State Sen. Yvonne Miller, Virginia’s first black female legislator dies

Senator Yvonne Miller, 77, had been ill for some time with cancer. PHOTO/File

Senator Yvonne B. Miller, the longest-serving woman in the Virginia Senate, died Tuesday, according to Senate Clerk Susan Clarke Schaar.

Miller, who would have turned 78 on Wednesday, had battled stomach cancer in the past year and missed several weeks of the 2011 legislative session.

Miller was the first African-American woman elected to Virginia’s state legislature.

She was a career educator and an outspoken advocate for Virginia’s poor and minorities in the General Assembly.

Miller broke the combined gender and color barrier in 1983 when she was the first black woman to win a seat in Virginia’s House of Delegates, the oldest continuously meeting legislative body in the Western Hemisphere.

Four years later, she did the same by winning a seat in the state Senate.

Miller ascended from obscurity, when neither women nor minorities had a voice in the legislature, to a seat on the budget-writing Finance Committee and chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.