WASHINGTON — Former Rep. Lindy Boggs, a plantation-born Louisianan who used her soft-spoken grace to fight for civil rights during nearly 18 years in Congress after succeeding her late husband in the House, died Saturday. She was 97.
Boggs, who later served three years as ambassador to the Vatican during the Clinton administration, died of natural causes at her home in Chevy Chase, Md., according to her daughter, ABC News journalist Cokie Roberts.
Boggs’ years in Congress started with a special election in 1973 to finish the term of her husband, Thomas Hale Boggs Sr., whose plane disappeared over Alaska six months earlier. Between them, they served a half-century in the House.
“It didn’t occur to us that anybody else would do it,” Roberts said in explaining why her mother was the natural pick for the congressional seat.
Her parents, who had met in college, were “political partners for decades,” she said, with Lindy Boggs running her husband’s political campaigns and becoming a player on the Washington political scene.
Roberts called her mother “a trailblazer for women and the disadvantaged.”
When Boggs announced her retirement in 1990, she was the only white representing a black-majority district in Congress. “I am proud to have played a small role in opening doors for blacks and women,” she said at the time.
As family tragedy brought her in to Congress, so did it usher her out. At the time of her July 1990 announcement, her daughter Barbara Boggs Sigmund, mayor of Princeton, N.J., was dying of cancer. Sigmund died that October.
Her son, Thomas Hale Boggs Jr., is a leading Washington lawyer and lobbyist.
The elder Boggs was first elected to Congress in 1940, two years after the couple married. Both were also active in local reform groups.
Breaking with most Southern whites, Lindy Boggs saw civil rights as an inseparable part of political reform in the 1940s and ’50s.
“You couldn’t want to reverse the injustices of the political system and not include the blacks and the poor. It was just obvious,” she said.
She worked for the Civil Rights Acts of 1965 and 1968, Head Start and other programs to help minorities, the poor and women.
Boggs changed the way politics operated, former Sen. J. Bennett Johnston, D-La., once said.
“I’ve seen it time after time,” Johnston said. “On difficult issues, powerful men and women are going toe to toe, sometimes civilly, sometimes acrimoniously. Lindy Boggs will come into the room. The debate will change.”
Corinne Claiborne was born March 13, 1916, on a plantation near New Orleans, a descendant of the state’s first elected governor.
In addition to her children, Boggs is survived by eight grandchildren and 18 great-grandchildren.
