Norwich — Jacqueline Owens, the woman known to many as “Mother Owens” who oversaw the Norwich chapter of the NAACP as it grew from a handful of people to a group of national prominence, died over the weekend.

Owens, who retired in December after serving 30 years as president of the branch, was 80, according to Dianne Daniels, her successor as president of the chapter.

She grew up on a small town in Iowa, later lived in Milwaukee, and married and moved to southeastern Connecticut in 1961, when her husband worked for the Naval Underwater Systems Center in New London.

She said in 2005 that the experience of being denied a clerk job in 1961 at the U.S. Naval Submarine Base as a recent transplant to Connecticut pushed her into a life of fighting against injustice and racism.

"They took one look at me and, all of a sudden, it wasn't a clerk-typist job. It was pushing a mail cart," Owens said in 2005. She said she felt stunned.

"It bothered me, because I never experienced it before. Where I came from, people were just people. In Milwaukee, a lot of my friends from the South told me about this type of thing, but it never happened to me."

Owens wrote to the commander of the sub base, and to U.S. Sen. Prescott Bush and U.S. Rep. Horace Seely-Brown. She had a hearing before a three-member panel at the base, which did not find evidence for discrimination.

In the meantime, she got a job at NUSC, where she advanced through various positions until retiring as a computer specialist in 1996.

She is predeceased by her husband, Burton Owens, and twin sons Albert and Burton Owens.

Owens, who lived in Lebanon, made her mark on Norwich in countless ways, Daniels said Sunday afternoon.

“She was so very important to so many people,” Daniels said. “I called her ‘Mother Owens’ for all kind of reasons.”

Owens launched multiple events that are now celebrated annually in the city, guided young people through mentoring at the now-closed Greenville School and a youth council she formed, rarely missed a Norwich school board meeting and often sat in Norwich Superior Court monitoring the treatment of those charged with crimes.

She also worked in the 1980s to amend a strained relationship between the city’s racial minorities and its police officers, arranging discussions about officer training and community relations that led the department to improve training, hire more minority officers and adjust its approaches to policing.

When she retired in December, Norwich Free Academy Diversity Director Leo Butler said he remembered looking up at the city’s Haitian Flag Day celebration to see Owens, then in her late seventies, “with her sleeves rolled up, handing out snacks and water bottles.”

As news of her death spread throughout the Norwich community Sunday morning, Daniels said those who knew her have been reflecting on Owens’ persistence and the "breadth and depth" of the mark she made on the city.

“She had such a huge impact on so many people,” Daniels said. “She just spread that love that she had in her heart all over everybody. Anyone who spent any time around her at all could feel it.”

U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Second District, released a statement about Owens on Sunday.

 "A giant has left us. The passing of Jackie Owens is a sad loss to all of us who were inspired by her integrity, compassion, and iron willed advocacy for education, fairness and democracy. It was a privilege to know her," Courtney said.

m.shanahan@theday.com