Ruth Apilado


Ruth Apilado is an American newspaper editor, novelist, anti-racism activist, and founder of America's Intercultural Magazine.

Early life and career

Apilado was born on April 30, 1908, in Chicago, Illinois. Her parents were Stewart and Clara Mays. Her maternal grandmother had emigrated from Canada to Ohio, and was partly indigenous. Her paternal great-grandfather was a slave owner in Virginia.
Apilado attended McKinley High School, which closed in 1954. She became a teacher in 1928, after graduating from Chicago State University. She began her journalistic career in 1942, when she briefly worked as an editor for the newly-created Negro Youth Photo Scripts Magazine. In 1945, she wrote a letter to the editor expressing her criticism of Richard Wright's memoir Black Boy, stating that it was an inaccurate depiction of the typical childhood of African-Americans. In 1950, Apilado published a novel called The Joneses, which was about the hardships of a black family living in Chicago.
After retiring from teaching in 1973, Apilado founded America's Intercultural Magazine, a quarterly-published journal that set out to "bridge the gap between races, cultures, and religions." Already in 1948, an initiative of creating such a journal took place, when she requested the newspaper Berkeley Daily Gazette to assist her and her associates with marketing. Her anti-racism stance was reflected in the editorials that she wrote; for example, she praised the activist and church leader Willa Saunders Jones in 1975. On June 16, 1990, she participated as a panelist at a writers' conference in Elgin Community College in Illinois.

Personal life

Apilado's husband was Filipino-American Inosencio Apilado. Their son, Myron Apilado, was the vice-president of minority affairs at University of Washington until the year 2000, as well as an editor of AIM. On August 26, 2004, at age 96, she was interviewed by Larry Crowe of The History Makers, a project that produces oral history material by African-Americans. Her second cousin was journalist Lu Palmer.
She was 110 years old as of December 19, 2018.