Amiri Baraka Dead: Controversial Author And Activist Dies At 79

Portrait of American writer Amiri Baraka, USA, 17th March 2013. (Photo by Mick Gold/Redferns)

 

By HILLEL ITALIE

NEW YORK (AP) — Amiri Baraka, the militant man of letters and tireless agitator whose blues-based, fist-shaking poems, plays and criticism made him a provocative and groundbreaking force in American culture, has died. He was 79.

His booking agent, Celeste Bateman, told The Associated Press that Baraka, who had been hospitalized since last month, died Thursday at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center.

Perhaps no writer of the 1960s and ’70s was more radical or polarizing than the former LeRoi Jones, and no one did more to extend the political debates of the civil rights era to the world of the arts. He inspired at least one generation of poets, playwrights and musicians, and his immersion in spoken word traditions and raw street language anticipated rap, hip-hop and slam poetry. The FBI feared him to the point of flattery, identifying Baraka as “the person who will probably emerge as the leader of the Pan-African movement in the United States.”

Baraka transformed from the rare black to join the Beat caravan of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac to leader of the Black Arts Movement, an ally of the Black Power movement that rejected the liberal optimism of the early ’60s and intensified a divide over how and whether the black artist should take on social issues. Scorning art for art’s sake and the pursuit of black-white unity, Baraka was part of a philosophy that called for the teaching of black art and history and producing works that bluntly called for revolution.

“We want ‘poems that kill,’” Baraka wrote in his landmark “Black Art,” a manifesto published in 1965, the year he helped found the Black Arts Movement. “Assassin poems. Poems that shoot guns/Poems that wrestle cops into alleys/and take their weapons leaving them dead/with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland.”

He was as eclectic as he was prolific: His influences ranged from Ray Bradbury and Mao Zedong to Ginsberg and John Coltrane. Baraka wrote poems, short stories, novels, essays, plays, musical and cultural criticism and jazz operas. His 1963 book, “Blues People,” has been called the first major history of black music to be written by an African-American. A line from his poem “Black People!” — “Up against the wall mother f—–” — became a counterculture slogan for everyone from student protesters to the rock band Jefferson Airplane. A 2002 poem he wrote alleging that some Israelis had advance knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks led to widespread outrage.

Decades earlier, Baraka had declared himself a black nationalist out to “break the deathly grip of the White Eyes,” then a Marxist-Leninist out to destroy imperialists of all colors. No matter his name or ideology, he was committed to “struggle, change, struggle, unity, change, movement.”

“All of the oaths I swore were sincere reflections of what I felt — what I thought I knew and understood,” he wrote in a 1990 essay. “But those beliefs change, and the work shows this, too.”

He was denounced by critics as buffoonish, homophobic, anti-Semitic, a demagogue. He was called by others a genius, a prophet, the Malcolm X of literature. Eldridge Cleaver hailed him as the bard of the “funky facts.” Ishmael Reed credited the Black Arts Movement for encouraging artists of all backgrounds and enabling the rise of multiculturalism. The scholar Arnold Rampersad placed him alongside Frederick Douglass and Richard Wright in the pantheon of black cultural influences.

“From Amiri Baraka, I learned that all art is political, although I don’t write political plays,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist August Wilson once said.

First published in the 1950s, Baraka crashed the literary party in 1964, at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village, when “Dutchman” opened and made instant history at the height of the civil rights movement. Baraka’s play was a one-act showdown between a middle class black man, Clay, and a sexually daring white woman, Lula, ending in a brawl of murderous taunts and confessions.

“Charlie Parker. All the hip white boys scream for Bird,” Clay says. “And they sit there talking about the tortured genius of Charlie Parker. Bird would’ve not played a note of music if he just walked up to East 67th Street and killed the first 10 white people he saw. Not a note!”

Less than a year after the March on Washington, Baraka pronounced the dream dead, a delusion. The war of words commenced. The Village Voice gave it an Obie award for the top off-Broadway show. Norman Mailer called it the “best play in America.” Jean-Luc Godard lifted some dialogue for his film “Masculin Feminine.” New York Times critic Howard Taubman was impressed, and, apparently, terrified.

“If this is the way the Negroes really feel about the white world around them, there’s more rancor buried in the breasts of colored conformists than anyone can imagine,” Taubman wrote in his review.

When Philip Roth, writing for The New York Review of Books, criticized the character development in “Dutchman,” the playwright answered: “Sir, it is not my fault that you are so feeble-minded you refuse to see any Negro as a man, but rather as the narrow product of your own sterile response.”

Baraka was still LeRoi Jones when he wrote “Dutchman.” But the Cuban revolution, the assassination in 1965 of Malcolm X and the Newark riots of 1967, when the poet was jailed and photographed looking dazed and bloodied, radicalized him. Jones left his white wife (Hettie Cohen), cut off his white friends and moved from Greenwich Village to Harlem. He renamed himself Imamu Ameer Baraka, “spiritual leader blessed prince,” and dismissed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as a “brainwashed Negro.” He helped organize the 1972 National Black Political Convention and founded the Congress of African People. He also founded community groups in Harlem and Newark, the hometown to which he eventually returned.

The revolution, Baraka believed, would be set to music. In “Blues People,” he traced the role of blues and jazz as forces of nonconformity in American culture from slavery days to the present. In essays and interviews, he supported such jazz artists as Sun Ra, Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp, chastised Sly and the Family Stone for including whites in the band and scorned the Beatles as “a group of middle-class white boys who need a haircut and male hormones.” He welcomed rap as “mass-based poetry,” but worried that corporate power was turning performers away from the mission of “struggle and democracy and political consciousness.”

The Black Arts Movement was essentially over by the mid-1970s, and Baraka distanced himself from some of his harsher comments — about Dr. King, about gays and about whites in general. But he kept making news. In the early 1990s, as Spike Lee was filming a biography of Malcolm X, Baraka ridiculed the director as “a petit bourgeois Negro” unworthy of his subject. In 2002, respected enough to be named New Jersey’s poet laureate, he shocked again with “Somebody Blew Up America,” a Sept. 11 poem with a jarring twist.

“Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed,” read a line from the poem. “Who told 4,000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers to stay home that day?”

Then-Gov. James E. McGreevey and others demanded his resignation. Baraka refused, denying that “Somebody Blew Up” was anti-Semitic (the poem also attacks Hitler and the Holocaust) and condemning the “dishonest, consciously distorted and insulting non-interpretation of my poem.” Discovering he couldn’t be fired, the state eliminated the position altogether, in 2003.

Baraka was born Everett LeRoy Jones in 1934, a postal worker’s son who grew up in a racially mixed neighborhood in Newark and remembered his family’s passion for songs and storytelling. He showed early talents for sports and music and did well enough in high school to graduate with honors and receive a scholarship from Rutgers University.

Feeling out of place at Rutgers, he transferred to a leading black college, Howard University. He hated it there (“Howard University shocked me into realizing how desperately sick the Negro could be,” he later wrote) and joined the Air Force, from which he was discharged for having too many books, among other transgressions. By 1958, he had settled in Greenwich Village, met Ginsberg and other Beats, married fellow writer Cohen and was editing an avant-garde journal, Yugen. He called himself LeRoi Jones.

He was never meant to write like other writers. In his “Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka,” published in 1984, he remembered himself as a young man, sitting on a bench, reading “one of the carefully put together exercises The New Yorker publishes constantly as high poetic art.”

And he was in tears.

“I realized that there was something in me so out, so unconnected with what this writer was and what this magazine was that what was in me that wanted to come out as poetry would never come out like that and be my poetry,” he wrote.

Baraka’s many works included the poetry collections “Black Magic” and “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note,” the plays “Slave Ship” and “Arm Yourself or Harm Yourself,” and a novel, “The System of Dante’s Hell.” Admittedly a hard man to work with, he wrote for numerous publishers and published some books himself.

“He opened tightly guarded doors for not only Blacks but poor whites as well and, of course, Native Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans,” the American Indian author Maurice Kenny wrote of him. “We’d all still be waiting for the invitation from The New Yorker without him. He taught us all how to claim it and take it.”

Baraka divorced Cohen in 1965 and a year later married Sylvia Robinson, whose name became Bibi Amina Baraka. He had seven children, two with his first wife and five with his second. A son, Ras Baraka, became a councilman in Newark and is running for mayor of that city. A daughter, Shani Baraka, was murdered in 2003 by the estranged husband of her sister, Wanda Pasha.

Amiri Baraka taught at Yale University and George Washington University and spent 20 years on the faculty of the State University of New York in Stonybrook. He received numerous grants and prizes, including a Guggenheim fellowship and a poetry award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Baraka was the subject of a 1983 documentary, “In Motion,” and holds a minor place in Hollywood history. In “Bulworth,” Warren Beatty’s 1998 satire about a senator’s break from the political establishment, Baraka plays a homeless poet who cheers on the title character.

“You got to be a spirit,” the poet tells him. “You got to sing — don’t be no ghost.”

 

Scholar Saw a Multicolored American Culture Albert Murray Dies at 97; Fought Black Separatism

 

 

By MEL WATKINS

Albert Murray, an essayist, critic and novelist who influenced the national discussion about race by challenging black separatism, insisting that the black experience was essential to American culture and inextricably tied to it, died on Sunday at his home in Harlem. He was 97.

Lewis P. Jones, a family spokesman and executor of Mr. Murray’s estate, confirmed the death.

Mr. Murray was one of the last surviving links to a period of flowering creativity and spreading ferment among the black intelligentsia in postwar America, when the growing force of the civil rights movement gave rise to new bodies of thought about black identity, black political power and the prospects for equality in a society with a history of racism.

As blacks and whites clashed in the streets, black integrationists and black nationalists dueled in the academy and in books and essays. And Mr. Murray was in the middle of the debate, along with writers and artists including James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Romare Bearden and his good friend Ralph Ellison.

One of his boldest challenges was directed toward a new black nationalist movement that was gathering force in the late 1960s, drawing support from the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam, and finding advocates on university faculties and among alienated young blacks who believed that they could never achieve true equality in the United States.

Mr. Murray insisted that integration was necessary, inescapable and the only path forward for the country. And to those — blacks and whites alike — who would have isolated “black culture” from the American mainstream, he answered that it couldn’t be done. To him the currents of the black experience — expressed in language and music and rooted in slavery — run through American culture, blending with European and American Indian traditions and helping to give the nation’s culture its very shape and sound.

With a freewheeling prose style influenced by jazz and the blues — Duke Ellington called him “the unsquarest man I know” — Mr. Murray challenged conventional assumptions about art, race and American identity in books like the essay collection “Stomping the Blues” and the memoir “South to a Very Old Place.” He gave further expression to those views in a series of autobiographical novels, starting with “Train Whistle Guitar” in 1974.

Mr. Murray established himself as a formidable social and literary figure in 1970 with his first book, a collection of essays titled “The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture.” The book constituted an attack on black separatism.

“The United States is not a nation of black and white people,” Mr. Murray wrote. “Any fool can see that white people are not really white, and that black people are not black.” America, he maintained, “even in its most rigidly segregated precincts,” was a “nation of multicolored people,” or Omni-Americans: “part Yankee, part backwoodsman and Indian — and part Negro.”

Fokelore and ‘Fakelore’

The book also challenged what Mr. Murray called the “social science fiction” pronouncements of writers like James Baldwin, Richard Wright and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who he said had exaggerated racial and ethnic differences in postulating a pathology of black life. As Mr. Murray put it, they had simply countered “the folklore of white supremacy” with “the fakelore of black pathology.”

“The Omni-Americans,” the novelist Walker Percy wrote, “may be the most important book on black-white relations in the United States, indeed on American culture,” published in his generation. But it had fierce detractors. Writing in The New York Times, the black-studies scholar and author J. Saunders Redding called the essays contradictory, Mr. Murray’s theories “nonsense” and his “rhetoric” a “dense mixture of pseudo-scientific academic jargon, camp idiom and verbal play.”

For many years Mr. Murray and the novelist Ralph Ellison, who met in college, were close friends and literary kindred spirits. In “King of Cats,” a 1996 profile of Mr. Murray in The New Yorker, Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote that the friendship between the two men “seemed a focal point of black literary culture.”

“Both men were militant integrationists, and they shared an almost messianic view of the importance of art,” Mr. Gates wrote. “In their ardent belief that Negro culture was a constitutive part of American culture, they had defied an entrenched literary mainstream, which preferred to regard black culture as so much exotica — amusing perhaps, but eminently dispensable. Now they were also defying a new black vanguard, which regarded authentic black culture as separate from the rest of American culture — something that was created, and could be appreciated, in splendid isolation.”

Disliked the Term ‘Black’

Like Ralph Ellison, Mr. Murray proposed an inclusive theory of “the American Negro presence.” (He disdained the use of the term “black” and later spurned “African-American” — “I am not an African,” he said, “I am an American.”)

Mr. Murray contended that American identity “is best defined in terms of culture.” And for him, American culture was a “composite,” or “mulatto,” culture that owed much of its richness and diversity to blacks.

Yet Mr. Murray was not always sure that whites understood this shared legacy when they embraced black artists. He could be suspicious of whites, asking whether they, even in their applause, nonetheless continued to regard black culture “as so much exotica,” as Mr. Gates put it. Thus Mr. Murray asked whether the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Toni Morrison in 1993 was not “tainted with do-goodism,” and whether the poet Maya Angelou’s readings at President Bill Clinton’s first inaugural echoed a song-and-dance tradition in which blacks entertained whites.

The essential bond between American culture and what Mr. Murray called Negro culture is the shared embrace of a “blues aesthetic,” which he said permeated the works of black musicians, writers and artists and was being increasingly adopted by whites. The blues were to Mr. Murray “the genuine legacy of slavery,” Laura Ciolkowski, a professor of literature now at Columbia University, wrote of Mr. Murray in The New York Times Book Review in 2002.

“For him, blues music, with its demands for improvisation, resilience and creativity, is at the heart of American identity,” she wrote.

Mr. Murray himself wrote: “When the Negro musician or dancer swings the blues, he is fulfilling the same fundamental existential requirement that determines the mission of the poet, the priest and the medicine man. He is making an affirmative and hence exemplary and heroic response to that which André Malraux describes as la condition humaine.”

Albert Lee Murray was born on May 12, 1916, in Nokomis, Ala., to middle-class parents who soon gave him up for adoption to Hugh Murray, a laborer, and his wife, Matty.

“It’s just like the prince left among the paupers,” said Mr. Murray, who learned of his adoption when he was about 11. The Murrays moved to Mobile, where Albert grew up in a neighborhood known as Magazine Point. In “Train Whistle Guitar,” his largely autobiographical first novel, he called it Gasoline Point.

An Alter Ego in Novels

Through the novel’s protagonist, Scooter, his fictional alter ego, Mr. Murray evoked an unharrowed childhood enriched by music, legends, jiving and jesting, and the fancy talk of pulpit orators and storefront storytellers.

As rendered in Mr. Murray’s inventive prose, the adolescent Scooter and his friend Buddy Marshall could imagine themselves as “explorers and discoverers and Indian scouts as well as sea pirates and cowboys and African spear fighters not to mention the two schemingest gamblers and back alley ramblers this side of Philmayork.”

After graduating from the Mobile County Training School, where he earned letters in three sports and was voted the best all-around student, Mr. Murray enrolled at what is now Tuskegee University, where he discovered literature and immersed himself in Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce and Mann. He met Ralph Ellison, an upperclassman, as well as another student, Mozelle Menefee, who became his wife in 1941. She survives him, as does their daughter, Michéle Murray, who became a dancer with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

Mr. Murray received a bachelor of science degree in education in 1939 and began graduate study at the University of Michigan. But the following year, he returned to Tuskegee to teach literature and composition.

He enlisted in the military in 1943 and spent the last two years of World War II in the Army Air Corps. After the war, the Murrays moved to New York City, where he used the G.I. Bill to earn a master’s degree from New York University and he renewed his friendship with Ellison. In 1951, a year before Ellison published his classic work, “Invisible Man,” Mr. Murray rejoined the military, entering the Air Force.

He served in the military, peripatetically, for 11 years — teaching courses in geopolitics in the Air Force R.O.T.C. program at Tuskegee in the 1950s, taking assignments in North Africa and studying at Northwestern University, the University of Chicago and the University of Paris.

After retiring from the Air Force as a major in 1962, he returned to New York with his family and settled in an apartment in the Lenox Terrace complex in Harlem. He began writing essays for literary journals and articles for Life and The New Leader, some of which were included in “The Omni-Americans.”

He also became a familiar figure on campuses, holding visiting professorships at the University of Massachusetts, Barnard, Columbia, Emory, Colgate and other schools. And he resumed exploring the streets and nightclubs of Harlem with Ralph Ellison.

From 1970 to the mid-1990s, as if compensating for his slow start, Mr. Murray published nine books. His second, “South to a Very Old Place” (1971), recounted his return to his Southern homeland. The book later became part of the Modern Library. In “The Hero and the Blues” (1973), a collection of essays based on a series of lectures, Mr. Murray criticized naturalism and protest fiction, which he said subjugated individual actions to social circumstances.

The Joy in the Blues

In “Stomping the Blues” (1976), he argued that the essence of the blues was the tension between the woe expressed in its lyrics and the joy infusing its melodies. He saw the blues, and jazz, as an uplifting response to misery.

“The blues is not the creation of a crushed-spirited people,” Mr. Murray said years later. “It is the product of a forward-looking, upward-striving people.”

He next began a long collaboration with Count Basie on his autobiography, “Good Morning Blues,” which was published in 1985, a year after Basie’s death. Along with the writer Stanley Crouch and the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, Mr. Murray was actively involved in the creation of Jazz at Lincoln Center, the institution’s first permanent jazz program.

In 1991 he returned to his fictional alter ego, Scooter, depicting his college years at Tuskegee in the novel “The Spyglass Tree.” Four years later, as he neared 80, Mr. Murray published two books: “The Seven League Boots,” the third volume of his Scooter cycle, and “The Blue Devils of Nada,” another essay collection. Still another collection, “From the Briarpatch File: On Context, Procedure, and American Identity,” which explored in part the “existential implications of the blues,” was published in 2001.

Mr. Murray published the fourth and last novel in his Scooter cycle, “The Magic Keys,” in 2005. The book, which received tepid reviews (it “feels plotted rather than lived,” John Leland wrote in The Times), brings its narrator, whose real name is never learned, to graduate school in Manhattan, where he befriends a thinly disguised Ralph Ellison and Romare Bearden.

Mainstream recognition was slow to come for Mr. Murray. But by the mid-1990s, the critic Warren J. Carson had called him “African America’s undiscovered national treasure,” and in 1997 the National Book Critics Circle gave Mr. Murray its award for lifetime achievement. The next year he received the inaugural Harper Lee Award as Alabama’s most distinguished writer.

In 2000, Mr. Murray published “Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray,” which he edited with John F. Callahan. That same year he appeared as a commentator in Ken Burns’s multipart PBS documentary “Jazz.”

The critic Tony Scherman wrote of Mr. Murray in American Heritage, “His views add up to a cohesive, elegant whole, making him a rarity in today’s attenuated intellectual world: a system builder, a visionary in the grand manner.”

He could also write on a personal scale: his first book of poems, “Conjugations and Reiterations,” appeared in 2001. And he was candid in writing about advanced age.

“I’m doing more than ever,” he wrote in an Op-Ed essay in The Times in 1998, two years after undergoing spinal surgery, “but it’s harder now. I’m in constant pain. At home I use a four-pronged aluminum stick to get around. I need a stroller when I’m on the street. At receptions and in airports I need a wheelchair to get down the long aisles.

“But nothing hurts quite like the loss of old friends. There are ways to cope at the time they die. But weeks and months later you realize you can’t phone them and talk: Duke Ellington, Romare Bearden, Ralph Ellison, Alfred Kazin, Robert Penn Warren, Joseph Mitchell. It’s hard to believe they’re all gone.”

William McDonald and Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

 

‘Strange Fruit’ Actress, Educator, Author Dorothy Carter Dies in NY

By Associated Press

Photo Credit: Bankstreet College of Education

NEW YORK (AP) — Dorothy Carter, a former stage actress who starred in the adaptation of the groundbreaking novel “Strange Fruit” on Broadway and later became an educator and a children’s book author, has died after battling bladder cancer. She was 94.

She died Sept. 14 in New York, family friend Mary Zaslofsky said Friday.

Carter, born in 1918 in Kissimee, Fla., studied drama at Spelman College and later was taught by Stella Adler in New York. She made her Broadway debut in 1945 in Lillian Smith’s adaptation of her novel “Strange Fruit,” an interracial love story.

The show, directed by Jose Ferrer and starring Jane White and Earl Jones, closed after 60 performances but got a positive write-up by then-first lady Eleanor Roosevelt in her syndicated column.

Carter, who was black, became part of the American Negro Theater under the direction of Abe Hill and played Ruth Lawson in its 1946 Broadway production of “Walk Hard.” She also appeared in Lou Peterson’s “Take a Giant Step” in 1953.

 

Michael Clarke Duncan, 54, Dead from 2nd Heart Attack in 2 Months

AARON MORRISON

Acclaimed black actor carried hit urban films and an Oscar-nominated picture

 

Michael Clarke Duncan, the unmistakable screen and voice actor in many hit urban and mainstream films, including an Oscar-nominated performance in “The Green Mile,” died Monday morning in Los Angeles, his fiancé, reality TV star Rev. Omarosa Manigault, said in a statement released by their publicist. Duncan, 54, suffered a fatal heart attack. The actor was hospitalized for another heart attack in mid-July and never fully recovered, according the statement. Duncan was best known to African American and wider audiences for his roles in “The Players Club,” “Planet of the Apes,” and “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.” Before turning to acting full-time, the muscular 6-foot-4 Duncan worked as a bodyguard for rapper Notorious B.I.G. and actors Will Smith and Jamie Foxx.

 

Renowned actor, professor Al Freeman Jr. dies at 78

 

WRITTEN BY DEBBIE VARGUS

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Albert Freeman Jr., the veteran actor who played Elijah Muhammad in Spike Lee’s epic film, “Malcolm X,” has died. He was 78. AL FREEMAN JR. Howard University in Washington, D.C., confirmed his death Friday night but details weren’t immediately available. Freeman taught acting there for years and served as chairman and artistic director of its theater arts department. “He was a brilliant professor, a renowned actor and a master director who made his mark in the classroom as well as on stage, screen and television. … He has mentored and taught scores of outstanding actors. He was a resounding voice of Howard and will be missed,” university spokeswoman Kerry-Ann Hamilton said in a statement. Freeman earned an NAACP Image Award for playing Malcolm X’s mentor in Lee’s 1992 biography. He also received an Emmy nomination for his role as Malcolm X in the 1979 miniseries “Roots: The Next Generations.” He won a best-actor Daytime Emmy that year for his work as Capt. Ed Hall on the soap opera “One Life to Live.”

 

Roy S. Bryce-Laporte, Who Led Black Studies at Yale, Dies at 78

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Roy S. Bryce-Laporte, a sociologist who led one of the nation’s first African-American studies departments, at Yale University, and did research that advanced understanding of blacks who came to the United States voluntarily rather than as slaves, died on July 31 in Sykesville, Md. He was 78.

Colgate University

Roy S. Bryce-Laporte

 

His brother, Herrington J. Bryce, said that the cause was undetermined, but that he had had a series of small strokes.

Professor Bryce-Laporte was named director of Yale’s new department of African-American studies in 1969, when colleges and universities were recruiting black students and searching for ways to include their culture, history and other concerns in the curriculum.

Students participated in the selection of Professor Bryce-Laporte. One of them, Donald H. Ogilvie, praised him as “not all academician and not all activist,” adding that Professor Bryce-Laporte was “still angry.”

Professor Bryce-Laporte taught a core course in the new program, “The Black Experience: Its Changes and Continuities,” which spanned the history of New World blacks from pre-slavery recruitment in Africa to 20th-century slums. He emphasized that black studies must address hot-button topics like racial stereotyping while retaining academic rigor.

“Black studies is the way by which respect is to be given to blacks and to knowledge about blacks,” he said in an article in The New York Times in 1969.

In an interview on Tuesday, the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., who has written influentially on the black experience, said that as a Yale freshman he was inspired by Professor Bryce-Laporte to become a professor himself. “A different model was available to me,” he said.

Professor Gates said Professor Bryce-Laporte had urged students to involve themselves in activities like writing for the college newspaper and joining secret societies as steps to acquiring influence in the larger society. He said Professor Bryce-Laporte told students, “You’ve been chosen, you’ve been blessed.”

Sidney W. Mintz, chairman of the committee that created Yale’s black studies curriculum, called Professor Bryce-Laporte “the first manager of the futures” of the outstanding black students drawn to Yale. He advised them to cultivate discipline, no matter how eager they were to change the world.

“You have to be adults,” he said, according to Professor Mintz, now research professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.

Yale’s program went beyond that of some colleges by studying blacks in the entire Western Hemisphere, an approach that meshed with Professor Bryce-Laporte’s research focus. He wrote articles and contributed to books on the African diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean. He examined how some sought new lives in the United States, and how some of them returned to the places in the Western Hemisphere they had left. The bulk of earlier research had concerned blacks brought unwillingly to the United States as slaves.

In 1986, when the centennial of the Statue of Liberty was being celebrated, Professor Bryce-Laporte curated an exhibit at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Manhattan that focused on black immigration. He collected old photographs, diaries and certificates of nationality given to laborers. “If there is a forgotten or overlooked fact of black history, it is migration,” he said in an interview with The Times.

Roy Simon Bryce-Laporte was born in Panama City on Sept. 7, 1933, and earned an associate’s degree from the University of Panama. He moved with his family to the United States and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. He next did advanced studies at the University of Puerto Rico, then went to the University of California, Los Angeles, to complete a Ph.D. in sociology.

Before moving to Yale, where he taught for three years, he was an assistant sociology professor at Hunter College of the City University of New York. After his time at Yale, he led a varied career that included being a Woodrow Wilson International Scholar and the first director of the Research Institute on Immigration and Ethnic Studies at the Smithsonian Institution.

At Colgate University, Professor Bryce-Laporte was John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur professor of sociology and anthropology, and director of the Africana and Latin American Studies Program. He taught a course called “Total Institutions” in which he compared plantation slavery with social life in prisons and asylums.

Professor Bryce-Laporte, who had dual American and Panamanian citizenship, was married to Dorotea Lowe Bryce, who died in 2009. In addition to his brother, he is survived by his companion, Marian D. Holness; his sons, Robertino and Rene; his daughter, Camila Bryce-Laporte Morris; his sisters, Celestina Carter and Yvonne St. Hill; and three grandsons.

 

Sherman Hemsley dead: ‘Jeffersons’ star dies at age 74

An iconic actor claimed a landmark African-American role in the world of sitcoms in the ’70s and ’80s.

BY DAVID HINCKLEY / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

“The Jefferson’s” made Sherman Hemsley and Isabel Sanford household names. The show ran from 1975 to 1985.

 

Sherman Hemsley, who as George Jefferson ensured that black folks would never again be invisible on television, died Tuesday at his El Paso home. He was 74.

Police said Hemsley was discovered by his nurse and apparently died of natural causes.

Hemsley played Jefferson for two years on “All in the Family,” from 1973-75, then starred opposite Isabel Sanford from 1975 to 1985 on their own spinoff, “The Jeffersons.” Isabel Sanford died in 2004 at age 86.

George Jefferson was not the first black character on television, but he remains one of the most indelible.

Because he first played in counterpoint to Archie Bunker, and because both had the exaggerated personalities of sitcom characters, George Jefferson shared many of Archie’s traits.

He was cranky, impatient and prone to speaking without thinking — though he was also more clever and calculating than Archie.

This made him one of television’s first angry black characters, and while some of that anger was blunted with a comic edge, his legitimate frustration over America’s racial situation was hard to miss.

He became a more effective answer to Archie’s bigotry not because he was noble and perfect, but because he also had dimension, quirks, strengths and weaknesses.

Isabel Sanford and Sherman Hemsley played the bickering, loving couple on “The Jeffersons” from 1975 to 1985.

Like all good sitcom men, he was also subject to regular deflation by his wife, Louise, known as Weezy.

She once told their son Lionel to go to his room so George wouldn’t hit him. Lionel wanted to know why Dad would hit him, and Weezy said it was because she didn’t know where she’d throw him.

Hemsley was born in South Philadelphia and served in the Air Force before graduating and taking a job with the Post Office while he studied acting.

JEFF KRAVITZ/FILMMAGIC, INC

Sherman Hemsley stayed active in TV. Here he is seem during the 1998 TV Land Upfront at Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles.

After moving to New York and working with the Negro Ensemble Company, he landed his first Broadway role in 1971 with “Purlie.”

“All in the Family” creator Norman Lear saw him there and offered him the role of George Jefferson that same year.

Hemsley declined, saying he didn’t want to give up the security of Broadway for television. So Lear held the part open for two years, while “Purlie” finished its Broadway run and then did a road tour.

Mr. Nanny, was another taste of stardom for Sherman Hemsley, seen here with Hulk Hogan in 1993.

Lear kept the role warm by creating a Jefferson brother, Henry, who disappeared when Hemsley agreed to play George in 1973.

Over the years, the George Jefferson character softened somewhat and the show segued from sharper social commentary to a more traditional family sitcom.

Hemsley kept working after it ended, notably in a five-year run on the NBC show “Amen” and as the voice of the triceratops on ABC’s “Dinosaurs.”

Sherman Hemsley debuted his role of George Jefferson in the legendary show, “All in the Family.”

He and Sanford reunited several times over the years, on “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and in commercials for Old Navy and the Gap.

He was also a musician, releasing an album called “Dance” in 1992, though his own taste ran more toward 1970s rock bands like Genesis and Yes.

Off the stage, he led a quiet, largely private life in out-of-the-way El Paso. But he left a towering image on the small screen.

dhinckley@nydailynews.com

 

Harlem’s ‘Queen of Soul Food’ Sylvia Woods dies at 86

Her restaurant is ‘meeting-place for black America,” says Al Sharpton

STUART RAMSON/AP

Sylvia Woods, center, moves to the music outside her restaurant, Sylvia’s, during the restaurant’s 40th anniversary celebration in 2002.

New York’s legendary “Queen of Soul Food” Sylvia Woods, whose iconic restaurant drew dignitaries and ordinary folk from all over the world to Harlem to taste her fried chicken, died Thursday at 86.

News that she died broke just as Mayor Bloomberg was paying tribute to the 50th anniversary of “Sylvia’s” at a gala reception at Gracie Mansion.

“We lost a legend today,” the mayor said. “Generations of family and friends have come together at what became a New York institution.”

The Woods family said she was surrounded by loved ones when she lost her battle with Alzheimer’s.

PEARL GABEL FOR NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Sylvia Woods’ granddaughter Trenness Wood-Black and son Kenneth Wood read a statement to the press outside the restaurant on Thursday after Sylvia Woods passed away.

Tributes quickly began pouring in.

“Sylvia’s has been more than a restaurant, it has been a meeting place for black America,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, who recalled dining there with everyone from President Obama to Caroline Kennedy.

Rep. Charles Rangel said he was “deeply saddened” by the loss of a friend.

PEARL GABEL FOR NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Banner honoring Sylvia Woods hangs outside her eponymous restaurant on Thursday.

“She was a dynamic, warm and kind woman whom the entire Harlem community will miss,” he said.

Rangel called the eatery, where he recently celebrated his squeaker primary win, “a magical place that brought the community together.”

“Sylvia’s may have been famous nationally and internationally, but its soul has always remained in Harlem,” he said.

Former Mayor David Dinkins called her an icon.

DEBRA DIPESO/FOR NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

 Herbert Woods, Sylvia’s husband and the manager of her restaurant, Van Deward Woods, president of Sylvia Woods Enterprises, and Sylvia Woods, owner and creater of Sylvia’s restaurant and food products, show off some new items and Sylvia’s cookbook at the famed soul food restaurant in August of 2006.

“She’ll be missed,” he said. “Not just because of the wonderful business she ran and the great food, but because of her contributions to the community.”

Longtime customers began gathering at the restaurant to pay tribute.

“She always made people feel like she was part of the family.” said Jill Ferguson, who said she’d been coming for chicken and waffles since 1975.”

ANGEL CHEVRESTT FOR NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Sylvia Woods, center, with (l. to r.) singer Melisa Morgan; Mayor Bloomberg; former Mayor Dinkins; and RB singer Freddie Jackson, celebrates her 80th birthday in 2006.

Harold Mozele, a retired postal worker, remembers seeing Woods behind the counter about four years ago, after she had retired.

“I asked her, ‘You still serve food?’ and she said, ‘Why not?’ It never got to her head. The fried chicken is no joke. The lemonade is smoking,” he said.

“She was everyone’s Mom, everybody’s grandmother. You just don’t expect her to pass away. She was so strong,” said Jeff Mann, 54, who knew her since he was a teenager.

“She was trying to hold off for her 50th anniversary,” he said. “When she started it was just a little counter. This is her legacy.”

Woods, an ambitious and charismatic beautician from South Carolina, opened “Sylvia’s” in 1962, buying the 35-seat luncheonette where she worked as a waitress.

She and her late husband and childhood sweetheart, Herbert, borrowed the money from Sylvia’s mother, who mortgaged the farm in South Carolina where Sylvia was born and raised to stake her daughter’s dream.

“I know I had to make it or else my mama was gonna lose her farm. So I gave it all that I had to give,” Woods once told Nation’s Restaurant News.

Located at 126th St. and Lenox Ave., it was right around the corner from the storied Apollo Theater.

THOMAS MONASTER/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Sylvia Woods cuts up some ribs in the kitchen at Sylvia’s in 1999.

GERALD HERBERT/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

A customer holds Sylvia Woods’ hand as they talk whileSylvia works in her restaurant in 1997.

Her fried chicken, collard greens and peach pie were a quick hit and the landmark restaurant has expanded over the years, now seating 450. The family also runs a catering business.

Sen. Bill Perkins said Woods’ business success was important in its own right.

“When Harlem was being abandoned, Sylvia was still there,” he said.

Woods published two best-selling cookbooks: “Sylvia’s Soul Food Cookbook” in 1992 and “Sylvia’s Family Soul Food Cookbook” in 1999.

She also launched a “Queen of Soul Food” line of bottled hot sauce, candied yams and barbecue sauce featuring her picture on the label.

Sylvia Woods (l.), owner of Sylvia’s Soul Food Restaurant, with sons Van and Kenneth and her mother at her mother’s house in Hemingway, S.C., on Easter of 1964.

Herbert Woods, wife Sylvia and their daughter Bedelia at Sylvia’s Restaurant in 1973.

She retired six years ago, passing the torch to her four children and numerous grandchildren.

In 2001, the Woods family created the Sylvia and Herbert Woods Scholarship Endowment Foundation, which provides scholarships to Harlem kids.

“Even as her brand became a nationwide success, she never forgot to give back to the community that helped make it all possible,” Bloomberg said.

 

 

Noted Journalist William Raspbery Dead at 76

by drowley@washingtoninformer.com (WI Web Staff Report)

Pulitzer Prize-winner William Raspberry, who served 40 years as a columnist for The Washington Post died Tuesday at his home in Washington, D.C. He was 76. His wife, Sondra Raspberry, said he had prostate cancer.

Noted for his fierce independent views on education, poverty, crime and race, Raspberry was one of the first black journalists — the other was Carl Rowan– to gain a wide following in the mainstream press.

Raspberry, who wrote a provocative opinion column for The Post that was also carried as a syndicated item in more than 200 newspapers across the country, retired in 2005.

As a depiction of his upbringing in the segregated South, Raspberry’s columns would often focus on integration while opposing busing students in order to achieve racial balance.

“From the day Bill Raspberry wrote his first Post column, his advice was as wise and his voice as clear as anyone’s in Washington,” Donald Graham, chairman of the Washington Post Co., said in an interview. “To the city, Bill’s columns brought 40 years of smart, independent judgment.”

Raspberry won the Pulitzer in 1994, making him the second black columnist to achieve the honor. The Mississippi native began his career at The Post in 1962 as a teletype operator and within months began working as a reporter.

Raspberry covered the riots in 1965 in the Watts section of Los Angeles, and a year later began writing a column on local matters.

For more 10 years Raspberry, the son of two preachers, taught journalism at Duke University. Born in 1935 in the northeastern Mississippi town of Okolona, he graduated from Indiana Central College, now the University of Indianapolis.

 

Last Surviving Platters Singer Herb Reed Dies at 83

*Herb Reed, founder of the 1950s vocal group the Platters who sang on hits like “Only You” and “The Great Pretender,” has died at the age of 83.

The last surviving original member of died Monday in a Boston area hospice after a period of declining health that included chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, manager Fred Balboni told the Associated Press.

Reed, a Kansas City, Mo., native, founded the Platters in Los Angeles in 1953. The group started out as a quartet, winning amateur talent shows and performed nights and weekends up and down the California coast while the members worked days at a car wash and at other odd jobs.

Reed came up with the group’s name, inspired by ’50s disc jockeys who called their records platters.

The group underwent several lineup changes, even adding a woman singer to become a quintet, before signing their first major recording contract in 1955.

Herb Reed (far left) with The Platters

Reed sang bass on the group’s four No. 1 hits, including “The Great Pretender,” ”My Prayer,” ”Twilight Time” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”

The Platters were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990 and the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in 1998. Their recordings are in the Grammy Hall of Fame.

The group’s popularity reached across racial lines and genres, “achieving success in a crooning, middle-of-the-road style that put a soulful coat of uptown polish on pop-oriented, harmony-rich material,” according to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s website.

Reed had homes in Atlanta and Miami but had called the Boston area home since the 1970s “because the people were always so nice to me,” he told a biographer.

Reed was the only member of the group to appear on all of their nearly 400 recordings. He continued touring, performing up to 200 shows per year, until last year, often performing with younger singers under the name Herb Reed and the Platters or Herb Reed’s Platters.

Reed is survived by a son and three grandsons. Funeral arrangements are pending.

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Barbara Graves, Wife of Black Enterprise Founder Earl Graves Sr., Dies

Family matriarch was a guiding force of Black Enterprise and a quiet source of strength and inspiration

by BLACK ENTERPRISE Posted: May 25, 2012

Barbara Kydd Graves (Image: Courtesy of The Graves Family)

Family matriarch and a guiding force of Black Enterprise, Barbara Kydd Graves succumbed early this morning at Howard University Hospital after a more than three-year battle with gall bladder cancer. She was 74.

The wife of Earl G. Graves Sr., the founder, chairman and publisher of Black Enterprise, she played a vital role in the growth and development of the publication and media company, and its mission of economic empowerment and wealth building for African Americans.

Since the launch of Black Enterprise Magazine in 1970, Barbara Graves, an alumna of Brooklyn College and a former elementary school teacher, held every major position, including editorial director, circulation director and chief financial officer, during the 40-plus-year history of this company. Along the way, she is credited with grooming and developing several generations of executive leadership, including sons Earl Jr., Johnny and Michael, all of whom have worked as executives at Black Enterprise. Graves also co-founded and guided the Black Enterprise Women of Power Summit, the premier networking event and conference for women executives of color.

“My mother was a steadfast and loving partner and counselor to my father; his quiet source of strength and inspiration,” says Earl Graves Jr., president and CEO of Black Enterprise. “She served as mentor and guide to several generations of employees, managers and professionals. Above all, she genuinely cared for every member of the Black Enterprise family, and held a special passion for children and young people in particular.”

Funeral arrangements have yet to be announced.

 

Hal Jackson Dead At 96

Radio pioneer Hal Jackson (pictured right) has died, WBLS reports.

He was 96.

Jackson’s exact cause of death is not known. WBLS’s website reports that he died from “illness”

The radio and television legend achieved many “firsts” during his 70-year career. He was the first to host a jazz show on ABC network. And he was also the first Black announcer in network radio. In the arena of sports, Jackson was the first play-by-play radio announcer, according to WBLS.

 

Here are a list of other “firsts” Jackson achieved during his long career:

the first Black to host an interracial network television show on NBC-TV; the first person to broadcast from a theater live; organized and owned the first Black team to win the World’s Basketball championship; the first Black host of an international network television presentation; was instrumental in acquiring the first radio station owned and operated by Blacks in New York City; the first to broadcast live from New York into Japan; the first New York City radio personality to broadcast three daily shows on three different stations in the same day; the first to broadcast live via satellite from Jamaica into New York and currently hosts a radio program which has been rated #1 by Arbitron continuously in its time slot for over 11 years on 107.5 WBLS in New York.

One of Jackson’s most notable professional achievements was his production of “Talented Teens International” that highlights the talents of young, black women between the ages of 13-17. The competition, which has lasted for more than 40 years, gives young women the opportunity to compete for college scholarships, trips abroad and the chance to network with other young women from around the world. Past winners and participants are Tammi Townsend, Vanessa Williams and Jada Pinkett Smith, according to WBLS. Watch Jackson discuss the competition with Don Cornelius below.

Don Cornelius Interviews Hal Jackson On “Soul Train”

In October of 1995, Jackson was the first Black to be inducted into the Radio Hall Of Fame. WBLS says his career can, perhaps, be summarized by the theme he choose for his radio programs: “It is nice to be important, but it is more important to be nice.”

 

‘Godfather of Go-Go,’ Chuck Brown Dies

by drowley@washingtoninformer.com (WI Web Staff Report)

Chuck Brown, the legendary musician and pioneer of Go-Go, has died at the age of 75. His passing was confirmed late Wednesday by his daughter, KK Brown.

Brown, who was widely revered as D.C.’s “Godfather of Go-Go,” had been hospitalized in recent weeks with pneumonia, and because of his failing health numerous shows had been cancelled — including a performance in April that celebrated the re-opening of the District’s historic Howard Theatre.

“I’m devastated. That’s a serious loss. All of D.C. will be mourning,” said Charles Stephenson, author of The Beat: Go-Go Music from Washington, D.C. “Chuck was the Godfather of Go-Go, but he was a also the godfather of all of us. He steered several generations straight and tried to be role model to all of us. He brought the best out of a lot of local artists.”

In addressing rumors a week ago of her father’s two-month absence from public performances, KK Brown said he was in the hospital recovering. At the time she asked that his fans keep him in their prayers. Sources close to his family have said that Brown initially was treated for arthritis and a removed blood clot, the latter resulting in his bout with pneumonia.

Brown was credited with creating Go-Go more than two decades years ago — a music genre which had become known as Washington’s own brand of funk. In creating the Go-Go sound, Brown combined Latin beats, African call and response chants and American Jazz, throwing in a touch of soul with a continuous drumbeat. This non-stop dance music is, and has been, a trademark of original creative music from the nation’s capital, and has gained Chuck Brown worldwide fans.

But Brown burst onto the musical scene in 1971 with his first hit “We The People.” That success was followed by the gold album “Bustin’ Loose” and the No. 1 hit single of the same title on MCA/Source Records. Years later song was sampled in the 2002 Nelly hit, “Hot in Herre.”

Born in Gaston, N.C., Brown moved to D.C. with his family when he was a toddler.

According to his biography, he started playing guitar, inspired by the gospel music of his youth, and by jazz guitarist Charlie Christian. In the early ’60s Brown joined the group Jerry Butler and His Earls of Rhythm. A few years later, Brown joined Los Latinos, a popular dance band that was helping spread the mambo craze around the mid-Atlantic. Brown’s notions of rhythmic complexity took shape while playing in this band, particular his desire to bring congas and cowbells into R&B.

Some of the high points of his career include having been chosen to represent Washington D.C, at the 2002 Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Brown has also received the Mayor’s Arts Award and dozens other awards for his musical contributions.

Upon learning of his death, thousands of Brown’s Facebook fans began posting messages expressing the impact of his passing on their lives.

Wayne Bruce wrote, “Today Heaven has gotten so much funkier!!!!…As a guitarist you could not be more funkier than the Godfather, as a human you couldn’t been kinder, and as an Innovator it speaks for itself. ‘Go-Go’ since its inception has influenced every popular form of recent music…R.I.P. Chuck Brown …I Love the man and his music!!!..”Wind me up Chuck”!!!!”

Michael Allen wrote: “Chuck u influenced alot of bands now and bands to come. U have graced many stages and played in many venues..anyone from DC/MD understands wut im talkin bout…thx for all the parties, the music and last but not least the memories..we love you and will always love you…R.I.P.

And, Cyprian Bowlding wrote, “D.C. and the music world has lost an icon. The Godfather of Go-Go, Chuck Brown is no longer with us. I had the honor of working camera for his half-time show at Fed Ex Field a few years ago. It was one of many highlights in my career. My prayers and condolences to the Go-Go community and the family of Chuck Brown. He may be gone but his music will live forever.”

 

Donna Summer, Queen of Disco, dies at 63

 

By MESFIN FEKADU Associated Press

AP Photo/Nick Ut NEW YORK (AP) — Disco queen Donna Summer, whose pulsing anthems such as “Last Dance,” “Love to Love You Baby” and “Bad Girl” became the soundtrack for a glittery age of sex, drugs, dance and flashy clothes, has died. She was 63. Her family released a statement, saying Summer died Thursday morning and that they “are at peace celebrating her extraordinary life and her continued legacy.” “Words truly can’t express how much we appreciate your prayers and love for our family at this sensitive time,” the statement read. She had been living in Englewood, Fla., with her husband Bruce Sudano. Summer came to prominence just as disco was burgeoning, and came to define the era with a string of No. 1 hits and her beauty queen looks. Disco became as much defined by her sultry, sexual vocals – her bedroom moans and sighs – as the relentless, pulsing rhythms of the music itself. “Love to Love You Baby,” with its erotic moans, was her first hit and one of the most scandalous songs of the polyester-and-platform-heel era. Unlike some other stars of disco who faded as the music became less popular, Summer was able to grow beyond it and later segued to a pop-rock sound. She had one of her biggest hits in the 1980s with “She Works Hard For The Money,” which became another anthem, this time for women’s rights. Soon after, Summer became a born-again Christian and faced controversy when she was accused of making anti-gay comments in relation to the AIDS epidemic. Summer denied making the comments, but was the target of a boycott. Still, even as disco went out of fashion she remained a fixture in dance clubs, endlessly sampled and remixed into contemporary dance hits. Summer, real name LaDonna Adrian Gaines, was born in 1948 in Boston. She was raised on gospel music and became the soloist in her church choir by age 10. “Love to Love You Baby” was her U.S. chart debut and the first of 19 No. 1 dance hits between 1975 and 2008 – second only to Madonna. During the disco era she burned up the charts: She was the only artist to have three consecutive double-LPs hit No. 1, “Live and More,” `’Bad Girls” and “On the Radio.” She was also the first female artist with four No. 1 singles in a 13-month period, according to the Rock Hall of Fame, where she was a nominee this year. She was never comfortable with the “Disco Queen” label. Musically, she began to change in 1979 with “Hot Stuff,” which had a tough, rock `n’ roll beat. Her diverse sound helped her earn Grammy Awards in the dance, rock, R&B and inspirational categories. Dionne Warwick said in a statement that she was sad to lose a great performer and “dear friend.” “My heart goes out to her husband and her children,” Warwick said. “Prayers will be said to keep them strong.” Summer released her last album, “Crayons,” in 2008. It was her first full studio album in 17 years. She also performed on “American Idol” that year with its top female contestants.

 

USOC’s 1st black chairman remembered for passion

Associated Press

DURHAM, N.C. — LeRoy Walker was remembered Tuesday for embodying the ideals of the Olympics and for his passion for excellence as a coach, administrator and college chancellor.

Hundreds gathered at Duke University for the funeral for the first African-American to lead the U.S. Olympic Committee and to coach an American men’s team at the games.

Former USOC leader Bill Hybl called Walker “a one-man diplomatic commission” who “truly shared the Olympic dream.” U.S. Rep. G.K. Butterfield, D-N.C., read a message of condolence from President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.

Walker died last week at 93. No cause of death was given. He coached the U.S. men’s track and field team at the Montreal Games in 1976 and led the USOC from 1992-96, shepherding the Atlanta Games and presiding over the group when the 2002 Winter Games were awarded to Salt Lake City.

“I thought he’d be here forever, really,” said George Williams, who coached the U.S. men’s track team in Athens in 2004. “Everything we do is Dr. Walker. Every championship we win is Dr. Walker’s championship. … He changed the atmosphere of coaching. … You don’t usually see doctors coaching anything.”

The Atlanta Games were panned across the globe, and Walker warned his countrymen the U.S. was not likely to host another games for a long time after Salt Lake City. He repeated his warnings after a bribery scandal threatened to derail the 2002 Winter Games.

Walker coached Olympic teams from Ethiopia, Israel, Jamaica, Kenya and Trinidad & Tobago before his home country gave him a chance to be the first black Olympic head coach when he led the Americans to Montreal. His team claimed 22 medals, including gold in the long jump, discus, decathlon, 400-meter hurdles and both men’s relays.

“He had a passion for excellence,” North Carolina Central Chancellor Charlie Nelms said. “Anything less was unacceptable.”

Walker coached football and men’s basketball at N.C. Central before starting a track program at the school that under his guidance produced 40 national champions and 12 Olympians. He earned a doctorate from New York University in 1957 and served N.C. Central in a variety of roles before taking over as chancellor from 1983-86.

Virginia Tech assistant Charles Foster, a former N.C. Central star and hurdler on the Walker-coached 1976 Olympic team, called himself “one of LeRoy’s boys” and remembered an episode when Walker recruited him.

“He said that he was going places, and he said, `If you want to go with me, sign this dotted line and then grab on to these coattails and see how far they can take us,” Foster said.

 
Copyright 2012 by The Associated Press

 

Walter L. Gordon Jr. dies; groundbreaking lawyer in era of segregation

Attorney Walter L. Gordon Jr. in the mid-1940s. “His personality was dynamic, plus he was good on the law. With that combination, he was unbeatable,” retired L.A. County Superior Court Judge William C. Beverly said. (Walter L. Gordon Jr./William C. Beverly / April 28, 2012)

A mentor to those who followed in his footsteps, he ran a practice on L.A.’s Central Avenue for 65 years.

By Valerie J. Nelson, Los Angeles Times

April 29, 2012

The legal establishment in Los Angeles was segregated in 1937 when African American attorney Walter L. Gordon Jr. pulled on a childhood connection to set up his new practice. The former newspaper carrier was given office space “three steps” from the pressroom of the California Eagle, a black weekly founded in 1879 by an escaped slave.

The newspaper’s location proved fortuitous. It was on Central Avenue, “the city’s black thoroughfare,” Gordon later said, and he benefited from being one of the first black lawyers to hang a shingle in the city’s African American community.

He kept his practice in the neighborhood for 65 years, defending the famous — jazz singer Billie Holiday was a steady client — and untold lesser-known names often facing criminal charges.

Gordon, who was 103, died April 16 at California Hospital Medical Center in Los Angeles, his family announced.

He once estimated that there were only 30 African American lawyers in the state when he entered the profession, and he made a point of mentoring those who followed him.

When veteran civil rights lawyer Leo Branton Jr. arrived in Los Angeles in 1949 to practice, “there were no black law firms, only individual practitioners. The white law firms were not hiring black lawyers, and the L.A. County Bar Assn. had a ‘Caucasians only’ clause in its constitution.

“Young black lawyers had no place to go, had it not been for Walter Gordon. He was a mentor to almost every lawyer who came along during the first five years I was in practice. He made a tremendous contribution,” the 90-year-old Branton said.

In the early 1940s, Gordon represented dozens of railroad dining-car waiters whom the government wanted to penalize for not reporting their tips. When the tax-evasion case was settled, each porter was ordered to pay a $25 fine.

During the same era, he defended a group of black deputy sheriffs who made an off-duty arrest while armed and were prosecuted for carrying weapons.

“In those days, black deputies were not allowed to carry guns on or off duty,” Gordon said in 2008 in an L.A. County Bar Assn. publication. “In our argument we went back to the ancient common law of England where a sheriff could be punished for not carrying arms at all times because he would not be able to protect the king’s peace.” The deputies were exonerated.

Gordon successfully defended Holiday in the 1950s after she was accused of assaulting a white patron at a local nightclub who heckled her as she sang “Strange Fruit,” a song about lynching. The judge deemed the audience member a troublemaker and threw out the case, Gordon later said.

“He had a heavy volume of cases. People would line up around the block,” retired L.A. County Superior Court Judge William C. Beverly said last week. “His personality was dynamic, plus he was good on the law. With that combination, he was unbeatable.”

Born June 22, 1908, in Santa Monica, Walter Lear Gordon Jr. was the only child of Walter Gordon and his wife, Vertner. His father delivered mail on horseback in South Pasadena and later went into real estate.

Growing up, Gordon sold papers outside meetings of the Los Angeles Forum, a civil rights organization. He later traced his interest in the law to the public speaking skills of the black attorneys he overheard there.

After graduating from high school, Gordon worked in a cargo ship’s mess, traveling through the Panama Canal, and lived in Boston for two years.

He attended USC for 18 months but in 1932 transferred to Ohio State. After a semester there, he was admitted to the university’s law school and received his law degree in 1936.

While establishing his practice, he began collecting photographs discarded by the California Eagle and eventually built an archive of nearly 800 images that he donated to UCLA‘s Charles E. Young Research Library. The majority of the photographs are from the 1940s.

“As an attorney, he traveled between boundaries, but he felt it was important to document his stratum of society, the people who were college-trained and in the professions,” said Susan D. Anderson, curator of the library’s Los Angeles collection. “He knew if he didn’t devote himself to documenting these people, no one would remember it.”

In 1945, Gordon bought a lot across the street from the newspaper and built the office where he practiced into his early 90s.

When his parents were found killed in 1949 in their Highland Park home, “he basically stopped taking violent criminal-defense cases and moved to representing bookmakers and a less-violent clientele,” said Lorn S. Foster, a Pomona College professor who had extensively interviewed Gordon.

Married four times, Gordon had three children with his second wife, Anne, and a high-profile divorce from his third wife, Ethel Sissle, a showgirl previously married to composer Noble Sissle. Media coverage of their 1951 divorce noted that Gordon did not have to pay her alimony but had offered her “$200 a month for six months if she made no future reference to their life together.”

His fourth wife, Clara, died in 2006 after 50 years of marriage, and his daughter, Anne, died in 2010.

His son Walter L. Gordon III, an attorney, is married to Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Teresa Sanchez-Gordon. He is also survived by another son, James; two grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

At 100, Gordon said he felt himself slowing down but still kept abreast of major legal decisions. And he said in the 2008 interview: “I make sure I catch ‘Judge Judy’ every day.”

Services will be held at 11 a.m. May 7 in the chapel at Angeles Rosedale Cemetery, 1831 W. Washington Blvd., Los Angeles.

valerie.nelson@latimes.com

Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times

 

Radio Personality Brian Carter of “Carter & Sanborn” has Died

Carter and Sanborn returned to the WDAS’ airwaves in July 2010 hosting afternoons for the vacationing Michael Baisden Show (pictured in center is Quiet Storm host Tony Brown)

Check back for updates… Brian Carter passed away this morning.

Brian Carter, a Baltimore native began his radio career in his hometown. In the late 1980’s and throughout the 90’s, Carter along with Bill Simpson came together to form the hugely popular “Carter and Sanborn in the Morning” show in Philadelphia at WUSL Power 99. The “C&S” morning show became the anchor that launched the station to the heritage status it now enjoys in the radio industry. The show featured a cast of off-beat characters, all voiced by Sanborn, including wise-cracking horoscope reader Horace the Taurus, with Carter playing the voice of reason. The show also featured co-host CeCe McGee as ‘The Skirt with the Dirt.’ Towards the end of their run on Power 99, Wendy Williams joined the show as well. The show was briefly revived in 2005 on WDAS FM, after that station dropped Tom Joyner from its schedule. Carter was a regular host on Sirius XM Satellite Radio and for the past few years he was the weekend midday host at 107.5 WBLS in New York.

Check out more pictures and video below:

A tribute from current and past staff at Power 99 WUSL radio via facebook

Colby Colb OM Radio One Cleveland, Former Morning Host of The Dream Team and host of the Radioactive show at Power 99:
-RIP a true radio legend Brian Carter. We had so many great conversations over the years, thanks for the support and positive encouragement. I recall one time at Power 99 morale was so low and we had a very tense staff meeting and Brian stood up with tears in his eyes and rallied the troops. He loved radio and will be missed.

Mikey Dredd, morning host at Power 99 -As a young dude coming home from college I got a job as a promotions assisiant at Power 99. One of the first people to take me under their wing was Brian Carter. He taught me the ups and downs wrongs and rights of the radio industry. He was so excited for me and Uncleo Uncleoo when we got the Morning show shift. He always told us to “remain humble” and “finish the job”. …RIP to the man who gave me the name “Mikey Dredd” who was a Friend, Mentor, Brother and a great person!!


Uncle O, morning host at Power 99 -I would like to send my condolences to my mentor and the reason I do and love radio RIP to Brian Carter formerly from the Carter and Sanborn show…he always told me to just finish the Job thx Carter love u bro I learned a lot from u and u will be missed

 

Saying Goodbye to Gil Noble

Black luminaries, colleagues and fans gathered in Harlem to bid farewell to the beloved journalist.

Eloquent tributes from a stream of religious leaders, elected officials, academics and celebrities punctuated a three-hour funeral service for journalist Gil Noble, who was gratefully remembered in New York City on Friday as the nation’s “electronic griot.” He died April 5 at the age of 80.

At the service, held at Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, notables such as Minister Louis Farrakhan; former New York Mayor David Dinkins; actor Danny Glover; and Susan L. Taylor, retired editor of Essence magazine, offered glowing appreciation for Noble’s effort to inform and educate African Americans over four decades on his WABC-TV show Like It Is. Despite professional risk, his show — America’s longest-running issues-oriented Sunday show aimed at black Americans — overflowed with powerful documentaries and, often, controversial guests who were misunderstood by many mainstream Americans.

Harlem’s Abyssinian Church has long featured high-profile funerals for African-American luminaries. Among them have been services for both Adam Clayton Powells — the father and his son, the famous congressman Adam Jr. — Ossie Davis, Count Basie and jazz singer Dakota Staton. The service for Noble followed in this tradition.

Amiri Baraka, the Newark, N.J.-based poet and fiery political activist, delivered a resolution, read by Abyssinian’s senior minister, Calvin Butts III, commending Noble’s dedication to informing black Americans and equipping them with knowledge. It was signed by Newark Mayor Cory Booker and all City Council members.

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the largest such collection worldwide, also paid homage to Noble in a tribute sent by Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, its director.

Noble, who died at his Montclair, N.J., home after suffering a debilitating stroke in 2011, was as magnetic in death as he was in life. Adoring New Yorkers also packed the church Thursday evening for another three-hour service, during which venerable New York journalist Les Payne announced that “Gil loved him some Harlem, and Harlem loved him back!”

That love was manifest as grateful New Yorkers stood in line — first on Thursday afternoon, waiting for a hearse from Benta’s Funeral Home to arrive with Noble’s body; and, on early Friday morning, for the same vehicle to bring the body for the second service.

First in line on early Thursday afternoon was Frezzel Martin. To guard against being crowded out of the service by the crush of mourners, Martin had arrived at 3:45 p.m., although the service wasn’t scheduled to begin until 7 p.m. “I’m here for an African-American icon,” she told The Root.

Martin said her childhood in segregated Virginia “created an inferiority complex. But when I started watchingLike It Is, I began feeling a lot better about myself. Gil Noble’s show put a stop to [feeling bad about myself] and changed my outlook and my life.”

Every Sunday morning mourner Adina Malik, who was also standing in line, said she “went to church to receive spiritual food,” adding, “in the afternoon, I watched Like It Is to receive cultural food.”

Kathy McCook, who stood in line to attend the Friday service, told The Root, “I learned black history through watching Like It Is and Gil Noble.” The show, she said, was so educational that she “could actually do [her] homework by watching it.”

Hours after the funeral, during the reception at the Schomburg Center, Noble’s wife, Norma Jean, sat surrounded by relatives and friends. Married to him since 1959, when they united after a brief courtship, she said adjusting to life without him, “a man who never yelled, screamed or raised his voice,” will take time.

“I have to get used to being without him,” she said.

F. Finley McRae is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles.

 

Okoro Harold Johnson, 1925-2012

Chicago actor, director helped promote African-American theater community

 

Okoro Harold Johnson, a veteran of film, stage and television, mentored thousands in the African-American theater community and in 1971 co-founded the eta Creative Arts Foundation.

“He was one of the most important educators and artists that we had,” said Jackie Taylor, founder and executive director of the Black Ensemble Theater. “If his spirit had not passed this way, a lot of people would be lost right now in this field.”

Mr. Johnson, 86, died of bone cancer Tuesday, April 3, at the Renaissance at South Shore nursing home, said his wife, Martha O’Kennard-Johnson.

Mr. Johnson started eta with Abena Joan Brown, Al Johnson and Archie Weston Sr. He met Brown while studying theater at Roosevelt University, and the two became involved in the Chicago Black Arts Movement.

The idea behind eta was to promote the work of African-American performers, who often found opportunity lacking.

“Okoro and I began to get calls (asking) did we know any black actors,” Brown said. She remembered Mr. Johnson saying, “Well, maybe we have to do something about that.”

“I said, ‘Yes, we do,'” she said, “and (we) proceeded to do it.”

“They were that generation right before me,” said Chuck Smith, resident director at theGoodman Theatre. “They were locked out, so they started things right here in the community.”

Mr. Johnson was artistic director of the eta for 17 years. He was also director of the South Shore Cultural Center and an educator at Chicago State University and City Colleges of Chicago, according to his wife. He directed plays written by African-American theater luminaries Ossie Davis and Ron Milner, and also wrote poetry, short stories and plays.

“He had an authenticity as a human being that translated into the way he approached art,” said Phillip Thomas, eta president.

When Milner premiered his play “Checkmates,” about disparities in values among African-American generations, at eta in 1987, Mr. Johnson played the role of Frank Cooper. He was an understudy to the late Paul Winfield when the production moved to Broadway the next year with a cast featuring Denzel Washington and Ruby Dee.

“He was a wonderful actor in the genre and the voice of ‘we’ — black people,” Brown said.

Mr. Johnson was considered an “actor’s director” for his way of drawing actors in and working with them effectively. He was among directors of writer and broadcast journalist Richard Durham’s “Bird of the Iron Feather” soap opera that premiered in 1970 onWTTW-TV in Chicago.

After the series was canceled, Mr. Johnson was a leader of a “Save the Bird Committee” that accused WTTW of blocking the show from national rebroadcast.

“He wanted to tell stories that were important to his people,” Thomas said. “He was very grounded in the African-American community.”

As an actor, he appeared in films including “The Spook Who Sat by the Door” and Robert Altman‘s “A Wedding.”

Harold C. Johnson was born in Chicago and graduated from DuSable High School. He received a bachelor’s degree in theater from Roosevelt and a master’s in theater from Governors State University. At some point, he took the name Okoro, which translates as prince, or young man, in Nigerian dialects.

Colleagues remembered Mr. Johnson for his commitment to instruction and the establishment of vibrant African-American theater nationwide.

“Black theater in Chicago would be a lot different, a lot poorer, a lot less interesting had there not been Okoro Harold Johnson,” Thomas said.

Survivors also include a brother, Willard; a son, Robert; daughter, Nailah; and three grandchildren.

Services were held.

Copyright © 2012, Chicago Tribune

 

Gil Noble joins the ancestors

Gil Nobel

The AmNews has confirmed that legendary New York City television personality Gil Noble has died. Noble was famous for anchoring the news on WABC 7 and hosting the long-running, weekly Black public affairs program “Like it Is.” He was 80.

WABC 7 Vice President of Public Affairs, Saundra Thomas, confirmed the passing on Thursday. Noble suffered a serious stroke in 2011 leaving him in critical condition taking him away from television.

Starting his career at WABC 7 in 1967 as a reporter, he became an anchor at the station in 1968. Among the many awards he won, Noble earned four Emmy Awards for his work.

Funeral arrangements at this time are pending.

WABC President and General Manager Dave Davis told the AmNews in a phone interview that Noble died peacefully surrounded by family.

“He was a huge part of our legacy at WABC,” Davis said. “He was really responsible for pioneering a lot of the programming that came after him. Gil took it upon himself to educate the entire community about African-American history.”

Davis added that Noble’s family is setting up a fund to preserve the library of archival footage during Noble’s celebrated career.

 

 

Artist, Elizabeth Catlett passes

Elizabeth Catlett

Elizabeth Catlett

By JASMIN K. WILLIAMS

Pioneering artist, master sculptor and printmaker, Elizabeth Catlett passed on April 2 at her home in Cuernavaca, Mexico. She was 96. Catlett was one of the few remaining links to the great Harlem Renaissance of the 1920’s and ‘30’s, and counted Langston Hughes, W. E. B. DuBois, Paul Roberson, Thurgood Marshall and Jacob Lawrence among her friends. Her groundbreaking work, which featured strong, graceful and elegant depictions of black women, cemented her place as one of the most important American artists of the 20th Century despite her having live most of her life in Mexico.

Catlett was born in Washington, D.C. on April 15, 1919 to schoolteachers, John and Mary Carson Catlett. She attended the famed Dunbar High School where she decided on a career as an artist. She won a scholarship to the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pa, but was denied because of her race. She studied design and drawing at Howard University and graduated cum laude in 1935 and was the first student to receive a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa in 1940.

During the infamous McCarthy era of the 1940s and ‘50s, hundreds of artists, both black and white, including Catlett, were accused of communist sympathies and were driven underground.

In 1946, Catlett won a Rosenwald Fund Fellowship and went to Mexico to study wood and ceramic sculpture at the Escuela de Pintura y Escultura in Esmerelsa. The following year, she married artist Francisco Victor Mora and became a Mexican citizen. The couple had three sons.

Catlett is most noted for her sculptures of the female nude. She began working in wood, studying wood carving with Jose L. Ruiz from 1955 to 1959. Catlett described her work as representations of black women and herself.

” I am a black woman. I use my body in working. When I am bathing or dressing, I see and feel how my body looks and moves. I never do sculpture from a nude model… Mostly I watch women.”

From 1958 to 1975, Catlett taught at the National Autonomous University of Mexico where she was the first female professor of sculpture.

Her work, though popular in Mexico, was not as well known in the United States until 1993 when her sculptures were selected for exhibition at the June Kelly Gallery in New York. After that, her work was featured in solo exhibitions across the country.

Over the past 25 years, Catlett’s prints and sculptures have found renewed appreciation and have been exhibited in major museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum Her prints have been exhibited worldwide.

Catlett’s sculptures and prints were recognized by the Women’s Caucus for Art the International Sculpture Center, for whom she received a Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award in 2003.

To see the work of this important African American artist, visit www.elizabethcatlett.net.