Lynn Walker Huntley, the former president of the Southern Education Foundation, civil rights lawyer, and Justice Department official, died at her home in Atlanta on August 30. She was 69 years old and had suffered from cervical cancer.
Huntley was a native of Petersburg, Virginia. Her father was the former dean of the Howard University Divinity School. Huntley attended historically Black Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, but transferred and earned her bachelor’s degree at Barnard College in New York City. She graduated with honors from Columbia Law School, where she was the first Black woman to serve as editor of the Columbia Law Review.
After law school, Huntley served as a clerk for Judge Constance Baker Motley of the federal district court in New York. She then served as an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and later was a deputy assistant attorney general in the civil rights division of the U.S. Justice Department.
In 1995, Huntley joined the Southern Education Foundation, an organization that raises funds to improve educational opportunities for Black and low-income students in the South. Seven years later she became its first woman president. Huntley retired from that post in 2010.
