Mária László, born on 17 November 1909 in Nagykáta, Hungary, was the first secretary general of the first nationwide organisation for Roma in Hungary, the Cultural Association of Gypsies in Hungary [Magyarországi Cigányok Kulturális Szövetsége], that was established on 26 October 1957.
Activism in the 1930s
She grew up in a family of thirteen children near Nagykáta, a village sixty-five kilometres from the capital city, Budapest, where the family cultivated land. Her father, Farkas László (1874–1954) born as Farkas Rafael, traded with horses and owned 120 acres of land and a house in the 1910s. According to the family legend, Mária László’s mother Rozália Czinka Kolompár (1880–1954) was a descendant of one of the first famous Hungarian gypsy musicians of the 18th century. Mária László attended the state primary school at Nagykáta and then a secondary school for girls in Budapest, where she completed grade five in 1928. In the 1930s, she worked briefly as a postal employee in Érd, a small town in Pest County, and as a journalist for the regional weekly, Balatoni Kurír. She also directed theatre plays at Fonyód, a town at the Balaton lakeside. The tone of her articles was influenced by the Hungarian nationalism of the era.
According to a newspaper interview from 1958, Mária László first rebelled against injustice in 1937 and called on the Roma of Pánd to organise themselves. She was arrested as a suspected communist for incitement and put under gendarmerie surveillance for years.1“Ne legyen különbség ember és ember között: Évszázados babonák ellen küzd az egy éve létesült Cigányszövetség” [Let there be no difference between person and person: The Gypsy Association, founded a year ago, is fighting against centuries-old superstitions], Magyar Nemzet, 19 September 1958, 5. Pánd was thirteen kilometres from Mária László’s home village, in Pest County, where the persecution of Roma increased in the 1930s as a result both of national legislation on expulsions and regular raids, and of the violently antisemitic and anti-Roma racist ideologies and policy practices of László Endre (1895–1946).
After 1945
After World War II, Mária László joined the Hungarian Social Democratic Party, where she rose to the board of leadership of the party’s Budapest section, and she was also secretary of the local Hungarian Red Cross. She tried to make use of the new political context following the system changes of the late 1940s to improve the situation of Roma in Hungary. She was the first person in postwar Hungary to raise the issue of the persecution of Roma during the Holocaust officially and—as secretary general of the Cultural Association of Gypsies in Hungary—to promote the compensation and rehabilitation of Romani victims.
The Cultural Association of Gypsies in Hungary was established as part of the Department for National Minorities at the Hungarian Ministry of Culture at a time when a shift was already taking place in the official approach to the ‘solution to Gypsy Question’ in state socialist Hungary: from leniency in the mid-1950s towards the preservation of Romani cultural heritage in the process of their assimilation, to the declaration in 1961, when the association was finally dissolved, that Roma were a ‘backward social stratum’ and not an ethnic minority.
In late 1958, Mária László was forced to leave the Cultural Association of Gypsies in Hungary, in consequence of the above political changes as well as her proactive defence of the rights of Roma. Her subsequent efforts to secure herself a job in a field of work related to Roma failed. Up to her retirement as a chief cashier she earned a living in the Hungarian postal service. She adopted and raised the daughter of a Jewish friend of hers who had been murdered during World War II.
Mária László died on 7 November 1989 in Budapest. Her life and work set an example for many later Roma rights activists and made her a hero of the Roma civil rights movement in Hungary.
