station in Berkeley. She started at the bottom, as a volunteer in the phone bank during pledge drive, and was elected to the local board in 2010 as chair. By 2013, she’d been elevated to the national board of the Pacifica Foundation. She became executive director, a fulltime job with the highest salary in the organization. But she never asked to be paid, doing it all as a volunteer.
“Margy was incredibly good at navigating a fractious organization by listening to everybody, even the people she was fighting with,” said Brian Edwards Tiekert, who cohosts the morningdrive show on KPFA. “Even the people she fought with probably came out of it liking her.”
She was also a cofounder of the Friends of Adeline, a South Berkeley neighborhood group dedicated to fighting for social justice and against gentrification. When artist Edy Boone created a mural on Ashby Avenue, Wilkinson was prominently featured, with her everpresent smile. The mural became an impromptu memorial after she died, and people are still bringing flowers and signing a poster board placed in her honor.
July 23 would have been Wilkinson’s 77th birthday, and a family memorial is being planned, possibly on July 25. Information can be found on her Facebook page.
Survivors include her husband of 50 years, Tony Wilkinson of South Berkeley; sons Jason of Bainbridge Island, Wash., and Matty of Somerville, Mass.; daughter Lila, of North Oakland; and six grandchildren.
Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SamWhitingSF