In the summer of 1973, Northeastern University announced that its Black studies department would become a degree-granting program the following year.
Ramona Edelin, then 27, had been chairing the program, and she chaired the new Afro-American studies department when it launched. The status change was important at Northeastern, she said, and sent a message to academia everywhere.
“Black cultural values are not usually represented in large, predominantly white institutions,” she had told Northeastern News, the student weekly newspaper, in March 1973, when the university was still considering whether to elevate Black studies to a degree program.
In 1975, Northeastern changed the department’s name to African American studies, and Dr. Edelin helped popularize that term nationally in the years ahead.
“We are not just former slaves living in the United States,” she told the Globe in January 1989, days after the Rev. Jesse Jackson and other influential Black leaders called for widespread acceptance and use of the term. “We are African Americans.”
Dr. Edelin, who left Northeastern in 1977 to lead the National Urban Coalition nonprofit in Washington, D.C., was 78 when she died Feb. 19 in her Washington home. Barnaby Towns, a communications strategist who worked with her, told The Washington Post she had died of cancer.
Along with chairing Northeastern’s African American studies department, Dr. Edelin was part of another prominent chapter in Boston history in the mid-1970s.
Her then-husband, Dr. Kenneth C. Edelin, was convicted of manslaughter in 1975 for performing a legal abortion two years earlier, several months after the US Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision struck down anti-abortion laws nationally.
Prosecutors in Boston argued that the fetus was viable at the time of the abortion, which Dr. Edelin performed six months into the pregnancy of his patient, a 17-year-old from Roxbury. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court reversed the manslaughter verdict the following year.
“It is time we got off the fictional level and deal with the realities of this case,” Ramona Edelin told the Globe a few days after her husband was convicted in February 1975.
Sitting in her Northeastern University office, she noted that her husband “was the first Black chief resident in obstetrics and gynecology at Boston City Hospital; one who was primarily in service to the poor.”
Most jurors in his trial were men, and most jurors were Catholics.
“I cannot accept the Catholic Church or the ‘right to life’ mentality as a regulating body. Their morality is not necessarily law nor should judgments be made as if it were,” said Dr. Edelin, who strongly supported her husband, though they were separated at the time and later divorced.
Referring to the sometimes violent protests in those years against a federal court’s order imposing busing as a way to address segregation in the city’s schools, she asked of the jurors: “What realistically do they care about a Black fetus?”
She added that “these same people are spitting and throwing rocks at Black children going to school on a bus. What they perceive now as a right to life would in six years be a right to be called names.”
Her activism continued when she left Northeastern and moved to Washington to join the National Urban Coalition, which she later led as president and chief executive.
During a coalition planning meeting in late 1988, Dr. Edelin suggested using African American, rather than Black, as a preferred term, she later told the Globe.
“At the meeting, a number of issues were being raised,” she said. “Reverend Jackson had asked me to be the official scribe. Toward the end of the meeting, I said that if the pieces of this puzzle are going to fit … it would be helpful to refer to ourselves as African American. It puts everything in context.”
A few days later, in a separate Globe interview, she focused on what the term meant historically.
“Who are we if we don’t acknowledge our motherland? We are really adrift if we are just former slaves,” she said.
Ramona Hoage was born in Los Angeles on Sept. 4, 1945. Her father, George, died in a motorcycle crash two weeks before her birth, and the family later moved to Atlanta and Carbondale, Ill.
Her early career in academia had been encouraged by her mother, Annette Lewis Phinazee, who was the first woman to earn a doctorate in library science from Columbia University.
But growing up amid the tumult of the Civil Rights Movement, Ramona was ostracized by white classmates in Georgia and Illinois schools.
After graduating from the progressive Stockbridge boarding school in Massachusetts, she received a bachelor’s degree in religious and philosophical studies in 1967 from Fisk University, a historically Black college in Nashville.
That same year, she married Kenneth C. Edelin.
Ramona Edelin graduated from the University of East Anglia in England in 1969 with a master’s degree when Kenneth was stationed nearby while serving in the Air Force.
A few years after leaving Northeastern’s faculty, she completed her doctorate in philosophy at Boston University in 1981, writing a dissertation about civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois.
Northeastern has created the Ramona Edelin Award for academic achievement in Africana studies — the latest name for the department she once led.
Kenneth Edelin died in 2013. Ramona Edelin’s survivors include two children from their marriage, Kenneth Edelin Jr. and Kimberley Freeman; a son, Ramad Speight, from a subsequent relationship with Alonzo Speight; eight grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
Plans for a memorial service were not immediately available.
In her years with the National Urban Coalition, Dr. Edelin oversaw programs such as a STEM initiative to promote math and science education, especially among children of color.
Her work led to appointments on educational panels and civic task forces, including as a member of the President’s Board of Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities during the Clinton administration. She also served for four years as executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.
A longtime Washington resident, she helped make charter schools a dominant force in the city’s education.
“Without her leadership, it’s safe to say that the charter school movement in the United States, and certainly the nation’s capital, would not be where it is today,” Ariel Johnson, the head of the D.C. Charter School Alliance, wrote in a tribute.
Dr. Edelin was a senior adviser to the group, which succeeded the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools, a now-defunct advocacy organization that Dr. Edelin led as executive director from 2006 to 2020.
Though critics say charter schools deprive traditional public schools of money and resources, and lack the financial transparency and accountability of neighborhood schools, Dr. Edelin said the charter system offered much-needed alternatives for families, including in low-income neighborhoods.
“Ramona was steadfast in always sitting before the City Council making sure that the position of families and children was foremost on their minds,” Donald L. Hense, the founder of Friendship Public Charter, one of Washington’s largest charter networks, told the Post.
Appropriately enough for a former teacher, her style was diplomatic, not combative, Hensesaid.
“More than anything, she was a stabilizing force,” he said. “She led by intellect, to be honest. She always sought the very best out of people. She never ever came back angry or upset.”
As she delved into activism and advocacy, looking to shape a political agenda that would “move us forward” and “reclaim our children,” as she put it, Dr. Edelin continued to reflect on the work of Du Bois.
In 1989, she told the Los Angeles Times that Du Bois had been as “right as a prophet” in predicting that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.”
“But it is up to us,” she continued, “to be sure that’s not the problem of the 21st century.”
Material from The Washington Post was used in this report. Bryan Marquard of the Globe staff contributed.