My mother, Susan Mannheim, who has died aged 90, was a teacher and political activist. In the late 1960s, she took part in an important episode in the US civil rights movement. The newly formed United Federation of Teachers, New York, whose members were primarily white, protested against community control of schools by local families, who were mostly Latino and black.

Many, including my mother, saw the union’s order to strike in these circumstances as racist. She resisted orders to walk off the job, and with other community activists, taught classes and helped keep schools open. A number of community-based educational programmes grew from this conflict. Community Action Now, which my mother helped found and lead, was one of these.

She was born Suselotte Herrmann in Heilbronn, Germany, where, as civil rights for Jews and educational opportunities decreased, her father Siegfried Herrmann, a salesman, was unable to work. The family fled to New York City, where her mother, Ruth (nee Beermann), sold her hand-made crochetwork. A distant relative in the US agreed to sponsor them as refugees and had an apartment waiting for them in Manhattan. My mother recalled how reassured she was when she opened the refrigerator in the apartment and found a bottle of full cream milk her relative had thought to provide. For the rest of her life she would remain a New Yorker.

Susan attended George Washington high school and Hunter College. In Germany, she had experienced how brutal politics could become, but in America she engaged with social change movements fully. As a young woman, she assisted postwar refugees, campaigned on behalf of the progressive presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson and became a member of Fairplay for Cuba.

Susan met Jack Mannheim through a club for refugees shortly after the war, and they married in 1949. After their separation in the 70s, she moved from upper Manhattan to Greenwich Village, where she enjoyed exploring the history of her neighbourhood’s winding streets and frequently attended film screenings at the nearby Quad Cinema.

As a specialist reading teacher in her later years, my mother helped many children to gain literacy, including me – she taught me to read and write before I began school.

On retiring in 1993, she pursued her love of opera, especially Wagner, cinema and hiking. She travelled widely, read voraciously and wrote memoirs of her childhood and later life.

Susan is survived by four children and five grandchildren.