NY Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/19/us/jean-graetz-dead.html
Mr. and Mrs. Graetz in 2005 on a bus in Montgomery commemorating the 50th anniversary of the start of the bus boycott there, in which they participated.Karen S. Doerr/The Montgomery Advertiser, via Associated Press
Jean Ellis was born on Dec. 24, 1929, on a farm in East Springfield, Pa., near the state’s border with Ohio. Her parents, Marshall and Marian (Smith) Ellis, were farmers.
In addition to her daughters Ms. Ellis and Ms. Glass, Mrs. Graetz is survived by two other daughters, Diann and Katherine Graetz; two sons, David and Jonathan Graetz; four sisters, Ruth Warner, Lola Mitchell, Kathleen Iamaio and Mary Maxwell; 26 grandchildren; 17 great-grandchildren; and one great-great grandson. A son, Robert S. Graetz III, died in 1991.
Mrs. Graetz met her husband at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, where she was studying elementary education and he was studying theology. They married in 1951. When he graduated that same year, two years ahead of her, and received his first preaching assignments — Los Angeles, followed by Montgomery — she left school to follow him.
After the Graetzes returned to Montgomery in 2005, she went back to school to complete her studies, attending Alabama State University, a historically Black college. She graduated in 2015.
The couple, often dressed in color-coordinated outfits of her choosing, became a fixture in Montgomery’s activist community, helping to run the National Center for the Study of Civil Rights and African-American Culture at Alabama State.
In 2018,
a handwritten note by Mrs. Parks documenting their friendship came up for auction. Mr. and Mrs. Graetz, never wealthy, bought it for $9,375. They immediately donated it to the university.
“Sacrifice is something they did their entire life,” said Mr. Mullinax, the couple’s friend. “So it really doesn’t surprise me that they would sacrifice financially at the end of their life. It ties it all up in a bow.”
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