A schoolteacher and founding member of the group behind the 1959 Theatre Boycotts, which helped destroy segregation, has died.

Vera Commissiong was 87.

David Burt, the Premier, told the House of Assembly that Ms Commissiong, a social and racial justice icon, died yesterday morning.

Mr Burt paid tribute to the “pioneering” activist.

He told MPs Ms Commissiong was “unafraid to be who she was at a time when it was unpopular for people to do it”.

Ms Commissiong and her husband, Rudolph, belonged to the Progressive Group that organised protests against the island’s segregated movie theatres.

The boycotts, which began in June 1959, forced the six cinemas to shut due to a lack of customers.

They reopened the next month with integrated seating.

The success of the boycotts sparked a wave of desegregation as other businesses followed the cinemas.

The mother of Rolfe Commissiong, a Progressive Labour Party backbencher, she was also a stalwart of the PLP.

Ms Commissiong said on the 60th anniversary of the Theatre Boycott last year: “What we achieved has lasted. Nobody has to put up with the things we did. We are really free now.”

She admitted she and her husband felt fear as they put up posters to publicise the movement.

Ms Commissiong added the retribution from the powers of the day would have been severe and the activists remained anonymous for decades.

Her husband later said: “Had the segregationists found out what was going on, they would have lost their home, their jobs and been blackballed for the rest of their lives in Bermuda.”

Ms Commissiong told The Royal Gazette: “Just because of the colour of your skin, there was so much frustration you had to put up with. It was so unfair. We changed that.”

The group was given public recognition in 1999.

Ms Commissiong was a teacher at Elliot School alongside the late Dame Lois Browne-Evans, a former leader of the PLP.

Her son said she had worked with Dame Lois in the “tumultuous Sixties and Seventies, as the PLP was seeking to establish itself during its early growth — at a time it was considered risky to be publicly associated with the party”.

Mr Commissiong said: “She would go on to be one of the first, if not the first, black woman to be employed in a front-office position at a major hotel, the Hamilton Princess, during the mid-60s and would go on to become the first female executive of the Electricity Supply Union at Belco.”

He added: “So much of who I am politically came from her, beginning while I sat on her knee listening to the greats of our movement, such as Dame Lois and Roosevelt Brown, and others who came by our house at Spanish Point during the 1960s.

“She was part of the generation where racism shadowed them from birth to grave — but a generation determined that would not be the legacy bequeathed to their children.”