This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here

When Lila A. Fenwick was a student at Harvard Law School in the 1950s, she was doubly invisible. She was a woman and she was black.

Neither of those hurdles meant much to her. “I knew I was going to be a lawyer when I was a little girl,” she told the Harvard Law Bulletin in 2000. “It never occurred to me that there were going to be any obstacles.”

In 1956, she was the first black woman to graduate from Harvard Law, and she went on to become a human rights official at the United Nations, a lawyer in private practice and a benefactor, establishing, with Dr. Doris Wethers and Dr. Yvette Fay Francis-McBarnette, the Foundation for Research and Education in Sickle Cell Disease.