Like so many thousands of other young people of her generation, Rosalind Howells, who has died aged 94, left the Caribbean in 1951 with her head and heart filled with plans and dreams and intent upon her own hopes of a future possible professional career as a lawyer in Britain. Having arrived in London and recognised the grim everyday realities of inequality and discrimination that faced black people, she dedicated the rest of her life to doing something about it.

She spent nearly half a century in south London working to improve the housing, education, health services and lifestyle of her community and then, on official “retirement”, went to the House of Lords in 1999. Tthe next 20 years she spent expounding her demands for equality to a wider audience, at Westminster and on international platforms in China, the Middle East and the US, seeking still to transform society and open the doors for others.

She was not interested in rhetoric without reality, even less in tokenism. “Representation means little if the door behind you is closed to others,” she said.

Howells was tireless, forceful, loved and also feared. She could not say “no” to anyone who wanted help and would not accept “no” as an answer from the forces of authority. She wanted equality and justice for everyone, in the streets and in the courts, for the 13 young black people killed in the New Cross fire in 1981 and for Stephen Lawrence, murdered in 1993. It was she who became a spokeswoman for the Lawrence family, who rattled on the doors of government for response and reaction.

Her first job was in a public library, in Catford, south London, and she went back to college to train as a social worker. She worked for the London borough of Lewisham, helping young, single black mothers and then, in nearby Greenwich, she began confronting council policies across the range of social services.

Most of her life was spent in community halls, classrooms, sports venues and committees, and her work was first recognised with appointment as OBE in 1994. She became the director of equal opportunities for the Greenwich Council for Racial Equality (1980-87) and she chaired the Lewisham Racial Equality Council (1994-97).

Ros was born in St David, a parish in the south-east of Grenada, the daughter of Daphne George. She came to regard Joseph Gibbs, a primary school head teacher who was active in municipal politics, as her father. He was a one-time minister for communications and known universally as “Uncle Joe” and in the family as “Papa Joe”. The family was staunchly Roman Catholic and Gibbs was appointed a papal knight.

Ros was educated at St Joseph’s convent from 1942 until 1949 and assisted in the school before taking a passage to the UK, accompanying a niece. The two girls hoped to emulate Ros’s adopted sister, Hilda Gibbs (later Dame Hilda Bynoe), who had graduated as a doctor in London that year – and who would later, in 1968, become governor of Grenada, the first Grenadian in that post and the first female governor in the British Commonwealth. Howells would be made a Companion of the Order of Grenada in 2009.

Growing up in Grenada, Howells had known from childhood that education was the first goal. “Education is freedom and power,” she said once. “Any investment in education is a good one.” She was a governor of Avery Hill College for teacher training, which became part of Thames Polytechnic, and then the University of Greenwich (1985-97), and became the first female member of the court of governors of the university.

She was appointed chancellor of the University of Bedfordshire (2009-14) and she was a board member of the Windward Islands research and education foundation, the research institute for St George’s University in Grenada. She was a trustee of St George’s UK Trust, of the Jason Roberts Foundation for sporting opportunities in the UK and Grenada, and of the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust.

At one stage, during a troubled period in Grenadian politics in the early 1980s, she served as Grenada’s deputy high commissioner in London.

Howells was the first black female member of the former Greater London Training Board, established by the Greater London council to develop learning programmes. She was a lifelong member of the Labour party and active across a range of organisations, including the former West Indian Standing Conference, an umbrella organisation formed in response to the 1958 Notting Hill riots and operational until 2000.

She also worked with the Women of the Year committee and was a patron of Greenwich and Bexley hospice (2014-2016). In the Lords she was a member of the constitution committee (2001-04), the works of art committee (2009-14) and the social mobility committee (2015-16). She retired from the Lords in 2019.

In 1955 she married John Howells, a librarian she met when working at Catford Library. They had two daughters, Anne and Amanda. John died in 2004 and Amanda in 2011.

She is survived by Anne, two grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

• Rosalind Patricia-Anne Howells, Lady Howells of St Davids, community worker and politician, born 10 January 1931; died 14 October 2025