Frances Howard, 88; Sister of Former Vice President

Frances Humphrey Howard, 88, a public service advocate and the younger sister of former Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, died Monday of congestive heart failure at a Washington hospital.

Howard was one of four Humphrey children who grew up in Doland, S.D. She studied sociology, earning a bachelor’s degree and then a master’s degree from George Washington University in 1937 and 1941. She was two years younger than Hubert, who died in 1978 at age 66.

Her lengthy career as a civil servant dates to the early 1940s, when she served as an assistant to Eleanor Roosevelt in the National Civil Defense Office and the United Nations Assn.

With Roosevelt, she helped integrate Washington hotels. Roosevelt asked her to arrange a staff party at the Shoreham Hotel. When Howard and a black colleague arrived to check on the arrangements, they were told that the reservation could not be found.

Howard picked up a phone and called Roosevelt at the White House, she told the Washington Post a few years ago. “Mrs. Roosevelt marched into the hotel and announced, ‘We shall occupy the room.’ We all did, and that was the way the first hotel in Washington was integrated.”

In between campaigning for her brother, Howard held a variety of Washington jobs. As a foreign service officer, she directed the Agency for International Development’s War on Hunger. Beginning in 1970, she worked at the National Library of Medicine, a branch of the National Institutes of Health, serving as a liaison between the library and other federal agencies.

She also served on the boards of numerous Washington institutions, including the Washington Opera, the National Theatre and the Capital Children’s Museum.