Rener Reed grew up in Mississippi during the Jim Crow era, where segregation ruled the day and opportunities for Blacks were limited. She personally knew what it was like to pick cotton and do domestic work, her family said.

But she also grew up in a household that stressed the importance of education, a focus that would become the thrust of her community activism over the decades.

Reed was known for bringing together a diverse group of people to advocate for fairness in her community work and the many years she headed the Lakeview NAACP.

"She actually was a leader," Michele Cadogan, a former officer in the Lakeview branch of the NAACP when Reed was president in the 1980s and '90s. "Ms. Reed was influential in finding out what was going on. She embraced her neighbors and she was the voi

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