Wilmington leader remembered as a 'moral compass' for the community

Linda Pearce Thomas, who founded Elderhaus, a nonprofit that serves hundreds of senior citizens in New Hanover and Brunswick counties, and who was the first Black woman to chair the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Board of Trustees, died Sunday. She was 77.

The death was announced on Thomas's Facebook page. A cause of death was not disclosed.

"Linda Pearce has been a driving force in this community for several decades. Her interests and influence have had a significant impact on the city of Wilmington," Wilmington Police Chief Donny Williams wrote on the WPD's official Facebook page. "She left an incredible legacy and at this time our department wants to send our condolences out to her family and friends. We will be providing funeral police escorts once additional information is released."

A public viewing will be held 5-8 p.m. Friday, Sept. 29, at Davis Funeral Home, 901 S. Fifth Ave. in Wilmington. Funeral service are scheduled for 11 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 30, at Mt. Olive AME Church, 1001 S. 7th St. in Wilmington. Interment at Greenlawn Memorial Park will follow the service.

"Linda Pearce didn’t suffer fools lightly," N.C. State Representative Deb Butler commented on the Facebook post announcing Thomas' death. "I admired that about her. She commanded respect and, buddy, she earned it and deserved it. And I never felt more welcome than at Mt. Olive, her neighborhood home church. This community has lost a moral compass."

Thomas served on several community boards, including for the former New Hanover Regional Medical Center, and was active in the Williston Alumni Association. Thomas graduated from Williston, which at the time was Wilmington's high school for Black students, in 1963.

"They always told us we had to be 10 times better than white people to be equal,” Thomas told the StarNews in 2022. “And so, we had a very strict, very disciplined educational system."

In 2007, Thomas received the StarNews Media Lifetime Achievement Award for her community service.

In 2019, Thomas started her Front Porch Pulpit series of conversations with community leaders (and, sometimes, just regular folks), a series that took off in popularity during the pandemic lockdown.

In a tribute to Thomas on Facebook, longtime WECT news anchor Frances Weller wrote, "Our community has lost a truly loyal friend. Linda was a rock in the community. She was also a woman of pure principle. Everything about her was real. What you saw is what you got. She was never able to mince words. That was not her style. She told it as she saw it."

"Linda’s passing has ripped a hole in our community," Weller added. "There’s no other way to say that as many of us are feeling a deep pain for this loss."

Linda Pearce Thomas Want to chat on this Wilmington front porch? You'll have to join the waiting list.

Thomas' nephew, Dorian Cromartie, said his aunt "taught me how to be a straight shooter, but with tact. She always got me to see the big picture of how the world should be instead of how it is. She was just an impactful, loving, thoughtful person."

Cromartie said that when he told his aunt that he was going to run for New Hanover County School Board (which he did last year, losing a close race), "She said, 'Well, I know you used to jump out of planes in the military, so you are crazy.'"

But Thomas helped him with his campaign, Cromartie said, and taught him that "I had a lot more learning to do than I thought I did. She showed me that I needed to do a lot less talking and a lot more listening."

In 2022, Thomas, who was born Linda Ann Pearce, told the StarNews that, after her mother died, she moved from New York to Wilmington at age 5 to live with her grandmother. Her grandmother lived in a house at Sixth and Wright streets where Thomas was living when she died.

Thomas said she had childhood memories of Wilmington’s segregated public bus system and of not being allowed to eat in certain restaurants.

After graduating from Williston, Thomas enrolled at North Carolina College in Durham, which is now North Carolina Central University.

After graduating college, she moved to Washington, D.C., where she worked at the Library of Congress and got a master's degree in gerontology. In 1980 she moved back to Wilmington to care for her aunt, and in 1981 started Elderhaus.

“I knew I was working to get back here to take care of elderly people," Thomas said in 2022. "I always liked elderly people."

The Elderhaus concept was a new one for Wilmington at the time.

"There was nothing where the person would be taken out of the home,” she said in 2022. “That’s why I think it worked."

According to history compiled by Elderhaus, the nonprofit was founded in 1981 "to offer an alternative to premature or unnecessary institutionalization of frail, elderly residents of New Hanover County.

"Elderhaus opened its doors on October 13 at St. James Episcopal Church at 3rd & Market with four clients attending two days a week. It quickly expanded as a full-time service."

The program later moved St. Paul’s Episcopal Church on 16th Street, where it remained for 15 years.

In July of 1998, the organization combined all of its programs at 1950 Amphitheater Drive near Greenfield Lake, and in 2004 it became a part of a state program called Program of All-inclusive Care for the Elderly, or PACE.

As of 2019, Elderhaus PACE had more than 100 employees and served more than 250 people in New Hanover and Brunswick counties.

Thomas served as Elderhaus CEO until 2013, when she retired. In 2014, she married Ferrold Wendell Thomas, who died in 2016.

This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: Linda Pearce Thomas of Wilmington NC dies at age 77, founded Elderhaus