Longtime Nevada civil rights leader Mary Valencia Wilson dies at 66
By Andrew Barbano
RENO, Nev. — Longtime Nevada civil rights leader Mary Valencia Wilson, 66, died at Renown Regional Medical Center in Reno shortly after midnight of Friday, June 10. She suffered from complications after a long battle with cancer.
She was born to Manuel Obregón Valencia and the former Margaret Regina Smith on October 21, 1944, in Palo Alto, California. As a child, Mary Valencia carried tools to help her father, a union carpenter, build a small four-bedroom house so that their family could leave a one-room shack south of Los Angeles. It took years. The house still stands.
She attended high school in Norwalk, Calif., and worked as a waitress. When she could no longer work, she attended Fullerton College. She participated in anti-Vietnam War protests while at Fullerton and marched with United Farmworkers Union leader César Chávez.
She learned activism at an early age.
"My dad would come home bloody (from AFL-CIO marches)," she remembered, "bloody from the police. There are a lot of good policemen, but every barrel has a couple of rotten ones. We need a citizen police review board," she said in 2001.
During her childhood, Wilson often worked with migrant harvesters at several farms south of Los Angeles and in Orange County. She often said that John Steinbeck perfectly captured the life of these workers in his novel, "The Grapes of Wrath," a book she re-read once a year.
In 1954, her father, an Aztec from Mexico, was honored as Norwalk man of the year, the first non-white so honored.
She became a Nevada resident in the early 1990's.
Valencia Wilson was honored with the Nevada Alliance for Workers' Rights (AWR) Sentinel Award in 2002.
She proved "instrumental in helping the alliance get a translator into agricultural areas to talk to non-English-speaking farm and ranch workers," according to a 2002 Reno News & Review profile written by UNR journalism Prof. Deidre Pike.
"She worked for increased diversity in the City of Reno's hiring process," Pike reported.
"Not only was Mary a dear friend and loyal NAACP volunteer, but she was also a truly great advocate for equality and civil rights for all people," stated Reno-Sparks NAACP President Lonnie Feemster when informed of her passing.
"When Sparks police started ticketing casual laborers on Galletti Way, the indignant Wilson was ready to do whatever she could to instigate change," Pike wrote in 2001.
Mary Valencia Wilson served on the boards of AWR, Washoe Legal Services and the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada. She was a longtime elected member of the Reno-Sparks NAACP executive committee and served as the organization's political action chair. She sat on the advocacy committee of the League of United Latin American Citizens and was also instrumental in establishing the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada (PLAN).
"She was our most avid volunteer and was loved by all," remembered PLAN lobbyist Jan Gilbert.
"Mary was on the founding board of PLAN, representing the Reno-Sparks NAACP, which was one of PLAN's founding member groups," stated PLAN State Director Bob Fulkerson.
"Our office was practically out the front door of Mary's apartment on Riverside Drive, so she was a frequent participant in our meetings, protests and social events. Out my office window, I used to watch the parade of kids that would go to Mary's place since she was known as the person in the neighborhood who would give them love, food, a place to hang out, whatever else was needed that, for some reason or another, they couldn't get at home," Fulkerson said.
"She also took in stray cats and we both cried the day when Bucket Mouth, her favorite, was killed by a dog whose owner was at a PLAN meeting for the day. Mary was the go-to person for anyone who needed support, love or redress against the establishment, whether police, city council or other organizations," Fulkerson added.
While increasingly physically disabled, she still insisted on participating in union picket demonstrations, most notably the 24-hour nurses strike against Washoe Medical Center (Renown) just before Christmas in 2001.
"'She's out there on the line with the nurses in the cold - and her health is terrible,' said the late AWR founder Tom Stoneburner. "It's a major hurdle just to get out there.'"
The AWR Sentinel Award was not intended for a large donor or someone paid to do community activism. It was instead directed toward an impassioned volunteer out in the trenches.
"Mary doesn't get paid to do this," Stoneburner told Pike. "She has an activist fire in her."
"This is a person that every time something is threatening the community, this person's ready to go," Stoneburner added.
"When you start thinking about the kind of activist I'm talking about, Mary is that - she lives it. She's an inspiration to everybody. We should all try to be like that."
She was twice married and is survived by a sister, Joan Valencia Treptow (Bill) of Reno; and brother, retired Los Angeles police officer Emmanuel Charles "Spike" Valencia (Karen) of Running Springs, Calif. She also leaves two nieces and three nephews.
Her family is especially grateful to John Keim for all of his kindnesses rendered in her final years.
Valencia Wilson willed her body donated to the University of Nevada School of Medicine. A memorial service will be announced later and posted at RenoSparksNAACP.org.
"The obstacles ahead in the struggle for equality are high, but not insurmountable," she wrote in 2001.
"We have come a long way since Jim Crow ruled the South. Unfortunately, deeply entrenched discrimination and racial violence still exist. The sense of moral urgency that fueled the civil rights era is just as imperative today."
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