Longtime District Politician Mason Dies at 91

By J.Y. Smith and Joe Holley
The Washington Post
Monday, December 17, 2007 3:51 PM

Hilda H.M. Mason, 91, an at-large member of the D.C. Council, the grande dame of city politics and a passionate and sharp-tongued champion of such issues as home rule, education and the welfare of children, died yesterday at Washington Hospital Center.

The cause of death was not immediately known, a daughter said.

Mason was a veteran of the civil rights movement, a former teacher, a formidable committee chairman and the self-described "grandmother of the world." She also was virtually unbeatable at the polls despite running on the ticket of the minuscule D.C. Statehood Party. With the late chairman David A. Clarke, she was regarded as the council's liberal conscience on social issues.

"Our city has lost a true legend today," Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) said in a statement. "From the earliest days of Home Rule to the present, as an elected official and a private citizen, Hilda Mason was a force behind the voting rights movement and the education of thousands of young people."

Mason was elected to the Board of Education in 1971 and served from 1972 to 1977, when she was appointed to the D.C. Council to fill the unexpired term of Julius Hobson Sr., who founded the Statehood Party. Later that year, she defeated nine other candidates to win an at-large seat in her own right. She won reelection four times with little difficulty.

Her great interest was public education. From 1981 to 1997, she chaired what is now the council's Education, Libraries and Recreation Committee. In addition, she served on the Local, Regional and Federal Affairs Committee, the Human Services Committee and the Judiciary Committee.

"Hilda Mason was the kind of champion for education in her time that drives people like me today," D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray (D) said in a statement. "Her brand of fortitude and tenacity is what we all aspire to in our public service."

Mason was a director of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority for many years and was chairman of the Metro board in 1988 and 1991.

As a council member, she turned a sympathetic ear to the concerns of the poor and disadvantaged among the city's residents. She worked for better schools and housing and preserved bus routes that were useful to the elderly. She backed measures for gun control, rent control, tenant and consumer rights, home rule and D.C. statehood. She opposed the death penalty.

In 1982, she supported a ballot initiative banning nuclear weapons in the city, a natural outgrowth, she said, of her work on civil rights. She was instrumental in the creation of the University of the District of Columbia in the 1970s and what became the David A. Clarke School of Law in the 1980s. The school's law library is named for Mason and her husband.

"She and Charlie were totally and completely committed to the School of Law, and at every level," said Shelley Broderick, the school's dean. Broderick noted that Mason and her husband crafted the legislation that created the school, set up a scholarship program and donated about $4 million in scholarship money over the years. They also attended every event the school had.

"The law school is thriving, and it wouldn't have happened without Hilda and Charlie Mason," Broderick said.

Mrs. Mason was unfazed by criticism from the business and real estate communities that she was unfair to their interests.

"She had an extraordinary commitment to social justice and equality. She worked hard at that," said Frank Smith, a former D.C. Council member who met Mason when both were civil rights activists in the 1960s. "She was involved with every progressive cause for the past 40 years."

Throughout those decades, Mason's constant companion, unofficial assistant and political alter ego was Charles N. Mason, her husband. He was a Boston-born, Harvard-educated white man who came to Washington to work as a government engineer and went on to earn a law degree at Howard University. She was an African American from rural Virginia who came here to be a teacher. They met at All Souls Unitarian Church, a center for activists at the time, got married in 1965 and became one of the city's most remarkable political couples.

They were usually among the first to arrive at the John A. Wilson Building and the last to leave. "Charlie," who died in 2006, was the seemingly bemused but meticulous note-taker and master of legislative detail whom the council officially designated a "gratuitous servant." She was the spry and intense issues person and no-nonsense committee chair.

In the matter of staying in office, Mason benefited from a provision of the D.C. Home Rule Charter that prohibits any one party from holding more than three of the five at-large council seats, including that of the chairman. She handily defeated the rare challenges she received for the Statehood Party nomination and then relied on a deep reservoir of goodwill among voters across the city to carry her in the general election.

She never stopped campaigning. Her day often started at 7 a.m. and went until midnight. She attended dozens of community meetings a year. She had a highly regarded staff and rarely missed a chance for constituent service. Her generosity to churches and charities was well known. At one time, she made several trips a week to bring food to a group home where nine previously abused children were living.

Her willingness just to show up sometimes embarrassed her colleagues on the council even as it pleased voters. In 1993, for example, her education committee scheduled a hearing at which UDC students were to testify on the institution's budget. She was the only council member present, a fact widely noted by her supporters. The students had to round up the other committee members.

Before the 1990 election, there were suggestions that Mason retire. Supporters rallied 'round her when former mayor Marion Barry tried to get back into politics after serving a prison sentence for a drug conviction by running for an at-large seat as an independent. Mason polled 70,000 votes to 50,000 for Barry. A campaign aide said the race had pitted "everyone's grandmother against everyone's boyfriend."

But the calls for her retirement continued, and they grew more insistent as Mason began showing intemperate and erratic behavior. In 1993, at a hearing on city furloughs, she questioned a teenager so sharply that the witness burst into tears.

In 1995, council members had to persuade her to start a previously scheduled meeting of her education committee with witnesses waiting. Once the hearing began, she berated speakers and kept the session going for 10 hours, until 2 a.m. On another occasion, she supported legislation on charter schools and then appeared at a news conference to criticize it.

In 1997, she reluctantly heeded pleas from council members and stepped down as chairman of the education committee. She lost her final bid for reelection the following year, at age 82.

Hilda Holland M. Mason was born June 14, 1916, near Altavista, Va. She attended Virginia Seminary in Lynchburg and St. Paul's College in Lawrenceville before moving to Washington in 1945. She graduated from Miner Teachers College. Miner later became part of D.C. Teachers College and UDC. She received a master's degree in education at D.C. Teachers and did further graduate work at the State University of New York in Plattsburgh and at Catholic University.

She was a teacher, counselor and administrator in the D.C. public school system for 19 years until she was elected to the Board of Education from Ward 4.

Mason was a member of the American Personnel and Guidance Association, the American Federation of Teachers, the D.C. Counselors Association, the NAACP, the National Organization for Women, the National Women's Political Caucus, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, the Links Inc., Women's Strike for Peace, the United Nations Association of the United States of America and All Souls Unitarian Church.

Survivors include two daughters, Joyce C. Hamer Betts of Philadelphia and Carolyn Dungee Nicholas of Culpeper, Va.; two grandsons; and three great-grandchildren.

J.Y. Smith, a former obituary editor of The Post, died in January 2006.