September 3, 2025
Pittsburgh NAACP has a new president who is making it her duty to revive the chapter.
Jacqueline Hill, the new president of Pittsburgh’s NAACP, is prioritizing growing membership and protecting voting rights in the key swing state.
Elected in July and officially installed on Aug. 2, Hill, 75, a Homewood native, has long devoted her life to community service. Since returning home in 2012, she’s been driven by a determination to revitalize the NAACP chapter she grew up admiring.
“Having some friends who kept trying to talk me into it and having an honest talk with myself, I decided to run for the office of president of the branch,” Hill told The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, noting the “obligation” she felt to take on a leadership role to revive the chapter.
Hill’s activism dates back to her youth, graduating from Westinghouse High School in 1968 amid the Homewood and Hill District riots that erupted after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.
The tense climate was when Hill “began to understand the importance of equality, fighting for one’s rights,” she said.
Her daughter, Megan, has childhood memories of helping her mother campaign for Pittsburgh’s school board, making posters, passing out flyers, and tagging along to community events. Now 46, she recalls how “politically active and charged” their home was, with her mother staying busy in projects that served the “greater good” of the community.
“I’ve never known her not to be this way,” Megan said. “This is who she’s always been.”
Hill has spent most of her life in Homewood, aside from the 10 years she spent in Philadelphia as director of the African-American Chamber of Commerce and the Pennsylvania Minority Business Development Center. During that time, she helped secure millions of dollars in contracts and financing for minority-owned businesses through a U.S. Department of Commerce initiative in Pennsylvania.
“Being a Black woman in Pittsburgh is a heavy lift,” Hill said. “We are not highly regarded and a lot of times disrespected, yet we bring extreme value to any situation when we sit at a table. We bring an insight that other people do not have because they have not had our experiences.”
With a lifelong commitment to activism and community service, Hill brings both experience and strong local support as she takes the lead of the Pittsburgh NAACP.
“I just think it’s time for our organization to get back in step,” said Marcella Lee-Wilson, a 35-year member of the Pittsburgh NAACP. “I’m so excited that Jackie is at the helm.”
Brenda Tate, elected second vice president alongside Hill, shared that since the election, people have been reaching out to rejoin the chapter.
“[She] has done a lot of work in this city and it has gone unnoticed,” Tate said. “I signed on because of that, because I know her work.”
As president, Hill is prioritizing issues like closing racial gaps in employment and safeguarding voting rights. Speaking at City Hall, she warned that some Pennsylvania residents could be stripped of their voter rolls if the U.S. Department of Justice succeeds in obtaining the personal data it has been requesting from states nationwide.
“If these people get their hands on the database for voters in Pennsylvania, we are certain that they will begin to purge Black voters,” she said.
Hill also hopes to increase support from locals beyond the Black community and remind them that the NAACP is “concerned not only with African American people, but also all others that are low-income” and “disenfranchised.”
“We all have something in common,” she said. “Poverty is not pretty in Black or white.”
RELATED CONTENT: NAACP Suing Texas Over Congressional Map It Says Strips Black Voters of Power
