Myra McAdoo, at 77; battler for housing rights in South End

Myra McAdoo , a longtime South End housing activist and educator who came of age amid Boston's thriving jazz scene in the 1930 s and 1940 s, died Saturday after having a heart attack. She was 77.

The granddaughter of a freed slave and an Irish immigrant, Ms. McAdoo spent much of her life fighting an uphill battle to reserve a place for poor people in the gentrifying South End. A former board member of the Tent City Corp., which waged a 19-year struggle to build affordable housing in the neighborhood, she also spent years advocating for tenants and helping the poor buy homes.

Ms. McAdoo was also a great storyteller who regaled friends with tales of a childhood steeped in jazz. Her mother, Gladys, was an actress and socialite known as "Lady Mac" who opened her Roxbury and South End homes to some of the great jazz musicians of the era.

Unwelcome at Boston's white nightclubs after gigs, "they would go over to Myra McAdoo's mother's house," said Lorraine Elena Roses , a Wellesley College professor who interviewed Ms. McAdoo for a study on black cultural life in Boston during that era. "All her memories were tied up with these jazz greats performing, and she grew up among them."

Musicians who played at the great jazz clubs of the South End during that era -- Wally's, Slade's, the Savoy, and the art deco Hi-Hat jazz club -- eventually found their way to the McAdoos' house, including Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Sarah Vaughn, and Nina Simone.

"Everybody came through our house -- politicians, actors, entertainers, musicians, racketeers, even a baron or two," Ms. McAdoo told Roses. "I'm not sure why, it was how we lived."

Ms. McAdoo was well into her teens before she realized she was in the company of legends. As a young woman, she saved for weeks to buy a ticket to see Edward "Duke" Ellington play, said her son, Lonnie. She was stunned when a man she knew as "Uncle Edward" -- a frequent presence at late-night bridge games at her house -- walked onstage.

"She couldn't believe she'd spent her money to hear him play," said her son, a 38-year-old actor who lives in Somerville.

But Ms. McAdoo's mother also introduced her to charitable work and community activism. Her grandmother was a founding member of the Women's Service Club, a prominent black women's charitable organization on Massachusetts Avenue, and her mother held a leadership role in the organization. Ms. McAdoo sang and performed in the group's annual follies, which helped pay to send inner-city children to summer camp.

After graduating from Roxbury Memorial High School For Girls, she attended Boston University and McGill University in Montreal. She returned to Boston and embarked on a lifelong journey of political and community activism.

"She was one of those community activists that got involved in everything," said state Representative Byron Rushing .

While raising her son as a single mother, Ms. McAdoo also worked for an architect, a housing development in Lower Roxbury, and then for the Tenants' Policy Council , a group that advocated for tenants in public housing, her son said.

She was a parent advocate during school desegregation. Later, she ran day-care centers in the South End and at Roxbury Community College, became an office manager at the Dimock Community Health Center in Roxbury, and then worked at the Martha Eliot Health Center in Jamaica Plain. She last lived in the Fenway.

Mel King , a South End activist and former state representative, said Ms. McAdoo was concerned that people of color retain a place in the neighborhood, which, since the late 1960s, has seen redevelopment and an army of wealthy young professionals displace the working class. But it was often a difficult struggle. By the time Tent City was ready for tenants in 1987, Ms. McAdoo was saddened by how long it had taken.

"One frustration is that when we started this 20 years ago, we hoped to bring back a percentage of the people who were displaced and give them apartments here," she told the Globe at the time. "It's been so long that we'd have to go after their grandchildren today."

In addition to her son, she leaves a grandson.

Services have not been announced.