Frances J. Perkins took her first steps toward becoming the first tenured African-American at Wheelock College when she began teaching courses at the school part time in 1970.

With a pair of Wheelock colleagues, she prepared the educational component of Boston’s Head Start program, “and as a result of that we were asked to do some training of people who were going to participate in Head Start classrooms,’’ she recalled in a 1987 interview in preparation for the college’s centennial celebration. “That was my introduction.

She stayed at Wheelock for 15 years, retiring in 1985 as an associated professor of psychology and sociology. That tenure capped a lifetime of work as an educator who guided the lives of young people from nursery school children to college graduate students.

When she departed from the school, the board honored her “as an energetic, faithful, committed faculty member and colleague; as a leader in her own community; and as a former member of the Wheelock College Board of Trustees.’’

Mrs. Perkins, who pursued her own graduate studies while raising her son, taking buses from her Roxbury home to work and to night classes, died April 22 after a period of declining health. She was 98 and had lived in North Eastham.

More than two decades after she retired, Mrs. Perkins was honored again, this time at a gathering of the college’s Alumni of Color organization, where she was presented with an inscribed crystal book.

It was “a very special event for me, the first Afro-American tenured faculty member, and guest of honor at the luncheon session,’’ she wrote later to thank the organizers.

The college, she added, clearly was enabling students and faculty in the human growth and development program “to enrich their professional contributions with a clearer understanding of culture differences, similarities, and effective ways to support the development of those entrusted to their care.’’

In the centennial celebration interview, Mrs. Perkins recalled that early in her association with Wheelock “I was asked to do a lecture in child development focusing on 3-year-olds.’’ That soon became a full-time position, teaching human development to undergraduates. She also was involved with the school’s social work program.

She later codirected a summer institute at Wheelock for graduate students studying the unique needs of culturally diverse special-needs children, and she participated in a project at Regis College in the early 1980s that taught faculty at other institutions about multicultural education.

To these academic posts she brought an extensive background. Mrs. Perkins began teaching children in 1941, beginning at the Ruggles Street Nursery School and going on to work at nursery schools in Belmont, Weston, and Waltham, where she directed what was then the Lemberg nursery school at Brandeis University.

“She was a very accomplished individual,’’ her son, Joseph of Eastham, wrote in notes he prepared for the eulogy he delivered at her memorial service last weekend in St. Mark Congregational Church in Boston.

“She was especially fond of young children,’’ he wrote. “In fact, it is safe to say that she dedicated her life to ensuring that young people get a good start in life. Early childhood education was not just something that paid her bills, it was a core belief.’’

The fourth of five children, Frances Jones was born in 1919 and was a granddaughter of slaves. She grew up and lived much of her life in Roxbury, until she moved to North Eastham in 1984.

“People have asked, ‘Why go to Roxbury to hold your mother’s memorial service? She lived in North Eastham,’ ’’ her son wrote.

“My mother could have been living on the moon for the last third of her life,’’ he added, but her 64 years in Roxbury created a permanent bond with her neighborhood.

Her father, Robert Jones, was a Pullman porter on the Boston & Maine Railroad. Her mother, the former Rebecca Campbell, stayed home to raise the children. “Her mom had only finished the eighth grade, but was very resourceful,’’ Joseph said in an interview. “I think a lot of my mom’s common sense came from her mother.’’

Mrs. Perkins graduated from Roxbury Memorial High School and received a bachelor’s degree from what was then State Teachers College in Boston.

Her first marriage brought her briefly to North Carolina, and she returned to Roxbury after it ended in divorce. “She picked up her life, she moved on, didn’t look back, and she took care of those things that were important,’’ her son said in an interview. “That’s the kind of person she was.’’

In the early 1950s, she married W. Wentworth Perkins, a builder who did finish carpentry and renovations. They lived in Roxbury while she worked at nursery schools and Wheelock.

Simultaneously, she did graduate work for a master’s in education from Tufts University in 1957.

She received a second master’s, in counseling education, from Boston University in 1981.

“She was determined to excel in her chosen field of early childhood education. Her drive was amazing,’’ her son wrote.

Each morning after sending her husband to work and her son to school, “she would go to Belmont, come home, serve dinner, and then head off to Medford to go to class,’’ Joseph wrote. “She did all of this using mass transportation. She did not own a car until the second half of the 1950s.’’

Mrs. Perkins, who was a licensed social worker, also had been a lecturer at Tufts and an instructor at Garland Junior College in the mid-1960s. At Wheelock later that decade, she directed programs for Head Start workers and for Peace Corps volunteers bound for Tunisia.

More than a decade later, while teaching at Wheelock, she worked 24 hours a week at the Solomon Carter Fuller Mental Health Center in Boston to complete a training program for counseling education.

Though her work commitments were extensive, “family was always her biggest priority,’’ her son wrote. Mrs. Perkins remained close to siblings and their children in Greensboro, N.C., and in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. “She loved her family and reveled in family gatherings.’’

Mrs. Perkins, in addition to her son, leaves two grandchildren and a great-grandchild.

“She was a very loving person,’’ her son recalled in an interview. “She liked all people, and she especially liked young children. We could be in a store or out somewhere and she’d start having a conversation with a cherub. The kids always responded to her.’’

Former school children and college students from throughout her career always remembered her, he learned after relocating to Eastham years ago.

“When I moved to the Cape,’’ he said, “I would run into people who would say, ‘Are you Fran Perkins’s son?’ They would go on to say just how wonderful she was and how much they had enjoyed her class.’’

Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard @globe.com.