Political Career
Through her work on the Migrant Labor Board Williams became interested in politics. In 1957 she was elected to the New Jersey General Assembly, becoming the first African American woman elected to either house of the state legislature. She was reelected in 1959. In the Assembly she focused on child welfare, child labor, juvenile delinquency, and migrant labor legislation.
In 1960 she was elected Essex County Registrar, and was reelected in 1965. She was an alternate delegate to the 1960 Democratic National Convention and vice chairwoman of the delegation at the 1964 Convention in Atlantic City.
In 1961 she was involved in a widely publicized dispute over segregated hotel accommodations at the Civil War Centennial Commission meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, commemorating the opening shots of the Civil War at Fort Sumter one hundred years earlier. Williams attended as a member of the New Jersey delegation, but she was denied accommodations at the Francis Marion Hotel, where the meeting was to take place. President John F. Kennedy, an ex officio member of the commission, supported the protest. The commission's executive committee originally refused to change the venue for the meeting, but eventually bowed to White House pressure and moved its sessions to the Charleston Naval Base.
Williams died in 1968 at Mountainside Hospital in Glen Ridge.
Read more about this topic: Madaline A. Williams
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