Peggy Cooper Cafritz

Peggy Cooper Cafritz, an arts patron, civil rights activist, educator and saloniste in Washington, died there on Feb. 18. She was 70. Her daughter, Arcelie Reyes, said the cause was complications of pneumonia. Ms. Cooper Cafritz was a voracious collector and champion of African and African-American artists. She amassed one of the country’s largest private collections of African-American art. She was born Pearl Alice Cooper in Mobile, Ala., on April 7, 1947, to Algernon Johnson Cooper Sr. and the former Gladys Mouton. At the time, the Coopers were the most prosperous black family in the city. Her grandmother had opened the first black school there, and her father owned a string of funeral and insurance companies all over the state. Ms. Cooper Cafritz was a junior at George Washington University when she and the choreographer Mike Malone founded a summer program that is now the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. She was in her first year of law school at George Washington when her father committed suicide — bedeviled, she said, by money troubles. Using her law books as collateral, she took out a loan so that her youngest brother could stay in boarding school. In 2009, more than 300 pieces of art that she had spent years collecting were destroyed in a fire that ravaged the gabled and columned eight-bedroom estate Ms. Cooper Cafritz had built in 1986 with her husband at the time, Conrad Cafritz, a wealthy developer, in the Kent neighborhood of northwest Washington. Her marriage to Mr. Cafritz ended in divorce in 1998. Besides her daughter, Ms. Reyes, she is survived by two sons, Zach and Cooper Cafritz.