Hazel N. Dukes, Longtime Civil Rights Stalwart, Dies at 92

Hazel N. Dukes, an early and unwavering crusader for civil rights who survived personal, professional and political setbacks to serve for nearly a half-century as the perennial president of New York State’s N.A.A.C.P., died on Saturday at her home in Harlem. She was 92.

Her death was announced by her son, Ronald.

From 1990 to 1992, Ms. Dukes was the national president of the venerable civil rights organization formally known as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She was also president of the organization’s New York State conference from 1977 until her death, as well as the founder and president of Hazel N. Dukes & Associates, a consulting firm that focused on strategic planning.

“She has been a fearless advocate for equal educational opportunity and has participated in the development of some of the nation’s most important advancements for early childhood education,” Leon W. Russell, the chairman of the N.A.A.C.P. national board of directors said in a statement.

Mr. Russell noted that Ms. Dukes made her voice heard as recently as last month at a national board meeting.

Former Gov. David Paterson of New York, who knew Ms. Dukes as a neighbor on Long Island, described her in an interview as “omnipresent, someone who when she came into a room you knew she was there and didn’t leave until it was accomplished.” Her legacy, he added, “was that she didn’t see any boundaries that she couldn’t cross if she thought it was necessary to correct a situation that was unfair.”

Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and U.S. senator from New York, said in a statement that Ms. Dukes “was a fearless and indefatigable force on the front lines of civil rights.”

Mayor Eric Adams ordered flags on city buildings lowered to half-staff in Ms. Dukes’s memory.

Although Ms. Dukes never held elective office, her durability and stubborn advocacy for guaranteeing Black people equal opportunities in housing, schools and the workplace provided her with access and influence in the administrations of several Democratic governors, including Mario M. Cuomo; his son, Andrew M. Cuomo; and Kathy Hochul, at whose inaugural in January 2023 Ms. Dukes officiated. She also was influential in the administration Mayor David N. Dinkins, also a Democrat.

“With humility and fortitude, it is my hope that my accomplishments have had an impact,” she told the N.A.A.C.P. national convention in Boston in 2023 when she received the Spingarn Medal, the group’s highest honor.

In 2023, when she was 91, she was named by Mayor Eric Adams to his Charter Revision Commission, a temporary panel appointed to recommend changes in the structure of city government.

“After all these years of being an important civil rights leader, Hazel could have slowed down, but that is and was not in her DNA,” said Dennis Walcott, the former New York City Schools Chancellor who was later the president of the Queens Public Library. “Hazel is and was a fighter to the end, and because of that, people who may not know her name owe her a big thank you.”

A fixture on the front lines of the civil rights movement — and eventually an elder stateswoman — she was seen by associates as courageous, implacable and ardently loyal.

“I wouldn’t say there was a major piece of legislation or an issue or a plan or approach that I could think of that she was the architect of,” Mr. Paterson said. “She was more the symbol of it, or the salesperson of it.”

In 1990, Mayor Dinkins appointed Ms. Dukes president of the city’s Off-Track Betting Corporation (OTB), a coveted patronage job that she held until she was let go in 1994 by Mr. Dinkins’s Republican successor, Rudolph W. Giuliani.

Battered by competition from casinos and state lottery games and hobbled by inefficient technology and political appointees, OTB had been experiencing declining profits for decades. The corporation posted its first deficit in 1993, under her watch.

The next year, the city paid $4 million to settle claims by OTB executives who had accused Ms. Dukes of dismissing them because they were white. (She had said they were incompetent.)

In 1997, she pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of embezzling $13,000 in 1993 from a former OTB employee who had granted her power of attorney when the employee was on disability leave with leukemia. Ms. Dukes paid the money back and suggested that some of it had actually been for repayment of a loan she had made to the employee.

Hazel Nell Dukes was born on March 17, 1932, in Montgomery, Ala., the only child of Edward and Alice Dukes. Her father was a Pullman porter and union organizer, and her mother was a domestic worker. One of the family’s neighbors was Rosa Parks, who would become known as the heroine of the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott.

Ms. Dukes enrolled in Alabama State Teachers College, but did not graduate. After moving to New York with her family in 1955, she worked at Macy’s and, while she lived in Roslyn, on Long Island, for the federal Head Start program; the Nassau County attorney’s office, where she was a trailblazer as one of the first Black hires; and the county’s Economic Opportunity Commission.

In 1978, after studying business administration at Nassau County Community College, she earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y. She also did postgraduate work at Queens College of the City University of New York. She did not receive a degree, but she had several honorary doctorates and preferred to be known as Dr. Dukes.

As the first Black vice chairwoman of the Nassau County Democratic Committee, she was a pioneer in pressing for integrated housing in the county and for lowering class sizes statewide. She was later president of her own public policy consulting firm and served on the Democratic National Committee from 1976 to 1982.

Despite having been president of the state N.A.A.C.P. since 1977, she was ousted at the end of her three-year term as national president in 1992 in a leadership dispute over term limits. She and several board members wanted to retain the limits, which would have forced the retirement of the organization’s chairman, Dr. William F. Gibson.

She remained a member of the organization’s national board of directors and executive committee as well as president of the New York State N.A.A.C.P. Conference.

Her son is her only immediate survivor. A brief marriage ended in divorce.

In 2023, the town of North Hempstead, N.Y., renamed a street for Ms. Dukes in Roslyn Heights, where she lived for decades before moving to Manhattan in her later years. At the ceremony, State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli, describing himself as a graduate of the “Hazel N. Dukes school of civic engagement and activism,” recalled that she had urged him to run for the local school board when he was 18.

That same year, despite the factionalism that had driven her from the presidency nearly three decades earlier, she was presented with the Spingarn Medal.

“We have made and lived history together, and I will always be grateful for her wisdom, her humor and her grace,” Mrs. Clinton said in presenting the medal.

Ms. Dukes accepted it with characteristic ebullience. “With every breath in my body I will continue to advocate and do the work necessary to stop those trying to turn back the hand of time,” she said.

“If I can help somebody as I travel along this way, then my living shall have not been in vain,” she added. “I’m not tired yet.”