Marcia Ann Gillespie was 26 when Essence made her editor-in-chief, and she kept the job for nine years. Gillespie, who went on to run Ms. magazine and to co-found the company that bought it, has died at 82.
She was editor in chief of Essence from 1971 to 1980. The magazine won a National Magazine Award during her tenure; she served as a vice president of Essence Communications, and she sat on its board. Her own account of how she got there was plain. She said it was not as though she chose it; she fell into it, and that she got lucky and it could have all gone another way.
Gillespie graduated from college in 1966 and left Time, Inc. in 1970. At Ms. magazine, she was a contributing editor and a featured columnist, then executive editor, then editor-in-chief from 1993 to 2001. She was president of Liberty Media for Women, which she co-founded with Gloria Steinem and which took ownership of Ms. in 1998.
She co-authored Maya Angelou: A Glorious Celebration, published by Doubleday in 2008. From 2010, she taught at the State University of New York at Old Westbury as a visiting professor in the American Studies department, teaching Writing for Media and a course on African Americans and the mass media. Her honors include the University of Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism, lifetime achievement awards from the New York chapter of the Association of Black Journalists and from New York Women in Communications, and a Doctor of Letters from Lake Forest College. In 2017, she was given the Barbara Graves Legacy Award at the twelfth annual Women of Power Summit in Phoenix, Arizona.
She mentored Susan L. Taylor, and she contributed to a 2008 biography of Maya Angelou.
Asked what she would want to be remembered for, Gillespie named excellence, and said she hoped she had in some small way encouraged women to go for it. Asked what she wished she had known earlier, she said she would have known to laugh more. The advice she gave other women was to be prepared to stand your ground, because you never know where the hand is going to come from.
