African American Public Relations Corporation

2012-01-04T01:21:00.003-05:00

Robert L. Carter, an Architect of School Desegregation, Dies at 94
Associated Press

The lawyers for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. From left, Louis L. Redding, Robert L. Carter, Oliver W. Hill, Thurgood Marshall and Spottswood W. Robinson III.

January 3, 2012

Robert L. Carter, an Architect of School Desegregation, Dies at 94
By ROY REED

Robert L. Carter, a former federal judge in New York who, as a lawyer, was a leading strategist and a persuasive voice in the legal assault on racial segregation in 20th-century America, died on Tuesday morning in Manhattan. He was 94.

The cause was complications of a stroke, said his son John W. Carter, a justice of the New York Supreme Court in the Bronx.

Judge Carter presided over the merger of professional basketball leagues in the 1970s and was instrumental in opening the New York City police force to more minority applicants. But perhaps his greatest impact came in the late 1940s and 1950s as a member of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., led by Thurgood Marshall.

Often toiling behind the scenes, Mr. Carter had a significant hand in many historic legal challenges to racial discrimination in the postwar years. None was more momentous than Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark case that led in 1954 to a Supreme Court decision abolishing legal segregation in the public schools.

Mr. Carter’s well-honed argument that the segregation of public schools was unconstitutional on its face became the Supreme Court’s own conclusion in Brown. The decision swept away half a century of legal precedent that the South had used to justify its “separate but equal” doctrine. Mr. Carter and his underpaid, overworked colleagues at the Legal Defense and Educational Fund argued before the court that the South’s schools rarely offered anything like equal opportunities to black children. But that was beside the point in any case, they said. Segregation itself, they argued, was so damaging to black children that it should be abolished, on the ground that it was contrary to the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal rights to all citizens.

Mr. Carter spent years doing research in law and history to construct that legal theory before it reached the Supreme Court. Though aspects of segregation law had been struck down before World War II, Mr. Carter’s task was still daunting. His challenge was to persuade the Supreme Court to overturn, finally, a looming obstacle to equal rights, the court’s 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. That ruling upheld a Louisiana law requiring racial separation on railroad cars. The South used that decision to justify a wide range of discriminatory practices for years to come.

“We have one fundamental contention,” Mr. Carter told the court. “No state has any authority under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to use race as a factor in affording educational opportunities among its citizens.”

Mr. Carter insisted on using the research of the psychologist Kenneth B. Clark to attack segregated schools, a daring courtroom tactic in the eyes of some civil rights lawyers. Experiments by Mr. Clark and his wife, Mamie, showed that black children suffered in their learning and development by being segregated. Mr. Clark’s testimony proved crucial in persuading the court to act, Mr. Carter wrote in a 2004 book, “A Matter of Law: A Memoir of Struggle in the Cause of Equal Rights.”

As chief deputy to the imposing Mr. Marshall, who was to become the first black Supreme Court justice, Mr. Carter labored for years in his shadow. In the privacy of legal conferences, Mr. Carter was seen as the house radical, always urging his colleagues to push legal and constitutional positions to the limits.

He recalled that Mr. Marshall had encouraged him to play the gadfly: “I was younger and more radical than many of the people Thurgood would have in, I guess. But he’d never let them shut me up.”

Robert Lee Carter was born in Caryville, in the Florida Panhandle, on March 17, 1917, the youngest of nine children. His family moved to New Jersey when he was 6 weeks old, and his father, Robert L. Carter, died when he was a year old. His mother, Annie Martin Carter, took in laundry for white people for 25 years.

Mr. Carter recalled experiencing racial discrimination as a 16-year-old in East Orange, N.J. The high school he attended allowed black students to use its pool only on Fridays, after classes were over. After he read in the newspaper that the State Supreme Court had outlawed such restrictions, he entered the pool with white students and stood up to a teacher’s threat to have him expelled from school. It was his first taste of activism, he said.

He attended two predominantly black universities: Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he enrolled at 16, and Howard University School of Law in Washington. He then went to Columbia University as a graduate student and wrote his master’s thesis on the First Amendment. He used parts of the thesis in preparing for the school segregation cases in the 1950s.

Mr. Carter joined the Army a few months before the United States entered World War II. His military experience made a militant of him, he said, starting with the day a white captain welcomed Mr. Carter’s unit of the Army Air Corps at Augusta, Ga. The captain, Mr. Carter said in his memoir, “wanted to inform us right away that he did not believe in educating niggers.” “He was not going to tolerate our putting on airs or acting uppity,” Mr. Carter said.

In spite of repeated antagonisms, Mr. Carter completed Officer Candidate School and became a second lieutenant. He was the only black officer at Harding Field in Baton Rouge, La., and promptly integrated the officers’ club, arousing new anger. He was soon transferred to a training base in Columbus, Ohio, where he continued to face racial hostility.

He left the service in 1944 and got a job as a lawyer at the Legal Defense and Educational Fund, then the legal arm of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. (It later became an independent organization.) He had become Marshall’s chief deputy by 1948, and soon became active in school segregation cases, notably Sweatt v. Painter, in which the Supreme Court ruled in 1950 that the University of Texas Law School had acted illegally in denying admission to a black applicant.

Mr. Carter was also involved in housing discrimination cases, the dismantling of all-white political primaries in several Southern states and the ending of de facto school segregation in the North.

Mr. Carter was disappointed when Marshall passed him over and chose a white staff lawyer, Jack Greenberg, to succeed him as director-counsel of the fund in 1961. Mr. Carter moved to the N.A.A.C.P. — by then a separate entity — as its general counsel. He considered that a demotion, and resented what he saw as Mr. Greenberg’s undercutting him.

Mr. Carter resigned in protest from the N.A.A.C.P. in 1968 when its board fired a white staff member, Lewis M. Steel, who had written an article in The New York Times Magazine critical of the Supreme Court. After a year at the Urban Center at Columbia, he joined the New York law firm of Poletti, Freidin, Prashker, Feldman & Gartner. President Richard M. Nixon nominated him to the federal bench for the Southern District of New York in 1972 at the recommendation of Senator Jacob K. Javits, Republican of New York.

On the bench, Judge Carter became known for his strong hand in cases involving professional basketball. He oversaw the merger of the National Basketball Association and the American Basketball Association in the 1970s, the settlement of a class-action antitrust suit against the N.B.A. brought by Oscar Robertson and other players, and a number of high-profile free-agent arbitration disputes involving players like Marvin Webster and Bill Walton.

In 1979, his findings of bias shown against black and Hispanic applicants for police jobs in New York City led to significant changes in police hiring policies and an increase in minority representation on the force.

Mr. Carter, who lived in Manhattan and died in a hospital there, married Gloria Spencer of New York in 1946. She died in 1971. Besides his son John, Judge Carter is survived by another son, David; a sister, Alma Carter Lawson; and a grandson.

Well into advanced age, Mr. Carter retained the fire of a civil rights agitator who believed that much remained to be done in the pursuit of racial equality.

“Black children aren’t getting equal education in the cities,” he said in an interview with The Times in 2004. “The schools that are 100 percent black are still as bad as they were before Brown. Integration seems to be out, at least for this generation.”

But, he said, “I have hope.”

“In the United States, we make progress in two or three steps, then we step back,” he added. “And blacks are more militant now and will not accept second-class citizenship as before.” Dennis Hevesi contributed reporting.

First Black Graduate of Virginia Tech

2010-08-14T09:42:00.001-04:00

First black graduate of Virginia Tech dies
By Tonia Moxley The Roanoke Times

Charlie Yates, who in 1958 became the first black man to graduate from Virginia Tech, died today.

Yates, originally from Norfolk, was the first African American to earn a degree at a historically white university in the former Confederacy, according to Tech history professor Peter Wallenstein.

The Peddrew-Yates residence hall on Tech's campus is named for Yates and Irving L. Peddrew III, the first black student admitted to Tech. The isolation of Jim Crow racism on campus and in Blacksburg drove Peddrew to leave the university before finishing his degree.

Neither Yates nor Peddrew were allowed to live or socialize on campus.

After graduating with honors in mechanical engineering, Yates earned a master's degree from Cal Tech and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins, according to Wallenstein.

Yates did two stints as a professor at Tech, one teaching mechanical engineering for four years beginning in 1979. He served a term on the board of visitors and returned to the university as a professor in 1987.

2009-12-28T22:22:00.002-05:00

Percy Sutton, Harlem political pioneer, dies at 89
By CRISTIAN SALAZAR

The Associated Press

Monday, December 28, 2009; 2:52 AM

NEW YORK -- Percy Sutton, the pioneering civil rights attorney who represented Malcolm X before launching successful careers as a political power broker and media mogul, has died. He was 89.

Marissa Shorenstein, a spokeswoman for Gov. David Paterson, confirmed that Sutton died Saturday. She did not know the cause. His daughter, Cheryl Sutton, declined to comment Saturday when reached by phone at her New York City home.

The son of a former slave, Percy Sutton became a fixture on 125th Street in Harlem after moving to New York City following his service with the famed Tuskegee Airmen in World War II. His Harlem law office, founded in 1953, represented Malcolm X and the slain activist's family for decades.

The consummate politician, Sutton served in the New York State Assembly before taking over as Manhattan borough president in 1966, becoming the highest-ranking black elected official in the state.

Sutton also mounted unsuccessful campaigns for the U.S. Senate and mayor of New York, and served as political mentor for the Rev. Jesse Jackson's two presidential races.
Jackson recalled Sutton talking about electing a black president as early as 1972. Sutton was influential in getting his 1984 campaign going, he said.

"He never stopped building bridges and laying the groundwork," Jackson said Sunday. "We are very glad to be the beneficiaries of his work."

In a statement released Saturday night, Gov. David Paterson called Sutton a mentor and "one of New York's and this nation's most influential African-American leaders."

"Percy was fiercely loyal, compassionate and a truly kind soul," Paterson said. "He will be missed but his legacy lives on through the next generations of African-Americans he inspired to pursue and fulfill their own dreams and ambitions."

President Barack Obama called Sutton "a true hero" to African-Americans across the country.
"His life-long dedication to the fight for civil rights and his career as an entrepreneur and public servant made the rise of countless young African-Americans possible," Obama said in a statement.

In 1971, with his brother Oliver, Sutton purchased WLIB-AM, making it the first black-owned radio station in New York City. His Inner City Broadcasting Corp. eventually picked up WBLS-FM, which reigned for years as New York's top-rated radio station, before buying stations in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit and San Antonio between 1978-85.

The Texas purchase marked a homecoming for the suave and sophisticated Sutton, born in San Antonio on Nov. 24, 1920, the youngest of 15 children.

Among Sutton's other endeavors was his purchase and renovation of the famed Apollo Theater when the Harlem landmark's demise appeared imminent.

"The Apollo and its staff stand on the shoulders of Mr. Sutton as the theater continues to flourish," said Jonelle Procope, president and CEO of Apollo Theater Foundation Inc. "(He) will be greatly missed and will always be an integral part of the Apollo legacy."

Sutton's father, Samuel, was born into slavery just before the Civil War. The elder Sutton became principal at a segregated San Antonio high school, and he made education a family priority: All 12 of his surviving children attended college.

When he was 13, Percy Sutton endured a traumatic experience that drove him inexorably into the fight for racial equality. A police officer approached Sutton as the teen handed out NAACP pamphlets. "N-----, what are you doing out of your neighborhood?" he asked before beating the youth.

When World War II arrived, Sutton's enlistment attempts were rebuffed by Southern white recruiters. The young man went to New York, where he was accepted and joined the Tuskegee Airmen.

After the war, Sutton earned a law degree in New York while working as a post office clerk and a subway conductor. He served again as an Air Force intelligence officer during the Korean War before returning to Harlem in 1953 and establishing his law office with brother Oliver and a third partner, George Covington.

In addition to representing Malcolm X for a decade until his 1965 assassination, the Sutton firm handled the cases of more than 200 defendants arrested in the South during the 1963-64 civil rights marches. Sutton was also elected to two terms as president of the New York office of the NAACP.

After Malcolm's assassination, Sutton worked as lawyer for Malcolm's widow, Betty Shabazz. He represented her grandson, 12-year-old Malcolm Shabazz, when the youth was accused of setting a 1997 fire that caused her death.

Sutton was elected to the state Legislature in 1965, and quickly emerged as spokesman for its 13 black members. His charisma and eloquence led to his selection as Manhattan borough president in 1966, completing the term of Constance Baker Motley, who was appointed federal judge.

Two years later, Sutton announced a run for the U.S. Senate seat held by Jacob Javits, although he pulled out of the Democratic primary to back Paul O'Dwyer.

Sutton remained in his Manhattan job through 1977, the same year he launched a doomed campaign for mayor that ended with Edward I. Koch defeating six competitors for the Democratic nomination.

Sutton was among the first voices raised against the Vietnam War, surrendering his delegate's seat at the 1968 Democratic convention in protest and supporting anti-war candidate George McGovern four years later against incumbent President Richard Nixon.

In addition to his radio holdings, Sutton also headed a group that owned The Amsterdam News, the second largest black weekly newspaper in the country. The paper was later sold.

Sutton's devotion to Harlem and its people was rarely more evident than when he spent $250,000 to purchase the shuttered Apollo Theater in 1981. The Apollo turned 70 in 2004, a milestone that was unthinkable until Sutton stepped in to save the landmark.

Sutton "retired" in 1991, but his work as an adviser, mentor and confidante to politicians and businessmen never abated. He was among a group of American businessmen selected during the Clinton administration to attend meetings with the Group of Seven (G-7) Nations in 1995-96.

"He was a great man," said Charles Warfield Jr., the president and chief operating officer of ICBC Broadcast Holdings Inc., when reached early Sunday. He declined to comment further out of respect for the wishes of Sutton's family.

The Rev. Al Sharpton said he last visited Sutton in a nursing home Wednesday. He recalled meeting Sutton for the first time at age 12; Four years later, Sutton paid for his trip to a national black political convention because the teenage Sharpton couldn't afford to go.

"He personified the black experience of the 20th century," Sharpton said. "He started the century where blacks were victims. We ended as victors."

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced Sunday that flags on city buildings would be lowered in Sutton's honor.
---
Associated Press writers Jennifer Peltz in New York and M.L. Johnson in Chicago contributed to this report.

2009-10-09T11:09:00.002-04:00

Founder of Ben's Chili Bowl

ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: October 9, 2009

WASHINGTON -- Ben Ali, the founder of Ben's Chili Bowl diner, a landmark in Washington's black business and entertainment district and a frequent stop for politicians and celebrities, has died. He was 82.

Ali died of congestive heart failure Wednesday night at his home, his daughter-in-law Sonya Ali said yesterday. Ben Ali was born in 1927 and opened the restaurant with his wife, Virginia, in an old movie house in 1958, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president and integrating public schools.

It became a longtime fixture in the black business community, serving up bowls of chili and its trademark chili-covered half-smokes. The smothered sausages became Washington's answer to the Philly Cheese Steak when rivalries flared between the Washington Redskins and Philadelphia Eagles.

Ali's family posted a statement on the restaurant's Web site thanking people for an outpouring of support. "Family, friends, and countless fans of Ben's will sorely miss the energetic and unforgettable personality of Ben Ali," the family wrote. "He was a true hero of the people and a great example of someone who actually epitomized the American dream."

Ali was an immigrant from Trinidad, earned a bachelor's degree at the University of Nebraska and moved to Washington to study at Howard University's medical and dental schools. He withdrew, though, after injuring his back in a fall.

The newlywed couple opened the restaurant on nearby U Street, then known as America's "Black Broadway" for its thriving black-owned shops and theaters. Jazz greats Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole performed along the strip and were known to visit Ben's.
More recently, Bill Cosby has been a favorite guest -- joining Ali to celebrate the diner's 45th anniversary -- as well as President Barack Obama in January. After the 2008 presidential election, the Ali family put up a sign: "Who eats free at Ben's: --Bill Cosby --The Obama Family."
Before that, only Cosby ate for free.

The restaurant has survived tumultuous times, including the 1968 race riots following Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination -- Ben's notably remained open, serving both protesters and police. Following years saw urban blight and recent gentrification in the surrounding neighborhood.

District Council chairman Vincent Gray called the landmark a meeting place for the community and said Ali was an "iconic figure" in the city.

Virginia Ali, who oversaw the business with her sons Kamal and Nizam in recent years, said the business survived because of community support.

District Councilman Kwame Brown called Ali a civil rights pioneer and entrepreneur.

"Through the best times and the worst times in our city's history, Ben was eternally optimistic," Brown said in a statement. "It was 51 years ago, with the sale of Ben's first hot dog, that a place was created that to this day transcends cultural, racial and political divides."

Ali and wife Virginia recently took a cruise to New England and Nova Scotia in September, said Sonya Ali, the wife of Ali's son Kamal. They would have celebrated their 51st wedding anniversary tomorrow.

Ben Ali continued to visit the diner each month, she said, though he suffered some heart problems.

"He was the patriarch," Sonya Ali said. "He was the reason that we're here. He had such great work ethic and determination and business acumen that he inspired his sons to basically follow in his footsteps and carry on his legacy."

The Chili Bowl, she said, will be open for many years to come.

-- The Associated Press

2009-09-21T14:47:00.000-04:00

September 21, 2009

W. Horace Carter, 88, a Publisher Whose Paper Challenged the Klan, Dies

By BRUCE WEBER

W. Horace Carter, the editor and publisher of a small-town North Carolina newspaper whose stubborn, angry opposition to local activities of the Ku Klux Klan helped quell the expansion of the Klan in the Carolinas and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1953, died Wednesday while being transported from a hospital in Wilmington, N.C., to his home in nearby Tabor City. He was 88.
The cause was a heart attack, the second one Mr. Carter had suffered within 10 days, his son, Russell, said.

On July 22, 1950, a Saturday, the Ku Klux Klan staged a parade, cars full of armed and hooded men, through Tabor City, on the border between North and South Carolina. Though without violence, the event was ominous, heralding a Klan recruiting drive in the area. Mr. Carter, the editor of The Tabor City Tribune, a weekly paper he had founded four years earlier, responded immediately. For the next issue, dated July 26, he composed a stern column of opinion under the headline: “An Editorial: No Excuse for KKK.”

“The Klan, despite its Americanism plea, is the personification of Fascism and Nazism,” he wrote. “It is just such outside-the-law operations that lead to dictatorships through fear and insecurity.”

Thus began Mr. Carter’s campaign against the Klan, a fiercely antagonistic opposition to the organization’s policies and methods and its very presence in Columbus County, N.C., and Horry County, S.C. Over three years, his paper ran more than 100 Klan-related stories and editorials that he wrote. They reported and commented on rallies, shootings, beatings and a series of floggings that eventually brought the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the region and ended with federal and state prosecutions of more than 100 Klansmen, including Thomas Hamilton, who was known as the Grand Dragon of the Association of Carolina Klans.

Mr. Carter stood up to numerous personal threats against himself and his family. He was twice visited in his office by Hamilton, who promised retribution against The Tabor City Tribune and its advertisers. And though he more than once published letters defending the Klan in his paper, he found himself somewhat isolated by his community, where many people shared the Klan’s pro-Christian, anti-Communist outlook and were roused as well by its white-supremacist exhortations.

“He was a God-and-country kind of guy,” Russell Carter said about his father. “But he was committed to social justice, and he was not prepared for the fact that other people didn’t see it that way. He had very meager support, especially early on.”

The Tabor City Tribune was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service, which it shared with another local paper nearby, The Whiteville News Reporter, whose editor, Willard Cole, was a Carter ally. The citation read: “For their successful campaign against the Ku Klux Klan, waged on their own doorstep at the risk of economic loss and personal danger, culminating in the conviction of over one hundred Klansmen and an end to terrorism in their communities.”

Walter Horace Carter was born in Albemarle, N.C., near Charlotte, on Jan. 20, 1921. He was the first in his family to graduate from high school, and he attended the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he was editor of the student newspaper, The Tar Heel. He served in the Navy, in both the North Atlantic and the Pacific, during World War II. When he returned, he took a job as executive secretary of the Tabor City merchants association, and on the strength of that affiliation, he founded The Tribune. It is now called The Tabor-Loris Tribune, also covering Loris, S.C.

Mr. Carter’s first wife, Lucile, died in 1982. A second marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his son, who lives in Wilmington and now owns The Tribune, he is survived by his third wife, Linda Duncan Carter, whom he married in 1995; a brother, Mitchell, of Albemarle, N.C.; two daughters, Linda Carter Metzger of Lumberton, N.C., and Velda Carter Hughes of Greenville, S.C., 10 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

Mr. Carter left newspapering in the 1970s, moving to Cross Creek, Fla., where he fished and wrote books and articles about the outdoors. But in the early 1990s, he returned to Tabor City and went back to The Tribune, continuing to write and edit the paper until just before his death. He often talked about the Klan battle, his son said, how the family had to move from place to place to stay safe, and how his wife, Lucile, supported him.

“He acknowledged being scared, especially for his family,” Russell Carter said. “But he was a newspaperman.”

Burl Toler, First Black N.F.L. Official

2009-08-21T14:19:00.003-04:00

August 21, 2009
Burl Toler, First Black N.F.L. Official, Dies at 81
By BRUCE WEBER

Burl Toler, who as perhaps the best player on one of college football’s greatest teams became the focus of racial discrimination, and who went on to become the first black on-field official in the National Football League, died Sunday in Castro Valley, Calif. He was 81.

He died after a sudden illness, said his daughter Susan Toler Carr.

The story of Toler’s college team, the 1951 University of San Francisco Dons, is one of the most extraordinary in sports. Called by Sports Illustrated “the best team you never heard of,” the Dons sent nine players to the N.F.L., three of whom — Gino Marchetti, Bob St. Clair and Ollie Matson — were eventually inducted into the Professional Football Hall of Fame. Its head coach was Joe Kuharich, who went on to coach at Notre Dame and for three professional teams; and the athletic publicity director was Pete Rozelle, who became the N.F.L. commissioner.

Toler, who played on the line on offense and linebacker on defense, was drafted by Cleveland, but he never made it to the pros because of a severe knee injury in a college all-star game.
“I personally felt Burl Toler was the best player of any of us,” Marchetti said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “He was the best tackler, the hardest hitter, and he had the most speed.”
The team went 9-0, defeating its opponents by an average score of 32-8, but it was not selected for a postseason game by the Southern-based bowl game committees, ostensibly because of its weak schedule, but in fact because of its two black players, Toler and Matson.

In the interview, Marchetti said Rozelle and Kuharich told the team they would be invited to play in a bowl only if the team agreed to leave the two black players behind.
“We answered ‘No, we’d never do that,’ ” Marchetti said. “And after we said no and removed ourselves from consideration, nobody ever had a second thought about it.”

In 2000, the United States Senate unanimously passed a resolution, submitted by Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, acknowledging that the Dons were victimized by racial prejudice and “that the treatment endured by this team was wrong and that recognition for it accomplishments is long overdue.”

Burl Abron Toler was born in Memphis on May 9, 1928. His father, Arnold, was a Pullman porter. His mother, Annie King Toler, operated a small store and ran a boarding house. Young Burl went to a segregated high school and did not play football because of a severe burn on his arm; he had an accident disposing of a vat of cooking grease.

After graduating, he went to San Francisco at the suggestion of an uncle who lived there, and he enrolled at the two-year City College of San Francisco, where the football coach spotted him in the gymnasium and asked him to come out for the team. In his first practice, the story goes, he tackled the star running back, Ollie Matson, on three consecutive plays. Their 1948 team was 12-0, and both Toler and Matson earned scholarships at the University of San Francisco.

Toler’s wife, Melvia, died in 1991. In addition to his daughter Susan, who lives in Altadena, Calif., he is survived by a brother, Arnold Jr., of Memphis; two other daughters, Valerie, of Hayward, Calif., and Jennifer, of Berkeley; three sons, Burl Jr., of El Sobrante, Calif., Gregory, of Oakland, and Martel, of San Francisco; and eight grandchildren.

After his knee injury, Toler taught math and physical education at a San Francisco junior high school, the Benjamin Franklin Middle School, where he eventually became the principal. The school was closed in 2004, but reopened in 2006 as the Burl A. Toler Campus, home to two charter schools. Toler was also a commissioner of the San Francisco Police Department from 1978 to 1986.

N.F.L. officiating is part-time work, conducted mostly on weekends. Toler was an N.F.L. official for 25 seasons, beginning in 1965, a year before Emmett Ashford became the first black umpire in the major leagues and three years before Jackie White broke the color barrier in the National Basketball Association.

Toler officiated a number of crucial games, including Super Bowl XIV in 1980, in which the Pittsburgh Steelers defeated the Los Angeles Rams, and the 1982 A.F.C. championship game, in which the Cincinnati Bengals defeated the San Diego Chargers. It became known as the Freezer Bowl because it was played in the coldest temperatures of any game in league history. The wind chill in Cincinnati on Jan. 10, 1982, reached minus 59 degrees Fahrenheit. Toler sustained frostbite on his fingers.

“He was very, very knowledgeable about the game,” Jim Tunney, who worked on the same crew with Toler for 11 years, said in a telephone interview Thursday. “He knew about blocking and tackling. He knew about the emotions the players go through playing the game, which is very important.”

Tunney said Toler was so self-possessed that whatever racist attitudes he encountered in the game simply never became an issue. He just didn’t allow racism to enter into his doing his job,” Tunney said. “He never mentioned it, and if it ever did occur, he just rose above it.”

Unlike baseball umpires, whose crews rotate positions from game to game, football officials specialize. When Toler began his career, there were six on-field officials: the referee, who lines up behind the offensive backfield; the umpire, who is positioned in the middle of the field behind the defensive line; the head linesman and the line judge, who are on opposite sidelines on the line of scrimmage; the field judge, who stands on the sideline in the defensive backfield, and the back judge, who is positioned in midfield behind the defensive backs. A seventh official, the side judge, an across-the-field complement to the field judge, was added in 1978.

For most of his career, Toler was a head linesman, with a twofold responsibility: first to watch for line-of-scrimmage infractions like being offside, and then to move downfield to monitor receivers running short and midrange pass routes and the defenders covering them. The job requires not just the instinct to read plays as they develop and foot speed, but also, because he lines up on the sideline and within easy shouting distance of coaches, an especially serene demeanor.

“Burl was extremely quick; he could run like the wind,” said Art McNally, the N.F.L.’s supervisor of officials from 1968 to 1990. “But more than that he was a master of getting people who were up on the ceiling screaming and bringing them back down again.”

Rev. Abraham Woods, Jr.

2008-11-10T10:59:00.000-05:00

Rev. Abraham Woods Jr.;

MLK-Era Rights Leader
By Joe Holley

Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, November 10, 2008; B05

The Rev. Abraham Woods Jr., 80, a civil rights leader in Birmingham, Ala., who stood behind the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during his 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial, died of complications from cancer Nov. 7 at Princeton Baptist Medical Center in Birmingham.

Rev. Woods, a founder and longtime president of the Birmingham chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, began his civil rights work in the mid-1950s, working with the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth as well as with King and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy.

After Alabama outlawed the NAACP, Rev. Woods and his brother, the Rev. Calvin Woods, along with Shuttlesworth, founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights.

In the spring of 1963, Rev. Woods led the first sit-in at a department store in Birmingham. Shuttlesworth and the Woods brothers invited King to Birmingham to help push for an end to segregation and unfair employment practices.

They were arrested for violating a judge's order against demonstrating, as was their sister, Lottie Woods Hall, and hundreds of other nonviolent demonstrators.

King penned his "Letter From Birmingham Jail" while incarcerated.

In a 2005 interview with the Greenville (S.C.) News, Hall recalled hearing King preach an Easter sunrise sermon at the jail. "I climbed up a high wall and looked out. Dr. King, my brother and other men were out in the court-way in the rain, and Dr. King was preaching."

The ministers had been worshiping in their cell, she recalled, "and I guess the police got mad at them, and they put them out."

On Sept. 15, 1963, a few weeks after the March on Washington, a bomb exploded at Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four little girls. Rev. Woods left his own church and was among the first to arrive at the scene. "The smell of dynamite, kids screaming, and some people cussing and swearing threats. . . . It was a tremendous, traumatic experience," he told the Greenville newspaper.

"It felt like something was swallowing your heart. You said to yourself, 'If they wanted to kill somebody, why not kill us, the so-called leaders? Why do this to the church and these little innocent girls.' "

Later that week, Rev. Woods preached at the funeral of another child, an African American boy shot in the back on the afternoon of the bombing. "He was throwing rocks, and was shot . . . with a shotgun when he started to run," Rev. Woods recalled.

In 1993, Rev. Woods pushed the FBI to reopen the bombing case, which resulted in the convictions of former Ku Klux Klansmen Thomas Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry.

"I felt very good about that, because something within me could have some satisfaction and rest because I was bothered down through the years, as long as the other assailants escaped the bar of justice," Rev. Woods said in the 2005 interview.

He also pushed to integrate law enforcement in Birmingham and was instrumental in the 1979 election of Richard Arrington, the city's first African American mayor.

In 1990, he protested the exclusion of minorities and women from Shoal Creek, a private golf club in Birmingham. The controversy was resolved when the club agreed to admit a black insurance executive as an honorary member, nine days before the PGA Championship.

The Rev. Abraham Lincoln Woods Jr. was one of 11 children born in Birmingham to the Rev. Abraham Lincoln Woods Sr., a Baptist minister, and Maggie Woods, a homemaker and housekeeper.

He said his involvement in the civil rights movement was inspired in part by what he learned in a black history class in high school. "It gave me a great sense of pride and self-esteem. I came to believe that I certainly was much more than what the Southern way of life had tried to portray me," he told the Greenville News.

Rev. Woods received an undergraduate degree in theology from Birmingham Baptist College, an undergraduate degree in sociology from Miles College and a master's degree in American history from the University of Alabama.

In 1968, he became the first African American to teach history at the University of Alabama. He also taught history at Miles for 41 years, retiring in 2002.

He became pastor of St. Joseph's Baptist Church in 1967 and was still serving at the time of his death. He stepped down as president of the local SCLC in 2006 and passed on the presidency to his brother Calvin.

Survivors include his wife of 60 years, Marian Ann Woods of Birmingham; seven children; four brothers; four sisters; 18 grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren.

2008-06-04T18:08:00.003-04:00

June 4, 2008

Obama Clinches Nomination; First Black Candidate to Lead a Major Party Ticket

By JEFF ZELENY

Senator Barack Obama claimed the Democratic presidential nomination on Tuesday evening, prevailing through an epic battle with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in a primary campaign that inspired millions of voters from every corner of America to demand change in Washington.

A last-minute rush of Democratic superdelegates, as well as the results from the final primaries, in Montana and South Dakota, pushed Mr. Obama over the threshold of winning the 2,118 delegates needed to be nominated at the party’s convention in August.

The victory for Mr. Obama, the son of a black Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother, broke racial barriers and represented a remarkable rise for a man who just four years ago served in the Illinois Senate.

“Tonight, we mark the end of one historic journey with the beginning of another — a journey that will bring a new and better day to America,” Mr. Obama told supporters at a rally in St. Paul. “Because of you, tonight I can stand here and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States of America.”

In a speech to supporters in New York City, Mrs. Clinton paid tribute to Mr. Obama, but she did not leave the race. In a speech more defiant than conciliatory, she again presented her case that she was the stronger candidate and argued that she had won the popular vote, a notion disputed by the Obama campaign.

“I want the nearly 18 million Americans who voted for me to be respected,” Mrs. Clinton told supporters. But she paid homage to Mr. Obama’s accomplishments, saying, “It has been an honor to contest the primaries with him, just as it is an honor to call him my friend.”

Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton talked early Wednesday morning by telephone. He congratulated her and renewed his offer to "sit down when it makes sense for you," according to a spokesman for Mr. Obama, Robert Gibbs.

Mrs. Clinton responded positively, Mr. Gibbs said, but added: "There are no plans to meet tomorrow."

Mr. Obama’s victory moved the presidential campaign to a new phase as he tangled with Senator John McCain of Arizona in televised addresses Tuesday night over Mr. Obama’s assertion that Mr. McCain would carry on President Bush’s policies. Mr. McCain vigorously rebuffed that criticism in a speech in Kenner, La., in which he distanced himself from the departing president while contrasting his own breadth of experience with Mr. Obama’s record.

“The American people didn’t get to know me yesterday, as they are just getting to know Senator Obama,” Mr. McCain told supporters.

Mr. Obama’s triumph closed a 16-month primary campaign that broke records on several fronts: the number of voters who participated, the amount of money raised and spent and the sheer length of the fight. The campaign, infused by tensions over race and gender, provided unexpected twists to the end as Mr. Obama ultimately prevailed over Mrs. Clinton, who just a year ago appeared headed toward becoming the first female presidential nominee of a major party.
The last two primaries reflected the party’s continuing divisions, as Mrs. Clinton won the South Dakota contest and Mr. Obama won Montana.
The race drew to its final hours with a burst of announcements — delegate by delegate — of Democrats stepping forward to declare their support for Mr. Obama. The Democratic establishment, from former President Jimmy Carter to rank-and-file local officials who make up the party’s superdelegates, rallied behind Mr. Obama as the day wore on.

When the day began, Mr. Obama needed 41 delegates to effectively claim the nomination. By the time the polls closed in Montana and South Dakota, Mr. Obama had secured the delegates he needed to end his duel with Mrs. Clinton, which wound through every state and territory in an unprecedented 57 contests over five months.

Every time a new endorsement was announced at the Obama headquarters in Chicago, campaign workers interrupted with a booming round of applause, followed by popping Champagne corks later in the evening. The aides are members of Mr. Obama’s team — a political start-up — that is responsible for defeating one of the most tried and tested teams in Democratic politics.

While the Democratic race may have ended, a new chapter began in the complicated tensions that have defined the relationship between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton. On a conference call with members of the New York Congressional delegation on Tuesday, Mrs. Clinton was asked whether she would be open to joining a ticket with Mr. Obama. She replied that she would do whatever she could — including a vice-presidential bid — to help Democrats win the White House.

Representative Nydia M. Velázquez, Democrat of New York, asked Mrs. Clinton whether she would consider teaming up with Mr. Obama. “She said that if it’s offered, she would take it,” Ms. Velázquez said later in an interview.

Mrs. Clinton and her family huddled at her home in Chappaqua to discuss the timing of her departure from the race. At her rally on Tuesday evening, Mrs. Clinton delivered a 20-minute address, but did not directly address speculation about her future.

“Now, the question is, Where do we go from here, and given how far we’ve come and where we need to go as a party, it’s a question I don’t take lightly,” Mrs. Clinton said, speaking to supporters who were cheering one moment, somber the next. “This has been a long campaign, and I will be making no decisions tonight.”

As some supporters chanted “Denver! Denver!” referring to the city where Democrats will gather in late August to crown their nominee, she added, “In the coming days I’ll be consulting with supporters and party leaders determining how to move forward, with the best interest of my party and my country guiding my way.”

Lanny Davis, an aide in the Clinton White House, said he was circulating a petition asking Mr. Obama to pick Mrs. Clinton as his running mate. Mr. Davis said he was acting on his own.

Mr. Obama called Mrs. Clinton late Tuesday evening to congratulate her, but aides said he left a message because he could not reach her. In his speech, his supporters cheered as he paid respect to his rival.

“Our party and our country are better off because of her,” Mr. Obama said, “and I am a better candidate for having had the honor to compete with Hillary Rodham Clinton.”

But associates to Mr. Obama played down the vice-presidential speculation. And he made no reference to it in his 30-minute speech, which was delivered at the same arena in which Mr. McCain is expected to formally accept the Republican nomination at the party’s convention in early September.

“You can rest assured that when we finally win the battle for universal health care in this country, she will be central to that victory,” Mr. Obama told his supporters. “When we transform our energy policy and lift our children out of poverty, it will be because she worked to help make it happen.”

Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton were both scheduled to speak on Wednesday morning in Washington at a meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Mrs. Clinton’s public schedule ended there, but Mr. Obama was set to campaign on Thursday in Virginia, a state his campaign calls a battleground.
The competition between Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama has been sharpening for weeks, but the close of the Democratic primary formally raised the curtain to a five-month general election contest. The race, as their respective speeches foreshadowed Tuesday evening, will unfold against a backdrop of an electorate that is restless about soaring gasoline prices, mortgage foreclosures and the Iraq war.

It is also a generational battle of personalities and contrasting styles. Mr. McCain staged an evening event in Louisiana so he would be included in the evening’s television narrative that otherwise belonged to Democrats.
About two hours later, Mr. Obama responded at a rally that offered a sharp contrast both in the size of the crowd and the energy in the room.

“There are many words to describe John McCain’s attempt to pass off his embrace of George Bush’s policies as bipartisan and new,” Mr. Obama said. “But ‘change’ is not one of them.”

2008-04-29T10:41:00.000-04:00

Will Robinson, 96;

First black Division I basketball coach;
Scouted for the Pistons

From the Associated Press
April 29, 2008

Will Robinson, the first black basketball coach at a Division I school and a Detroit Pistons scout who discovered Joe Dumars and Dennis Rodman, died Monday in a Detroit hospital, team spokesman Matt Dobek said. He was 96.

Robinson had been sick for 15 months and in a nursing home for more than a year, Dobek said. The cause of death was not announced.

Robinson broke a racial barrier when he coached the Illinois State basketball team from 1970 to 1975. He finished with a 78-51 record and never had a losing season. His best player was Doug Collins, who was drafted by the Philadelphia 76ers with the No. 1 overall pick in 1973.

"I'm incredibly sad that I lost a guy that I loved as much as anybody in the world," Collins said Monday. " He taught me the essence of life that has served me well from the age of 18 to 56 because he was more of a life coach than a basketball coach."

Robinson joined the Pistons as a scout in 1976, and the additions of Dumars and Rodman were keys to Detroit's 1989 and 1990 NBA championships. Those teams were coached by Chuck Daly, who took the job after Robinson declined former general manager Jack McCloskey's offer.

Robinson scouted for the Pistons for 28 years and scouted part time for the NFL's Detroit Lions for 22 years.

Midway through the 2003-04 basketball season, en route to their third title, the Pistons renamed their locker room the "Will Robinson Locker Room of Champions."

Robinson joined Spencer Haywood in a successful legal challenge to the NBA's ban on underclassmen. Haywood, a member of Robinson's Detroit Pershing 1967 state championship high school team, left the University of Detroit to sign with the ABA's Denver Rockets.

The '67 Pershing team featured not only Haywood but four others who went on to play professional sports: Ralph Simpson (ABA, NBA), Glen Doughty and Paul Seal (NFL) and Marvin Lane (MLB).

Born in Wadesboro, N.C., Robinson quarterbacked Ohio's Steubenville High football team and finished second in the state high school golf tournament despite not being allowed to play the course at the same time as whites. He won 15 letters in four sports at West Virginia State College before graduating in 1937.

While scouting for the Lions, Robinson scoured black colleges in the South for talent. His finds included Jackson State cornerback Lem Barney, who went on to a Pro Football Hall of Fame career.

The funeral will be held Saturday in Detroit.

2008-01-21T14:58:00.000-05:00

Howard Washington, 98; no-nonsense gatekeeper for Warner Bros. Records
By Valerie J. Nelson
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
January 21, 2008

At Warner Bros. Records, Howard Washington was both the gatekeeper and the great equalizer, a security guard who stood out in a celebrity-obsessed town because he didn't care if that was Madonna or Prince or David Lee Roth behind the windshield. If the small Burbank parking lot was full, he'd order the most famous of rock stars to park their cars on the street."Especially when everyone has an ego, getting into that parking lot was a bigger deal than anyone could know," said Adam Somers, a former senior vice president at the label.

"Howard's word was law."Washington, whose career at Warner Bros. spanned 65 years, died Tuesday of complications related to pneumonia at Brotman Medical Center in Culver City, said Eunice Glover, his longtime companion. He was 98.

His stereo-wired guard shack -- known as "the philosophy corner" for Washington's propensity to hold forth on the meaning of life -- was considered one of the more powerful offices on the lot. The inhabitant had a way with vegetables, tending a nearby garden, and a way with bureaucracy.

He knew how to cut through clutter. When Somers had to find a bulldozer in half an hour for a photo shoot, he managed it by placing a call to Washington, who said: "You think you can come up with a six-pack of beer and six cassettes?"

Washington had been forging connections at Warner Bros. since 1929, when he opened a shoeshine and carwash concession at the studio and struck up a friendship with studio boss Jack Warner. Washington used to recall how he would walk the lot at night with Warner, who cursed when he saw the lights on in the writers' offices because he worried about the cost of replacing the lightbulbs.

Bob Merlis, former head of Warner Bros. public relations, said Warner "had special affection" for Washington, who was one of about 40 people who attended the 1978 funeral of the studio chief.

Howard William Washington was born July 15, 1909, in Norco, La. An only child, he ran away from home at 16 and came to Los Angeles on a freight train. At 20, he started working at Warner Bros., but he left during World War II to serve in the Navy. He took another break from the studio in 1958 to sell real estate for several years. Washington married and divorced five times, explaining that he mainly lived in an age of marriage, "not shacking up."

He had a cameo in Busby Berkeley's "Cinderella Jones" (1946) and appeared as a waiter in the Alfred Hitchcock film "Strangers on a Train" (1951). After an independent facility was built for Warner Bros. Records in the early 1970s, Washington oversaw the parking lot until he retired in 1994 at 85.

The record label threw a party for his 80th birthday that was emceed by rock's flamboyant Roth, who expressed fondness for the security guard with the booming voice.

He "was my first contact with the big corporate empire of the music business," Roth told The Times in 1989. "Howard's your first barometric reading when you get here."After the party, Washington explained his egalitarian attitude toward VIPs: "I treat them just like everybody else. I've been around stars. They're human like everybody else."

Employees at the gathering presented Washington with his own framed, platinum record titled, "Howard Washington on the Lot." Among the cuts: "You Can't Park Here," "Park on the Street," "The Lot Is Full," "They Didn't Tell Me You Were Coming" and the long version of "I Don't Care Who You Are."

In addition to Glover, his companion of 24 years, Washington is survived by a son, Nicholas; a daughter, Sondra Allinice; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Another son, Howard Washington III, died in 1965.

A memorial service will be held at 10 a.m. Wednesday at Angelus Funeral Home, 3875 S. Crenshaw Blvd., Los Angeles.Memorial donations may be made to the United Negro College Fund, http://www.uncf.or/g.valerie.nelson@latimes.com

2007-12-06T15:21:00.000-05:00

Basketball Pioneer Honored

T.C. Williams Names Court for Earl Lloyd
By Mark Berman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 6, 2007; VA03

As he had so many times before, Earl Lloyd stood at the center of a basketball court. The stands were packed with fans, and when Lloyd was called to center court, rapturous applause broke out.

It was the kind of applause NBA players hear at every game, and the kind Lloyd probably didn't get when he suited up as the first African American to play in the league 57 years ago.

Lloyd, 79, came back to his hometown of Alexandria last weekend to be honored for his trailblazing achievements. On Saturday, the court of the new T.C. Williams High School gym was dedicated to him. "Nothing beats to come back to your hometown for this kind of an honor," he said. "It probably stands right up there with the Hall of Fame."

During the dedication, Lloyd was heralded for inspiring generations.
"Today's basketball athletes are heroes to our children, and this was made possible by Earl Lloyd's accomplishments," School Board Chairman Claire M. Eberwein said during the dedication. "Mister Lloyd, welcome to your court."

Lloyd was born April 3, 1928. He started playing pickup ball on playgrounds and got his first taste of organized sports at the city's segregated Parker-Gray High School. He went on to West Virginia State University before being selected in the ninth round of the 1950 NBA draft by the Washington Capitols.
"If somebody said I'd be drafted by Washington, I'd never have believed it," Lloyd said, describing it as the "cradle of segregation."

He wasn't alone among African Americans joining the young league heading into its fifth season, but by fortune of schedule, Lloyd was the first to play in an NBA game, on Oct. 31, 1950.

"The game was so uneventful," he said of the team's 78-70 loss to the Rochester Royals. "If you were going to pick a city to play the first NBA game with a black guy on the floor, Rochester was the place to play."

That's because his Halloween debut was such a non-event, he said. "They probably thought I was a goblin," he joked. But he remains modest about his achievement: "How do you work it into a normal conversation?"

It was three years after Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier in baseball but four years before Brown v. the Board of Education and school desegregation. Lloyd was insulted and called names, but only by the people who bought the tickets.

"Fans only," he said. "I can truthfully say I was never called a name by an opposing coach or player." But a big difference between baseball and basketball is proximity to your opponents -- in baseball, a second baseman such as Robinson didn't have to interact with a right-fielder, Lloyd said. "When a guy is standing next to you on the foul line, it's a lot harder to call him names."

He didn't let the harassment from the fans get him down. "My parents taught me you don't dignify ignorance," he said.

He played seven games for Washington before he was drafted into the Army, and he spent two years in the service. Upon his discharge, he went back to the NBA. The Capitols had folded, and he was picked up by the Syracuse Nationals.

In 1955, a week after turning 27, he became an NBA champion. (Later that year, Robinson would win his first and only championship as well.) Lloyd, nicknamed "the Big Cat," played in 560 NBA games over his decade in the league, averaging 8.4 points and 6.4 rebounds per game, before retiring in 1960.

"The word 'blessed' is thrown around a lot," he said. "But my whole career, I've been blessed. When I tell you I've been blessed, you can take it to the bank."

He spent his last two seasons with the Detroit Pistons, a team he would later coach. As for why he retired in 1960, at age 32, he has two words: Wilt Chamberlain. Lloyd said he saw Chamberlain play for the first time in an exhibition game before the 1960-61 season and knew then that it was time to step aside for the next generation. He said he always thanked Chamberlain for that.

Lloyd doesn't follow the league too closely these days, but he's willing to converse about current players. He hasn't been to a game in years, and when he turns on a game, it isn't until the fourth quarter ("When I do turn it on, it's hard to turn it off," he said). But he reads the papers every day and tells children the importance of being informed.

Among today's players, he likens himself to Bruce Bowen of the San Antonio Spurs, a renowned defensive specialist. Lloyd's forte was as a defender and a rebounder, and just about every point he scored was a hustle point because no plays were drawn up for him.

In 2003, Lloyd was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame as a contributor. "A young black kid born in Alexandria in 1928 in a huge cradle of segregation . . . Those child's prospects went from dim to none," he said. "I was a giant question mark in 1928, and in 2003, I became a huge exclamation point."

After his stint as assistant coach, Lloyd worked for the Dodge division of Chrysler, becoming an executive before he returned to the Pistons as head coach in 1971. He was fired seven games into the 1972-73 season when the team started 2-5, and he became an administrator in the Detroit public school system.

He's now "extremely retired" in Tennessee, he said.

The dedication ceremony was part of the All Alexandria Tip-Off Challenge, a series of games featuring the city's four high school teams. Proceeds will go toward providing free preschool to at-risk children through the Child and Family Network Centers and the Hopkins House.

Jim Lewis, the new girls' basketball coach at T.C. Williams, called Lloyd his mentor and the biggest influence in his life outside his family. He sees a synergy in how things tie together and how he made his debut Saturday shortly before the dedication with a 82-24 victory over Fredericksburg's Chancellor High School.

"I'm so happy," Lewis said. "He's close to 80 now, and here I am, 60. We both grew up here with basketball as our love, as the conduit. I've watched him coach, he's watched me coach, and here we are on a basketball court again, in the center of our hometown. Things happen for a reason."

Walking around T.C. Williams before the dedication, Lloyd chatted with everyone who wanted a word with him. Thomas Wolfe said you can't go home again, but "I don't know what the hell he's talking about," Lloyd said.

He remains gracious. Just before the "Earl Lloyd Court" was unveiled, he thanked the audience and the event's organizers.

"You cannot understand what an honor this is," he said. "There's no better honor than being validated by people who know you best. I will always, always treasure this.''

2007-11-30T01:19:00.000-05:00

Bill Willis, 1921 - 2007
Hall of Famer With Cleveland Browns Helped Break Modern Pro Football's Color Barrier

From Times Staff and Wire Reports
November 29, 2007

Bill Willis, a Hall of Fame guard with the Cleveland Browns and one of four black players to break modern professional football's color barrier in 1946, has died. He was 86.

Willis, who was also Ohio State University's first black football All-American, died Tuesday at Grant Medical Center in Columbus, Ohio, of complications from a stroke.

Playing both offense and defense for the Browns from their inaugural season of 1946 until 1953, Willis won acclaim as a defensive middle guard on a five-man front. Recognized as the first black full-time starter in the sport's modern era, he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1977.

"Bill Willis is one of the true heroes in the history of pro football," Hall of Fame President Steve Perry said in a statement. "The courage and leadership exemplified by him while leading the cause to break down racial barriers is a model for all of us all to live by."

Willis and fellow Hall of Fame teammate Marion Motley broke into the All-America Football Conference in 1946, the same year Woody Strode and Kenny Washington of the Los Angeles Rams first played in the National Football League. Willis had been the last surviving member of the group, which helped re-integrate pro football a year before Major League Baseball had its first black player when Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Starting with Fritz Pollard, 13 African Americans played in the NFL from 1920 to 1933, according to the Hall of Fame. But historians suggest that an unwritten agreement between league owners kept black players off rosters from 1934 until after World War II.Willis was a key part of Ohio State's 1942 national championship squad and an All-American in 1943 and 1944. He was a devastating blocker on offense and a punishing, relentless tackler on defense, despite his 6-foot-2, 213-pound frame.

Paul Brown, his coach at Ohio State and Cleveland, later said Willis "had the quickest defensive charge after the ball was snapped of any defensive lineman I ever saw."

"Paul made a difference," Willis told a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch earlier this month. "There were only two or three other blacks in the whole league at the time, but I hardly noticed. Paul treated me the same as everyone else."

After leaving Ohio State, where he also ran track, Willis coached the football team at Kentucky State, a historically black college, for one year. But at age 24 he wanted to play football, not coach, so he agreed to a deal with Montreal of the Canadian Football League.

Before heading north, Willis attended a tryout for a new team called the Cleveland Browns, who were led by his old college coach. He performed so well that Brown quickly signed him to a contract for $4,000.

Next to sign was Motley, who had played for Brown on the Great Lakes Naval Station football team during World War II but wound up working at a steel mill.

Willis and Motley became teammates and lifelong friends.

They endured taunts, racial slurs and dirty play from opponents on the field, and Brown kept them home from a game at Miami in 1946 because of death threats.

But their teammates welcomed them."Bill had the respect of everyone on our team, no exceptions," Dante Lavelli, a Hall of Fame wide receiver with the Browns, said in a story on the team website Wednesday.

Willis helped the Browns advance to the league championship game in each of his eight seasons.

The Browns won the AAFC title all four years of the league's existence, 1946-49.

After the upstart league was absorbed into the established NFL, the Browns won the 1950 NFL championship game against the Rams. They were league runner-up the next three seasons.

Willis was named to the Pro Bowl three times in the early 1950s.

William Karnet Willis was born Oct. 5, 1921, in Columbus. After his football career ended, he worked with the Cleveland recreation department and became director of the Ohio Youth Commission.

Willis, who was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1971, had his No. 99 jersey retired at halftime during the Wisconsin-Ohio State game Nov. 3 at Ohio Stadium.

"He was to football what Jackie Robinson was to baseball, and he did it before Jackie Robinson," Ohio State's current football coach, Jim Tressel, told reporters before that game. "I'm not sure we have talked enough about Bill Willis."

Willis' survivors include sons Bill Jr. and Clem of Columbus and Dan of Atlanta and four grandchildren. His wife of 56 years, Odessa, died in 2003.

Ernest C. Withers

2007-10-18T09:01:00.000-04:00

Ernest C. Withers, 85;
photographer documented modern U.S. black history
By Claire Noland
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 18, 2007

Ernest C. Withers, a photographer who documented more than 60 years of African American history by capturing visual images from the civil rights movement, Negro Leagues baseball and blues and R&B performances on Beale Street in his native Memphis, Tenn., has died. He was 85.

Withers died Monday at the Memphis VA Medical Center from complications of a stroke he suffered last month, his son Andrew Withers said Tuesday.

Trained as a photographer during World War II by the Army Corps of Engineers, Withers returned to Memphis and opened a commercial studio. He also worked as a freelance photojournalist for black newspapers, including the Tri-State Defender and the now-defunct Memphis World.

In 1955, Withers traveled to Sumner, Miss., to cover the trial of two white men accused of the grisly murder of Emmett Till, an African American teenager from Chicago who had allegedly whistled at the wife of one of the defendants. An all-white jury acquitted the pair, who later admitted their guilt.

Many blacks, including Withers, were outraged by the verdict, and he self-published a booklet with photographs from the trial.The pamphlets, which he sold for $1 each, brought Withers to the attention of the national black press. He started getting assignments from the Chicago Defender, the Baltimore Afro-American, Jet and Ebony, as well as such mainstream outlets as Time, Life, the New York Times and the Washington Post.

"Ernest was doing conventional studio work," his agent, Tony Decaneas of the Panopticon Gallery in Boston, told The Times, "but he loved history and he was aware of this social revolution that was taking place."

Over the next several years Withers became an up-close witness to key moments in the civil rights movement in the South. He captured the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his colleague Ralph Abernathy riding a bus in Montgomery, Ala., on the first day the transit system was desegregated in December 1956.

Withers went on to chronicle the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957 and the enrollment of James Meredith as the first black student at the University of Mississippi in 1962.

Withers' photos provided records of the funerals of NAACP organizer Medgar Evers, who was killed after working to register voters in 1963, and King, who was assassinated in Memphis in 1968.

The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art has in its permanent collection more than 100 of Withers' black-and-white images."There is a level of immediacy in those photos that's extraordinary," Marina Pacini, the museum's chief curator, told The Times. Calling the images "powerful and potent," Pacini noted that Withers "was part of the community, which meant that he had an entree to it and could get a much more intimate point of view."

Ernest Columbus Withers was born Aug. 7, 1922, to a Memphis postal worker and his wife. The teenage Withers made his first photograph with a Brownie camera he borrowed from his sister at a school event where the wife of prizefighter Joe Louis was speaking.

Returning from military service, Withers became one of nine black men to join the Memphis Police Department in 1948. He patrolled black neighborhoods and got to know judges, police officers and other law enforcement figures. He soon turned to photography full time and took all manner of jobs to make ends meet, shooting weddings and graduations, church socials and civic meetings.

He toted his camera to Martin Stadium, where the Memphis Red Sox played in the Negro American League. Withers provided publicity shots for the team and photographed many of the greatest black baseball players who competed against one another before the major leagues were integrated.

His pictures of Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby, a teenage Willie Mays and many others appeared in a 2005 book of his photos called "Negro League Baseball."

Withers also spent a lot of time on Beale Street, the center of Memphis' music scene, photographing B.B. King, Elvis Presley, Howlin' Wolf, Aretha Franklin and countless other singers and musicians at the packed, smoky nightclubs. Many of these images were collected in book form in "Pictures Tell the Story" (2000) and "The Memphis Blues Again" (2001).

In addition to his son Andrew of Memphis, survivors include his wife of 65 years, Dorothy; sons Perry of Memphis and Joshua of Los Angeles, and a daughter, Rosalind, of West Palm Beach, Fla. A funeral will be held Saturday in Memphis, with a memorial walk down Beale Street to follow, ending at W.C. Handy Park.

Instead of flowers, his family requests donations to preserve and restore his photos, to be sent to the Ernest C. Withers Sr. Historical Photographic Foundation, P.O. Box 152, Memphis, TN, 38101. claire.noland@latimes.com

William R. Hudgins

2007-09-05T10:17:00.000-04:00

William R. Hudgins, 100, helped start nation's largest black-owned bank

Published on: 09/05/07

William R. Hudgins, a former door-to-door salesman in Harlem who helped start the Carver Federal Savings Bank, now the largest black-owned bank in the nation, and was its president for 18 years, died Friday at his home in Manhattan.

Hudgins, who along with Jackie Robinson later helped start the Freedom National Bank, was 100.

The death was announced by his daughter, Jan Hudgins Riley.

With seven other Harlem leaders, Hudgins founded what was originally known as the Carver Federal Savings and Loan Association in 1948, when blacks were facing what an article in The New York Times called "a wall of bias" in obtaining loans from major financial institutions.

"There was always black homeownership and business ownership in Harlem in the '40s, '50s, '60s, but the question was who provided the loan money," Earl G. Graves Sr., the publisher of Black Enterprise magazine, said Tuesday. "It was usually family, friends, persons you knew in the church that you attended or, in the West Indian community, sou-sous, informal credit unions."

"Bill Hudgins recognized the need," Graves said.

The Carver bank, named for the botanist George Washington Carver, was started on a financial shoestring of $250,000 with $14,000 in cash and the rest in pledges from community residents.

By 1962, it had lent more than $30 million to about 3,000 home buyers and maintained more than 32,000 savings accounts.

Last year, with branches in Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn, Carver held assets of $648 million and deposits of $488 million, according to Black Enterprise Magazine.

In 1966, Hudgins joined with another group of black leaders, including Robinson, who by then had retired as a baseball player, to form the Freedom National Bank. He was its president until 1971. Freedom National went out of business in 1990.

William Randolph Hudgins was born in Petersburg, Va., on April 30, 1907. At the age of 2 he was adopted by William and Agnes Hudgins. His adoptive father was a carpenter and owned a delivery truck; his adoptive mother was a music teacher.

A tall, thin young man, Hudgins came to Harlem in his early 20s. He first worked door to door as a Fuller Brush salesman, then took a job at a local dry-cleaning store that specialized in refurbishing costumes from Broadway shows.

In 1943, he parlayed the value from several real estate investments to start Best Yet Hair Products, a mail-order business that sold high-quality wigs made from human hair.

Because of his business success in the late 1940s, Hudgins became the first black person chosen to join the merchants' division of the Uptown Chamber of Commerce in Manhattan, now called the Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce.

Hudgins married three times. His first marriage, to the former Martha Fitzgerald, ended in divorce. His second wife, Myrtle Patterson Hudgins, died in 1972. Besides his daughter, Jan, of Manhattan, Hudgins is survived by his third wife, the former Dorothy Carroll, whom he married in 1972; a son, Alvin, of Sarasota, Fla.; eight grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.

Although Freedom National Bank was less successful than the Carver bank, a Time magazine article in 1966 offered a glimpse of the mission that Hudgins envisioned for his banking enterprises. "Almost like a small-town banker, Hudgins gets personally involved in many loan applications," the article said. "Doubtfuls usually wind up in his second-floor office to plead their bcases, and frequently get their loans after careful investigation."

IRENE MORGAN

2007-08-14T11:19:00.000-04:00

Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, 90; won early battle against Jim Crow bus laws

By Elaine Woo
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 14, 2007

Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, whose defiance of bus segregation laws -- more than a decade before Rosa Parks' landmark case -- helped lay the foundation for later civil rights victories, died Friday at her home in Hayes, Va. She was 90. The cause was complications of Alzheimer's disease, according to her granddaughter Aleah Bacquie Vaughn.

On a hot July morning in 1944, Kirkaldy, who was then known as Morgan, was riding a crowded Greyhound bus from Hayes to Baltimore when a white couple boarded and the driver demanded her seat. The mother of two, who helped build B-26 bombers at a plant in Baltimore, refused.

She had no overarching agenda to challenge the entrenched racism of the era and no intention of picking a fight. If she had, she would not have taken a seat at the rear of the bus, in accordance with Jim Crow laws.Morgan refused because she had paid for her seat and she wasn't feeling well, having recently suffered a miscarriage.

"I can't see how anybody in the same circumstances could do otherwise," she told the Washington Post years later. "I didn't do anything wrong. I'd paid for my seat. I was sitting where I was supposed to.

"Her rebellion led to her arrest and eventually to the U.S. Supreme Court, which decided in her favor June 3, 1946, when, in Morgan vs. Virginia, it declared interstate bus segregation unconstitutional.

The Parks case involved intrastate bus travel and attracted far more public attention, in part because of the bus boycotts that followed in its wake and the eloquent advocacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

But "if you know the name Rosa Parks, you need to know the name Irene Morgan," said Robin Washington, an editor at the Duluth News Tribune who produced an award-winning 1995 documentary about the freedom riders called "You Don't Have to Ride Jim Crow!"

"She did everything that Rosa Parks did, with very little knowledge that anyone would come to her aid. Irene Morgan was simply doing what she thought was right," Washington said.

Her case inspired the first formal "freedom ride" in 1947, when an interracial group led by civil rights leader Bayard Rustin traveled by bus and train from Washington, D.C., to Louisville, Ky., to challenge Southern states to implement the Supreme Court's decision in the case. Their actions in turn set the mold for the famous rides across the South during the spring and summer of 1961, which helped awaken the nation to racial injustice.

On that July day in 1944 when Morgan rode the bus, all she wanted was to get home to Baltimore to see her husband and her doctor. She had left her children with her mother in Hayes and hoped the doctor would tell her she was well enough to return to work at the plant where she helped assemble B-26 Marauders.

The Greyhound was jammed, leaving her no choice at first but to stand in the aisle. After a short while, Raymond Arsenault wrote in his 2005 book "Freedom Riders," she "accepted the invitation of a young black woman who graciously offered her a lap to sit on."

About 20 miles later, a seat opened up and Morgan sat down. The back of the bus was an ever-shifting zone that was reduced depending on the number of white passengers. On this day, Morgan found herself sitting directly in front of a pair of whites, even though she was in the third row from the back.

Because she was not sitting next to a white person, she thought she was safe. But then two more whites boarded the bus and the driver turned to Morgan and the woman next to her. He told both of them to give up their seats. Morgan refused and also tried to stop her seatmate, a young mother, from complying, saying: "Sit down. Where do you think you're going with that baby in your arms?"

At the next town, Saluda, the driver headed for the jail. A deputy claiming to have a warrant for her arrest ordered Morgan off the bus.

"You don't even know my name," she told him, and ripped up the warrant.

According to her granddaughter, she then said she was willing to be arrested but warned the deputy not to touch her. Unschooled in nonviolence but a firm believer in self-defense, Morgan made the deputy regret his next move.

"When he put his hands on me, I kicked him where men should not be kicked," she told Newsday in 2000. He hobbled off the bus, and another deputy weighed in. When he tried to grab her, "I started to bite him," she recalled, "but he looked so dirty I didn't want to touch him."

She was thrown in jail, charged with resisting arrest and violating Virginia's Jim Crow transit laws.

Her mother paid $500 bail, and three months later, determined to see justice served, Morgan stood before a judge in Middlesex County, Va., to plead her case. She agreed to pay the $100 fine for resisting arrest but would not concede on the issue of breaking segregation laws.

Her decision to appeal the latter conviction caught the attention of lawyers for the NAACP, led by Thurgood Marshall, who were searching for test cases to challenge the Jim Crow laws. Marshall and his team, which included Spottswood Robinson and William Hastie, took the case to the Supreme Court using an unusual argument.

They did not argue that segregation was wrong. They argued that it impeded commerce between the states. The court ruled 6 to 1 in Morgan's favor, declaring that "seating arrangements for the different races in interstate motor travel require a single, uniform rule to promote and protect national travel."

Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the black New York congressman from Harlem, called the case "the most important step toward winning the peace at home since the conclusion of the war."

Morgan was thrilled by the victory, but it was largely ignored by bus companies, which treated the decision "as if it did not exist," James Peck, one of the organizers of the 1947 freedom ride, wrote.

As the movement moved on to other battles, Morgan returned to her family. She faded into obscurity but didn't shrink from carrying out a personal vision of justice.

A high school dropout, she worked an extra job to put her sister through college.

She helped save a man from a burning house. She drafted petitions to desegregate Baltimore schools. For many years, after she had remarried and was living in New York, she sent her husband to the Bowery every year at Thanksgiving with instructions to bring back homeless men to join in the family dinner.

"She introduced them as Uncle So-and-So," Vaughn said, "and she sent them away with clothes and food."

Late in life, she returned to school, earning a bachelor's degree from St. John's University at 68 and a master's in urban studies from Queens College at 73.

The granddaughter of slaves who had worked as a laundress and a maid, Morgan received overdue recognition in 2000 when she was 83 and the town of Gloucester, where she had boarded the bus in 1944, honored her with a day called "A Homecoming for Irene Morgan.

"The next year, President Clinton called out her name, along with those of Muhammad Ali, Hank Aaron and 25 others, to receive the Presidential Citizens Medal.The citation noted that she "took the first step on a journey that would change America forever."

She is survived by her daughter, Brenda Morgan Bacquie; son, Sherwood Morgan Jr.; two sisters; five granddaughters; and four great-grandchildren.

elaine.woo@latimes.com

OLIVER W. HILL

2007-08-06T23:03:00.000-04:00

Civil Rights Crusader

Monday, Aug 06, 2007 - 12:10 AM Updated: 09:43 AM

By ELLEN ROBERTSON, MICHAEL PAUL WILLIAMS AND LINDSAY KASTNER

• FULL COVERAGE: Oliver W. Hill 1907-2007

Oliver W. Hill Sr., a pivotal figure in the fight to desegregate schools in Virginia and across the nation, died Sunday morning at his Richmond home. He was 100.

Mr. Hill's son, Oliver Hill Jr., said Mr. Hill died while the family was eating breakfast together. "It was a very peaceful ending," he said.

Mr. Hill was a lawyer and a former Richmond city councilman, the first black person elected to that office in the 20th century.

During the segregation era, Mr. Hill's legal team filed more civil-rights suits in Virginia than were filed in any other state in the South. The team won landmark decisions involving voting rights, jury selection, access to school buses, employment protection and other matters.

He played a crucial role in the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 that outlawed school segregation in the U.S.

"Few individuals in Virginia's rich history have worked as tirelessly as Oliver Hill to make life better for all of our citizens," Gov. Timothy M. Kaine said in a statement. "His life's work was predicated on the simple truth that all men and women truly are created equal."

Former Gov. and U.S. Sen. Charles S. Robb, D-Va., once described Mr. Hill as the "last lion of the civil-rights movement." As a senator, Robb nominated Mr. Hill for the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, which Mr. Hill received in a 1999 White House ceremony.

In 2005, Mr. Hill received the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's highest honor, the Spingarn Medal. NAACP board Chairman Julian Bond called Mr. Hill "a giant in civil-rights law . . . risking life and limb to defend civil rights in hostile circumstances."
. . .
A founder of the state chapter of the NAACP in 1934, Mr. Hill played a key role on the legal team for the national organization in earning the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision. That unanimous decision held that school segregation was unconstitutional.

Mr. Hill said later that Prince Edward County was not the battleground he would have chosen for that epic fight. He would have preferred a big-city courtroom, where he might be able to gain greater exposure and greater public support.

But after black students from the county's Robert R. Moton High School went on strike in 1951 to protest inadequate school facilities and wrote to him seeking legal help, he reluctantly agreed to meet with them -- in the basement of a Farmville church on his way to try another civil-rights case in Southwest Virginia.

At first, he urged the students to go back to school. "But we found them so well-organized we didn't have the heart to break their spirit," Mr. Hill said in 1979. "We told them if their parents were willing to support them, we would meet them again and talk about it, and that's why we got into it."

That case became one of the original cases in the Brown decision.

In June 1959, white officials in Prince Edward County closed the county's schools to avoid desegregation. The schools remained closed until September 1964.

At the height of the battle, Mr. Hill emphasized, "We are battling the segregationists, not the white race. We have no desire to take anything from any white person granted him under the law or our common Christian concepts. . . .

"We are now in a period of desegregation, and must remember that integration is a social process that is quite different, and which will come in time."
. . .
Speaking throughout his career to various groups, Mr. Hill hammered home his philosophy time and again: "The Negro must expand his thinking beyond the other side of the tracks where he often has lived. We must come to think of ourselves as members of the general public, and not as a group apart which need not concern itself with community functions."

In a 1991 interview, he recalled, "I never had a class with white folks, and I never believed Negro children had to go to school with white children in order to learn. But I fought for school integration because I believed that for the Negro to enjoy the full advantages of our culture, he needed to be associated with the people who run that culture."

Born Oliver White in Richmond, he was the son of a minister who deserted the family when Mr. Hill was an infant. Mr. Hill took the name of his stepfather early in life and became Oliver W. Hill. At age 6, he moved with his family to Roanoke, where he attended elementary school. He went to the old Dunbar High School in Washington because of the inadequacy of Roanoke's black schools.

In 1931, he graduated from Howard University, where he also earned a law degree in 1933. He was second in his law class, behind his best friend, Thurgood Marshall, who was to become a chief ally in the desegregation fight and who later was the first black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.

In a 1992 interview, Marshall said Mr. Hill "was well-educated, and he was a person you could rely upon. Those don't come often. I don't know anything I can say that's good enough for Oliver Hill."

Mr. Hill said his stepuncle influenced him to study law.

"He had a day job and practiced law at night, what we called a sundown practice," Mr. Hill said. "When he died, his widow gave me some of his law books to read, and that's when I figured out that segregation was for the birds. So I decided to become a lawyer and fight to change things."

During the 1930s, Mr. Hill was part of what was called a "family group" formed at Howard University by faculty and students to combat segregation. "We knew one day there would have to be a Brown decision. We began making plans to move forward legally working to change the status quo," he said in a 1981 interview.

Mr. Hill began practicing law in Roanoke but returned to Washington in 1936. Three years later, he moved to Richmond at the invitation of friends to join a law firm. Those plans fell through and he opened his own office. He later joined Martin A. Martin and Spottswood Robinson III to form the law firm of Hill, Martin & Robinson at 623 N. Third St. . . .

Mr. Hill and Robinson toured Virginia seeking civil-rights cases. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, their target was equalization of teachers' pay, school facilities and bus transportation for black pupils.

Mr. Hill was drafted into the Army in 1943 and served as a staff sergeant in an engineering outfit that landed on Omaha Beach in France on D-Day.

In 1947, two years after his military discharge, he was defeated in the Democratic primary election for a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates by fewer than 200 votes.

A year later, when the city's population was 30 percent black, he was the first black person to be elected to the Richmond City Council in the 20th century. He said at the time that he believed his election would give black Richmonders a greater feeling of the responsibility of citizenship and that his presence on council might help remove prejudices against blacks.

He was given the Chicago Defender Merit Award for courage in entering politics in a Southern state.

Mr. Hill was defeated in a re-election bid for the City Council by 44 votes in 1950. That year, he also participated in the first suit brought in North Carolina to force equalization of school facilities for children of all races.

Mr. Hill and Robinson continued at the forefront of the civil-rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, bringing lawsuits challenging segregated schools.

Kaine's statement yesterday said, "With righteous determination, a sense of honor, and at considerable personal risk, Mr. Hill methodically and skillfully worked within the legal system to win landmark cases in voting rights, equal pay, better schools, and fair housing."

In 1952, President Harry S. Truman named Mr. Hill to his newly-created Committee on Government Contract Compliance, set up to help enforce the anti-discrimination clauses written into government contracts with private firms.

In 1960, Mr. Hill was named to the national Democratic Party's Biracial Committee on Civil Rights. The committee, headed by former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, was to propose a civil-rights plank for the party's convention that year.

The Richmond City Democratic Convention voted to censure the national Democratic Party chairman for appointing Mr. Hill.

Mr. Hill served as chief counsel for the Virginia Branch of the NAACP until 1961, when he became assistant for intergroup relations to the commissioner of the Federal Housing Administration. The job involved broadening housing opportunities for all Americans. At the time, he also withdrew as NAACP counsel in the Prince Edward County school desegregation case.

He quit his federal job in 1966 to return to private law practice as a partner of the law firm of Hill, Tucker and Marsh at 509 N. Third St. Two years later, he was appointed by Gov. Mills E. Godwin Jr. to the Virginia Constitutional Revision Commission, which drafted the state's 1971 constitution.

In 1980, Mr. Hill argued for the appointment of James E. Sheffield as the first black federal judge in Virginia. Speaking in behalf of Sheffield, Mr. Hill told the Senate Judiciary Committee, "In my generation, everybody who was really ambitious politically left Virginia."
In his later years, Mr. Hill commented on how segregation dominated his career path. "I would have loved to have gone to Congress . . . if we had lived in a free society. But we had more important things to do."

He was a charter member of the Richmond Civic Council, which encouraged blacks to take part in city government. He was twice president of the Old Dominion Bar Association and was a member of local, state and national bars.

He was a member of the American College of Trial Lawyers, an honorary organization that seeks to improve the standards of trial practice, the administration of justice and ethics of the trial branch. Its membership is limited to a maximum of 1 percent of the lawyers practicing in a state.

In 1992, Mr. Hill was named a charter member of the Civil Rights Hall of Fame of the Virginia State Conference of the NAACP. In 1989, the Richmond Bar Association's established its Hill-Tucker Public Service Award, named for it first recipients.

Mr. Hill was among four leaders in the fight for civil rights in Virginia who received the National Bar Association's annual Wiley A. Branton Award in 1993. That same year, he received the prestigious American Bar Association's highest award for public service, the Pro Bono Publico Award, for his contributions to free legal service to the poor.

In March 1994, Mr. Hill and Lewis F. Powell Jr., a retired U.S. Supreme Court justice, were the first recipients of the annual Distinguished Citizen Awards from the Richmond City Council.
An Oliver W. Hill Scholarship Fund was set up for Virginia students attending Howard University Law School. And in 1996, the city's new juvenile courts building was named in his honor.

The Oliver W. Hill Freedom Fighter Award was created in 1999 "to honor those who would dare to fight for a just world, even at the risk of losing physical comfort, security and safety."
In October 2005, in a move that represented the full-circle of Mr. Hill's career and Virginia history, the state renamed its renovated Finance Building, once a pillar of segregation-era politics and patronage, as the Oliver W. Hill Sr. Building.

Mr. Hill celebrated his 100th birthday in May, at the inaugural fundraiser for the Oliver White Hill Foundation, created to honor his legacy. With help from the city of Roanoke, the foundation purchased Mr. Hill's boyhood home, which it is restoring for use as a center where law students can provide pro bono assistance to area residents.

Mr. Hill's wife, Beresenia Walker Hill, died in 1993. Among his survivors are a son, Oliver W. Hill Jr. of Richmond, and three grandchildren.

Funeral arrangements are incomplete.

2007-05-05T09:23:00.000-04:00

Edward Boyd, 92;
Pepsi Ad Man Broke Color Barriers
By Jocelyn Y. Stewart
Times Staff Writer
May 5, 2007

The advertisement featured a smiling African American mother and her handsome, 7-year-old son. She holds a six-pack of Pepsi-Cola in her hand, lovingly. He reaches up for a bottle. The message was simple, its poignancy understood only in the context of America's troubled history of race relations. "We'd been caricatured and stereotyped," said Edward F. Boyd, who came up with the idea for the ad campaign. "The advertisement represented us as normal Americans."

It was 1947, and in a bold move, Pepsi-Cola hired Boyd and a team of highly educated African American salesmen to help the company capture the black dollar in its war with Coca-Cola. A cornerstone of their effort was the ad campaign, which also profiled "Leaders in Their Fields" such as future Nobel Peace Prize winner Ralph Bunche, stylishly dressed, well-to-do families and black university students.

By offering black America more respect and attention than any major corporation had before, Boyd and his team achieved their goal of driving up Pepsi's sales, pioneered what is now known as niche or target marketing, and helped break the color barrier in corporate America.

Boyd died Monday at Century City Doctors Hospital in Los Angeles from complications of a stroke he suffered in March. He was 92.

In January, Boyd's story received national attention with the release of the book "The Real Pepsi Challenge: The Inspirational Story of Breaking the Color Barrier in American Business," by Stephanie Capparell, an editor at the Wall Street Journal.

"Jackie Robinson may have made more headlines, but what Ed did — integrating the managerial ranks of corporate America — was equally groundbreaking," Donald M. Kendall, retired chairman and CEO of PepsiCo, said in a statement.

If Boyd was the Jackie Robinson of corporate America, Walter S. Mack played the part of Branch Rickey, the Dodger general manager who signed Robinson and integrated Major League Baseball in 1947. Mack saw the so-called Negro market as a potential revenue builder for Pepsi and set out to capture it.

After World War II, Mack hired Boyd, who was then working at the National Urban League in New York City.

At a time when U.S. businesses mostly ignored black consumers — or characterized them by using insulting images of mammies and pickaninnies in their advertisements — the campaign directed by Boyd was historic.

Hired as an assistant sales manager, Boyd's responsibility was wide-ranging. He created the concept for the ad campaign, determined who and what would appear and decided to use photos of models for some ads. The boy reaching up for a bottle of Pepsi was a very young Ron Brown, who went on to become secretary of Commerce in the Clinton administration. The mother in the advertisement was a popular model, Sylvia Fitt.

According to Capparell, the "Leaders in Their Fields" series of advertisements profiled 20 African American achievers. Another series featured top students at black universities drinking Pepsi. There was also a series drawn by Jay Jackson, an African American cartoonist noted for his satirical commentary on racism.

Racism was a reality that Boyd and his team encountered regularly. Inherent in the job description of the 12-man team that Boyd led was a requirement that they be able to endure the daily injustices of life in the U.S. in the days of Jim Crow laws. The team traveled the country, stopping at black colleges and churches, social clubs and neighborhood markets, promoting Pepsi. The salesmen rode on segregated trains, were refused service at white-owned hotels and faced threats by the Ku Klux Klan and insults from some colleagues at Pepsi.

In an odd twist, Mack, the visionary who hired them, was responsible for one of the team's most painful moments.The setting was the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, where Pepsi bottlers — including those from the South — had gathered. By then Boyd's team had seen success and was respected in black communities. Pepsi revenues had risen. Hiring African Americans and offering scholarships had also built goodwill.

But some at Pepsi worried that the company ran the risk of being shunned by white consumers. In remarks to the bottlers, Mack explained the dilemma: "We don't want to be known as the nigger drink," he said, according to a 1997 Wall Street Journal article.

An appalled Boyd registered his protest by standing and slowly walking out of the ballroom, what he later called "the longest walk in my life." He knew Mack and knew that sentiment was not his; he was pandering to the bottlers who felt that way. "I didn't forget it, but I didn't hold it against him either," Boyd told Capparell in a Wall Street Journal article in January.

Although the marketing campaign proved successful, a new company president disbanded the team and let Boyd go. But by then history had been made.

In recent months, Boyd expressed surprise that people were interested in his story. He said he was "simply in the right place at the right time."

"We told him yes, he was in the right place, but he also brought the skills and talents that were necessary for the challenge," said his son Timothy Boyd of Chicago.

Born in Riverside on June 27, 1914, Boyd grew up in a solid, middle-class family. After graduating from high school in 1932, Boyd, a gifted singer, trained at a local opera company. His dream was to become a diplomat, but after earning a degree from UCLA in 1938, he saw few avenues open to him for realizing that goal.

After a brief acting career, Boyd worked for a federal war housing program, then found work at the Civil Service Commission in San Francisco, becoming the first African American professional to work there, according to a biography released by his family. Boyd was employed as a housing specialist with the National Urban League when Pepsi hired him.

Leaving PepsiCo meant leaving a rare opportunity. "For a black man in America who had executive responsibility, finding another job of that level was extremely difficult and probably some of the hardest times that he had were the in-between periods," Timothy Boyd said.

But the decades that followed were filled with rich and varied work experiences that included travel to Egypt and Gaza to head food relief missions and work with the Society of Ethical Culture in New York, offering leadership training to high school students. Years after retiring in 1981, Boyd broke new ground again, this time as a pioneer in the burgeoning business of alpaca farming. He raised the animals on his 120-acre farm in Sullivan County in New York State.

In addition to his son Timothy, Boyd is survived by his wife, the former Edith Jones; daughter Rebecca Boyd-Driver of New York; and sons Brandon of New York and Edward Jr. of Boulder, Colo.

Over the years Boyd witnessed niche marketing become a standard practice in corporate America. He also lived long enough to see corporations diversify in ways that did not exist in the 1940s. The chairman and CEO of PepsiCo is now Indra Nooyi — a woman born in India.

"When I think of how the odds were against us, I never would have thought a woman could take Mack's place," Boyd told Capparell, "and even less that a person of color could."

Mary Carter Smith

2007-05-01T01:43:00.000-04:00

Mary Carter Smith, 88; storyteller, teacher, writer
By Jacques Kelly and Frederick N. Rasmussen
Baltimore Sun
April 30, 2007

Mary Carter Smith, a storyteller, folklorist and entertainer who became nationally known as she helped popularize traditional African stories, dress and songs to American audiences and school pupils, has died. She was 88.

Smith, who worked as a schoolteacher and librarian, died of renal failure Tuesday at a Baltimore-area nursing home. Often called the Mother Griot, she had been in declining health since suffering a heart attack in January."She was the grande dame of storytelling," said Jimmy Neil Smith, founder of the International Storytelling Center in Jonesborough, Tenn. "She was a legend in our world and a precious human being who gave and gave and gave."

Smith was born Mary Rogers Ward in Birmingham, Ala., and grew up in Ohio, West Virginia and Baltimore. She popularized the term "griot," a West African storyteller who recounts the oral history of a village or family.

In a December interview, she told the Baltimore Sun that her first "professional" engagement followed the death of her mother, Eartha Nowden Coleman, who at age 22 was shot to death by Smith's stepfather in New York City. At the time, Smith was 4 years old and living in Youngstown, Ohio, with her grandmother, whom she called "Mama Nowden."

She didn't quite understand what had happened and why her mother had returned lying lifeless in a coffin."People kept patting my head and saying, 'You poor little thing' and pressing money into my hand," she said.

"After the funeral, I went down to the corner and told a story of what happened to my mother, and people felt sorry and gave me money." Then Mama heard what I was doing and came down, spanked me and took me right home, and told me never to do that again," she said.

Smith graduated from what was then Coppin Teachers College in Baltimore and was a teacher and librarian in the Baltimore school system for 31 years. At a time when the city's school system did not provide classes on African culture, Smith started wearing African dresses, headpieces, necklaces and bracelets, and once she mortgaged her home so she could spend a summer in Ghana.

In 1969, Smith attended a poetry reading by actress Joanna Featherstone at what is now Morgan State University. She learned that performers were paid and asked Featherstone's agent if she could get work — and be paid. Smith took a leave of absence in 1971 to become a full-time storyteller and left the city schools in 1973.

She went on to perform at the Smithsonian Institution, the Kennedy Center and in the Caribbean, Europe and Africa, including appearances on Nigerian television.

"Her voice was mesmerizing, exciting and wonderfully received," said storyteller Stanley Bunjo Butler. "She had the ability to meet you where you were, and she could deal with all ethnicities."

Smith also reached audiences through local radio and public television programs and was a co-founder in 1982, with Linda Goss of Philadelphia, of the National Assn. of Black Storytellers, which provides opportunities for African American storytellers to be heard.

In a private life touched by tragedy, she was married three times: The unions with Ulysses J. Carter and Eugene Grove ended in divorce; and her second husband, Elias Raymond Smith, died in 1962 after two years of marriage.

Her only child was murdered. Ricardo Rogers "Ricky" Carter, 29, was stabbed to death in 1978 by a woman in a bar. Living by her religious principles, Smith later befriended the woman and helped her find a job after she was released from prison.

"I realized that I couldn't call myself a Christian and hate the woman who had killed my son. I thought of her mother. I had lost a son, but she had a daughter who had taken somebody's life, and I went to where she lived and talked with her. She was hurting almost as badly as I," Smith told the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper in 1987.

Smith was the author of the books "Heart to Heart," "Town Child," "Vibes" and in 2004 "My Autobiography: A Tale That Is Told." She is survived by several cousins.

Navy's First Black Captain

2007-04-23T11:58:00.000-04:00

Navy's first black captain remembered as a 'spiritual giant'
By DAVE FORSTER,
The Virginian-Pilot© April 22, 2007
Last updated: 9:18 PM

NORFOLK - History will remember Thomas David Parham Jr. as the Navy's first black captain, but anyone who heard him preach will remember why he was a chaplain.
Parham, who died Tuesday at the age of 87, was a legend by the time Capt. Robert L. Ford joined the service in 1979.

"Everybody told me, you have to go to one of his services," Ford recalled Saturday, after a memorial service for Parham at the Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base's chapel.
Parham, with his ram rod-straight posture and quiet confidence, looked like he came from central casting for a naval officer, said retired Rear Adm. Barry Black.

Black, now the U.S. Senate chaplain, recalled one of the first times he saw Parham in action, during a briefing to a four-star admiral. Parham, a reserved man away from the pulpit, fielded the admiral's questions so calmly and thoroughly he made it look easy. "He literally put on a clinic," Black said.

Parham joined the Navy in 1944, but not without resistance. A recruiter accepted his application for chaplain only after Parham showed him a newspaper article proving that another black man, J. Russell Brown, had already been commissioned to the position, according to Parham's biography.

As his career progressed, Parham began recruiting other black preachers to become Navy chaplains, Ford said. Parham was " one of the most ethically congruent people I have ever met," Black said. "He was a spiritual giant."

Parham's service cut across racial lines. His son, Thomas David Parham III, noted that several white chaplains had attended a family gathering Friday and said they counted Parham as a friend and mentor.

Many will remember his sense of humor. Thomas Parham III said his father had a famous sermon in which he explained why he preferred his middle name over his first.

He gave three reasons: "Doubting Thomas, Peeping Tom and Uncle Tom."

Parham retired from the Navy in 1982, and later taught sociology at Norfolk State University. He left behind three children and his wife, E. Marion Cordice Parham of Norfolk.

Coach Eddie Robinson

2007-04-04T11:05:00.000-04:00

Apr 4, 8:31 AM EDT

Ex-Grambling Coach Eddie Robinson Dies

By MARY FOSTER AP Sports Writer

RUSTON, La. (AP) -- Eddie Robinson, who sent more than 200 players to the NFL and won 408 games during a 57-year career, has died. He was 88.
Super Bowl MVP quarterback Doug Williams, one of Robinson's former players, said the former Grambling State University coach died shortly before midnight on Tuesday. Robinson had been admitted to Lincoln General Hospital on Tuesday afternoon.
"For the Grambling family this is a very emotional time," Williams said Wednesday. "But I'm thinking about Eddie Robinson the man, not in today-time, but in the day and what he meant to me and to so many people."
Robinson's career spanned 11 presidents, several wars and the civil-rights movement.
His older records were what people remembered: in 57 years, Robinson set the standard for victories, going 408-165-15. John Gagliardi of St. John's, Minn., passed Robinson and has 443 wins.
"The real record I have set for over 50 years is the fact that I have had one job and one wife," Robinson said.
He had been suffering from Alzheimer's, which was diagnosed shortly after he was forced to retire following the 1997 season, in which he won only three games. His health had been declining for years and he had been in and out of a nursing home during the last year.
Robinson said he tried to coach each player as if he wanted him to marry his daughter.
He began coaching at Grambling State in 1941, when it was still the Louisiana Negro Normal and Industrial Institute, and single-handedly brought the school from obscurity to international popularity.
Grambling first gained national attention in 1949 when Paul "Tank" Younger signed with the Los Angeles Rams and became the first player from an all-black college to enter the NFL. Suddenly, professional scouts learned how to find the little school 65 miles east of Shreveport near the Arkansas border.
Robinson sent over 200 players to the NFL, including seven first-round draft choices and Williams, who succeeded Robinson as Grambling's head coach in 1998. Others went to the Canadian Football League and the now-defunct USFL.
Robinson's pro stars included Willie Davis, James Harris, Ernie Ladd, Buck Buchanan, Sammy White, Cliff McNeil, Willie Brown, Roosevelt Taylor, Charlie Joiner and Willie Williams.
Robinson said he was inspired to become a football coach when a high school team visited the elementary school he attended.
"The other kids wanted to be players, but I wanted to be like that coach," Robinson said. "I liked the way he talked to the team, the way he could make us laugh. I liked the way they all respected him."
Robinson was forced to retire after the 1997 season, after the once perennial powerhouse fell on tough times. His final three years on the sidelines brought consecutive losing seasons for the first time, an NCAA investigation of recruiting violations and four players charged with rape.
As pressure mounted for him to step aside, even the governor campaigned to give him one last season so he could try to go out a winner.
But 1997 produced only three wins for the second straight year.
Robinson's teams had only eight losing seasons and won 17 Southwestern Athletic Conference titles and nine national black college championships. His den is packed with trophies, representing virtually every award a coach can win. He was inducted into every hall of fame for which he was eligible, and he received honorary degrees from such prestigious universities as Yale.
In 1968, because of a tiny home stadium on a hard-to-reach campus, Robinson put Grambling's football show on the road, playing in all the nation's biggest stadiums.
That same year, Howard Cosell and Jerry Izenberg produced the documentary, "Grambling College: 100 Yards to Glory," Robinson became vice president of the NAIA and all three major television networks carried special programming on Grambling football.
A year later, Grambling played before 277,209 paying customers in 11 games, despite the home field that seated just 13,000.
Robinson had an autographed portrait of Paul "Bear" Bryant, the late Alabama coach, hanging in the conference room where the coaches worked out game plans. Robinson's record eclipsed his old friend's 323-85-17.
"If the Bear were alive, I'd still be chasing him," Robinson said as he entered his last season. "I'm no better than any other coach. But I've heard the best coaches in America and learned from them for close to 60 years."
When he began his career, Robinson had no paid assistants, no groundskeepers, no trainers and little in the way of equipment. He had to line the field himself and fix lunchmeat sandwiches for road trips because the players could not eat in the "white only" restaurants of the South.
He was not bitter, however. "The best way to enjoy life in America is to first be an American, and I don't think you have to be white to do so," Robinson said. "Blacks have had a hard time, but not many Americans haven't."
Robinson said he tried to teach his players about opportunity.
"The framers of this Constitution, now they did some things," Robinson would say. "If you aren't lazy, they fixed it for you. You've got to understand the system. It's just like in football, if you don't understand the system, you haven't got a chance."
Neither of Robinson's parents graduated from high school - he was the son of a cotton sharecropper and a domestic worker - and they encouraged him to stay in school and get a college degree. Robinson was a star quarterback at Leland College under Reuben S. Turner, a Baptist preacher who introduced Robinson to the playbook and took him to his first coaching clinic.
After college, Robinson took a job at a feed mill in Baton Rouge, earning 25 cents an hour. He learned through a relative that there was an opening at Grambling.
His first season, Robinson's team went 3-5. His second year Grambling was 9-0, not only unbeaten, but not scored on.
In 1943 and 1944 there was no football at Grambling because of the war. Robinson coached at Grambling High School those years and won a high school championship.
"A daddy pulled my best running backs off our team and said they couldn't play anymore because they had to pick cotton," Robinson said. "So I got all the boys on the team, we packed up and went out there to pick the cotton, then went on to win the championship."
The same year Robinson started coaching at Grambling, he married his high school sweetheart, Doris, whom he courted for eight years.
Robinson is survived by his wife, son Eddie Robinson Jr., daughter Lillian Rose Robinson, five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

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Jane Bolin, the Country's First Black Woman Judge

2007-01-11T11:28:00.000-05:00

January 10, 2007

Jane Bolin, the Country’s First Black Woman to Become a Judge, Is Dead at 98

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Jane Bolin, whose appointment as a family court judge by Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia in 1939 made her the first black woman in the United States to become a judge, died on Monday in Queens. She was 98 and lived in Long Island City, Queens.

Her death was announced by her son, Yorke B. Mizelle.

Judge Bolin was the first black woman to graduate from Yale Law School, the first to join the New York City Bar Association, and the first to work in the office of the New York City corporation counsel, the city’s legal department.

In January 1979, when Judge Bolin had reluctantly retired after 40 years as a judge, Constance Baker Motley, a black woman and a federal judge, called her a role model.
In her speech, Judge Motley said, “When I thereafter met you, I then knew how a lady judge should comport herself.”.

The “lady judge” was frequently in the news at the time of her appointment with accounts of her regal bearing, fashionable hats and pearls. But her achievements transcended being a shining example. As a family court judge, she ended the assignment of probation officers on the basis of race and the placement of children in child-care agencies on the basis of ethnic background.

Jane Matilda Bolin was born on April 11, 1908, in Poughkeepsie. N.Y. Her father, Gaius C. Bolin, was the son of an American Indian woman and an African-American man. Her mother, the former Matilda Emery, was a white Englishwoman.

Mr. Bolin, who was the first black graduate of Williams College, had his own legal practice and was president of the Dutchess County Bar Association. His daughter grew up enamored of his shelves of leather-bound books on the law. But her comfortable girlhood was profoundly shaken by articles and pictures of lynchings in Crisis magazine, the official publication of the N.A.A.C.P.
“It is easy to imagine how a young, protected child who sees portrayals of brutality is forever scarred and becomes determined to contribute in her own small way to social justice,” she wrote in a letter at the time of her retirement in December 1978.

She attended Wellesley College, where she was one of two black freshmen. They were assigned to the same room in a family’s apartment off campus, the first instance of many episodes of discrimination she said she encountered there.

At her graduation in 1928, she was named a Wellesley Scholar, a distinction given to the top 20 students of the class.

When she broached the subject of a law career to a Wellesley guidance counselor, she was told that black women had little chance. Her father also discouraged her at first, saying that lawyers had to deal “with the most unpleasant and sometimes the grossest kind of human behavior.”
But Mr. Bolin did not know she had already been admitted to Yale Law School, and he eventually agreed to her career choice.

At Yale, Ms. Bolin was one of three women in her class and the only black person. In an interview with The New York Times in 1993, she said that a few Southerners at the law school had taken pleasure in letting the swinging classroom doors hit her in the face. One of those Southerners later became active in the American Bar Association and invited her to speak before his bar group in Texas. She declined.

After graduation, she practiced for a short time with her father in Poughkeepsie. She then married a lawyer, Ralph E. Mizelle, and the two practiced in New York. He died in 1943. In 1950, she married Walter P. Offutt Jr., a minister; he died in 1974. In addition to her son, she is survived by a granddaughter and a great-granddaughter.

In 1937, six years after her graduation from Yale, she applied for a position in the New York City corporation counsel’s office. An assistant there was initially dismissive, but the counsel, Paul Windell, walked into the office and hired her on the spot. She was assigned to Domestic Relations Court, renamed Family Court in 1962.

On July 22, 1939, she was told that Mayor La Guardia wanted to see her at the New York City building at the World’s Fair, which had just opened. She worried that she was going to be reprimanded. Instead, she was sworn in as a judge. The ceremony made news around the world.
In an interview with The New York World-Telegram the next day, she said she hoped to show “a broad sympathy for human suffering,” adding, “I’ll see enough of it.”

Her cases included homicides and other crimes committed by juveniles; nonsupport of wives and children; battered spouses; neglected children; children in need of supervision; adoptions; and paternity suits. She chose not to wear judicial robes in order to make children feel more comfortable.

She was reappointed to 10-year terms by Mayors William O’Dwyer, Robert F. Wagner Jr. and John V. Lindsay. When she resigned in December 1978 because she had reached the mandatory retirement age of 70, she complained, “They’re kicking me out.”

After her retirement, she was a volunteer reading instructor in New York City public schools for two years, and was appointed to the Regents Review Committee of the New York State Board of Regents.

She was outspoken on civil rights issues of many kinds. When she returned to her hometown of Poughkeepsie in 1944 as a judge and something of a local heroine, she pointed out that the city government, schools and hospitals remained segregated.

“Poughkeepsie is fascist to the extent of deluding itself that there is superiority among human beings by reasons solely of color, race or religion,” she said in an interview with The Poughkeepsie New Yorker.

In 1958, speaking on women’s rights, she said, “We have to fight every inch of the way and in the face of sometimes insufferable humiliations.”

Carl Brashear, 75; Navy's First Black Deep-Sea Diver

2006-07-27T10:23:00.000-04:00

Carl Brashear, 75; Navy's First Black Deep-Sea Diver Inspired Film
By Jocelyn Y. Stewart
Times Staff Writer
July 27, 2006

After enduring threats from white shipmates and efforts by Navy officers to sabotage his final exam in diving school, Carl Maxie Brashear emerged as the Navy's first African American deep-sea diver.
So he had no intention of giving up that hard-won position in 1966, after injuries suffered while recovering a bomb from the ocean left him an amputee.
In the months after the accident, Brashear put himself through grueling physical training and held fast to an attitude, learned from his father, that worked in the face of racism as well as disability.
"It's not a sin to be knocked down," Brashear told the Salt Lake Tribune in 2002. "It's a sin to stay down.
"Brashear went on to become the first African American master diver in the U.S. Navy, and the first amputee to be restored to full active duty as a diver. Brashear, whose story was told in the 2000 film "Men of Honor," died of respiratory and heart failure Tuesday at the Naval Medical Center Portsmouth. He was 75.
"The movie could well have been called 'Man of Courage,' " said Paul Stillwell, former director of the history division of the U.S. Naval Institute at Annapolis, Md. "The amount of determination and persistence he had and the pain that he put up with was amazing.
"Actor Cuba Gooding Jr., who played Brashear in the movie, called him "the strongest man I have ever met."
"He is a symbol of inspiration … a true example of greatness not only to the African American community but to any race today that aims to achieve in the military," Gooding told The Times.
Brashear's story began in 1948, the year the U.S. armed forces were ordered integrated by President Harry S. Truman. Brashear, the sixth of his parents' nine children, was a 17-year-old son of a sharecropper from Sonora, Ky. He enlisted in the Navy and, always drawn to a challenge, set his sights on becoming a diver. That the Navy had no African American divers did not stop him from trying.
"I told them they were about to get one," Brashear told the Virginian-Pilot newspaper in 2000.
By law the Navy's doors were open to African Americans, but in reality Jim Crow was firmly entrenched in the service.
Even though some black men had been commissioned as officers during World War II, early postwar integration mostly meant black men cooking for white men and cleaning ships. Diving, an elite undertaking, was, in the minds of most, reserved for whites.
After several attempts, Brashear was finally allowed into diving school in Bayonne, N.J. Brashear, who entered the Navy with a seventh-grade education, not only had to master the physical requirements of diving but the science behind working in deep water.
"The big obstacle was the attitudes of his classmates, some of whom did not want a black sailor in their presence and issued threats," said Stillwell, who interviewed Brashear for a Naval Institute oral history. Notes were left on his bunk, threatening to drown him.
But in the midst of the hostility there was an island of support, Stillwell said of a few who encouraged him to continue. " 'Those notes are not hurting you. Show them you're a better man than they are,' " Stillwell said, recounting one man's words of support.
In 1953, after Brashear succeeded in becoming the first African American diver, he set about to achieve even greater heights as a master diver, the highest level in the Navy diving hierarchy, obtained by special training and an examination process. In 1966 he was well on his way to achieving that goal when two U.S. Air Force planes collided off the coast of Spain and a nuclear weapon fell into the water.
The salvage ship Hoist, to which Brashear was assigned, was sent to retrieve the weapon. A large pipe being used in the attempt to lift the bomb "came loose, flew across the deck, and it struck my leg below the knee," Brashear told Stillwell. "They said I was way up in the air just turning flips.
"By the time he arrived at a hospital hours later, doctors thought he was dead. He was about to be sent to the morgue when one doctor found a faint pulse. Brashear recovered but his injuries were severe. Eventually a portion of his left leg was amputated.
Such an injury guaranteed retirement, but Brashear still wanted to dive.
He refused to appear at a hearing where he would be evaluated and found unfit for duty. Instead he set out to prove he could dive with his prosthetic limb. Eventually, he was allowed to return to duty, but after a year he was to be evaluated.
"Sometimes I would come back from a run, and my artificial leg would have a puddle of blood from my stump," he told Stillwell. "In that year, if I had gone to sick bay, they would have written me up. I didn't go to sick bay. I'd go somewhere and hide and soak my leg in a bucket of hot water with salt in it — an old remedy.
"Brashear was allowed to return to full duty as a diver, the first time in the Navy's history that an amputee was allowed to do so. Four years after the accident he achieved his goal of becoming a master diver.
In 1979 Brashear retired from the Navy as a master chief petty officer and for the next 20 years there were discussions about a movie based on his life. In 2000 "Men of Honor," hailed as an inspiring story of triumph over adversity, starring Gooding and Robert De Niro, was released. Though based on Brashear's life, the writer and director took certain liberties, such as creating the character Billy Sunday, played by De Niro. Sunday, a training officer who torments and later supports Brashear, was a composite, representing several men Brashear encountered during his career.
Brashear attended one screening with former President Clinton and later remarked that he had "gone from the outhouse," referring to his days in poverty as a sharecropper, "to the White House."
In later years Brashear continued sharing his story through talks before a wide range of groups, including college students and corporate types, old and young, said Scott Wolfman, president of Wolfman Productions, Brashear's booking agency. "Carl was not a polished speaker; he always spoke from the heart," Wolfman said. "He really touched people."
One of those he touched was his son Phillip, a helicopter pilot in the Virginia Army National Guard, who was brought back from the war in Iraq last week because of his father's illness.
In addition to Phillip, Brashear is survived by sons DaWayne Brashear of Newark, N.J., and Patrick Brashear of Portsmouth, Va., all with his first wife Junetta Brashear, whom he married in 1952. Another son, Shazanta Brashear, died in 1996. The couple divorced but remained friends.
Phillip Brashear knew little about his father's impact on the Navy until the release of the movie.
"I couldn't believe it," Phillip Brashear said. "Being in the military myself, I just couldn't believe he could hold his composure and withstand the things he withstood without going off or getting in trouble."
What he did understand was his father's positive approach to life. He had heard it many times before, such as when Phillip Brashear told his father that he wanted to go to flight school and fly helicopters."
He said, 'Son, if that's what you want to do, do it,' " Phillip Brashear said. " 'Don't let anything hold you back.' And of course I didn't."

Four U.S. Presidents Attend Funeral of Coretta Scott King

2006-02-08T22:59:00.000-05:00

By CAMERON MCWHIRTER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 02/08/06

Her journey is over.

After a week of ceremonies that drew about 170,000 mourners, including four U.S. presidents, celebrities, dignitaries and everyday folks from working-class Atlanta, Coretta Scott King's remains have been laid in a temporary mausoleum near her husband's tomb on Auburn Avenue.
About 1,000 people gathered outside the King Center on Tuesday night to give a final goodbye. While people shouted "We love you," an honor guard brought King to her grave. White doves were released into the night sky, satisfying one of her last wishes.
The ceremony closed the day's momentous events, which had culminated Tuesday afternoon when more than 10,000 people — including President Bush, three ex-presidents, celebrities and dignitaries from as far as South Africa — gathered at the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia to say a goodbye.
"Who could have brought this crowd together but Coretta?" the Rev. Joseph Lowery, former president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said to cheers in the megachurch's sanctuary.
King died Jan. 30 at 78 of complications from ovarian cancer while staying at an alternative treatment center in Mexico.
Tuesday's service, billed as a celebration of King's life and work, included recollections of her life, calls for renewed commitment to achieving racial equality, jokes, music and numerous loud ovations. Occasionally, speakers made subtle and not-so-subtle political gibes, many directed at the administration of President Bush. For the several hours he attended the service, he sat in a leather chair directly behind the podium. The service was scheduled to run from noon to 3 p.m., but ran instead past 6 p.m.
More than eight hours passed from the time the service began until the time King was interred. Her husband's funeral and burial in 1968 took about six hours.
More than 40 people sang or spoke at Tuesday's service, including Bush and three former presidents, Bill Clinton, George Bush and Jimmy Carter; Sens. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.); Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, former Mayor Andrew Young and poet Maya Angelou.
Singer Stevie Wonder, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and others performed.
The crowd was filled with civil rights leaders, politicians, celebrities and average people — many of whom began waiting hours before sunrise to get into the service.
The funeral was held at New Birth instead of at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. preached, in part to accommodate the large crowd.
But the funeral's location in an arena-sized church, set in the heart of an affluent section of black suburbia, spoke volumes about how much the civil rights movement has transformed the political, economic and social landscape of the United States since the 1960s and the demise of segregation.
Coretta King's funeral drew more dignitaries than the funeral for Martin Luther King Jr. Gov. Sonny Perdue spoke in tribute and sat through the entire service. When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Gov. Lester Maddox did not attend the funeral, held April 9, 1968, at Ebenezer. Vice President Hubert Humphrey attended, but President Lyndon B. Johnson did not.
A 'forgiving heart'
Tuesday's service opened with President Bush, the first dignitary to speak, who called Coretta King "one of the most admired Americans of our time."
"Others could cause her sorrow, but no one could make her bitter," Bush said, standing behind King's bronze casket, which was covered in an enormous floral arrangement. "By going forward with a strong and forgiving heart, Coretta Scott King not only secured her husband's legacy, she built her own. Having loved a leader, she became a leader."
The largest applause Tuesday was for former President Clinton, who stood at the podium with his wife, Sen. Clinton.
Clinton urged the crowd members to take up causes that they consider just and right, even if victory is uncertain. He urged people to support the Kings' four children as they work to carry on the legacy of civil rights activism. "What are you going to do with the rest of your lives?" he asked.
Former President Bush said King was a woman who "with dignity and grace" castigated race-baiters of any race and lived "a life that mattered, a life well-lived."
Carter told the audience that he met Coretta King when, as governor, he joined her to hang a portrait of her husband in the state Capitol. Ku Klux Klansmen protested outside. He said political support from Coretta King and her family legitimized his presidential candidacy as a Southern white man in 1976.
"Each of the public handshakes to me was worth a million Yankee votes," Carter said.
Shirley Franklin told the crowd that women activists like King laid the groundwork for her to become mayor.
"Who among us will sing Coretta's song with courage and conviction, to smother the cries of hatred, economic exploitation, poverty and political disenfranchisement?" she asked the crowd.
Joseph Lowery, who marched with Martin Luther King Jr., made several digs at Bush, seated behind him, as he read a rhyme that he composed for the funeral. At one point, he said, "For war, billions more, but no more for the poor."
He ended his poem with God telling King, "Good night, my sister, well done, well done."
Edward Kennedy, whose brother Sen. Robert Kennedy (D-N.Y.) was assassinated two months after Martin Luther King Jr., quoted Jesus' Sermon on the Mount in referring to Coretta King. "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God," he read.
A daughter's reflections
Bernice King, at 42 the youngest of the four King children and the only one to take up the ministry, gave the eulogy, praising "the Lord for Coretta Scott King and her example and her life."
King described her mother's last hours, saying she appeared to "wrestle with God," then let go. King, an elder at New Birth, said her mother's death served as a symbolic message from God for the world to forgo violence and greed and undergo a new birth of its own.
While many addressed King's public or historical role, some speeches focused on her personal friendships. "She began as my brother's wife," King's sister-in-law, Christine King Farris said, "but years of sharing and triumphs, mountains and valleys, joy and sorrow, made Coretta as close to me as any blood sister could be. I will miss my sister-in-law, but I will try to carry on."
After the service, crowds of people clad in dark dresses and suits formed lines to move out of the enormous church as the choir sang "Hallelujah" from Handel's "Messiah." They spilled into the chilly parking lot as twilight spread across the sky.
They returned to their everyday lives having witnessed something the youthful Kings would have found hard to imagine.
Famous politicians, celebrities and thousands of average people, all had come to pay homage to a soft-spoken woman who had worked for civil rights throughout her marriage to Martin Luther King Jr. and then for another 38 years after his death.
In October 1960, at the DeKalb County Courthouse, a mere 15 miles from the site of Tuesday's church service, Martin Luther King Jr. had been sentenced by a judge to four months' hard labor. His crime: He had not immediately renewed his driver's license when he had moved back from Alabama to Georgia. The motive of the white judge was not hard to discern.
When Gov. Ernest Vandiver had first learned King was moving back to Atlanta, he had declared flatly, "He is not welcome to Georgia."
According to Taylor Branch in his civil rights history "Parting the Waters," the harsh sentence traumatized Coretta King, then pregnant with her third child, Dexter. When she was allowed to meet her husband at his jail cell, she came to him weeping.
King, exhausted, pleaded with her: "Corrie, dear, you have to be strong. ... You have to be strong for me."
Judging by what so many people said about her life in the last week, she had.
Staff writers Ernie Suggs, Mae Gentry, Sonji Jacobs, Carlos Campos, Bill Torpy, Phil Kloer, Richard L. Eldredge, Rhonda Cook, Lateef Mungin, Craig Schneider and Add Seymour contributed to this article.

Carter's Groove

2006-02-08T20:02:00.000-05:00

John H. Johnson; Founder and Publisher of Ebony magazine

2005-08-08T19:55:00.000-04:00

Founder of Ebony, Jet magazines dies

August 8, 2005

BY HERBERT G. McCANN
ASSOCIATED PRESS

Pioneering black publisher John H. Johnson, whose Ebony magazine countered stereotypical coverage of blacks, died Monday. He was 87.
LaTrina Blair, promotions manager with Chicago-based Johnson Publishing Co., confirmed Johnson's death and said the company would release a formal statement later Monday afternoon.
Born into an impoverished family in Arkansas, Johnson went into business with a $500 loan secured by his mother's furniture and built a publishing and cosmetics empire that made him one of the wealthiest and most influential black men in the United States.
Beyond his own economic stature, Johnson broke new ground by bringing positive portrayals of blacks into a mass-market publication and encouraging corporations to use black models in advertising aimed at black consumers.
Johnson built Ebony from a circulation of 25,000 on its first press run in November 1945 to a monthly circulation of 1.9 million in 1997. Jet magazine, a newsweekly, was founded in 1951 and a third magazine, Ebony Man, a monthly men's magazine, was started in 1985.
Born Jan. 19, 1918 in Arkansas City, Ark., Johnson moved to Chicago with his family at age 15. After graduating from public schools, Johnson attended the University of Chicago and Northwestern University.
While working at black-owned Supreme Life Insurance Co., where he started as a clerk, Johnson founded Johnson Publishing Co. in 1942. Its first magazine was "Negro Digest" a journal that condensed articles of interest to blacks and published the poems and short stories of black writers.
Johnson used Supreme Life's mailing list to offer discount charter subscriptions. To persuade a distributor to take the magazine, he got co-workers to ask for it at newsstands on Chicago's South Side. Friends bought most of the copies, convincing dealers the magazine was in demand, while Johnson reimbursed the friends and resold the copies they had bought.
The tactic was used in New York, Philadelphia and Detroit, and within a year, "Negro Digest" was selling 50,000 copies a month. The magazine, is no longer published.
Johnson launched Ebony just after World War II, as black soldiers were returning home. At the time there were no black players in major league baseball and little black political representation.
With blacks' income far below white Americans, the idea of a black publishing company was widely dismissed. Civil rights leader Roy Wilkins advised Johnson to forget the publishing business and save himself a lot of disappointment; Wilkins later acknowledged he gave Johnson bad advice.
Ebony-- named by Johnson's wife, Eunice-- was created to counter stereotypical portrayals of blacks in white-owned newspapers, magazines and broadcast media. The monthly magazine generally shuns critical articles about black problems, instead highlighting the positive in black life.
"We try to seek out good things, even when everything seems bad," he said in explaining the magazine's purpose. "We look for breakthroughs, we look for people who have made it, who have succeeded against the odds, who have proven somehow that long shots do come in."
Beginning with television maker Zenith Corp., Johnson broke the barrier of major white companies advertising in black media. Johnson sent an ad salesman to Detroit every week for 10 years before an auto manufacturer agreed to advertise in the magazine.
"We couldn't do it then by marching, and we couldn't do it by threatening," Johnson said of gaining advertisers. "We had to persuade people that it was in their best interest to reach out to black consumers in a positive way."
Johnson also used market research to convince companies to use black models in their advertising, increasing the appeal of their products among blacks.
Along with his wife, Johnson is survived by a daughter, Linda Johnson Rice, president of Johnson Publishing.
Copyright 2005 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Prof. Samuel Massie Dies; First African American to teach At the U.S. Naval Academy

2005-04-15T15:28:00.000-04:00

washingtonpost.com

Prof. Samuel Massie Dies; Broke Naval Academy's Race Barrier

By Yvonne Shinhoster Lamb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 15, 2005; Page B06

Samuel P. Massie Jr., a chemistry professor who was the first African American to teach at the U.S. Naval Academy, died April 10 at Mariner Healthcare Center in Laurel. He was 85 and had dementia.
Dr. Massie considered himself first and foremost a teacher, though he also gained widespread recognition for his work in chemistry. He was named one of the 75 premier chemists of the 20th century, along with Marie Curie, George Washington Carver, Kodak founder George Eastman and DNA researchers James Watson and Francis Crick.
As a young man studying for his doctoral degree, Dr. Massie worked on the Manhattan Project with scientists making liquid compounds of uranium for the atomic bomb. He conducted pioneering silicon chemistry research and investigated antibacterial agents. With two midshipmen and colleagues from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, he was awarded a patent for chemical agents effective in battling gonorrhea.
He received awards for research in combating malaria and meningitis, worked on drugs to fight herpes and cancer and developed protective foams against nerve gases.
Dr. Massie, a former professor at several historically black colleges who lectured on campuses nationwide, also received recognition for encouraging African American and other minority students to pursue science careers.
"Many people, some of them teachers, who unconsciously make science and mathematics too difficult feel that science and mathematics are not for the common student," he once said. "They are wrong. The depth of use may vary, but the principles remain understandable to all of us."
Samuel Proctor Massie Jr. was born in North Little Rock, Ark., the son of two schoolteachers. He read at a third-grade level by the time he entered first grade, skipped several grades and graduated from high school at 13.
Because of his age and family finances, he worked in a grocery store for a year before enrolling in Dunbar Junior College in Little Rock. After graduating, he wanted to attend the University of Arkansas, but the doors were closed to black students.
He did not allow the barefaced segregation of the day to impose limits on him. Interested in finding a cure for his father's asthma, he graduated summa cum laude in chemistry from Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical and Normal College (now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff) in 1936. He received a master's degree in chemistry from Fisk University in 1940, then returned to Arkansas AM&N to teach for a year.
In 1941, Iowa State University accepted him in its doctoral program in organic chemistry but would not allow him to live on campus or use the same science lab as the white students.
"The laboratory for the white boys was on the second floor next to the library," Dr. Massie recounted. "My laboratory was in the basement next to the rats. Separate but equal."
With the outbreak of World War II, he joined a special research team at Iowa State working on the Manhattan Project. In 1946, he received his doctorate.
Afterward, Dr. Massie began his enduring career in academia. He became a chemistry professor at Fisk but left after one year when he was named chairman of the chemistry department at Langston University in Oklahoma. He returned to Fisk in 1953, where one of his students was Marion Barry, who became Washington's mayor.
While at Fisk, he continued his research of phenothiazine, which was used in treating psychiatric disorders and in cancer therapy, and wrote a landmark article on the subject. From 1963 to 1966, Dr. Massie was president of what was then North Carolina College at Durham. President Lyndon B. Johnson then tapped him for a chemistry professorship at the U.S. Naval Academy.
He remained at the academy for nearly 30 years until his retirement as a professor emeritus in 1993.
Jeffrey Fitzgerald, chairman of the Naval Academy's chemistry department, said Dr. Massie was modest about his accomplishments and was a mentor to students and junior faculty members.
Ever the advocate of education, Dr. Massie served as chairman of the Maryland Board for Community Colleges and chairman of the governor of Maryland's Science Advisory Council. Of the many honorary degrees he received, he took particular pleasure in the one from the University of Arkansas because its segregation policies had prevented his admission.
Among his honors, he was named one of the six best college chemistry professors in the United States in 1960. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from a White House initiative in 1988 and the U.S. Naval Academy's Faculty Achievement Award in 1990. His portrait was hung in the National Academy of Sciences gallery in 1995.
In 2002, the U.S. Department of Energy sponsored the Dr. Samuel P. Massie Chairs of Excellence, a $14.7 million grant awarded to 10 universities to enhance "groundbreaking environmental research and the production of top-level graduates." In 2004, Prince George's County dedicated Samuel P. Massie Elementary School in Forestville in his honor.
Dr. Massie's autobiography, "Catalyst: The Autobiography of an American Chemist," written with Robert C. Hayden, was published in 2004.
He regularly attended St. Philip's Episcopal Church in Laurel for 35 years, serving as an usher for most of that time.
His wife of 57 years, Gloria Thompkins Massie, died in January.
Survivors include three sons, Herbert Massie and Samuel P. "Trei" Massie III, both of Laurel, and James Massie of Little Rock; six grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
"I'd like to be remembered as a teacher who cared," Dr. Massie once said, "as a man who tried to make a difference."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr. - 1937-2005

2005-03-30T12:23:00.000-05:00

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-cochran30mar30,0,6388220.story?coll=la-home-headlines
JOHNNIE L. COCHRAN JR. 1937-2005

Flashy, Deft Lawyer Known Worldwide

Famous for heading Simpson 'Dream Team,' he was proudest of freeing Geronimo Pratt.

By Carla Hall

Times Staff Writer

March 30, 2005

Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., the masterful attorney who gained prominence as an early advocate for victims of police abuse then achieved worldwide fame for successfully defending football star O.J. Simpson against murder charges, died Tuesday. He was 67.
Cochran died of an inoperable brain tumor at his home in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles, said his brother-in-law Bill Baker. The tumor was diagnosed in December 2003, Baker said.
Initially, Cochran, his family and colleagues were secretive about his illness to protect the attorney's privacy as well as the network of Cochran law offices, which largely draw their cachet from his presence. But Cochran confirmed in a September 2004 interview with The Times that neurosurgeon Keith Black at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles was treating him.
Simpson praised Cochran on Tuesday from his home in Florida.
"I've got to say, I don't think I'd be home today without Johnnie," the Hall of Famer told Associated Press. "Johnnie is what's good about the law. He loved the system. I always tell people, if your kids or your loved ones got in trouble, you would want Johnnie. Even his adversaries respected him."
Long before his defense of Simpson, Cochran challenged what many viewed as the Los Angeles Police Department's misconduct toward people under arrest, at a time when the court system still ignored that behavior and victims took it for granted.
From the 1960s on, when he represented the widow of Leonard Deadwyler, a black motorist killed during a police stop in Los Angeles, Cochran took brutality cases to court. He won historic financial settlements and helped bring about lasting changes in police procedure.
His clients weren't always black: He unsuccessfully represented Reginald O. Denny, the white trucker beaten by a mob during the 1992 riots after the not-guilty verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating were announced.
Instead of arguing, as he often did, that police had been brutal on the job, Cochran contended that the trucker's civil rights had been violated when police failed to do their jobs at all upon being ordered to withdraw from the intersection of Florence Avenue and Normandie Street, a flash point of the riots where Denny was pulled from his big rig and attacked.
By the time Simpson was accused of murder in 1994, Cochran was "larger than life" in the city's black community, said Kerman Maddox, a political consultant and longtime L.A. resident. After the Simpson case, that profile would expand, earning him new admirers, as well as new detractors who considered him a racially polarizing force.
His successful defense of Simpson against charges of murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman, a waiter and casual friend of hers, vaulted him to the rank of celebrity, beseeched by autograph-seekers and parodied on "Saturday Night Live" and "Seinfeld." His name was invoked by movie characters, one of whom boasted in the 1997 film "Jackie Brown" that his lawyer was so good, "he's my own personal Johnnie Cochran."
Ever aware of his public image, the attorney delighted in the attention and even played along, showing up in the occasional movie or TV show in a cameo role as himself.
Resplendently tailored and silky-voiced, clever and genteel, Cochran came to epitomize the formidable litigator, sought after by the famous and wealthy, the obscure and struggling, all believing that they were victims of the system in one way or another.
He was able to connect with any jury, and in his most famous case, the Simpson trial, he delivered an eloquent, even lilting closing argument.
He famously cast doubt on the prosecution's theory of the case, saying: "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit." The line — actually conceived by co-consul Gerald F. Uelmen during a strategy session — referred to the defense's overall assessment of the evidence.
But it most evoked the moment in the trial when Simpson appeared to struggle to put on what were presumed to be the murderer's bloody gloves — one of which was found at the crime scene, the other outside Simpson's house."
He could walk into court and charm the pants off a jury," said Leslie Abramson, a leading defense attorney now retired. "But it wasn't snake oil. He could figure out the essence of the case — of how ordinary people would view the law, the facts — and the equity, the sense of justice. He always had it figured out. And he had it figured out in Simpson. And the prosecutors never did."
Duke University law professor Erwin Chemerinsky agreed. "I think you could have given that case to a lot of talented lawyers and O.J. would have been convicted," he told The Times in late 2004.
Cochran inspired law students and attained a level of stardom rare for a lawyer and even rarer for a black lawyer. One of his most important legacies was the transforming effect of an African American man achieving that degree of success."
Clients of all races are now no longer hesitant to retain black lawyers to represent them in significant cases," said Winston Kevin McKesson, a black criminal defense attorney in Los Angeles. "That was not the case 25 or 30 years ago. We couldn't even get African Americans in our community to trust us. He's a historic figure."
However, the Simpson criminal trial defined Cochran's career for better and for worse. While it made him a household name and offered him access to virtually every high-profile criminal case, it also changed his life "drastically and forever," he wrote in "A Lawyer's Life." "It obscured everything I had done previously."
More galling and perplexing to him was the criticism that rained down after the Simpson verdicts. Though many legal experts marveled at Cochran's skill, a parade of critics — TV pundits and newspaper columnists, California's then-governor, Republican Pete Wilson, and even the attorney's own co-counsel Robert Shapiro — denounced a legal strategy that put the competence and character of the LAPD on trial."
Not only did we play the race card, we dealt it from the bottom of the deck," Shapiro said in a national TV interview after a jury of nine African Americans, two whites and one Latino, all but two of them women, acquitted Simpson.
During the trial, Cochran and the rest of the defense team excoriated criminalists for sloppy work that compromised blood evidence and claimed that the police prejudged Simpson. Cochran and his "Dream Team," as the defense attorneys were known, revealed that Det. Mark Fuhrman, who collected key evidence in the case, had a history of making racist remarks. Everything about the Simpson case came to personify the excess of Los Angeles. A combustible combination of murder, sex and race, the extravagantly lengthy trial was carried live on television, making it probably the first high-profile reality TV show.
When it was finally over and the jury had acquitted Simpson, many in the public had not. A Times poll indicated that half the American public disagreed with the verdict. And the majority believed that the defense had used the race issue inappropriately to help free a defendant whose controversial saga began when he fled police in a nationally televised slow freeway chase.
Chemerinsky said Cochran did nothing more than discharge his duty as a zealous advocate in defending Simpson.
"I think Johnnie Cochran did a superb job," Chemerinsky said. "He ultimately put the LAPD and the racism of the LAPD on trial, and that worked with that jury."
Cochran spent two post-trial memoirs trying to dispel the criticism."
The charge that I could convince black jurors to vote to acquit a man they believed to be guilty of two murders because he is black is an insult to all African Americans," he wrote in "A Lawyer's Life."
It wasn't that Cochran believed the police had conspired to frame Simpson. It was more that their racism had led to a "rush to judgment" and a willingness to "adjust the physical evidence slightly," he wrote.
"He got an awful rap in the white community after the Simpson trial," said Stuart Hanlon, a white attorney who was a longtime criminal defense collaborator with Cochran.
"All he did was do a great job as a lawyer — which is what we're supposed to do — and beat some inept prosecutor. For him to get vilified for it just shows the racism in our community. I really think if O.J.'s lawyer had been white, that wouldn't have happened…. If I had done that trial and won, no one would hate me."
Ironically, up to that time, Cochran had spent most of his life not as a racially polarizing force but as the integrator, the black man gliding easily through white conference rooms, dinner parties and neighborhoods.
In the September 2004 phone interview with The Times, Cochran said he still would have taken the case had he known it would change his life. "I thought it was the right thing to do," he said.
Cochran continued to support Simpson's version of his activities the night his former wife and Goldman were found knifed to death outside her Brentwood townhouse.
"I still believe he's innocent of those charges," Cochran said in the September interview. "Even after all this time."
Although the Simpson case might have been Cochran's bravura moment on the public stage, he did not consider it his most important case. It was the long and twisted legal saga of Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt that for Cochran marked, at different points, the nadir and the pinnacle of his career.
Authorities contended that Pratt, a former Black Panther leader and Vietnam War veteran, robbed and shot a young white couple on a public tennis court in Santa Monica in December 1968. The woman died, but her husband survived and identified Pratt in a lineup two years after the shootings.
Cochran said his biggest disappointment was watching his client, Pratt, convicted of murder in 1972. And his greatest triumph came when a judge in Orange County reversed that conviction 25 years later.
Pratt, who now calls himself Geronimo ji Jaga, told The Times on Tuesday that Cochran was "truly a soldier fully dedicated to making sure that the rights of the oppressed be defended."
The course of Cochran's four-decade career zigzagged across the legal landscape, starting in the Los Angeles city attorney's office, where he eagerly prosecuted drunk-driving cases, and ending in a private practice that earned him wealth and fame.
His law firm sprouted 14 offices outside California, devoted to personal-injury law and other civil litigation. But Cochran remained rooted not just to Los Angeles but to Wilshire Boulevard, maintaining his legal headquarters there even as the street's glamour faded. For rising black professionals of his generation, a Wilshire address was the ultimate aspiration.
The eldest child of four, Cochran was born in a charity hospital in Shreveport, La. He was, he wrote, the great-grandson of slaves and the grandson of a sharecropper. His ambitious father, Johnnie L. Cochran Sr., moved the family halfway across the country to California and began an upward climb from working as a pipe fitter in San Francisco Bay Area shipyards to selling insurance for Golden State Mutual, the state's leading black-owned insurance company.
The family settled in Los Angeles in 1949. There, Cochran's father ran an insurance district office, bought a house in a well-tended neighborhood on West 28th Street and took his family to Second Baptist Church.
Like other members of the mid-century's burgeoning black middle class in America, the senior Cochran and his wife, Hattie, expected much of themselves and more of their children. In "A Lawyer's Life" the attorney wrote that his father stressed education and working hard "to reach our fullest potential. And he seemed to think our fullest potential was always a little fuller than we did."
Cochran grew up wanting to be a lawyer, he surmises, because he loved to debate, a skill he honed at the dinner table and at Los Angeles High School. Dazzled by the natty attire of many classmates and their late-model convertibles, Cochran began developing a taste for stylish clothing and a love of fine cars.
After graduating from UCLA, he earned a degree from Loyola Law School in 1962. The summer after his first year at Loyola, he married Barbara Berry.
The couple eventually had two girls — Melodie and Tiffany — but the marriage began to crumble. Before they divorced, he had a relationship with Patricia Sikora, who bore him his only son, Jonathan, now a California Highway Patrol officer — something Cochran loved reminding critics who said he hated all peace officers.
As a college-age man, Cochran wrestled with his feelings about a white world that saw him as black before anything else, a concept of duality that he said writer and black liberationist W.E.B. Dubois best described as "two-ness."
"The concept of 'two-ness' is one that has eternally intrigued me," the attorney wrote in "Journey to Justice," his first memoir. " … We were never viewed as just teachers, doctors, lawyers, scientists and writers. We were perceived as black teachers, black doctors, black lawyers, black scientists and black writers."
But that distinction was inescapable as he made his way in Los Angeles. In the fall of 1961, during his last year in law school, he became the first black law clerk in the office of the city attorney. In early 1963, he became a deputy city attorney.
He enjoyed trial work, but he grew uncomfortable prosecuting people — usually black men — who had allegedly resisted arrest. And he grew wary of the police, since many of those people showed signs of severe beatings.
"By the mid-1960s, the problem of unchecked police misconduct was the defining issue among black Angelenos of every social class," he wrote in "Journey to Justice."
He left the city attorney's office in 1965 for private practice.
It was a case of alleged police misconduct in May 1966 that first thrust Cochran into the spotlight. Deadwyler, speeding his pregnant wife to the hospital, was pulled over by police, then shot to death. The officer who stopped him said later that he had reached into the car to grab the ignition key and that the car had lurched forward, causing the gun to discharge accidentally.
The shooting outraged a black community still emotionally smoldering from the Watts riots less than a year earlier. Cochran represented Deadwyler's widow, Barbara, at a coroner's inquest. As TV cameras rolled, viewers saw the deputy district attorney consulting with Cochran and often prefacing questions to witnesses with "Mr. Cochran wants to know…. "
A majority of jurors found the shooting of Deadwyler accidental, but Cochran's presence offered an indelible image of a black attorney as an important player.
"If you talk to African American professionals between 40 and 50, it was a powerful moment when they were young," said Maddox, who was one of those youngsters.
In the two decades after the inquest, Cochran took on other cases that challenged Los Angeles juries and police policies.
But he was devastated when Pratt was convicted in July 1972 of murder. Although the husband of Caroline Olsen, the murdered woman, had identified Pratt as the assailant and although a former Black Panther Party rival, Julius Butler, had testified against Pratt, Cochran had been confident that the system would exonerate his client.
Only years later would he learn that Butler had been an informant for the government, including the district attorney's office. Butler had denied that on the stand. If Cochran had known at the time, it would have been a different case.
"I had learned that prosecutors and law enforcement officials, convinced of their own righteousness, would do anything to make the system yield the 'right result,' " he wrote.
Years later, Cochran would suggest that the LAPD did just that to make its case against Simpson — and others would accuse Cochran of using similar methods to defend his client.
The attorney continued to represent the families of people he believed to be victims of police abuse and was able to extract from the city of Los Angeles the first cash settlement — $25,000 — in a wrongful-death suit stemming from a police shooting.
In 1978, Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. John K. Van de Kamp chose Cochran to be assistant district attorney, the No. 3 position in the office, and suggested that he change the system from the inside. Cochran left his $300,000-a-year practice for the $49,000 salaried job, becoming the first African American to hold it.
But change came slowly. He lost a debate with his bosses over filing manslaughter charges against police officers who killed Eulia Love, a black woman they said had threatened them with a knife. The police had been called to her home after Love, overdue on her gas bill, allegedly used a shovel to shoo away gas company employees.
Later, however, Cochran and Gil Garcetti, then a deputy district attorney, changed the way prosecutors investigated police shootings. They initiated the policy of having a prosecutor and a district attorney's investigator go immediately to the scene of every police shooting, a move designed to make the investigation impartial. No longer would the government rely entirely on police investigations of their own shootings.
Cochran left the district attorney's office in 1981 and soon took on another case that would become a benchmark for the Los Angeles area.
After a traffic stop, police in Signal Hill booked Cal State Long Beach football player Ron Settles on suspicion of resisting arrest, possession of cocaine and assault on a police officer. However, the validity of the charges would never be tested in court — a few hours later, just before his bail was posted, Settles was found dead in his cell. Police said he had apparently hanged himself.
Cochran and attorney Mike Mitchell, representing Settles' parents at the coroner's inquest, contended that the athlete died as a result of a police chokehold. Although the jury never specified how he was killed, it did issue a majority verdict that Settles had not killed himself but "died at the hands of another." Cochran also helped the Settles family win a $760,000 judgment.
Later, in Los Angeles, Cochran was part of a group that successfully argued before the Police Commission that the bar-arm chokehold should be banned.
In the 1980s, he worked on burnishing his reputation as a premier attorney and player in Los Angeles. Mayor Tom Bradley, his mentor and Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity brother, appointed him to the Airport Commission, which oversaw expansion of Los Angeles International Airport and the awarding of contracts to run it.
And in court, Cochran was winning millions of dollars in awards for people injured or killed by the police. Most notably, he and law partner Eric Ferrer secured a $9.2-million judgment for Patty Diaz, a 13-year-old Latina sexually assaulted in her home by an LAPD officer. At the time it was the largest award resulting from LAPD misconduct ever granted by a trial jury, although the plaintiff later agreed to the reduced sum of $4.5 million.
In the middle of his rise as an attorney, Cochran's personal life took a turn. As airport commissioner, he was attending a 1981 conference when he met Dale Mason, an executive for an Atlanta-based concessionaire. He and Mason, 13 years his junior, were married at the Bel-Air Hotel in 1985.
Dale Mason Cochran survives him, as do his son, Jonathan; daughters, Tiffany Cochran Edwards and Melodie Cochran; sisters, Pearl Baker and Martha Jean Sherrard; and father, Johnnie L. Cochran Sr.
The attorney also cultivated a clientele of celebrities in trouble. In 1993, he represented pop superstar Michael Jackson during his first battle against accusations of sexual molestation. A year later, Simpson called Cochran from jail begging him to join his defense team.
After victory in that trial, there was hardly a prominent civil rights or police abuse case that Cochran was not connected to in some way. But his impact was diluted by the sheer volume of what he undertook. He jetted between coasts, tried his hand at being co-host of a syndicated television legal show and dipped in and out of numerous cases.
"At any given time, I am actively involved in about 50 different cases," he wrote in "A Lawyer's Life." That didn't always sit well with clients. The mother of Amadou Diallo, the unarmed immigrant whose fatal 1999 shooting by New York police in the Bronx stirred national outrage, retained Cochran to represent her but fired him when she felt he didn't have enough time for her.
"Maybe I did a few too many cases," he mused in the September 2004 phone interview. "I handled a lot, and they were real tough cases."
Cochran gave up the stressful and time-consuming practice of criminal law after successfully defending rap music mogul Sean Combs on weapons charges in New York in 2000. Last Tuesday, Cochran was at the center of a case heard by the U.S. Supreme Court after a former client picketed his law offices with signs accusing him of being a crook and a liar. Cochran sued for defamation.
A California court had found for Cochran and barred the defendant, Ulysses Tory, from orally making any statements about Cochran, a judgment that Tory argued violated his 1st Amendment rights. Chemerinsky, one of Tory's attorneys, argued the case before the high court.
The one case Cochran stayed involved with more than two decades was Pratt's.
"Some people would say that Cochran abandoned the case. I know better," said Hanlon, who spent 23 years on the matter. "He was always there when I needed to talk to him."
Not only did Cochran lend his expertise when they finally got a hearing on whether Pratt's conviction should be overturned, but he also lent his credit card to the effort. "We were broke," Hanlon said.
Because the court hearing was transferred from L.A. to the Orange County courtroom of a conservative judge, Cochran's presence was key.
"I was a known radical," Hanlon said. "He brought a credibility to the courtroom that I couldn't bring.
Pratt's murder conviction was overturned in May 1997, and he was freed after 27 years behind bars. The Los Angeles County district attorney declined to retry him. Cochran helped Pratt secure the $4.5-million settlement of a false-imprisonment suit.
"There are so many cases I believe in," said Cochran in the 2004 phone interview. "Probably the biggest was Pratt…. Just getting him free — I remember that day down in Orange County; that was probably the happiest day for me in my whole career."
Services are pending.*

Some notable cases

Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. was already well known in Southern California when he successfully defended O.J. Simpson in the renowned 1994 murder case. Here are some other notable cases handled by Cochran:

1972: Unsuccessfully represents Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt in a murder case. The former Black Panther Party leader and Vietnam veteran's case is reversed in 1997. Cochran later helps Pratt settle a false-imprisonment suit for $4.5 million.

1981: Represents family of Cal State Long Beach football star Ron Settles, maintaining that he died as a result of a chokehold while in Signal Hill police custody. The coroner's inquest finds that Settles died at the hand of another.

1992: His firm wins a $9.2-million judgment in the sexual assault of 13-year-old Patty Diaz by an LAPD officer. It was then the largest jury award for LAPD misconduct. It was later reduced to $4.5 million.

1993: Helps pop star Michael Jackson settle the initial molestation allegation.

1993: Represents Reginald O. Denny in an unsuccessful suit against the LAPD for failure to protect the white truck driver who was beaten at the start of the 1992 riots.

2001: Represents Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant brutally assaulted by New York City police. Louima wins an $8.75-million settlement from the city.

2001: Wins acquittal of rap star Sean Combs on weapons and bribery charges.

2003: Wins a record-setting $700-million environmental pollution settlement against Monsanto, Pharmacia and Solutia for exposing about 18,000 Anniston, Ala., residents to PCBs, which are toxic.

Sources: Times research, http://www.thetennessee/ tribune.com, http://www.cochranfirm.com/ , Tobin & Associates.Los Angeles Times

Average Income for African Americans with a Bachelor's Degree

2005-03-28T11:13:00.000-05:00

From Times Wire Reports

March 28, 2005

Black and Asian women with bachelor's degrees earn slightly more than similarly educated white women, and white men with comparable degrees make more than anyone else.A white woman with a bachelor's degree typically earned about $37,800 in 2003, compared with about $43,700 for a college-educated Asian woman and $41,100 for a college-educated black woman, according to data being released today by the Census Bureau. Hispanic women took home $37,600 a year.
A white male with a college diploma earns far more than any similarly educated man or woman — more than $66,000 a year, according to the Census Bureau. Among men with bachelor's degrees, Asians earned more than $52,000 a year, Hispanics earned $49,000 and blacks earned more than $45,000.

Black Marriage

2005-03-21T18:04:00.000-05:00

By Jabari Asim

Monday, March 21, 2005; 10:24 AM

WASHINGTON -- "We will laud the bold and brave couples around the country that have committed to each other until death do they part," Nisa Islam Muhammad's Web site declares. "We want to acknowledge their bravery because in a world where it is far easier to break up a family than it is to get help to stay together, it takes sheer courage to fight for your marriage and resist divorce."
She is referring to Black Marriage Day, which will be observed March 27. The event, founded by Muhammad three years ago, continues to gather steam. Last year's activities included workshops and programs in about 70 cities. In churches and community centers, couples gathered to renew their vows and recite a black marriage pledge. Muhammad hopes to involve 150 cities in this year's commemoration. She writes, "much of what we hear about marriage in the black community is a blues song about low (marriage) rates, out-of-wedlock births, escalating divorces and how somebody done somebody wrong."
I share Muhammad's distress. The rates to which she refers are, in the words of the African American Healthy Marriage Initiative, "crisis-level statistics." While 62 percent of adult whites and 60 percent of adult Hispanics are married, only 41 percent of adult African-Americans are. There are 23 divorces per 1,000 black couples per year, compared to 19 for whites. The number of unmarried women having children is high for whites and Hispanics as well (25 percent and 42 percent, respectively), but astronomical for African-Americans: 69 percent.
While black communities are allegedly more opposed to gay marriage than other populations, one can look at those numbers and wonder if African-Americans are beginning to lose faith in marriage of any kind. Wedded bliss once attracted considerably more esteem from African-Americans, especially in the years following emancipation, when blacks were able to marry legally for the first time.
According to Betty DeRamus, between 1890 and 1940, a slightly higher percentage of black adults than whites married.
DeRamus is the author of "Forbidden Fruit: Love Stories From the Underground Railroad." She pored over unpublished memoirs, Civil War records and other materials to document the efforts of couples (some interracial, most of them black) who risked life and limb to be together. She told me she began the book after researching a couple whose descendants live in the upper peninsula of Michigan. Her investigations led her "to believe that there must be other stories about people who made extraordinary efforts to get married despite all these forces arrayed against them."
Foremost among those forces were slave owners who, DeRamus writes, "justified splitting up plantation couples by claiming that slaves felt little pain at losing a mate and cared nothing about lasting relationships." She quotes the wife of an Alabama minister who contended, "Not one in a thousand, I suppose, of those poor creatures have any conception whatever of the sanctity of marriage."
DeRamus' book, like others before it, exposes the fallacy of such outrageous claims. Among many remarkable accounts in "Forbidden Fruit," I was most affected by the tale of John Little who, during an arduous escape to Canada, often carried his sickly wife on his back. They reached the Canadian wilderness with "nothing but two axes, one suit of clothes, an iron pot, a Dutch oven, a few plates and forks, some pork and flour." They built a home there amid wolves and bears, DeRamus writes, and raised wheat and potatoes. Compare that to modern couples of any race, who spend an average of $24,000 on their weddings only to likely divorce, according to statistics, within 15 years.
Meanwhile, word of Black Marriage Day is spreading slowly. DeRamus hadn't heard of the observance but understood its purpose. "Sociologists could give you a zillion reasons why the family is in shambles," she said. "I'm not saying single parents can't raise their kids but it has to be harder." DeRamus fondly recalls her dad reading to her each night and combing her hair on Sunday mornings before sending her off to church. "He was such an important part of my life that I have to think we're all the poorer when we don't have that," she said.
DeRamus' talk of growing up in a two-parent household led me to recall a sage observation from the actress Ruby Dee. "The divorce rate would be lower if instead of marrying for better or worse people would marry for good," she once said. Good words to keep in mind on March 27, or any day.

© 2005 washingtonpost.com

Once Excluded From Va. College, Black Professor Takes a Top Post

2005-03-21T11:26:00.000-05:00

By Susan Kinzie
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 21, 2005; Page A01

LEXINGTON, Va. -- Theodore DeLaney walked to the front of the chapel where Civil War Gen. Robert E. Lee is buried, past the narrow white pews filled with the Washington and Lee University faculty.
He was a bundle of nerves. He was about to deliver the Founders' Day address honoring an 18th-century alumnus rarely mentioned in the days of the Old South: John Chavis, perhaps the first black man to graduate from an American college.
DeLaney got to the podium on unsteady legs, and before he had said a word, the faculty members stood and applauded. It was a moment in which DeLaney, overwhelmed, could see just how far he had come: from his childhood in the racially split college town in the 1950s to his early days at Washington and Lee working as a janitor and technician to a scholar at the liberal-arts college getting a standing ovation from his colleagues.
"I never dreamed I'd be in that spot," he said recently.
In the fall, the history professor will head the new African American studies program at Washington and Lee. It has been a long time coming -- some universities have had similar programs 30 years or more. But change came slowly to this place saturated in the history and traditions of the South. DeLaney is leading students on a research project about school desegregation in western Virginia, interviewing people who lived through the changes, listening to their stories about race and education and opportunity.
He knows this history: It's intertwined with his own.
DeLaney grew up in Lexington, close enough to Washington and Lee to fall asleep listening to the music from fraternity parties drifting through the warm night air. He dreamed of going to college there, but back then, the small Shenandoah Valley town was divided. Washington and Lee and the Virginia Military Institute, the two universities on the hill, were places where white southern gentlemen studied, and where African Americans worked -- as cooks, as maids and as gardeners.
DeLaney went to a school with black children and black teachers, and if he went to the movies, he sat in the balcony. If he bought a soda, he had to drink it outside the shop. "In Virginia, genteel as it was . . . there were people fighting like hell to keep it segregated," he said.
In 1961, when he graduated from high school, few African Americans had college degrees. DeLaney was offered a United Negro College Fund scholarship to Morehouse College, but his mother, a divorced barber with five children, worried about money and the early violence of the civil rights movement. She forbade him to go to Atlanta, so he resigned himself to staying in Lexington to help support the family.
For months, no one would hire him.
Finally, he got part-time work tending gardens for well-to-do white families. He considered the priesthood. Then he went to work at Washington and Lee as a janitor.
The professors in the biology department he cleaned soon saw how quickly he learned. After a year they asked him to be a lab technician.
Meanwhile change was coming -- slowly -- to Virginia schools. Years after the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, DeLaney's younger brother and sisters went to integrated schools. And in the mid-1960s, black students came to Washington and Lee.
DeLaney had gotten married, and his wife kept encouraging him to take classes. So did the professors with whom he worked. "He had this desire to learn," said Tom Nye, a retired biology professor.
But DeLaney was scared. So he kept working, taking care of the greenhouse and the animals, setting up labs. His son Damien remembers visiting the lab as a toddler, watching his dad feed a mouse to a snake. Students in the lab remember DeLaney's friendliness, his practical jokes and his kindness: One, just when he had run out of money, found a big bag of groceries on his kitchen table.
In 1979, DeLaney finally got the courage to sign up for a class. Four years later, when he was 40, he quit his job and became a full-time student at Washington and Lee. His wife, the treasurer of Lexington, supported them financially while he took lots of art and biology classes, avoided math and researched John Chavis while studying history. Often he and his son, then in elementary school, would sit across the table, both doing lessons.
One day after he had graduated from college and started teaching high school in North Carolina, DeLaney opened a letter from Washington and Lee while standing in line at a drug store. A professor he knew had written to urge him to go back to school to get his doctorate.
DeLaney was so shocked he dropped the letter.
But he did it. DeLaney defended his dissertation in summer 1995 at the College of William and Mary with Damien watching -- just months before he started as a freshman there. Then DeLaney went home to Lexington, to the sweeping lawns and patterned brick paths of Washington and Lee.
"We got Ted back -- it's one of the smartest things the school's ever done," said Holt Merchant, chairman of the history department.
There's still a southern gentility to the school, where students smile and drawl hello to strangers, drop purses without worrying about theft and sometimes wear jackets and ties to class in the white-columned buildings. The school still has a hard time recruiting black students, several professors said, to a place where the Old South and Civil War linger. People make pilgrimages to Lee's tomb and to Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson's house a few steps away.
It's something DeLaney can hardly avoid. Sometimes he just walks away -- from a white student years ago who told him he couldn't greet him publicly on campus, from a tourist wearing a Confederate flag T-shirt that said, "If this flag offends you, you need a lesson in history."
He has pushed for change at the college and seen Washington and Lee move forward to recruit students and faculty of different races and cultures from across the country and the world. That's why he was asked to speak about John Chavis in 2001, and why the college now sends out postcards about Chavis. Now 12 percent of the nearly 1,800 undergraduates are not white; about 4 percent of them are African American. In the law school, 19 percent are not white, and 9 percent are African American.
Two years ago, Damien DeLaney graduated from the law school at Washington and Lee, and his father, fighting back tears, got to hand him the diploma.
In class on a recent morning, DeLaney, 61, with his gray beard, bow tie and little round spectacles, wrote on the chalkboard and pushed students to think harder. "He's a superb teacher, students absolutely adore him," Merchant said. "He attracts hordes of followers."
People keep stopping DeLaney as he walks. They know him from the lab, or class, or church, or local Democratic politics, or just because he's Ted DeLaney, and everyone knows Ted DeLaney.
He and his wife live in the tiny, white house in Lexington that his mother bought decades ago; he wanted to stay connected to the black community. It's worn and crowded, he said, but with memories as close at hand as the places worn smooth around the wrought-iron handles of the knotty-pine cabinets.
DeLaney hopes the desegregation project, which started with people meeting in Lee Chapel to tell their stories, will be a book one day. "I want to get some scholarship out there that can be a legacy," he said.
He has one more dream: Someday, before he retires, he wants to leave Washington and Lee. He wants to teach at a historically black college, he said, "to come full circle."

Staff researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this report.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Fred McKinley Jones

2005-03-20T21:21:00.000-05:00

Fred McKinley Jones is certainly one of the most important Black inventors ever based on the sheer number of inventions he formulated as well as their diversity.
Fred Jones was born on May 17, 1893 in Covington, Kentucky. His father was a white railroad worker of Irish descent and his mother was Black. It is believed that his mother died while he was young and Fred was raised by his father. When Fred was eight years old, his father took him to Cincinnati, Ohio to where they visited St. Mary's Catholic Church rectory. Fred's father urged Father Edward A. Ryan to take Fred in in order to expose him to an environment where he might have a better opportunity for gaining an education. Fred performed chores around the church in return for being fed and housed, cutting the grass, shoveling snow, scrubbing floors and learning to cook. At an early age, Fred demonstrated a great interest in mechanical working, whether taking apart a toy, a watch or a kitchen appliance. Eventually he became interested in automobiles, so much so that upon turning 12 years of age, he ran away from his home at the rectory and began working at the R.C. Crothers Garage.
Initially hired to sweep and clean the garage, Fred spent much of his time observing the mechanics as they worked on cars. His observation, along with a voracious appetite for learning through reading developed within Fred an incredible base of knowledge about automobiles and their inner workings. Within three years, Fred had become the foreman of the garage. The garage was primarily designed to repair automobiles brought in by customers but also served as a studio for building racing cars. After a few years of building these cars, Fred desired to drive them and soon became one of the most well known racers in the Great Lakes region. After brief stints working aboard a steamship and a hotel, Jones moved to Hallock, Minnesota began designing and building racecars which he drove them at local tracks and at county fairs. His favorite car was known as Number 15 and it was so well designed it not only defeated other automobile but once triumphed in a race against an airplane.
On August 1, 1918 Jones enlisted in the 809 Pioneer Infantry of the United States Army and served in France during World War I. While serving, Jones recruited German prisoners of war and rewired his camp for electricity, telephone and telegraph service. After being discharged by the Army, Fred returned to Hallock in 1919. Looking for work, Jones often aided local doctors by driving them around for housecalls during the winter season. When navigation through the snow proved difficult, Fred attached skis to the undercarriage of an old airplane body and attached an airplane propeller to a motor and soon whisked around town a high speeds in his new snowmachine. Over the next few years Fred began tinkering with almost everything he could find, inventing things he could not find and improving upon those he could. When one of the doctors he worked for on occasion complained that he wished he did not have to wait for patient to come into his office for x-ray exams, Jones created a portable x-ray machine that could be taken to the patient. Unfortunately, like many of his early inventions, Jones never thought to apply for a patent for machine and watched helplessly as other men made fortunes off of their versions of the device. Undaunted, Jones set out for other projects, including a radio transmitter, personal radio sets and eventually motion picture devices.
In 1927, Jones was faced with the problem of helping friend convert their silent movie theater into a "talkie" theater. Not only did he convert scrap metal into the parts necessary to deliver a soundtrack to the video, he also devised ways to stabilize and improve the picture quality. When Joe Numero, the head of Ultraphone Sound Systems heard about Fred's devices, he invited Fred to come to Minneapolis for a job interview. After taking a position with the company, Fred began improving on many of the existing devices the company sold. Many of his improvements were so significant, representatives from A.T. & T and RCA sat down to talk with Fred and were amazed at the depth of his knowledge on intricate details, particularly in light of his limited educational background. Around this time, Fred came up with a new idea - an automatic ticket-dispensing machine to be used at movie theaters. Fred applied for and received a patent for this device in June of 1939 and the patent rights were eventually sold to RCA.
At some point, Joe Numero was presented with the task of developing a device which would allow large trucks to transport perishable products without them spoiling. Jones set to work and developed a cooling process that could refrigerate the interior of the tractor-trailer. In 1939 Fred and Joe Numero received a patent for the vehicle air-conditioning device which would later be called a Thermo King.
This product revolutionized several industries including shipping and grocery businesses. Grocery chains were now able to import and export products which previously could only have been shipped as canned goods. Thus, the frozen food industry was created and the world saw the emergence of the "supermarket."
In addition to installing the Thermo King refrigeration units in trucks and tractor-trailers, Jones modified the original design so they could be outfitted for trains, boats and ships.
During World War II, the Department of Defense found a great need portable refrigeration units for distributing food and blood plasma to troops in the field. The Department called upon Thermo King for a solution. Fred modified his device and soon had developed a prototype which would eventually allow airplanes to parachute these units down behind enemy lines to the waiting troops.
For the next 20 years, Fred Jones continued make improvements on existing devices and devised new inventions when necessary to aid the public. Jones died on February 21, 1961 and was posthumously awarded the National Medal of Technology, one of the greatest honors an inventor could receive. Jones was the first Black inventor to ever receive such an honor.

Granville Woods

2005-03-20T21:11:00.000-05:00

The magnitude of an inventors work can often be defined by the esteem in which he is held by fellow inventors. If this is the case, then Granville Woods was certainly a respected inventor as he was often referred to as the "Black Thomas Edison."
Granville Woods was born on April 23, 1856 in Columbus, Ohio. He spent his early years attending school until the age of 10 at which point he began working in a machine shop repairing railroad equipment and machinery. Intrigued by the electricity that powered the machinery, Woods studied other machine workers as they attended to different pieces of equipment and paid other workers to sit down and explain electrical concepts to him. Over the next few years, Woods moved around the country working on railroads and in steel rolling mills. This experience helped to prepare him for a formal education studying engineering (surprisingly, it is unknown exactly where he attended school but it is believed it was an eastern college.)
After two years of studying, Woods obtained a job as an engineer on a British steamship called the Ironsides. Two years later he obtained employment with D & S Railroads, driving a steam locomotive. Unfortunately, despite his high aptitude and valuable education and expertise, Woods was denied opportunities and promotions because of the color of his skin. Out of frustration and a desire to promote his abilities, Woods, along with his brother Lyates, formed the Woods Railway Telegraph Company in 1884. The company manufactured and sold telephone, telegraph and electrical equipment. One of the early inventions from the company was an improved steam boiler furnace and this was followed up by an improved telephone transmitter which had superior clarity of sound and could provide for longer range of distance for transmission.
In 1885, Woods patented a apparatus which was a combination of a telephone and a telegraph. The device, which he called "telegraphony," would allow a telegraph station to send voice and telegraph messages over a single wire. The device was so successful that he later sold it to the American Bell Telephone Company. In 1987, Woods developed his most important invention to date - a device he called Synchronous Multiplex Railway Telegraph. A variation of the "induction telegraph," it allowed for messages to be sent from moving trains and railway stations. By allowing dispatchers to know the location of each train, it provided for greater safety and a decrease in railway accidents.
Granville Woods often had difficulties in enjoying his success as other inventors made claims to his devices. Thomas Edison made one of these claims, stating that he had first created a similar telegraph and that he was entitled to the patent for the device. Woods was twice successful in defending himself, proving that there were no other devices upon which he could have depended or relied upon to make his device. After the second defeat, Edison decided that it would be better to work with Granville Woods than against him and thus offered him a position with the Edison Company.
In 1892, Woods used his knowledge of electrical systems in creating a method of supplying electricity to a train without any exposed wires or secondary batteries. Approximately every 12 feet, electricity would be passed to the train as it passed over an iron block. He first demonstrated the device as an amusement apparatus at the Coney Island amusement park and while it amused patrons, it would be a novel approach towards making safer travel for trains.
Many of Woods inventions attempted to increase efficiency and safety railroad cars, Woods developed the concept of a third rail which would allow a train to receive more electricity while also encountering less friction. This concept is still used on subway train platforms in major cities in the United States.
Over the course of his life time Granville Woods would obtain more than 50 patents for inventions including an automatic brake and an egg incubator and for improvements to other inventions such as safety circuits, telegraph, telephone, and phonograph. When he died on January 30, 1910 in New York City he had become an admired and well respected inventor, having sold a number of his devices to such giants as Westinghouse, General Electric and American Engineering - more importantly the world knew him as the Black Thomas Edison.

Henry Blair

2005-03-20T21:00:00.000-05:00

Henry Blair was the second Black inventor issued a patent by the United States Patent Office. His first invention was a seed planter which enabled farmers to plant more corn utilizing less labor in a smaller period of time. Two years later, in 1836, Blair received a second patent for a corn harvester. Blair had been a successful farmer for years and developed the inventions as a means of increasing efficiency in farming.
It is noteworthy that in both of his patents he was listed as a "colored man", the only example of an inventor's race being listed or acknowledged on an issued patent.

Lewis Latimer

2005-03-20T20:47:00.000-05:00

Lewis Latimer is considered one of the 10 most important Black inventors of all time not only for the sheer number of inventions created and patents secured but also for the magnitude of importance for his most famous discovery.
Lewis Latimer was born on September 4, 1848 in Chelsea, Massachusetts. His parents were George and Rebecca Latimer, both runaway slaves who migrated to Massachusetts in 1842 from Virginia. George Latimer was captured by his slave owner, who was determined to take him back to Virginia. His situation gained great notoriety, even reaching the Massachusetts Supreme Court. Eventually George was purchased by abolition supporters who set him free.
Lewis served in the United States Navy for the Union during the Civil War, assigned to the U.S.S. Massasoit gunboat and received an honorable discharge on July 3, 1965. After his discharge he sought employment throughout Boston, Massachusetts and eventually gained a position as an office boy with a patent law firm, Crosby and Gould earning $3.00 each week. After observing Latimer's ability to sketch patent drawings, he was eventually promoted to the position of head draftsman earning $20.00 a week. In addition to his newfound success, Latimer found additional happiness when he married Mary Wilson in November of 1873.
In 1874, along with W.C. Brown, Latimer co-invented an improved of a train water closet, a bathroom compartment for railroad trains. Two years later, Latimer would play a part in one of the world's most important inventions.
In 1876, Latimer was sought out as a draftsman by a teacher for deaf children. The teacher had created a device and wanted Lewis to draft the drawing necessary for a patent application. The teacher was Alexander Graham Bell and the device was the telephone. Working late into the night, Latimer worked hard to finish the patent application, which was submitted on February 14, 1876, just hours before another application was submitted by Elisha Gray for the a similar device.
In 1880, after moving to Bridgeport, Connecticut, Latimer was hired as the assistant manager and draftsman for U.S. Electric Lighting Company owned by Hiram Maxim. Maxim was the chief rival to Thomas Edison, the man who invented the electric light bulb. The light was composed of a glass bulb which surrounded a carbon wire filament, generally made of bamboo, paper or thread. When the filament was burned inside of the bulb (which contained almost no air), it became so hot that it actually glowed. Thus by passing electricity into the bulb, Edison had been able to cause the glowing bright light to emanate within a room. Before this time most lighting was delivered either through candles or through gas lamps or kerosene lanterns. Maxim greatly desired to improve on Edison's light bulb and focused on the main weakness of Edison's bulb - their short life span (generally only a few days.) Latimer set out to make a longer lasting bulb.
Latimer devised a way of encasing the filament within an cardboard envelope which prevented the carbon from breaking and thereby provided a much longer life to the bulb and hence made the bulbs less expensive and more efficient. This enabled electric lighting to be installed within homes and throughout streets
Latimer applied for a patent for the "Process of Manufacturing Carbons" and it was granted in January 1882. Because he was working at the time for US Electric Lighting Company, he was forced to assign the patent to the company, and thus lost out on the enormous financial rewards which would result. Around this time, Latimer, along with Joseph V. Nichols received a patent for an improved incandescent lamp which utilized a more efficient way of connecting the carbon filament to the lead wires at the lamp base. Hiram Maxim named this invention the "Maxim Electric Lamp."
Latimer abilities in electric lighting became well known and soon he was sought after to continue to improve on incandescent lighting as well as arc lighting. Eventually, as more major cities began wiring their streets for electric lighting, Latimer was dispatched to lead the planning team. He helped to install the first electric plants in Philadelphia, New York City and Montreal and oversaw the installation of lighting in railroad stations, government building and major thoroughfares in Canada, New England and London.
In 1890, Latimer, having been hired by Thomas Edison, began working in the legal department of Edison Electric Light Company, serving as the chief draftsman and patent expert. In this capacity he drafted drawings and documents related to Edison patents, inspected plants in search of infringers of Edison's patents, conducted patent searches and testified in court proceeding on Edison's behalf. Later that year wrote the worlds most thorough book on electric lighting, "Incandescent Electric Lighting: A Practical Description of the Edison System." Lewis was named one of the charter members of the Edison pioneer, a distinguished group of people deemed responsible for creating the electrical industry. The Edison Electric Lighting would eventually evolve into what is now known as the General Electric Company.
Latimer continued to display his creative talents over then next several years. In 1894 he created a safety elevator, a vast improvement on existing elevators. He next received a patent for Locking Racks for Hats, Coats, and Umbrellas. The device was used in restaurants, hotels and office buildings, holding items securely and allowing owners of items to keep the from getting misplaced or accidentally taken by others. He next created a improved version of a Book Supporter, used to keep books neatly arranged on shelves.
Latimer next devised a method of making rooms more sanitary and climate controlled. He termed his device an Apparatus for Cooling and Disinfecting. The device worked wonders in hospitals, preventing dust and particles from circulating within patient rooms and public areas.
Throughout the rest of his life, Latimer continued to try to devise ways of improving everyday living for the public, eventually working in efforts to improve the civil rights of Black citizens within the United States. He also painted portraits and wrote poetry and music for friends and family.
Lewis Latimer died on December 11, 1928 and left behind a legacy of achievement and leadership that much of the world owes thanks.

Benjamin Banneker

2005-03-20T20:34:00.000-05:00

Benjamin Banneker was born in 1731 just outside of Baltimore, Maryland, the son of a slave. His grandfather had been a member of a royal family in Africa and was wise in agricultural endeavors. As a young man, he was allowed to enroll in a school run by Quakers and excelled in his studies, particularly in mathematics. Soon, he had progressed beyond the capabilities of his teacher and would often make up his own math problems in order to solve them.
One day his family was introduced to a man named Josef Levi who owned a watch. Young Benjamin was so fascinated by the object that Mr. Levi gave it to him to keep, explaining how it worked. Over the course of the next few days, Benjamin repeatedly took the watch apart and then put it back together. After borrowing a book on geometry and another on Isaac Newton's Principia (laws of motion) he made plans to build a larger version of the watch, mimicking a picture he had seen of a clock. After two years of designing the clock and carving each piece by hand, including the gears, Banneker had successfully created the first clock ever built in the United States. For the next thirty years, the clock kept perfect time.
In 1776, the Third Continental Congress met and submitted the Declaration of Independence from England. Soon thereafter, the Revolutionary War broke out an Banneker set out to grow crops of wheat in order to help feed American troops. His knowledge of soil gained from his grandfather allowed him to raise crops in areas which had previously stood barren for years.
When a family friend died and left him a book on astronomy, a telescope and other scientific inventions, Banneker became fascinated with the stars and the skies. He soon was able to predict events such as solar eclipses and sunrises and sunsets. In 1792, he developed his first almanac, predicting weather and seasonal changes and also included tips on planting crops and medical remedies. Banneker sent a copy of his book to Thomas Jefferson, at that time the Secretary of State and in a twelve page later expressed to Jefferson that Blacks in the United States possessed equal intellectual capacity and mental capabilities as those Whites who were described in the Declaration of Independence. As such, he stated, Blacks should also be afforded the same rights and opportunities afforded to whites. This began a long correspondence between the two men that would extend over several years.
Around the same time, President Washington decided to move the Nation's Capitol from Philadelphia to an area on the border of Maryland and Virginia. Major Pierre L'Enfant from France was commissioned to develop the plans for for the new city and at Jefferson's request, Banneker was included as one of the men appointed to assist him. Banneker consulted frequently with L'Enfant and studied his draft and plans for the Capitol City carefully. L'Enfant was subject to great criticism and hostility because he was a foreigner and abruptly resigned from the project and moved back to France.
As the remaining members of the team gathered, they began debating as to how they should start from scratch. Banneker surprised them when he asserted that he could reproduce the plans from memory and in two days did exactly as he had promised. The plans he drew were the basis for the layout of streets, buildings and monuments that exist to this day in Washington D.C.
Benjamin Banneker died quietly on October 25, 1806, lying in a field looking at the stars through his telescope. Nations around the world mourned his passing, viewing him as a genius and the United States' first great Black Inventor.

Help Wanted: Black Journalists

2005-03-20T17:26:00.000-05:00

BY JESSICA HANTHORN
247-4537
March 19, 2005 HAMPTON -- The news media should do a better job of covering black families, and the key way to do that is get more African-American representation in journalism, according to a noted panel of journalists who gathered at Hampton University on Friday.
"We did not finish the job of telling the story of the black family," said Jack E. White, a former Time magazine columnist and editor. "The black community is much more complex than we thought it was in the 1960s, and the media continues to oversimplify our story."
The session was part of Hampton University's 27th annual Conference on the Black Family, which started Wednesday and ended Friday. The conference, hosted this year by HU's journalism school, focused on ways to repair and restore black families.
The journalists - who now work as professors at HU - gathered to discuss how the media has portrayed the black family since the 1968 Kerner Report. That report, released by an 11-member panel appointed by President Johnson, criticized the media's coverage of black communities, saying they had "failed to analyze and report adequately on the racial problems in the United States."
Speakers also included former New York Times columnist Earl Caldwell, sports journalist Doug Smith and Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Leonard Pitts. They called on more African-Americans to work in the news media and own media companies to help improve coverage.
Several panelists argued the media still does a poor job analyzing and reporting racial problems more than 35 years after the Kerner Report's release.
"Media did then, and do now, render our lives in primary colors and in the most simplistic ways possible," said Pitts. "Our community is rendered in a very few stock ways."
However, when white people own many media companies and most working journalists are white, it's often difficult to get stories about black people into the newspaper, said Smith, who worked for years at USA Today.
Smith shared a story:
When he wrote a piece for USA Today about tennis players Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert, the story ran on the front page. But a similar story about Venus and Serena Williams was delegated to the sports pages. He thinks USA Today's leadership didn't see the importance of the story. "When you have an operation that is still controlled, essentially, by whites, it's difficult to get them to understand," he said. "We need more black people in the boardrooms in the news media."
The Kerner Report also said the journalistic profession has been "shockingly backward" in hiring, training and promoting African-Americans.
Today, the numbers of minority journalists are still low. Just 5.4 percent of journalists were black in 2004, according to a survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. But, of minorities in newsrooms, the percentage who work as supervisors has grown. In 1978, 4 percent of minority journalists worked as supervisors; that number increased to 20 percent in 2004.
The number of minorities working as journalists in 1978 was about 3.9 percent, and in 2004, that number had grown to nearly 13 percent. The panelists said it's not enough. News outlets need to do more to recruit black employees, and black families should do more to own media businesses.
Copyright © 2005, Daily Press

Constance Baker Motley

2005-03-16T17:30:00.000-05:00

MarieBrenner.com > Articles > The New Yorker > Judge Motley's Verdict
May 16, 1994
ANNALS OF LAW

JUDGE MOTLEY'S VERDICT
Forty years after the N.A.A.C.P. won Brown v. Board of Education, the first woman on its legal team discusses the battle over integration–then and now.
BY MARIE BRENNER
From time to time when Constance Baker Motley is invited to recall her glory days as an N.A.A.C.P. lawyer in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, she is challenged by law students who think of her as an anachronism, a holdover from a time when it was believed that undoing the pathology between the races could be accomplished largely through the courts. This was the case last October, for example, when Motley, a New York federal judge, spent a week as jurist-in-residence at the law school of the University of Indiana in Bloomington. Motley is popular on the law-school circuit; she and her former colleagues at the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund ride a crest of civil-rights-era nostalgia.
On May 17, 1954, when the Supreme Court issued its unanimous ruling in Brown v. Board of Education which overturned school segregation, Motley, then a Legal Defense Fund trial lawyer, was thirty-two years old. She was "the girl in the office" then, the drudge, but over the next ten years she became the only woman at the plaintiff’s table in the Jim Crow South as she and other lawyers tried case after case to enforce the Brown decision; she helped to desegregate lunch counters, schools, and buses, and in those years she also argued ten cases in front of the Supreme Court. In Montgomery, Alabama, she recently recalled, she argued five different appeals in one day as the school boards tried to put off the evil moment of desegregation. In Jackson, Mississippi, a local paper referred to her as "the Motley woman." She was chided for her fashionable clothes. Her presence in court often brought dozens of spectators, simply to marvel at the fact that a Negro woman could actually be a lawyer. But the majority of the law students who gathered to hear her at Indiana last October were only vaguely aware of her importance. They weren’t yet born when she travelled from courtroom to courtroom through Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.
A few days before Motley arrived in Indiana, Alfred Aman, the law-school dean, arranged a display of the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund’s achievements in the foyer of the law-school building: among other items, news accounts of Charlayne Hunter entering the University of Georgia in 1961 and James Meredith desegregating the University of Mississippi the same year were visible in a glass case. The moot-court room at the law school was filled to capacity on the afternoon Motley delivered her lecture. That night, she spoke at a dinner given by the Black Law Students Association, or B.L.S.A. She recalled the many school-desegregation cases that had led to and followed Brown, but after she spoke she was kept busy answering sharp questions about her own experiences, posed by several of the B.L.S.A. members: the narrative of Constance Motley’s life seemed to contradict the reality of modern racial politics. "Shouldn’t you have fought for equal schools?" one student asked her, and went on to cite the breakdown in black communities, the black-on-black crime, the miserable test scores, and the loss of pride among black men. "Your generation always used the word ‘mainstream,’ " another student said, and asked, "What is wrong with black culture?" Motley was brisk with the B.L.S.A. students. "I don’t know what black culture is," she said, as if attempting to camouflage her irritation. When Motley returned to New York, she told me that she had been startled at being asked to defend herself. At this point in her life, she has come to expect, at the very least, a certain degree of respect for what she and the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund accomplished. A mistake to fight for integration? The guiding principle of Constance Baker Motley’s life has been her belief that the law is the primary instrument of social reform. "In my early days at the N.A.A.C.P., I could never have imagined this situation at the colleges today," she told me.
A few weeks later, I went to visit Judge Motley at the United States Court House in downtown Manhattan. I took the elevator to the twentieth floor, but Motley was not yet in her chambers; she was in court, hearing pretrial motions on a case that involved the alleged mistreatment of a Black Muslim by prison officials.
The décor of Motley’s chambers was very feminine, with floral chintz curtains and pink walls. Judge Motley’s law clerk had left a stack of faded newspapers for me on the conference table. A headline on the top paper, a copy of the September 11, 1963, Times, read, "WALLACE ENDS RESISTANCE AS GUARD IS FEDERALIZED; MORE SCHOOLS INTEGRATE." The news story described the events of the previous day, when, after months of resistance by Governor George Wallace, the schools in Birmingham and two other Alabama cities were integrated. It told of a blond high-school girl in Birmingham who had cried when she learned that black children were enrolled in her school. "I hope my momma heard, so she’ll come get me," she said. The Times correspondent in Birmingham related that seventy-five youths had shouted, "Keep the niggers out!" "Go home!" and "Two, four, six, eight, we don’t want to integrate!" I flipped through the stack of newspapers. In one, I saw a photograph, snapped in the hallway of the federal courthouse in Birmingham in l962, that showed Motley wearing a fashionable black coat and matching hat and an elegant printed scarf. She was looking down at the floor, as if to distance herself from the mob, but she did not look particularly afraid; in fact, she appeared oddly serene.
There was also an envelope of documents referring to Constance Motley that went back as far as fifty years. They included the expected awards letters and banquet menus, and some unexpected examples of the way she handled her anger: Motley had kept a copy of every complaint she filed with the Taxi and Limousine Commission about drivers who failed to pick her up. ("Complainant, who is a Negro, charged that respondent discriminated against her . . .because of complainant’s color.") Then I came to a single-spaced letter signed "Anthropologist":
Mrs. Motley:
When you made your plea before Judge Tuttle, how many windows did you raise to let your stinking body odor escape? How much cologne did you use to saturate your clothing with to prevent others from smelling your stinking body? . . . It is hard to see how any person with an ounce of brains would get up and argue that the nigger is equal to other races. It just is not so.
As I finished the letter, Judge Motley walked into the room. I asked her about the letter, and she told me she could hardly remember receiving it. "I used to get letters like that all the time. I wonder why I even kept it," she said.
Constance Baker Motley is seventy-two years old. When she was admitted to Columbia Law School, in 1943, her photograph ran in a rotogravure for African-Americans, and she was held up as a role model. "She’s one of the few Negro women enrolled in Columbia University’s famous School of Law," the caption noted. As time passed, she became the first African-American woman to be a New York state senator, a borough president (Manhattan), a federal judge. Judge Motley is tall and large-boned, but she has delicate features and dainty hands and feet. She is judicial, formal, precise. Unlike many of the civil-rights activists of her generation, she is far more comfortable discoursing on the history of the Fourteenth Amendment than delivering an impassioned speech. Given what she has been through, her dry, legalistic demeanor may be her most remarkable achievement. She has been in jail cells with Martin Luther King, Jr., where the air was so foul that she became faint; she spent long nights in Birmingham churches singing freedom songs; she stayed with Medgar Evers, and, under armed guard, in the Birmingham home of a Legal Defense Fund attorney whose house was repeatedly bombed during the fifties and sixties; racist insults have been hurled at her by white lawyers. Yet, for all this, her memories tend to be a lawyer’s memories. She focusses on the method by which school integration was actually achieved, the litigation strategies, the motions and sustaining orders, the quashing of subpoenas, the emergency appeals. It was her knowledge of the law that enabled her to transcend the emotionalism of the Jim Crow courts. In her 1992 memoir, "In My Place," Charlayne Hunter-Gault recalls sitting with Constance Motley at the plaintiff’s table in a Georgia courtroom during her attempt to enter the University of Georgia: "She barely acknowledged my presence. . . . I never, for example, heard her laugh in the presence of any state or university officials, except as a barely masked form of sarcasm. It seemed as if this was the most important mission in her life. In fact, she often talked about the South in those days as if it were a war zone and she was fighting in a revolution. No one–be it defendant or plaintiff–was going to distract her from carrying her task to a successful conclusion."
Until she was a teen-ager, Connie Baker had never heard of Harriet Tubman or Sojourner Truth. She attended a New Haven school where she was one of the few Negro students. Her parents, originally from the tiny Caribbean island of Nevis, moved to New Haven at the turn of the century and became part of the clannish West Indian community there. Connie Baker had eleven brothers and sisters. Although the family was poor, the children had an air of superiority, from their parents’ years at British schools. The Bakers lived on the outskirts of the Yale campus, and Connie’s father was a cook at Skull & Bones; in fact, most of the Baker family was associated with Yale–her uncles also worked in the university’s clubs. "They told all the little white Yalies what to do," Judge Motley’s niece and namesake Connie Royster told me.
Nevertheless, Connie was once turned away from a Connecticut beach near New Haven, and some restaurants in New Haven wouldn’t serve blacks. She learned about black heroes and heroines and discovered the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois at church lectures.
Last October, Judge Motley was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, in Seneca Falls, New York. The list of women inducted with her included the physicist Rosalyn Yalow, who had won a Nobel Prize; the civil-rights leader and founder of the Children’s Defense Fund Marian Wright Edelman; the labor organizer Dolores Huerta; and Wilma Mankiller, the chief of the Cherokee Nation. The mother of Emmett Till, a black teen-ager who was murdered in Mississippi in 1955, accepted an award for Rosa Parks, who had inspired the 1955-56 bus boycott in Montgomery when she refused to give up a front seat. "Rosa Parks was willing to pay the cost to save the lost," Emmett Till’s mother said. Most of the women used the occasion to make political speeches, but Judge Motley spoke about a white man named Clarence Blakeslee. "There was no money for me to go to college," she said. "I went to work at the National Youth Administration, and one day I gave a speech at a black community house. Clarence Blakeslee had built the community house. He was a contractor who had done a lot of work at Yale.
He had made millions of dollars, and what he did with those millions was to help educate black Americans." Blakeslee had been impressed by the teen-ager’s speech and had asked her where she would attend college. When Connie Baker told him that her parents could not afford to send her, he offered to pay for her entire education. "Clarence Blakeslee was a white man responsible for my being here today," she said.
Connie Baker travelled to Fisk University, in Nashville, by train, riding in a Jim Crow car; she was eager to experience segregation. Her parents were frightened for her; they themselves refused to cross the Mason-Dixon Line. On her first trip home, she brought them back a "Colored Only" sign. At Fisk, she met, for the first time, black students from middle-class families in the South, who were ensconced in black communities, with their own clubs and churches. "It was my first experience in a black institution with black people who were just like white people, as we used to say," Judge Motley said of Fisk. "Their parents were college educated, they had wealth. For the first time, I met blacks who were doing something other than cooking and waiting on tables. They intended to go back into the black community." White people, however, were the standard, and Connie Baker could not understand why the Fisk students were not interested in advancing in the white world. It was, she told me, the enigma of her college days. "All of our lives, we had to be like white people. We had to dress, think, and act like white people," she recalled, yet her classmates did not want to become part of the white community.
At Columbia Law School, she began to work as a volunteer at the N.A.A.C.P.’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., a subsidiary that Thurgood Marshall and his mentor, Charles Houston, had created in 1939. It was usually called the Inc. Fund, for short. Marshall seemed to find little remarkable in the fact that she was a woman, and took her on as a clerk. After she graduated, in 1946, she began working full-time. Her salary was fifty dollars a week. Besides Motley, the entire staff consisted of Marshall and three other lawyers, one of whom worked part time. At first, Motley worked on housing cases, challenging the restrictive covenants that excluded blacks from buying real estate in white neighborhoods. Marshall was then involved in several cases to integrate universities at the graduate-school level, such as the ones in which Ada Sipuel sought admission to the University of Oklahoma College of Law and Heman Sweatt to the University of Texas School of Law. It was Marshall’s strategy to argue the graduate-school cases under Plessy v. Ferguson, the onerous 1896 Supreme Court decision that upheld existing separate-but-equal doctrine and set up the legal framework for segregation. Marshall argued that since there were no black law schools in Texas and Oklahoma, Sipuel and Sweatt should be admitted to the white institutions. Ultimately, of course, in Brown, the Supreme Court ruled against separate facilities, arguing that even where they were equal segregation per se had a negative effect.
In 1949, when Connie Motley tried her first case, in Jackson, Mississippi, the people there had hardly ever seen a Negro lawyer before, and had never seen one who was a woman. She was married by then. Her husband, Joel Motley, was a New York real-estate broker whom she had met when they were living at the Harlem Y.M.C.A. and Y.W.C.A., respectively. They had got married in August of 1946, and this was her first trip to the deep South ever; her husband worried about her. Her only experience in a courtroom had been observing the meticulous style of Charles Houston in a University of Maryland nursing-school case. Motley found it impressive that Houston wrote down every one of his exhibits and questions in advance and never deviated from his text.
Motley and her colleague Robert Carter, who is now also a federal judge, booked a Pullman to Jackson. (She had bought a new dress at Lord & Taylor for the trial.) The case was an equalization-of-salary suit originally brought by a teacher, Gladys Noel Bates. When Connie Motley walked into the courtroom in Jackson for the first time, she was appalled by a W.P.A. mural depicting the glories of lost Dixie which covered an entire wall. She remembers staring at the white women in their crinolines and hoopskirts on one side and the darkies hoisting cotton bales on the other. She had never imagined that on her first big case, when she needed all the poise she could muster, she would have to interrogate witnesses and offer arguments while being confronted with such a spectacle. She recalls that trial as one of the few occasions when she was almost overcome with rage.
Other memories of the trial also remain vivid. "When we got to court on the first day, we saw that all the seats were taken by whites, because the black people believed that they had to sit in the balcony," she told me. "But this court did not have a balcony, so the blacks stood along the walls. After the first session, Bob Carter told the people that, unlike in state court, in a federal court you could sit anywhere you wanted. The next morning, we got there at nine o’clock, and all the seats were taken by blacks."
She went on to say, "In those days, no black lawyers ever went to court. If they had a case, they got a white lawyer to go for them. Bob and I needed a local lawyer to appear and sign the complaint. This was the first case since Reconstruction where blacks had appeared as lawyers in a courtroom in Mississippi. We found a black lawyer who lived in Meridian, Mississippi–James Burns. He owned a little grocery store, and he was scared to death. When we were in court, he sat with his back to us. He was making notes. He wanted to give the impression that he was just local counsel. He wanted to convey that he was not the lawyer bringing the suit. On the second day of the trial, Bob Carter said to him, ‘Go out and see if our witnesses are out there.’ He went out bent over completely–again, showing that he knew his place as a black man. When we went to have dinner, he would disappear; he did not want to take the chance of being killed with us.
"From time to time, the judge would rule in our favor, and once Bob spoke to the judge about a witness who was speaking very softly. He said, ‘Could you ask that witness to speak up, please?’ The black people in Jackson had never seen that before, and when Bob went to get his hair cut at the barbershop that evening everyone was reënacting this white man being made to speak up so a black man could hear. The final day, the judge was very polite. He addressed me as Mrs. Motley. The judge was from the Mississippi coast, and had no hostility toward black people. So, on the last day, when Bob told our lawyer to go out and get our witnesses, Burns for the first time in the entire trial walked out erect. I said to Bob, ‘At least we have accomplished something in this case.’ "
In the several TV movies made about the drama leading up to the Brown decision, the Inc. Fund is commonly portrayed as resembling a tabloid newsroom, filled with bantering black lawyers. The office jokes have become standards; one had it that Marshall called himself "H.N.I.C."–"head nigger in charge." In Jack Greenberg’s book "Crusaders in the Courts," a history of the Inc. Fund that will be published this month, a different portrait emerges. Greenberg, now a Columbia Law School professor, started at the Inc. Fund several years after Connie Motley. For a while, they shared the same office. (When Greenberg, as a naïve young white lawyer, first met Motley, according to his new book, he was startled when she quickly corrected his use of the term "Negress," then in common use. "Negress," she said, "was like using the word ‘tigress’ or ‘lioness,’ and was offensive to women.") In one TV miniseries, "Separate but Equal," the actor Ron Silver portrayed Greenberg, and Sidney Poitier portrayed Thurgood Marshall. Greenberg recently told me that he was nettled by the histrionics. "The idea that Thurgood was waving his arms around in court yelling and screaming and grimacing!" Greenberg said. "Thurgood didn’t do that. In fact, no lawyer does that. Except William Kunstler." The real atmosphere was "lawyers at work," Greenberg recalled, the pedestrian stuff of "following precedents and filing motions for preliminary injunctions." It was difficult to tell the difference between the Inc. Fund office and any other office, except that its occupants talked about race all the time.
"What do you remember about the day of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education?" I asked Judge Motley a few months ago. We were on a train on our way to Washington. It was the morning of the Supreme Court’s memorial service for Thurgood Marshall, and Judge Motley had been asked to speak. At first, her memories were atmospheric–the pandemonium in the office, the joyous ringing of the telephones. That night, she recalled, she went home to her apartment on West End Avenue. She was proud of that apartment; the Motleys were the first black family to move into the building. Motley had big plans then for her two-year-old son, Joel–and, indeed, he ultimately graduated from Harvard Law School and became a partner in an investment-banking firm. Motley’s memory of the day of the Brown decision focussed on Joel in his high chair. She had already realized, she told me, that the effect of Brown was going to be primarily psychological, and she informed her toddler that the Supreme Court had, that very day, undone segregation. She made no effort to explain it in terms a two-year-old might begin to comprehend, but she was convinced that Joel understood her.
When she got to the office the next morning, she learned that Walter White, the head of the N.A.A.C.P., had had to cancel a lecture date in Selma, Alabama. "Thurgood called me and said, ‘You go, Connie’–very terse. He did not say, ‘I will help you with your speech,’ or give me any ideas. You were supposed to do it on your own. If you made a mess, you made a mess. That was the way Thurgood was. So I went to Selma that Sunday. And the place was jammed. It was a small church, and one man had even come in an oxcart."
It was Connie Motley’s first real exposure to Southern black rural poverty. She recalled the drive from the airport in Birmingham to Selma, during which she looked out the window at tarpaper shacks and outhouses. She was not prepared for the starkness. "It sort of knocked me over," she said. The church was filled with people from all over Alabama, many of whom had saved their money to travel to hear Walter White. Thinking of that day in Alabama, she recalled that she knew immediately that the white people would fight Brown all the way. She saw her future in terms of a vast tapestry of court cases and problems, and worried about how the tiny Inc. Fund, with its minimal budget, could afford the years of litigation. On the flight back to New York, she recalled, her euphoria over the Brown decision faded, and she felt lost, with no idea what lay ahead.
As each Brown v. Board of Education milestone occurs, civil-rights legal scholars–Randall Kennedy among others inevitably comment on the obliqueness of the Court’s language, which led to years of legal maneuvers and the continued de-facto segregation that plagues inner-city schools. When the Brown decision came down, Motley recalls, it was initially viewed as a decision that prohibited segregation but not as one that required affirmative action from state officials. Connie Motley prepared many of the hundreds of court papers and arguments necessary to enforce Brown, yet she never became a darling of the civil-rights movement, perhaps because her skill as a litigator lay in her very thorough preparation and understanding of the arcana of the law.
Connie Motley first met Martin Luther King, Jr., in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, in Atlanta. King was seen as a nuisance by the Inc. Fund, because his demonstrations had strained their ability to pursue school cases. In 1962, King had been enjoined by a court order from leading a march in Albany, Georgia. Motley arrived in Atlanta at one in the morning, in order to be in Judge Elbert Tuttle’s court that day. Tuttle, an Eisenhower appointee, held relatively liberal views on race. He was born in California, and had once seen his mother leave her porch and stand at a bus stop with a black woman so that the bus would stop to pick her up. At the airport, Motley was met by the Legal Defense Fund’s local counsel and, to her surprise, by William Kunstler, who was a private attorney at that time and had flown in from New York a few days before, claiming to represent Martin Luther King. Kunstler arranged with Motley and the other lawyers that he would make the first argument. "First of all, Judge Tuttle, let me introduce Mrs. Motley," Motley remembers him saying in court later that morning. Tuttle then said, "Mr. Kunstler, Mrs. Motley has been here so often that she could be a member of the court." The question at hand–whether the injunction against King’s march was a preliminary one, and could be appealed–was a tricky point to argue. As Motley recalls it, Kunstler told Judge Tuttle, "Well, Mrs. Motley will argue that." With little preparation, Motley stood up and spoke. Tuttle overturned the injunction. "As I was walking out," she said, "who should be sitting in the front row but Martin Luther King!" Not long afterward, the Inc. Fund became King’s primary counsel.
The envelope of papers that Connie Motley keeps in her chambers includes a copy of a letter written by James Meredith on January 29, 1961, to Thurgood Marshall:
I am submitting an application for admission to the University of Mississippi. I am seeking entrance for the second semester which begins the 8th of February. I am anticipating encountering some type of difficulty with the various agencies here in the State which are against my gaining entrance into the school. . . . I am making this move in, what I consider, the interest of and for the benefit of (1) my country (2) my race (3) my family, and (4) myself.
Connie Motley is convinced that she was assigned the Meredith case because she was a woman. "Thurgood knew they treated black men a whole lot differently in Mississippi from the way they treated black women," she told Alfred Aman, the dean of the Indiana University—Bloomington School of Law, during an interview he conducted in 1988. "This is the last place in the world we wanted to hear from," she added, explaining that Marshall was worried about getting involved in Mississippi at that point, because the state seemed to be nearing an explosion, with Freedom Riders being arrested by the hundreds. By 1961, the Inc. Fund had grown to seven lawyers, and some of them were before the Supreme Court every couple of months. The office was already strained by its caseload, but Marshall knew that he had to make his last and best stand in Mississippi.
By then, Motley was well known in the Jackson federal court. She recalled that when she appeared to file her motion for Meredith, the judge, Sidney Mize, called to her from the bench, "Hi, Miz Motley!" "This was in the middle of another trial," she said. "He was very informal. When he took his recess, I told him I wanted to file my complaint against the University of Mississippi. Knowing there would be resistance, given the volatile situation in the state, he said to me, ‘Why did you have to come now?’ "
Motley was brisk with Meredith. She told him to get decent clothes and to shave his beard. He was a meticulous record keeper, Motley recalled. At one point, she subpoenaed his files from the university. The registrar, in an attempt to stall, said, "We didn’t bring the records," whereupon Meredith said, "I have a copy of everything I sent." Motley had a vivid memory of the moment: "They were floored. They had never expected that here was this student who would have a copy of all their correspondence!" One of the many tactics that were used to keep Meredith out of the university was to threaten to arrest him for having registered to vote in Jackson, where he had gone to college, rather than in his home town, Kosciusko. Immediately, Motley flew to New Orleans, where the court of appeals judge on Meredith’s case was sitting. "They are about to arrest Meredith," she told Judge John Minor Wisdom, and then suggested, "You could issue an injunction under the all-writs statute," a statute that permits a court to take whatever action is necessary to preserve its jurisdiction. Wisdom did so. Motley met Medgar Evers, the Mississippi field secretary of the N.A.A.C.P., in New Orleans and, with him, drove straight to Jackson. "We got there at five minutes to six to prevent Meredith’s arrest," she recalled.
For months, the Justice Department avoided weighing in on Meredith, because the new Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, did not want a confrontation with Governor Ross Barnett. The litigation dragged on for a year and a half; Motley made twenty-two trips to Mississippi. For Joel Motley, then in grade school at Dalton, his mother’s travel was part of a great crusade. "There was no question in our house that history was being made," he told me. "One day during the Meredith trial, Burke Marshall"–an Assistant United States Attorney General–"called. I remember he told my mother that he wanted her to do X, Y, and Z. She hung up the phone on him. She told us that she was happy to have his help, but he wasn’t going to tell her how to run her case." On the day when Connie Motley decided that she would file a motion in federal district court to hold Governor Barnett in contempt, she drove to the Meridian, Mississippi, courthouse with Meredith and her secretary, in Medgar Evers’ car. "While we were driving," she recalled, "Meredith said to me, ‘Put those papers inside the Times. We are being followed. We don’t want them to know who you are.’ There we were, frightened to death, driving to Meridian. This occurred going through a wooded area. The state police just followed us all the way. They knew it was Medgar’s car, because they had been following him for years." (Within a year, of course, Evers was murdered.) "When we got to court, my secretary, in her haste, wrote ‘motion’ instead of ‘order.’ Judge Mize was presiding over the court, with Harold Cox, another judge, who was the most anti-black human being I ever met. Judge Cox looked at our document and threw it at us. He said, ‘Look at this, it says "motion"!’ Judge Mize put his hand on Judge Cox’s hand and said, ‘Judge Cox, it is all over.’ Mize was saying, in effect, ‘You are a federal judge. You cannot take sides.’ "
A few weeks before the fortieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, I went to Columbia to visit Jack Greenberg. Greenberg has been on sabbatical this year, finishing "Crusaders in the Courts," and I wondered whether the years he spent analyzing the Inc. Fund cases had given him a larger perspective on what he and Connie Motley and their colleagues accomplished. Greenberg, who is sixty-nine, is slightly built and appears younger than he is. I had noticed many black students on the campus; Greenberg recalled that when he entered Columbia Law School, in the nineteen-forties, there was only one black in his class and she was from the Virgin Islands. Greenberg talked about Thurgood Marshall and his legacy, and that conversation led inevitably to the subject of Clarence Thomas. Greenberg simply shook his head sadly, as if he could hardly tolerate the fact that Thomas had taken Marshall’s place on the bench.
I asked Greenberg about the many celebrations that I had been told he plans to speak at for the fortieth anniversary of Brown. He said, "I’ll tell you exactly," and pulled out a small calendar and read off a list: it included forums at Princeton, the College of William and Mary, and Texas Southern University, and an event that the Legal Defense Fund, which now has a staff of twenty-five lawyers, will hold in Washington on May 16th, at which the President will also speak. I told Greenberg about Connie Motley’s trip to Indiana and how she was confronted by B.L.S.A. members who seemed to be trying to hold the Inc. Fund responsible for the breakdown in the black communities.
"None of these things are simple," Greenberg said. "We can’t do anything about the pathologies of the ghetto: drugs, guns, single-parent households, and housing that has collapsed. But Brown has been an important factor in producing a large black middle class."
As Judge Motley and I arrived in Washington for Thurgood Marshall’s memorial service and walked through Union Station, she said, "When I first came to Washington, on that restrictive-covenants case, this was the only place Thurgood and I could eat." Motley and I had talked about some of her cases since she became a judge. In 1969, she had been vigorous in her decision to protect prisoners’ right to due process in the Sostre case; in 1978, it was her ruling that allowed women reporters to enter the locker rooms of professional sports. But she said that it was her time at the Legal Defense Fund that was "lasting and significant." She later remarked that she was annoyed when the Indiana law students expected her to be an architect of social policy. "We were trying to eke out a legal victory. If you want to win a legal case, you had to win a legal argument," she said. It was a warm day in November–freakishly warm–and Judge Motley decided to take a taxi the short distance to the Court. In the taxi, she again brought up the subject of what had happened to her in Indiana. "Don’t those students realize that they would not even be at Indiana if it weren’t for Thurgood Marshall and the Brown decision?" she said.
I was sitting in the front seat of the taxi, whose driver happened to be black. When he heard the name Thurgood Marshall, he suddenly became attentive. He looked carefully in the rearview mirror at the Judge. When we pulled up at the Supreme Court Building, it took Judge Motley a few moments to organize her papers in her briefcase and comb her hair. I noticed a sea of gray heads moving toward the entrance of the building, and she began to tell me which lawyer had helped with each case. The unpleasant questions posed by the Indiana students were forgotten. As we got out of the car, the taxi-driver asked her, "Ma’am, did you really know Thurgood Marshall?"
"Yes," she said matter-of-factly.
"My God," he said. ©

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2005-03-14T18:55:00.000-05:00

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