Originally published in The New York Times as “Jean Rice, Advocate for the Homeless With Firsthand Experience, Dies at 85” on March 28, 2025.

Jean Rice, who for decades scratched out a living, nickel by nickel, picking up deposit cans in New York while becoming a well-respected advocate for the homeless, died on March 12 in Queens. He was 85.

The cause of his death, in a hospital, was heart disease, said Lillie Mae John, his cousin. Since 2020, after surviving Covid, Mr. Rice had lived in a veterans’ residence on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Mr. Rice was homeless on and off for 30 years — but during that time he took and passed college-level courses, spoke at Brooklyn Law School and struck alliances with powerful political figures.

“He always took care of himself,” Ms. John said. “He didn’t have to be homeless. He chose that life.”

Attorney General Letitia James of New York met Mr. Rice when she served on the City Council. She called him Daddy because the sparkle in his eyes reminded her of her father, a maintenance worker.

“When Jean walked into a room, everyone would call his name out,” Ms. James said in an interview. “I looked past his struggles and the fact that he was unhoused and just respected his humanity, and thought about how we as a society need to tap into the human potential of individuals who are unhoused, but offer us so much as a society.”

Mr. Rice, who moved with his mother and stepfather to Harlem from South Carolina in the 1940s, led a complicated life, one that included bad decisions and victories seized from meager circumstances. He served time in the maximum-security state prison in Attica, N.Y., after he shot and wounded a man in Manhattan in the 1960s. During his incarceration, Ms. John said, the family sent him law books and he advised inmates about their cases.

Once out, he returned to a life of drug trafficking and other hustles. He became homeless in 1987 after an aunt he was living with on West 141st Street was murdered and the landlord took back the lease.

“I’m not squeamish about any of my past history,” Mr. Rice said in 2020, as part of an oral history project for an advocacy group he helped lead, Picture the Homeless. “It might have been negative and antisocial behavior then. But later on, it enhanced my ability to organize in the social justice movement.”

Through a prison release program, he took courses in public administration in the 1980s at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut (now Connecticut State Community College Norwalk), where he was elected president of the Black Students Union.

In 2001, he walked into the office of Picture the Homeless, in the basement of a church in Greenwich Village. The organization had been founded two years earlier by two men who met at the Bellevue Men’s Shelter and wanted to change negative perceptions of the homeless. Its motto: “Don’t talk about us, talk with us.”

“The first I heard of Jean was a rattle of cans; he had this giant bag, like a Santa Claus, over his shoulder,” Lynn Lewis, the former executive director of Picture the Homeless, recalled in an interview. “He puts his bag of cans down and sits and reads the mission statement of the group. He said, ‘This reminds me of the 14th Amendment.’ We ran up to him and said, ‘You’re recruited.’”

Mr. Rice, who had also taken courses at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York on a scholarship, became a board member of Picture the Homeless. Through Union Theological Seminary, he was later named a Poverty Scholar — part of a program for low-income community activists — and received training in leadership skills.

He was a pivotal member of Picture the Homeless campaigns for nearly two decades, as New York’s homeless population increased substantially and public attitudes teetered between fear, compassion and exasperation.

The group’s “canners campaign” of 2004, which included protests outside supermarkets that refused to redeem deposit cans and bottles from homeless people — many of whom, like Mr. Rice, earned a small living by collecting them — drew the attention of the state attorney general, Eliot Spitzer.

Members of Mr. Spitzer’s staff visited Picture the Homeless, which had moved its office to Harlem. The attorney general threatened fines for supermarkets that didn’t comply with a state law requiring businesses to redeem deposit containers. The threat got results, according to an oral history that Ms. Lewis compiled.

“We were all surprised by our power,” Mr. Rice said.

As a leader of the civil rights committee of Picture the Homeless, Mr. Rice participated in a yearslong fight, on multiple fronts, to permit homeless people to occupy public spaces, including park benches and train terminals, without what they perceived as police harassment.

In 2002, Picture the Homeless, represented by the New York Civil Liberties Union, sued the Police Department for singling out the homeless for arrests, on charges from minor violations to felonies.

The city agreed to settle the suit, directing police units to enforce violations evenhandedly, “regardless of whether the person is homeless or not.”

A much broader victory came in 2013 when the City Council, over the opposition of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, passed the Community Safety Act. The act notably barred the police from the discriminatory profiling of suspects because of race, which had led to thousands of stop-and-frisk encounters with Black and Hispanic New Yorkers.

A lesser-known provision of the law barred police from profiling suspects based on “housing status.” Picture the Homeless, as part of a coalition of groups that lobbied for the law, fought to include homelessness as a prohibited category of biased profiling.

When the bill passed the City Council after hours of debate, Ms. James, then a council member, spotted Mr. Rice in the gallery, waved and called out, “Hi, Daddy.”

“I think what Jean really did for a lot of other organizations is make them look at people who are homeless differently,” Ms. Lewis, the former executive director, said. “You couldn’t hear him speak and look at homeless people the same way.”

Jean Rice was born on July 1, 1939, in Anderson, S.C., to Lizzie and John Rice. His mother told the French Creole midwife that her baby would be named for his father; the midwife wrote “John” down as “Jean,” and people came to pronounce it “Gene.”

Jean’s father died soon after, and his mother married William Perry and took his name. The family moved to Harlem in 1944, and later to Brooklyn, where Jean attended public schools. He entered the Army before completing high school.

Though an only child, he had an extended family in New York and called Ms. John, his cousin, who was a year older, “Sis.”

He is survived by his daughters, Deborah Howard and Kimberley Williams; a grandson; and three great-grandchildren.

Ms. John said that although Mr. Rice never earned a college diploma, he was well educated because he read so much: “Reading was his hobby.”

But also, she added, “His education was to be there on the streets. He picked up so much knowledge from being on the streets.”