Longtime District Politician Mason Dies at 91

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.