Lois Rice Helped Create Pell Grants for Low-Income College Students
January 20 2017 - 05:59AM
Dow Jones News
By James R. Hagerty
Lois Dickson Rice, a daughter of Jamaican immigrants, helped
develop the Pell grants that provide tuition money for low-income
college students across the U.S. She also was among the first wave
of African-American women serving on boards of major U.S.
corporations.
Ms. Rice played a large role in shaping and lobbying for the
1972 legislation that created Basic Educational Opportunity Grants,
renamed Pell grants to honor the bill's sponsor, Sen. Claiborne
Pell, a Rhode Island Democrat. The program "would not have come
into existence without her," said Clay Pell IV, a former U.S.
Education Department official and a grandson of Sen. Pell.
She served as a senior vice president and director of Control
Data Corp., a maker of computers. She also was a director of
McGraw-Hill Inc., Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. and Fleet
Financial Group Inc., among other companies. Her daughter, Susan
Rice, served as national security adviser to President Obama.
The elder Ms. Rice died Jan. 4 at a hospital in Washington, D.C.
She was 84 and had cancer.
Lois Ann Dickson, the youngest of five children, was born Feb.
28, 1933, in Portland, Maine. Her mother worked as a maid and did
laundry for wealthy families. Her father worked as a janitor and
elevator operator at a music store. While moonlighting as a
bartender at a Bowdoin College alumni event, he heard good things
about the school. All four of his sons later attended Bowdoin.
Three became medical doctors. A fourth, David Dickson, earned a
doctorate at Harvard University and served as president of what is
now Montclair State University.
Lois Dickson attended Radcliffe College in the early 1950s and
earned a bachelor's degree in history and literature.
"My parents were very motivated people, especially in terms of
educating their children," Ms. Rice told the Portland Press Herald
in 2008. Her father, she said, "mortgaged and re-mortgaged our home
to put us through college."
She was a vice president of the College Entrance Examination
Board in the early 1970s when she pushed for what became the Pell
grant program. In 1992, she became a scholar at the Brookings
Institution, a Washington-based think tank, where she focused on
education policy. She was a member of President Clinton's Foreign
Intelligence Advisory Board.
Her son, E. John Rice, is the founder and chief executive of
Management Leadership for Tomorrow, a nonprofit that helps
minorities prepare to be leaders. Her marriage to Emmett Rice, an
economics professor who served on the Federal Reserve Board of
Governors, ended in divorce. Her second husband, Alfred Fitt, who
was general counsel at the Congressional Budget Office, died in
1992.
She is survived by her two children, four stepchildren and four
grandchildren.
Write to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 20, 2017 05:44 ET (10:44 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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