The cause was Lewy body dementia, said her daughter Emily Jackson.

Alexine Jackson, whose late husband was chief of the urology department at Howard University Hospital, spent decades involved in Washington-area community and civic activities. She received community honors and recognitions for her philanthropy and activism.

She was a past president of the nonprofit Black Women’s Agenda and past board chair of the Community Foundation for the National Capital Region and what is now Washington Performing Arts.

Jackson was a 23-year breast cancer survivor and active in cancer awareness groups, including one focused on minority cancer education and prevention, when she was named to head the Komen organization in 2009. She remained in that role for two years.

She also was on the board of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Strathmore Hall Arts Center in North Bethesda, Md., and the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts in Vienna, Va., among other arts organizations, and she helped organize fundraising galas for Howard University’s medical school.

Through her various roles, she often spoke to audiences about overcoming racism and other barriers to progress. “Look around you always and see who is not at the table,” she told one audience in 2000. “You often find it’s the people who should be at the table.”

Helen Alexine Clement was born in Sumter, S.C., on June 10, 1936, and she was 4 when her mother died of breast cancer at 29.

She was raised in Atlanta and then in Durham, N.C., by her father, an insurance company executive, and her stepmother, an educator and civil rights activist whose father, John Wesley Dobbs, was an early mentor to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. One of Alexine’s cousins was Maynard Jackson, the future mayor of Atlanta.

She graduated in 1956 with a bachelor’s degree in English and music from Spelman College, the historically Black women’s college in Atlanta, and received her master’s degree in speech pathology and audiology from the University of Iowa in 1958. She settled in the Washington area in 1973.

She was married to Dr. Aaron Jackson from 1958 to his death in 2012. Three of her children died, Gordon Jackson in 2004 and Celia Sarter and Juliet Jackson-Othman, both in 2016.

In addition to her daughter Emily, survivors include a son, Scott Jackson; three half-brothers; two half-sisters; 11 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.