Iowa’s capital city – and the state itself – might be far different if not for the influence of Elizabeth Kruidenier and her late husband, David, the 2007 recipients of Bravo Greater Des Moines’ Bravo Award for a lifetime of giving and support for cultural arts.

The Des Moines Art Center might be a less impressive edifice, had David Kruidenier not insisted on commissioning I.M. Pei to design a wing that four years ago was named in honor of Florence Cowles Kruidenier, his mother. An inner city branch of the Des Moines Public Library might still be little more than a convenience store, and Gray’s Lake an eyesore. Had Kruidenier not prodded them, civic leaders might have accepted defeat in the 1970s and lived with the aging KRNT Theater a little longer. Follow the money in the city’s premier cultural assets, and the Kruidenier name is omnipresent.

It’s also etched in the annals of Iowa  civil rights history. While David Kruidenier, a grandson of Des Moines Register founder Gardner Cowles and a former publisher of the newspaper, enthusiastically helped shape the city’s cultural landscape, Elizabeth Stuart Kruidenier was devoting her own considerable energy to the civil rights movement. David may have helped instill in her a deeper love and appreciation for the  arts, but she convinced him of the urgency of the social justice issues that she felt just as passionate about.

“He got me interested in art, and I got him interested in social problems,” she said. “It’s something I cared about deeply, and I wanted to convince people of the essence of my beliefs and the essentialness of my beliefs.”

Though they “generally agreed on what causes we should support,” there wasn’t always complete agreement in ideology. “He didn’t always agree with me,” Kruidenier said,”but he was always supportive of anything I tried to do. He was not discouraging.”

In fact, one of the things the Kruideniers  disagreed about near the time of their marriage was the role of women in society. “He expected me to be the domestic housewife, and that wasn’t what I wanted.”

She prevailed and has spent a lifetime working for the disenfranchised. The seeds of advocacy were planted when she was in junior high school and her other classmates shunned an African-American student and refused to share a locker with her in gym class. “No one would choose her as a locker-mate and I felt bad for her,”  Kruidenier said.

As she developed more friendships  with African-Americans, Kruidenier  began to “see discrimination through their eyes,” she said.

When the couple lived in Minneapolis for four years in the late 1940s and early 1950s while he worked for the family-owned Star and Tribune, she became involved with the League of Women Voters and went on to lobby Minnesota lawmakers to pass a fair employment practices act, albeit unsuccessfully. When they returned to Des Moines in 1952 and found the city lacking in cultural amenities in comparison to Minneapolis, he began using The Register as a bully pulpit to rally community leaders, and she took her civil rights campaign to the Iowa Statehouse.

There, she was more successful. Lawmakers approved legislation prohibiting   discrimination on the basis of race, creed or national origin, and Kruidenier went to work lobbying for the creation of an enforcement agency, the Iowa Civil Rights Commission, which celebrated its 40th  anniversary in 2005, and served on the  council for a decade.

She was active on the civil rights  front in other areas as well. In the racially charged 1960s, she was part of the original “Know Your Neighbor Panel,” a  group of women who traveled the country and spoke to civic and community groups to break down barriers created by racial, religious and social prejudice. Organized by Helen Norvan “Sis” Stein, the group featured women of varying races, cultures and religious beliefs and was so in demand that it actually consisted of several panels of women. Each talked about themselves and their interests, demonstrating they were more alike than different.

Kruidenier, who says she was “the W.A.S.P. on the panel,” said she often told audiences that she was “more fortunate than the rest of the women on the panel because “I didn’t have to suffer from discrimination based on my race or religion or national origin.” She recalls seeing on the faces of audience members a shift in attitudes as the women talked, and credits the group with bringing about change in a politically charged atmosphere.

It was an exciting time, marked by change that seemed at the same time rapid and too slow in coming. Kruidenier hopes she and her husband will be remembered not only as champions of the arts, but also for promoting equality.

“I hope they remember us as bringing  about some social change, and sincere  in our work, dedicated, truthful  and, hopefully, effective.