Ruth Apilado

Apilado was born on April 30, 1908, in Chicago, Illinois. Her parents were Stewart and Clara (née Whetsel) Mays.[2] Her maternal grandmother had emigrated from Canada to Ohio, and was partly indigenous. Her paternal great-grandfather was a slave owner in Virginia.[3]

Apilado attended McKinley High School, which closed in 1954.[3] She became a teacher in 1928, after graduating from Chicago Normal College (now Chicago State University).[4] She began her journalistic career in 1942, when she briefly worked as an editor for the newly-created Negro Youth Photo Scripts Magazine.[5] 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.[6] In 1950, Apilado published a novel called The Joneses, which was about the hardships of a black family living in Chicago.[7]

After retiring from teaching in 1973, Apilado founded America's Intercultural Magazine (AIM), a quarterly-published journal that set out to "bridge the gap between races, cultures, and religions."[8] Already in 1948, an initiative of creating such a journal (called Freedom Press) took place, when she requested the newspaper Berkeley Daily Gazette to assist her and her associates with marketing.[9] 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.[10] On June 16, 1990, she participated as a panelist at a writers' conference in Elgin Community College in Illinois.[11]

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.[12] 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.[2] Her second cousin was journalist Lu Palmer.[3]