Shirley Kennedy, 76; Activist Taught at UC Santa Barbara

Shirley Kennedy, 76, political and social activist and black studies lecturer at UC Santa Barbara who annually helped arrange celebrations for Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, died on that holiday Monday in Santa Barbara of colon cancer.

Born Shirley Graves, she grew up in Chicago and became an itinerant Air Force wife until the family settled in Santa Barbara County in the early 1970s. Kennedy earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science at UC Santa Barbara and in 1986 completed a doctorate at Claremont Graduate School (now Claremont Graduate University).

For the last 20 years, she taught political science, black studies and constitutional law at UC Santa Barbara, where she also founded the Black Cultural Festival.

Last year, she brought to Santa Barbara an exhibition of artifacts from the slave ship Henrietta Marie, which sank off Florida in 1700. The exhibit was sponsored by the Building Bridges Coalition, which Kennedy helped to found.

An avid Democrat, she served as a delegate to the party’s national convention in 1988 and worked in California for Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign.

She also lobbied for incorporation of Goleta, where UC Santa Barbara is located, was active in the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, and in 1995 went to China for the United Nations’ fourth World Conference on Women.