WASHINGTON _ To those unversed in South Carolina politics and civic life, she was the wife of 58 years to Democrat Jim Clyburn, the highest-ranking African American in Congress.
To everyone else, she was known, with great reverence, as Ms. Emily _ a driving force behind her husband's political rise, a civil rights demonstrator who went to jail for her activism and a fixture in the community in her own right.
Emily England Clyburn _ who died Thursday morning, at the age of 80 _ was a longtime librarian who helped raise tens of thousands of dollars to help students afford college.
"When she started the scholarship program, she said, 'There are people out there who may not have, and these kids may not have,'" recalled Edith Canzater, Emily Clyburn's close friend of 40 years.
Emily Clyburn hosted her own luncheon each year in Santee in conjunction with Jim Clyburn's annual charity golf weekend _ named for Rudolph Canzater, Edith Canzater's late husband _ and received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from South Carolina State University, her alma mater, in 2010.
At South Carolina State, she will be remembered through the Emily England Clyburn Honors Scholarship Fund and the Dr. Emily England Clyburn Pedestrian Bridge.
She helped raise three daughters who are now also fixtures of their community _ a former commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, a career educator currently at the University of South Carolina and the political director of the state Democratic Party.
And the history of "Jim Clyburn's World-Famous Fish Fry" fundraiser will recount how she always harangued her husband onto the dance floor.
"When my wife was physically able, she would not allow me to stay in my seat if the Electric Slide was on," Jim Clyburn, now the U.S. House Majority Whip, recalled earlier this year.
Elsewhere, Emily Clyburn's legacy has been cemented in the influential role she played shepherding her husband through some of the biggest moments of his career and serving as a voice of conscience as he navigated personal obstacles.
In 1971, it was Emily Clyburn who gave Jim Clyburn the "jolt" to consider how to build a career in public service, the congressman recalled in his 2014 memoir, "Blessed Experiences."
He had just delivered a rousing speech at a housing and community development conference in Charleston. Her reply, in almost a whisper: "I just wonder when you are going to stop talking about South Carolina's problems and start doing something about them."
A year earlier, after Jim Clyburn had spent the night celebrating his clinching the Democratic nomination for a seat in the South Carolina Legislature, she'd taped a note to his bathroom mirror: "When you win brag gently. When you lose weep softly."
The note was still there when he woke up the morning after losing the general election under circumstances almost certainly due to race.
"I felt anger and bitterness ... (but) I remembered that note Emily had left on my mirror," he wrote in his memoir. "I walked into that same bathroom; looked up at the mirror where that note was still stuck, and I wept softly."
When he was preparing to run for Congress in 1992, she held the "veto power" to stop him. He was nervous about telling her about his plans. As it turned out, he recalled, Emily Clyburn had "known all along what I was thinking and doing and had just decided that she was going to make it tough for me."
In 2016, when Jim Clyburn decided to break his pledge to stay neutral in the South Carolina Democratic primary and endorse Hillary Clinton for president, he cited as among the motivating factors "intensive discussions with my wife."
