BERKELEY — Longtime city resident and activist and former radio executive Margy Wilkinson died Saturday at her South Berkeley home. She was 76.
Born to Helen Lima and Alfred J. “Mickie” Lima, she grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and later earned a bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley, majoring in U.S. history and minoring in American literature, before working in multiple university departments, including the economics department, accounting office, the Cal Band and the library.
She also worked to organize workers at Berkeley and throughout the UC system, serving as a founding member of Cal’s AFSCME union representing non-academic workers and later becomign a contract-bargaining team member and chief steward for the Coalition of University Employees (CUE) union representing clerical workers.
After retiring from Cal in 2007, Wilkinson began volunteering at radio station KPFA-FM, pushing back against moves by parent organization Pacifica Foundation and eventually rising to become board chair during a tumultuous period in the station and organization’s history.
As a longtime Berkeley resident, Wilkinson weighed in on prominent local issues, including vacant units during the ongoing housing crisis, health-care organizations’ moves and, in one resonant instance, a 2016 discussion over the police department’s acquisition of a van via a grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
“The real safety of police officers is in their relationship with the community,” she said at the time. “If the community loves and respects the police, that’s where their safety comes from — not from a vehicle.”
An agenda posted in advance of Tuesday’s scheduled Berkeley city council meeting still lists her as one of just over a dozen expected speakers on the subject of “police concerns.”
A statement Sunday on KPFA’s site mourned her passing, remembering her as “fun, upbeat, pragmatic, generous, easy to get along with, easy to love. We miss you Margy and we thank you for a life lived deeply and in the truest solidarity!”
Contact George Kelly at 408-859-5180.