Victoria DeLee, a South Carolina civil rights leader who battled bigotry and gunfire as she led voter registration drives and helped desegregate schools in her home state, died June 14 at her home in Ridgeville, S.C. DeLee, 85, had complications from brain surgery.

DeLee, who had witnessed a lynching when she was 12, began her civil rights crusade in the 1940s, when she overcame official obstacles to register to vote. In spite of repeated death threats, she continued her fight for decades.

Little known beyond her state's borders, DeLee had a historical significance similar to that of Daisy Bates in Arkansas and Fannie Lou Hamer in Mississippi. She participated in civil rights marches, including the 1963 March on Washington, and was friends with Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King Jr. She was profiled in a 1971 New Yorker magazine article written entirely in the dialect of her spoken voice.

DeLee was the mother of seven, raised three other children and worked as a school maintenance supervisor. Still, she managed to register thousands of voters and established a day-care center and a school to teach literacy skills to black and American Indian residents.

In 1964, she began efforts to integrate South Carolina's segregated public school system by trying to enroll her children in all-white schools. Her family became the target of harassment, and DeLee and her children slept on mattresses on the floor to avoid being hit by bullets fired through their windows. Her house was burned down in 1966.

In 1970, she sought protection from the Justice Department after receiving mailed threats warning of "booby traps in your home and car." They were signed, "your loving friends, the KKK."

DeLee made frequent visits to Washington to see congressmen and federal officials and in 1971 made a third-party bid for Congress. She once staged a sit-in at the Capitol Hill office of Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., but later reconciled with the senator, a onetime segregationist.