Leona W. Martin, who was elected to the Lexington Housing Authority in 1991 and remains the only Black person the town has ever elected to it, died on October 18, 2026, on Martha’s Vineyard. She was 90.
She held that seat for 25 years. Her obituary describes her as the first, and so far only, Black member elected to the authority, and the second half of that phrase is doing more work than the first.
She got there the long way, and she got there before the town was ready to send her. In the 1960s she was publicity chairman of the Lexington Civil Rights Committee, when the committee’s job in a wealthy Boston suburb was to point out that the suburb had a problem. She was a founding member of the Lexington Human Rights Committee and a founding board member of the Association of Black Citizens of Lexington, and she sat on the No Place for Hate steering committee. In 1987 she was elected a Town Meeting member, the first Black woman and the second Black person to serve as one in Lexington, Massachusetts, and she stayed for 12 years. She was the first Black resident the town elected to any townwide position.
In 1995 she created LexFest, a multicultural celebration, and coordinated it for the next 10 years. She was past president of the West Medford Community Center Senior Club.
The recognition arrived late and it arrived in a cluster. The West Medford Elders Project honored her in February 2019. The Black History Project of Lexington put her portrait on a banner in January 2021. The LexSeeHer Women’s Visibility Banners honored her the same year. In 2022 the town gave her the Minuteman Cane Award. She was in her eighties for all of it.
A banner is not a successor. Thirty-five years after Lexington elected Leona W. Martin to its housing authority, the number of Black people it has elected to that body is still one.
