Lillian Roberts, a crusading labor leader hailed as a “tiger” — and briefly jailed — during her fiery tenure at the nation’s largest municipal workers union, which now represents more than 150,000 nurses, pothole fillers, zookeepers, and other New York City employees, died July 9 in Manhattan. She was 98.
Her death, at a nursing facility, was from cardiac arrest, said Ivan Smith, her sister’s son, whom Ms. Roberts raised as her own after her sister’s death.
Starting in the 1960s, Ms. Roberts established a reputation as a firebrand, working for — and, eventually, as a de facto partner of — Victor H. Gotbaum, the notoriously combative executive director of District Council 37.
The district council — part of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, or AFSCME — has long been considered the nation’s most powerful public employees union, representing more than 1,000 job titles and nearly a third of the city’s municipal workers.
Rising to prominence at a time when labor leadership was dominated by white men, Ms. Roberts, a Black woman, spent nearly 14 years as the associate director of District Council 37, which roughly quadrupled in membership during that period. Her biggest coup was unionizing 20,000 workers at the city’s public hospitals, in what the New York Times later called one of the largest organizing drives in American history.
After a lengthy absence, she returned to District Council 37 as executive director in 2002, when she was 74, and...
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