Carol "Kay" McCabe was a deeply rooted Quaker who enacted her convictions in myriad ways, among them by adopting and providing a safe home in Santa Rosa to one of the "Little Rock Nine" and rallying Sonoma County to celebrate and protect the Russian River.
McCabe, for 55 years the wife and partner in activism to the late George McCabe, a founder of Sonoma State University, died April 19. She was 94.
"She made a big difference, I think," said one of her three daughters, Judith Ashley of Sebastopol.
A resident of Sonoma County since 1956, Kay McCabe made her mark through acts of community and conscience that spanned nearly six decades. She helped to bring Head Start preschool to the region, to prepare unemployed people for work through Job Corps and to put the KRCB public-broadcasting TV and radio stations on the air.
The hiker, paddler and conservationist also co-founded the multi-faceted former Russian River Watershed Celebration.
As a young woman, McCabe, a California native and descendant of Quakers going back to before the birth America, worked for a time for Eleanor Roosevelt in New York City. She regretted having to decline the former First Lady's request that she become her assistant.
She left the East Coast in 1952 to accompany her husband and fellow UC Berkeley graduate back to the Bay Area, where he took an assistant-professor position at San Francisco State College.
Four years later, the college administration chose George McCabe to open and direct San Francisco State's new Santa Rosa Center. It was a training center intended to help California meet a burgeoning need for grade-school teachers — and the predecessor to Sonoma State College, now Sonoma State University.
The McCabes raised three children in a home on Santa Rosa's eastern edge. Daughter Ashley recalled that her mother always was "very involved in things that would help people and she was always bringing people home stay with us."
At various times, the McCabes sheltered and treated as family a Native American girl, a cousin kicked out of his house because he refused to get a haircut and a youngster whose mother had died.
Ashley recalls the day in 1959 that her father answered the phone, then announced, "There's a girl who needs a place to stay."
She wasn't just any girl.
She was a black teen named Melba Joy Pattillo, now Melba Pattillo Beals. In '59 she was a 17-year-old marked for death by the Ku Klux Klan in Arkansas.
Two years earlier, in September 1957, Pattillo was one of nine black teens who volunteered with the NAACP to register for classes at Little Rock's white-only Central High School. It would be the first major confrontation over the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, the ruling that outlawed deliberate racial segregation in public schools.
As Pattillo and the others who'd become known as the Little Rock Nine walked into the school, they and the soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division who guarded them were cursed. Some of the nine were spat upon.
Beals would recall in her book, "Warriors Don't Cry," that she later had acid thrown in her eyes, and a group of white girls tried to burn her alive by dropping pieces of burning paper on her in a bathroom stall.
Two years later, in 1959, the Ku Klux Klan was offering $10,000 to have her killed, and Arkansas' segregationist governor, Orval Faubus, had closed all of Little Rock's high schools rather than integrate.
Officials of the NAACP looked for safe homes for Pattillo and other of the Little Rock Nine. Somebody suggested the McCabe home in far-away Santa Rosa.
Melba Beals remembers meeting in McCabes for the first time and tensing at the sight of the white family. With his crew-cut hair, George McCabe looked much like some of the Arkansas men she'd so feared.
But she soon felt right at home. She shared a bedroom with her new sisters, Judith and Dori, and made a brother of the late Richard McCabe.
Judith Ashley recalls, "All I cared about was that she got in line for her turn to do the dishes." The new member of the family did step up, though her mother in Arkansas had warned her not to let her California family make a maid of her.
The McCabes made her a daughter.
"For a white family to take on a black child at that time was incredible," Melba Beals said.
She said her adoptive mother "never treated me as anything other than a daughter."
"It was her love and her protection and her joy of life that bridged me into adulthood. It healed the wounds of my fiery experience in Little Rock."
Beals, who wrote of her life with the McCabes in the book, "White Is a State of Mind," said it was as though folowing her exposure to the hatred of white people in 1950s Arkansas, "God said, 'Hey, Melba, I'm going to hit you with my best shot; I'm going to give you an angel.'"
She loved George and Kay McCabe as her adoptive parents as she completed her secondary studies at Montgomery High, continued on to San Francisco State and became a journalist, network radio host and Ph.D. Now 72, she retired earlier this year from Dominican University in San Rafael, where she was chairwoman of the Department of Communications and Media Studies.
George McCabe died in 1996.
In 1999, Beals took Kay McCabe to the White House, where President Bill Clinton presented the Little Rock Nine with the Congressional Gold Medal. Two years earlier, McCabe accompanied Beals to Little Rock for an emotional, 40th-anniversary commemoration of the former students' courage at facing down segregation.
McCabe said following the Gold Medal ceremony in the East Room of the White House, "It was extraordinarily moving, sharing tears with the President.
"Everybody was so totally moved by the image of how nine kids led this nation to find a solution to this incredible problem of segregation. These were the children who led the nation into seeing another way so that all people could have an equal education."
McCabe and her late husband moved from Santa Rosa to Occidental a number of years ago. For the past six years, she resided at Mirabel Lodge, a residential care home in Forestville.
In addition to her daughter in Sebastopol and Beals, she is survived by daughter Dori Gilbert of Portland, Ore.; 11 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.
A memorial service is at 2 p.m. Saturday at the Redwood Forest Friends Meeting, 1647 Guerneville Road in Santa Rosa.
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