Bastille Day memorial for Evelyn Munro

Family and friends of Evelyn Munro will gather to memorialize her life on July 14, Bastille Day, at the Laguna Beach Woman’s Club, 286 St. Ann’s Drive.

The celebration will run from 2 to 8 p.m., and will feature a traditional Quaker Memorial Service at 2 p.m., with periods of silence, reflection, and spoken shared memories.

Next will be a potluck and party at 4 p.m. The event will conclude with Munro’s favorite music, Dixieland jazz.

Evelyn Munro died Feb. 16 at 92 in Laguna Beach. She lived in Laguna Beach for 50 years, and was known as an early agricultural union activist, involved in the formation of a sharecropper’s union in the South in the 1930s which presaged the United Farm Workers in California.

Munro also loved French culture and visited Paris every year. She hosted weekly meetings of a French club in her Bluebird Canyon home, where members read aloud Proust, Sartre, and Baudelaire.

Born and raised in New Orleans, Munro took a job after high school as an office worker with the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union.

During five years of association with the union, she was known to have been chased by a lynch mob in Tennessee and to have ridden rural back roads to sign up sharecroppers, among other adventures.

After receiving a degree in Social Ecology at UCI, she turned to photography; later she became a water colorist.

She traveled the world to help the poor, helping to set up nursery schools in Cuba and Nigeria. Back in Laguna, she worked with the Friendship Shelter and was a founding member of Village Laguna.

She and her late husband, David, raised three daughters.

All are invited to the memorial.