Everybody was rushing to do what we could. That atmosphere sparked Wilson, already a union steward at the A.O. Smith Corp., to run for a seat on the Executive Board of Smith Steelworkers Local 19806. She set up the union's civil rights committee and was appointed to the boards of the local Red Cross and the Children's Service Society, and later to the Apprenticeship Advisory Council and the State Personnel Board. They were following the leader by getting a black to put in the window, except I had a lot more to do than sit up in the window. Indeed, Wilson has asserted and distinguished herself over the years as a labor activist, a civil rights crusader, a feminist pioneer and an advocate for the elderly with the Milwaukee County Commission on Aging and AARP's Minority Affairs Initiative.
Few people become activists overnight.
For Wilson, it was a lifetime of struggle that eventually led to her questioning and challenging the status quo. Born in 1916 in Lufkin, Texas, she worked hard in her early years. She now speaks nostalgically of the cycles of planting and harvesting, and of the endless canning of peaches, apples, figs, tomatoes and blackberries. She attended school every day and read many of her father's and uncle's books by the light of an oil lamp. She also learned about the racist order of Texas at an early age.