Hazel Dukes

Hazel Dukes was president of the national N.A.A.C.P. in the early 1990s and headed the organization’s New York State Conference from 1977 until her death in March 2025. Dukes died on Saturday March 1 2025 at her home in Harlem. She was 92. In 1990, New York Mayor Dinkins appointed Ms. Dukes president of the city’s Off-Track Betting Corporation (OTB), a coveted patronage job that she held until she was let go in 1994 by Mr. Dinkins’s Republican successor, Rudolph W. Giuliani. In 1884 he city paid $4 million to settle claims by OTB executives who had accused Ms. Dukes of dismissing them because they were white. (She had said they were incompetent.) In 1997, she pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of embezzling $13,000 in 1993 from a former OTB employee who had granted her power of attorney when the employee was on disability leave with leukemia.