Notable Births
*Clifford Leopold Alexander, Jr., a lawyer, businessman and public servant who became the first African American to serve as Secretary of the Army (1977-1981), was born in New York City, New York (September 21).
Clifford Alexander, Jr., was born in New York City in 1933 to Clifford Leopold Alexander and his wife. He attended its private Ethical Culture and Fieldston Schools. Alexander graduated from Harvard College in 1955 and from Yale Law School in 1958. He enlisted in the New York National Guard in 1958 and served briefly with the 369th Field Artillery Battalion at Fort Dix, New Jersey.
He married Adele Logan in 1959. She became a professor at George Washington University after earning her doctorate in history and has specialized in African-American history. They have a daughter, Elizabeth Alexander (born in 1962) and son Mark C. Alexander (born 1965).
After being admitted to the bar, Alexander served as an assistant district attorney for New York County, 1959–1961. He became executive director of the Manhattanville Hamilton Grange Neighborhood Conservation Project. He next served as program and executive director of Harlem Youth Opportunities. He also practiced law in New York City.
In 1963 during the John F. Kennedy administration, Alexander was called to Washington to serve as a foreign affairs officer on the National Security Council staff. He served next as deputy special assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson, associate special counsel, and deputy special counsel on the White House staff, 1964–1967. Alexander was appointed as chairman of the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 1967–1969. Acting as a special representative of the President, he headed the United States delegation to ceremonies marking the independence of the Kingdom of Swaziland in 1968.
Leaving government service after Republican Richard M. Nixon was elected to the presidency, Alexander practiced law with the Washington firm of Arnold and Porter between 1969 and 1975. He was a television news commentator in Washington, D. C., 1972–1976; and also taught as a professor of law at Howard University, 1973–1974. In 1974, he ran unsuccessfully as a candidate for mayor of the District of Columbia.
Alexander returned to law, becoming a partner in the law firm of Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson and Hand in 1975.
Alexander returned to public service as Secretary of the Army under the Carter Administration, serving from February 14, 1977, to January 20, 1981. During this time he concentrated upon making the all-volunteer Army work, stressed programs to enhance professionalism, and emphasized the award of contracts to minority businesses to fulfill the federal commitment to encourage diversity.
Alexander was outspoken in his opposition to the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy of the 1990s. He called for its repeal by Congress.
Alexander was outspoken in his opposition to the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy of the 1990s. He called for its repeal by Congress.
He formed the consulting firm of Alexander and Associates in 1981. In addition, he served on the boards of directors of several national corporations and was a member of the Board of Governors of the American Stock Exchange.
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*Gerald William Barrax, a poet and the author of Leaning Against the Sun, was born in Attalia, Alabama (June 21).
Gerald Barrax was born in Attalla, Etowah County, Alabama, on June 21, 1933, to Aaron and Dorthera Barrax. He lived in rural Alabama until 1944, when he and his family moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as part of the Great Migration. His father had moved there earlier seeking work during World War II. Barrax was not always interested in poetry and ultimately came late to it. His interest was sparked initially during his senior year in high school when a girl wrote him a poem after he had been hospitalized for several days following a tonsillectomy. After graduating high school in 1951, Barrax worked for a year with U.S. Steel in Homestead, Pennsylvania, to earn money for college. The job unexpectedly proved to be a turning point for his interest in poetry when an ex-convict co-worker at the steel mill introduced him to Walter Benton's poetry, love poems written in diary format. Benton's work had a profound impact on Barrax's perception of poetry both in stimulating his interest and in influencing his poetic style.
Barrax enrolled at Duquesne University in 1952 as a pharmacy major. Financial problems forced him to drop out after a year, however, and he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force. He was stationed in Greenville, South Carolina, at Donaldson Air Force base, where he worked as a radio mechanic. During this time, Barrax wrote a great deal of poetry despite being largely unaware of poetic conventions. He discovered Clement Wood's Poets' Handbook and used it to teach himself about the art and craft of poetry. Barrax was discharged in 1957 with the final rank of Airman First Class. In 1954, Barrax met and married Geneva Catherine Lucy, with whom he would have three sons.
After his discharge, Barrax returned to Duquesne and, with the GI Bill to fund his schooling, earned a bachelor of arts in 1963. In 1967, Barrax entered the University of Pittsburgh and completed a master of arts in English in 1969. During this time, Barrax held multiple jobs, including cab driver, mail carrier and postal clerk, awning hanger, and encyclopedia salesman. That same year, he took a teaching job at North Carolina Central University and then joined the North Carolina State University (NC State) faculty in 1970. He divorced Geneva in 1971 and married Joan Dellimore, with whom he had two daughters. An award from the Ford Foundation prompted him to pursue a PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but he dropped out of the program after he realized that the doctoral work was limiting his time to write. He stayed on as an instructor at North Carolina State, also serving as the editor of Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora, a literary journal he brought to the university in 1985.
Barrax's poetry, both in form and thematic material, reflects a personal introspection and a deep commitment to poetical craft as an art. His work is characterized by three major periods. His earliest work explores existentialism and reflects the Black Arts movement, the literary and arts manifestation of the Black Power movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. His middle works are distinctly personal, often confessional. And his later works maintain the confessional themes but gravitate toward ruminating on both personal and social anxieties. In creating his work, Barrax draws from what he knows—he merges influences, technique and craft, and personal experience to address themes such as the African American experience, romantic love, music, and the power of verse, as well as death, God, and religion.
Barrax published his first book in 1970, nearly two decades after he first began writing poetry. The work, entitled Another Kind of Rain, featured poems he had written over many years that dealt with the search for renewal and center around themes of father-son relationships and the general African American experience. In 1980, his second collection was published called An Audience of One. This second collection is equally personal; it reflects on his movement from one marriage to another and explores the possibilities that a new family and new beginnings might have. His third work, The Deaths of Animals and Lesser Gods, was published a short time later in 1984. The themes of this work shift from experiences with family to experiences through faith. Barrax focuses on possibilities of belief and the belief in belief.
Despite the enthusiasm of his publishers over his first three books, Barrax received little popular recognition for his work. It was not until his fourth work, Leaning Against the Sun (1992), was nominated for the National Book Award that he began to be noticed by a wider audience. Leaning Against the Sun celebrates domestic peace and further attempts to understand God and humanity and meditates on freedom and faith. In 1995, he edited and published a collection of work from Obsidian under the title Obsidian II: Black Literature in Review. Barrax published his last volume, From a Person Sitting in Darkness: Selected and New Poems, in 1997. Released by Louisiana State University Press, the work is a career retrospective collection.
In 1997, Barrax retired from his position as professor of English and Poet-in-Residence at North Carolina State. During his career, he earned various awards including the Ford Foundation Fellowship, the Sam Ragan Award, and the Raleigh Medal of Arts. He was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2006 and was the recipient of the 2009 North Carolina Literature Award.
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*Camille Billops, painter, sculptor, and filmmaker, was born in Los Angeles (August 12).
*Camille Billops, painter, sculptor, and filmmaker, was born in Los Angeles (August 12).
Camille Billops (b. August 12, 1933, Los Angeles, California), an African American sculptor, filmmaker, archivist, and printmaker.
Billops was born in Los Angeles on 12 August 1933. Her parents, Alma Gilmore and Lucius Billops, worked "in service" for a Beverly Hills family, enabling them to provide her with a private secondary education at a Catholic school. Billops traced the beginning of her art to her parents' creativity in cooking and dressmaking.
Billops graduated in 1960 from Los Angeles State College, where she majored in education for physically handicapped children. She obtained her B.A. degree from California State University and her M.F.A. degree from City College of New York in 1975. In 1987, she married Jamew Hatch, a playwright and theater producer.
Billops's primary visual art medium is sculpture and her works are in the permanent collections of the Jersey City Museum and the Museum of Drawers, Bern, Switzerland. Billops has exhibited in one-woman and group exhibitions worldwide including: Gallerie Akhenaton, Cairo, Egypt; Hamburg, Germany; Kaohsiung, Taiwan; Gimpel and Weitzenhoffer Gallery, and El Museo de Arte Moderno La Tertulia, Cali, Colombia. She was a long time friend and colleague of master printmaker Robert Blackburn, whom she assisted in establishing the first printmaking workshop in Asilah in 1978.
Although she began her career as a sculptor, ceramist, and painter, Billops is best known as a filmmaker of the black diaspora. In 1982, Billops began her filmmaking career with Suzanne, Suzanne. She followed this by directing five more films, including Finding Christa in 1991, a highly autobiographical work that garnered the Grand Jury Prize for documentaries at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival. Finding Christa has also been aired as part of the Public Broadcasting Service's P. O. V. television series. Her other film credits include Older Women and Love in 1987, The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just Rednecks in 1994, Take Your Bags in 1998, and A String of Pearls in 2002. Billops produced all of her films with her husband and their film company, Mom and Pop Productions.
Billops's film projects have been collaborations with, and stories about, members of her family. For instance, they were co-produced with her husband James Hatch and credit Hatch's son as director of photography. Suzanne, Suzanne studies the relationship between Billop's sister Billie and Billie's daughter Suzanne. Finding Christa deals with Billops's daughter whom she gave up for adoption. Older Women and Love is based on a love affair of Billops's aunt.
In 1961, the seeds of Hatch-Billops Collection were sown when Billops met James Hatch, a professor of theater at UCLA, through Billops's stepsister, Josie Mae Dotson, who was Hatch's student. A 40-year artistic collaboration followed. The Collection is an archive of African-American memorabilia including thousands of books and other printed materials, more than 1,200 interviews, and scripts of nearly 1,000 plays. Once housed in a 120-foot-long (37 m) loft in lower Manhattan, the Collection is now largely located at the Camille Billops and James V. Hatch archives at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Library at Emory University.
Hatch and Billops also hosted a salon in their Manhattan loft, which led to the publication of Artist and Influence, an annual journal featuring interviews with noted American "marginalized artists" across a wide range of genres. To date, more than three hundred interviews have been recorded.
Billops collaborated with photographer James Van Der Zee and poet, scholar, and playwright Owen Dodson on The Harlem Book of the Dead, which was published in 1978 with an introduction by Toni Morrison.
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*Lonnie Brooks, a blues singer and guitarist, was born in Dubuisson, Louisiana (December 18).
Lonnie Brooks (b. Lee Baker, Jr., December 18, 1933, Dubuisson, St. Landry Parish, Louisiana - d. April 1, 2017, Chicago, Illinois) was born in Dubuisson, St. Landry Parish, Louisiana. He learned to play blues from his banjo-picking grandfather but did not think about a career in music until he moved to Port Arthur, Texas, in the early 1950s. There he heard live performances by Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, T-Bone Walker, B. B. King, Long John Hunter and others and began to think about making money from music. Clifton Chenier heard Brooks strumming his guitar on his front porch in Port Arthur and offered him a job in his touring band.
Embarking on a solo career, he began calling himself Guitar Jr. and signed with the Goldband label, based in Lake Charles, Louisiana. His singles for the label included the regional hit "Family Rules". Other Goldband singles included "Made in the Shade" and "The Crawl" (both of which were later recorded by the Fabulous Thunderbirds).
In 1960, he moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he adopted the stage name Lonnie Brooks (Luther Johnson was already using the name Guitar Junior in Chicago). Brooks found regular work in clubs on the West Side of Chicago, in nearby Gary and East Chicago, Indiana, and occasionally in the Rush Street entertainment area on Chicago's North Side. Brooks recorded numerous singles for various labels, including Chess, Chirrup, Mercury, Midas and USA Records, receiving some local radio airplay. He also supported other artists on record and live, including Jimmy Reed. In 1961, he played guitar on the double album Jimmy Reed at Carnegie Hall.
In 1969, he recorded his first album, Broke an’ Hungry, for Capitol Records. It was produced by Wayne Shuler, son of Eddie Shuler, who had founded Goldband Records in Louisiana.
In 1974, Brooks participated in a multi-artist tour of Europe and recorded an album, Sweet Home Chicago, for the French label Black & Blue. When he returned to Chicago, he began playing regularly at Pepper’s Hideout on the South Side. There he attracted the attention of Bruce Iglauer, head of the fledgling Alligator Records, who had previously seen him at the Avenue Lounge on the city’s West Side.
In 1978, Iglauer included four of Brooks’s songs (including three originals) in the anthology series Living Chicago Blues, released by Alligator. He was signed to the label, which released his album Bayou Lightning the following year. The album won the Grand Prix du Disque Award from the 1980 Montreux Jazz Festival. While in Montreux, Brooks befriended the country music star Roy Clark, who arranged for him to appear on the country music television program Hee Haw.
After that time, Brooks recorded exclusively for Alligator, releasing seven albums in his own name and contributing to shared recordings and compilation appearances. His style, sometimes described as "voodoo blues", included elements of Chicago blues, Louisiana blues, swamp pop and rhythm and blues. Other labels issued pre-1978 recordings by Brooks and compilations of his singles.
Following the release of Bayou Lightning, Brooks began touring in the United States and also returned to Europe. A 1982 trip to Germany resulted in an hour-long live performance on German television. His next album, Hot Shot, was released in 1983. His album Wound Up Tight, released in 1986, featured his most famous fan, Johnny Winter, on guitar. Rolling Stone took notice of the album, running a six-page feature on Brooks. In 1987, BBC Radio broadcast an hour-long live performance by Brooks. By this time, his teenage son Ronnie Baker Brooks was touring with the band. The younger Brooks made his recording debut on his father's album Live from Chicago—Bayou Lightning Strikes.
Brooks’s 1991 release, Satisfaction Guaranteed, received much coverage in the press, including features and articles in the Washington Post, the Village Voice, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Guitar World, Living Blues, Blues Revue, and other publications.
Brooks went on a national concert tour with B. B. King, Buddy Guy, Koko Taylor, Junior Wells and Eric Johnson in the summer of 1993. Eric Clapton, performing in Chicago as part of his "From the Cradle" tour, honored Brooks by inviting the bluesman on stage for an impromptu jam at the blues club Buddy Guy's Legends.
In 1996, Brooks released Roadhouse Rules. The album was produced in Memphis by Jim Gaines, who also produced Luther Allison, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Santana. Ronnie Baker Brooks also played on this album. With fellow Gulf Coast blues veterans Long John Hunter and Phillip Walker (both of whom he had known and played with in the 1950s in Port Arthur), Brooks released Lone Star Shootout in 1999.
Besides his live and recorded performances, Brooks appeared in the films Blues Brothers 2000 and The Express and in two United Kingdom television commercials for Heineken beer. His song "Eyeballin'" was used in the film Forever LuLu. "Got Lucky Last Night", featuring Johnny Winter, was used in the film Masters of Menace. Brooks also co-authored the book Blues for Dummies, with Wayne Baker Brooks and the music historian, guitarist, and songwriter Cub Koda.
Brooks died in Chicago, Illinois, United States, on April 1, 2017, at the age of 83.
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*James Brown, a singer known as the "Godfather of Soul", was born in Barnwell, South Carolina (May 3).
James Brown, (b. May 3, 1933, Barnwell, South Carolina — d. December 25, 2006, Atlanta, Georgia) was one of the most important and influential entertainers in 20th-century popular music and whose remarkable achievements earned him the sobriquet “the Hardest-Working Man in Show Business.”
Brown was raised mainly in Augusta, Georgia, by his great-aunt, who took him in at about the age of five when his parents divorced. Growing up in the segregated South during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Brown was so impoverished that he was sent home from grade school for “insufficient clothes,” an experience that he never forgot and that perhaps explains his penchant as an adult for wearing ermine coats, velour jumpsuits, elaborate capes, and conspicuous gold jewelry. Neighbors taught him how to play drums, piano, and guitar, and he learned about gospel music in churches and at tent revivals, where preachers would scream, yell, stomp their feet, and fall to their knees during sermons to provoke responses from the congregation. Brown sang for his classmates and competed in local talent shows but initially thought more about a career in baseball or boxing than in music.
At age 15, Brown and some companions were arrested while breaking into cars. He was sentenced to 8 to 16 years of incarceration but was released after 3 years for good behavior. While at the Alto Reform School, he formed a gospel group. Subsequently secularized and renamed the Flames (later the Famous Flames), it soon attracted the attention of rhythm-and-blues and rock-and-roll pioneer Little Richard, whose manager helped promote the group. Intrigued by their demo record, Ralph Bass, the artists-and-repertoire man for the King label, brought the group to Cincinnati, Ohio, to record for King Records' subsidiary Federal. The label’s owner, Syd Nathan, hated Brown’s first recording, "Please, Please, Please" (1956), but the record eventually sold three million copies and launched Brown’s extraordinary career. Along with placing nearly 100 singles and almost 50 albums on the best-seller charts, Brown broke new ground with two of the first successful “live and in concert” albums—his landmark Live at the Apollo (1963), which stayed on the charts for 66 weeks, and his 1964 follow-up, Pure Dynamite! Live at the Royal, which charted for 22 weeks.
During the 1960s, Brown was known as “Soul Brother Number One.” His hit recordings of that decade have often been associated with the emergence of the Black Arts and black nationalist movements, especially the songs “
Despite the success, Brown’s life continued to be marked by difficulties, including the tragic death of his third wife, charges of drug use, and a period of imprisonment for a 1988 high-speed highway chase in which he tried to escape pursuing police officers.
Brown’s uncanny ability to “scream” on key, to sing soulful slow ballads as well as electrifying up-tempo tunes, to plumb the rhythmic possibilities of the human voice and instrumental accompaniment, and to blend blues, gospel, jazz and country vocal styles together made him one of the most influential vocalists of the 20th century. His extraordinary dance routines featuring deft deployment of microphones and articles of clothing as props, acrobatic leaps, full-impact knee landings, complex rhythmic patterns, dazzling footwork, dramatic entrances, and melodramatic exits redefined public performance within popular music and inspired generations of imitators (including Michael Jackson). His careful attention to every aspect of his shows, from arranging songs to supervising sidemen, from negotiating performance fees to selecting costumes, guaranteed his audiences a uniformly high level of professionalism every night and established a precedent in artistic autonomy. In the course of an extremely successful commercial career, Brown’s name was associated with an extraordinary number and range of memorable songs, distinctive dance steps, formative fashion trends, and even significant social issues. A skilled dancer and singer with an extraordinary sense of timing, Brown played a major role in bringing rhythm to the foreground of popular music. In addition to providing melody and embellishment, the horn players in his bands functioned as a rhythm section (they had to think like drummers), and musicians associated with him (Jimmy Nolan, Bootsy Collins, Fred Wesley, and Maceo Parker) have played an important role in creating the core vocabulary and grammar of funk music.
James Brown, (b. May 3, 1933, Barnwell, South Carolina — d. December 25, 2006, Atlanta, Georgia) was one of the most important and influential entertainers in 20th-century popular music and whose remarkable achievements earned him the sobriquet “the Hardest-Working Man in Show Business.”
Brown was raised mainly in Augusta, Georgia, by his great-aunt, who took him in at about the age of five when his parents divorced. Growing up in the segregated South during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Brown was so impoverished that he was sent home from grade school for “insufficient clothes,” an experience that he never forgot and that perhaps explains his penchant as an adult for wearing ermine coats, velour jumpsuits, elaborate capes, and conspicuous gold jewelry. Neighbors taught him how to play drums, piano, and guitar, and he learned about gospel music in churches and at tent revivals, where preachers would scream, yell, stomp their feet, and fall to their knees during sermons to provoke responses from the congregation. Brown sang for his classmates and competed in local talent shows but initially thought more about a career in baseball or boxing than in music.
At age 15, Brown and some companions were arrested while breaking into cars. He was sentenced to 8 to 16 years of incarceration but was released after 3 years for good behavior. While at the Alto Reform School, he formed a gospel group. Subsequently secularized and renamed the Flames (later the Famous Flames), it soon attracted the attention of rhythm-and-blues and rock-and-roll pioneer Little Richard, whose manager helped promote the group. Intrigued by their demo record, Ralph Bass, the artists-and-repertoire man for the King label, brought the group to Cincinnati, Ohio, to record for King Records' subsidiary Federal. The label’s owner, Syd Nathan, hated Brown’s first recording, "Please, Please, Please" (1956), but the record eventually sold three million copies and launched Brown’s extraordinary career. Along with placing nearly 100 singles and almost 50 albums on the best-seller charts, Brown broke new ground with two of the first successful “live and in concert” albums—his landmark Live at the Apollo (1963), which stayed on the charts for 66 weeks, and his 1964 follow-up, Pure Dynamite! Live at the Royal, which charted for 22 weeks.
During the 1960s, Brown was known as “Soul Brother Number One.” His hit recordings of that decade have often been associated with the emergence of the Black Arts and black nationalist movements, especially the songs “
Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud” (1968), “
Don’t Be a Drop-Out” (1966), and “
I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothin’ (Open Up the Door, I’ll Get It Myself)” (1969). Politicians recruited him to help calm cities struck by civil insurrection and avidly courted his endorsement. In the 1970s, Brown became “the Godfather of Soul,” and his hit songs stimulated several dance crazes and were featured on the sound tracks of a number of “blaxploitation” films (sensational, low-budget, action-oriented motion pictures with African American protagonists). When hip-hop emerged as a viable commercial music in the 1980s, Brown’s songs again assumed center stage as hip-hop disc jockeys frequently incorporated samples (audio snippets) from his records. He also appeared in several motion pictures, including The Blues Brothers (1980) and Rocky IV (1985), and attained global status as a celebrity, especially in Africa, where his tours attracted enormous crowds and generated a broad range of new musical fusions.
Despite the success, Brown’s life continued to be marked by difficulties, including the tragic death of his third wife, charges of drug use, and a period of imprisonment for a 1988 high-speed highway chase in which he tried to escape pursuing police officers.
Brown’s uncanny ability to “scream” on key, to sing soulful slow ballads as well as electrifying up-tempo tunes, to plumb the rhythmic possibilities of the human voice and instrumental accompaniment, and to blend blues, gospel, jazz and country vocal styles together made him one of the most influential vocalists of the 20th century. His extraordinary dance routines featuring deft deployment of microphones and articles of clothing as props, acrobatic leaps, full-impact knee landings, complex rhythmic patterns, dazzling footwork, dramatic entrances, and melodramatic exits redefined public performance within popular music and inspired generations of imitators (including Michael Jackson). His careful attention to every aspect of his shows, from arranging songs to supervising sidemen, from negotiating performance fees to selecting costumes, guaranteed his audiences a uniformly high level of professionalism every night and established a precedent in artistic autonomy. In the course of an extremely successful commercial career, Brown’s name was associated with an extraordinary number and range of memorable songs, distinctive dance steps, formative fashion trends, and even significant social issues. A skilled dancer and singer with an extraordinary sense of timing, Brown played a major role in bringing rhythm to the foreground of popular music. In addition to providing melody and embellishment, the horn players in his bands functioned as a rhythm section (they had to think like drummers), and musicians associated with him (Jimmy Nolan, Bootsy Collins, Fred Wesley, and Maceo Parker) have played an important role in creating the core vocabulary and grammar of funk music.
Brown recorded 16 singles that peaked at number-one on the Billboard R&B charts. Brown also holds the record for the most singles listed on the Billboard Hot 100 chart which did not reach number-one.
During his long career, James Brown received several prestigious music industry awards and honors. In 1983 he was inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame. Brown was named as one of the first inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at its inaugural induction dinner in New York on January 23, 1986. At that time, the members of his original vocal group, The Famous Flames (Bobby Byrd, Johnny Terry, Bobby Bennett, and Lloyd Stallworth) were not inducted. However, on April 14, 2012, The Famous Flames were automatically and retroactively inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame alongside James Brown, without the need for nomination and voting, under the premise that they should have been inducted with James Brown back in 1986. On February 25, 1992, Brown was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 34th annual Grammy Awards. Exactly a year later, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 4th annual Rhythm & Blues Foundation Pioneer Awards. A ceremony was held for Brown on January 10, 1997 to honor him with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
On June 15, 2000, Brown was honored as an inductee to the New York Songwriters Hall of Fame. On August 6, 2002, he was honored as the first BMI Urban Icon at the BMI Urban Awards. His BMI accolades include an impressive ten R&B Awards and six Pop Awards. On November 14, 2006, Brown was inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame, and he was one of several inductees who performed at the ceremony. In recognition of his accomplishments as an entertainer, Brown was a recipient of Kennedy Center Honors on December 7, 2003. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked James Brown as No. 7 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.
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*Tony Brown, producer and host of the Emmy-winning TV series Black Journal, was born in Charles Town, West Virginia (April 11).
Tony Brown, in full William Anthony Brown (b. April 11, 1933, Charleston, West Virginia), American activist, television producer, writer, educator, and filmmaker who hosted Tony Brown’s Journal (1968–2008; original name Black Journal until 1977), the longest-running black news program in television history.
Brown was the son of Royal Brown and Catherine Davis Brown. Segregation and poverty were a part of Brown’s upbringing and influenced his view that freedom can be achieved only through economic means. Brown attended public schools in Charleston, West Virginia, where he joined the track team and excelled in academics, especially English and drama. He performed in school plays and, shortly before graduating in 1951, performed segments of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar on WGKV radio in Charleston.
After serving in the army from 1953 to 1955, Brown enrolled in Wayne State University in Detroit where he studied sociology and psychology, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1959. Primarily concerned with the suffering caused by poverty that plagued the African American community, Brown continued his studies at Wayne State, focusing on psychiatric social work. He earned a master’s degree in 1961 and began a career as a social worker but quickly discovered that he did not like the work. Changing careers, Brown became a drama critic for the Detroit Courier in 1962. He soon rose to the position of editor at the newspaper, but in 1968 he decided to move on to a job in public-affairs programming at WTVS, Detroit’s public television station.
Over the next 30 years, Brown hosted and produced programming that concerned the black community. While at WTVS, he produced Colored People’s Time, the station’s first show aimed at a black audience, and Free Play, another community-oriented program. In 1970 Brown became executive producer and host of Black Journal, a New York-based program that aired nationally and had begun in 1968. The program consisted of commentaries, documentaries, and surveys. Brown’s approach to Black Journal garnered much criticism. His view of the United States government and its effect on African American life, as well as his seeming arrogance when focusing on the struggles of black people, caused a stir in both the broadcasting and black communities. As a result, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funded the program, announced that it would not fund the 1973–74 season of Black Journal. The national black community protested the decision, however, and the show was aired, although on a limited basis. In 1977 Brown negotiated a contract with the Pepsi-Cola Company to sponsor the show, changing its name to Tony Brown’s Journal and moving it to commercial television. The show was later moved back to public television after Brown experienced trouble getting desirable viewing times on commercial television stations.
Activism was important to Brown. He maintained a strong presence in community-oriented programs as well as launching initiatives of his own. His belief that education was the key to success prompted him to initiate Black College Day to highlight black colleges and the need for African American youth to pursue a college education. He also formed the Council for the Economic Development of Black Americans; the organization’s Buy Freedom campaign encouraged African Americans to patronize black businesses. To address the problem of drug addiction, he wrote and produced a film about the issue, The White Girl (1990).
Brown held academic positions throughout his career. He founded the School of Communications at Howard University in Washington, D. C., in 1971 and served as the school’s dean until 1974. He later served as dean of the Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communications at Hampton University in Virginia from 2004 to 2009.
In addition to writing a syndicated column for many years, Brown also wrote the books Black Lies, White Lies: The Truth According to Tony Brown (1995), Empower the People: A 7-Step Plan to Overthrow the Conspiracy That Is Stealing Your Money and Freedom (1998), and What Mama Taught Me: The Seven Core Values of Life (2003).
Brown was the son of Royal Brown and Catherine Davis Brown. Segregation and poverty were a part of Brown’s upbringing and influenced his view that freedom can be achieved only through economic means. Brown attended public schools in Charleston, West Virginia, where he joined the track team and excelled in academics, especially English and drama. He performed in school plays and, shortly before graduating in 1951, performed segments of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar on WGKV radio in Charleston.
After serving in the army from 1953 to 1955, Brown enrolled in Wayne State University in Detroit where he studied sociology and psychology, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1959. Primarily concerned with the suffering caused by poverty that plagued the African American community, Brown continued his studies at Wayne State, focusing on psychiatric social work. He earned a master’s degree in 1961 and began a career as a social worker but quickly discovered that he did not like the work. Changing careers, Brown became a drama critic for the Detroit Courier in 1962. He soon rose to the position of editor at the newspaper, but in 1968 he decided to move on to a job in public-affairs programming at WTVS, Detroit’s public television station.
Over the next 30 years, Brown hosted and produced programming that concerned the black community. While at WTVS, he produced Colored People’s Time, the station’s first show aimed at a black audience, and Free Play, another community-oriented program. In 1970 Brown became executive producer and host of Black Journal, a New York-based program that aired nationally and had begun in 1968. The program consisted of commentaries, documentaries, and surveys. Brown’s approach to Black Journal garnered much criticism. His view of the United States government and its effect on African American life, as well as his seeming arrogance when focusing on the struggles of black people, caused a stir in both the broadcasting and black communities. As a result, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funded the program, announced that it would not fund the 1973–74 season of Black Journal. The national black community protested the decision, however, and the show was aired, although on a limited basis. In 1977 Brown negotiated a contract with the Pepsi-Cola Company to sponsor the show, changing its name to Tony Brown’s Journal and moving it to commercial television. The show was later moved back to public television after Brown experienced trouble getting desirable viewing times on commercial television stations.
Activism was important to Brown. He maintained a strong presence in community-oriented programs as well as launching initiatives of his own. His belief that education was the key to success prompted him to initiate Black College Day to highlight black colleges and the need for African American youth to pursue a college education. He also formed the Council for the Economic Development of Black Americans; the organization’s Buy Freedom campaign encouraged African Americans to patronize black businesses. To address the problem of drug addiction, he wrote and produced a film about the issue, The White Girl (1990).
Brown held academic positions throughout his career. He founded the School of Communications at Howard University in Washington, D. C., in 1971 and served as the school’s dean until 1974. He later served as dean of the Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communications at Hampton University in Virginia from 2004 to 2009.
In addition to writing a syndicated column for many years, Brown also wrote the books Black Lies, White Lies: The Truth According to Tony Brown (1995), Empower the People: A 7-Step Plan to Overthrow the Conspiracy That Is Stealing Your Money and Freedom (1998), and What Mama Taught Me: The Seven Core Values of Life (2003).
*****
*William Bryant, a recipient of the Medal of Honor for his actions in the Vietnam War, was born in Cochran, Georgia (February 16).
William Maud Bryant (b. February 16, 1933, Cochran, Georgia – d. March 24, 1969, Long Khanh Province, Republic of Vietnam) was a United States Army Special Forces soldier and a recipient of America's highest military decoration — the Medal of Honor — for his actions in the Vietnam War.
Bryant joined the Army from Detroit, Michigan, in 1953. By March 24, 1969 he was serving as a Sergeant First Class in Company A of the 5th Special Forces Group, 1st Special Forces. On that day, in Long Khanh Province, Republic of Vietnam, Bryant led a company of South Vietnamese Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG) troops during an intense attack by North Vietnamese forces until being fatally wounded by enemy fire. For his actions during the battle, Bryant was awarded the Medal of Honor.
William Bryant's Medal of Honor Citation reads:
For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty. Sfc. Bryant, assigned to Company A, distinguished himself while serving as commanding officer of Civilian Irregular Defense Group Company 321, 2d Battalion, 3d Mobile Strike Force Command, during combat operations. The battalion came under heavy fire and became surrounded by the elements of 3 enemy regiments. Sfc. Bryant displayed extraordinary heroism throughout the succeeding 34 hours of incessant attack as he moved throughout the company position heedless of the intense hostile fire while establishing and improving the defensive perimeter, directing fire during critical phases of the battle, distributing ammunition, assisting the wounded, and providing the leadership and inspirational example of courage to his men. When a helicopter drop of ammunition was made to re-supply the beleaguered force, Sfc. Bryant with complete disregard for his safety ran through the heavy enemy fire to retrieve the scattered ammunition boxes and distributed needed ammunition to his men. During a lull in the intense fighting, Sfc. Bryant led a patrol outside the perimeter to obtain information of the enemy. The patrol came under intense automatic weapons fire and was pinned down. Sfc. Bryant single-handedly repulsed 1 enemy attack on his small force and by his heroic action inspired his men to fight off other assaults. Seeing a wounded enemy soldier some distance from the patrol location, Sfc. Bryant crawled forward alone under heavy fire to retrieve the soldier for intelligence purposes. Finding that the enemy soldier had expired, Sfc. Bryant crawled back to his patrol and led his men back to the company position where he again took command of the defense. As the siege continued, Sfc. Bryant organized and led a patrol in a daring attempt to break through the enemy encirclement. The patrol had advanced some 200 meters by heavy fighting when it was pinned down by the intense automatic weapons fire from heavily fortified bunkers and Sfc. Bryant was severely wounded. Despite his wounds he rallied his men, called for helicopter gunship support, and directed heavy suppressive fire upon the enemy positions. Following the last gunship attack, Sfc. Bryant fearlessly charged an enemy automatic weapons position, overrunning it, and single-handedly destroying its 3 defenders. Inspired by his heroic example, his men renewed their attack on the entrenched enemy. While regrouping his small force for the final assault against the enemy, Sfc. Bryant fell mortally wounded by an enemy rocket. Sfc. Bryant's selfless concern for his comrades, at the cost of his life above and beyond the call of duty are in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service and reflect great credit upon himself, his unit, and the U.S. Army.
William Bryant's Medal of Honor Citation reads:
For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty. Sfc. Bryant, assigned to Company A, distinguished himself while serving as commanding officer of Civilian Irregular Defense Group Company 321, 2d Battalion, 3d Mobile Strike Force Command, during combat operations. The battalion came under heavy fire and became surrounded by the elements of 3 enemy regiments. Sfc. Bryant displayed extraordinary heroism throughout the succeeding 34 hours of incessant attack as he moved throughout the company position heedless of the intense hostile fire while establishing and improving the defensive perimeter, directing fire during critical phases of the battle, distributing ammunition, assisting the wounded, and providing the leadership and inspirational example of courage to his men. When a helicopter drop of ammunition was made to re-supply the beleaguered force, Sfc. Bryant with complete disregard for his safety ran through the heavy enemy fire to retrieve the scattered ammunition boxes and distributed needed ammunition to his men. During a lull in the intense fighting, Sfc. Bryant led a patrol outside the perimeter to obtain information of the enemy. The patrol came under intense automatic weapons fire and was pinned down. Sfc. Bryant single-handedly repulsed 1 enemy attack on his small force and by his heroic action inspired his men to fight off other assaults. Seeing a wounded enemy soldier some distance from the patrol location, Sfc. Bryant crawled forward alone under heavy fire to retrieve the soldier for intelligence purposes. Finding that the enemy soldier had expired, Sfc. Bryant crawled back to his patrol and led his men back to the company position where he again took command of the defense. As the siege continued, Sfc. Bryant organized and led a patrol in a daring attempt to break through the enemy encirclement. The patrol had advanced some 200 meters by heavy fighting when it was pinned down by the intense automatic weapons fire from heavily fortified bunkers and Sfc. Bryant was severely wounded. Despite his wounds he rallied his men, called for helicopter gunship support, and directed heavy suppressive fire upon the enemy positions. Following the last gunship attack, Sfc. Bryant fearlessly charged an enemy automatic weapons position, overrunning it, and single-handedly destroying its 3 defenders. Inspired by his heroic example, his men renewed their attack on the entrenched enemy. While regrouping his small force for the final assault against the enemy, Sfc. Bryant fell mortally wounded by an enemy rocket. Sfc. Bryant's selfless concern for his comrades, at the cost of his life above and beyond the call of duty are in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service and reflect great credit upon himself, his unit, and the U.S. Army.
*****
*Lee Calhoun, the 1956 and 1960 Olympic 110 meter hurdles champion, was born in Laurel, Mississippi (February 23).
Lee Quincy Calhoun (b. February 23, 1933, Laurel, Mississippi – d. June 21, 1989, Erie, Pennsylvania) was an American athlete who won the 110 meter hurdles at the 1956 and 1960 Olympic Games.
Born in Laurel, Mississippi, Lee Calhoun, representing North Carolina Central University, won the NCAA 120 yard hurdles in 1956 and 1957. He also won the AAU (Amateur Athletic Union) championships in 110 meter hurdles in 1956 and 1959 and in the 120 yd hurdles in 1957.
At the 1956 Summer Olympics, Calhoun surprisingly improved his personal best in 110 m by almost a full second in a final. He ran 13.5 to win the gold medal, edging teammate Jack Davis with a lunge that just got his shoulder across the line in front. He had learned the maneuver from Davis.
(At the US Olympic Trials, Calhoun had tied for first with 1952 silver medalist Jack Davis. In Melbourne, Davis was likely a slight favorite, as the world record holder, set in winning the 1956 AAU Championship. The final was close throughout. Calhoun got a slight lead at the start and Davis never fully closed, losing out by 3/100ths of a second at the line. In two consecutive Olympics, Davis had lost the gold medals by a combined margin of 0.12 seconds. Duke University’s Joel Shankle won the bronze medal for the United States, the third consecutive Olympics at which American hurdlers had swept the high hurdle medals.)
(At the US Olympic Trials, Calhoun had tied for first with 1952 silver medalist Jack Davis. In Melbourne, Davis was likely a slight favorite, as the world record holder, set in winning the 1956 AAU Championship. The final was close throughout. Calhoun got a slight lead at the start and Davis never fully closed, losing out by 3/100ths of a second at the line. In two consecutive Olympics, Davis had lost the gold medals by a combined margin of 0.12 seconds. Duke University’s Joel Shankle won the bronze medal for the United States, the third consecutive Olympics at which American hurdlers had swept the high hurdle medals.)
Calhoun was suspended in 1958 for receiving gifts on "Bride and Groom," a television game show, and seemed to be past his prime for the 1960 Summer Olympics. However, shortly before the Rome Olympics began, he tied the world record of 13.2 and went to the Olympic Games as a favorite. In the final, he won in 13.98, beating teammate Willie May by 0.01 seconds.
After retiring from competition, he became a college track coach, first at Grambling State University, then at Yale, and finally at Western Illinois University. He was an assistant Olympic coach at the 1976 Summer Olympics.
He was elected to the United States National Track and Field Hall of Fame in 1974.
Lee Calhoun died in Erie, Pennsylvania on June 21, 1989.
*****
*Godfrey Cambridge, a comic and actor, was born in New York City, New York (February 26).
Godfrey MacArthur Cambridge (b. February 26, 1933, New York City, New York – November 29, 1976, Burbank, California) was a stand-up comic and actor. Alongside Bill Cosby, Dick Gregory, and Nipsey Russell, he was acclaimed by Time magazine in 1965 as "one of the country's four most celebrated Negro comedians."
Cambridge was born Godfrey MacArthur Cambridge in New York City, New York, on February 26, 1933 to Alexander and Sarah Cambridge, who were immigrants from British Guiana. His parents, dissatisfied with the New York Public School System, sent him to live with his grandparents in Sydney, Nova Scotia, during his primary school years. When he was 13, Cambridge moved back to New York and attended Flushing High School in Flushing, Queens.
In 1949, Cambridge studied medicine at Hofstra College, which he attended for three years before dropping out to pursue a career in acting.
While pursuing an acting career, Cambridge supported himself with a variety of jobs, including cab driver, bead-sorter, ambulance driver, gardener, judo instructor, and clerk for the New York City Housing Authority, as well as cleaning airplanes and making popcorn bunnies.
His first role was as a bartender in the off-Broadway play Take a Giant Step. He made his Broadway debut in the original production of Herman Wouk's 1957 play Nature's Way. Cambridge received a 1962 Tony Award nomination as part of the original cast of Purlie Victorious, a play written by and starring Ossie Davis. Cambridge was featured in an opening-night cast that also included Ruby Dee, Alan Alda, Sorrell Booke, Roger C. Carmel, Helen Martin, and Beah Richards.
Godfrey's memorable film roles include The President's Analyst (1967), where he plays a depressed government agent, and Watermelon Man (1970), in which he played the lead character, a white bigot who one day wakes up and discovers his skin color has turned black. He also had a starring role in the 1970 Ossie Davis adaptation of the Chester Himes novel Cotton Comes to Harlem, as well as its 1972 sequel, Come Back, Charleston Blue. Cambridge made an impressive cameo appearance in director Sidney Lumet's Bye Bye Braverman (1968) as a Yiddish speaking New York City cab driver involved in a car collision with the main protagonists, and another as a gay underworld figure in the 1975 film Friday Foster. His other film appearances included roles in The Busy Body (1967), The Biggest Bundle of Them All (1968), The Biscuit Eater (1972), Beware! The Blob (1972), and Whiffs (1975).
He hosted, financed, and produced Dead is Dead (1970), a drug-awareness film. It gave an uncensored look at the downside of drug-use, showing actual drug users injecting drugs and going through withdrawal.
Cambridge appeared on several network television programs, including Car 54 Where Are You? ("The Curse of the Snitkins"), The Dick Van Dyke Show ("The Man From My Uncle"), I Spy ("Court of the Lion"), and Police Story ("Year of the Dragon"). He also had a small speaking part as a member of Sgt. Bilko's platoon in The Phil Silvers Show, 1957 episode "Boys Town". Cambridge gave an acclaimed performance alongside Tom Bosley in the episode "Make Me Laugh" of Rod Serling's Night Gallery, a story about a failed comedian who looks to a genie for a quick fix to success. The episode was directed by Steven Spielberg. Cambridge perhaps reached his largest television audience in a series of comical commercials for Jockey brand underwear.
Cambridge later appeared in Jean Genet's The Blacks: A Clown Show, giving a performance that earned him an Obie Award in 1961. Four years later, he did a stock version of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
In addition to acting, Cambridge had major success as a stand-up comedian. By 1965, he was earning as much as $4,000 a week, working the best places, such as San Francisco's hungry i and Hollywood's Crescendo. He appeared on The Tonight Show and was introduced by his favorite actress Joan Crawford on The Hollywood Palace. His routines were imbued with biting sarcasm and the trenchant topical humor that was common in comedic circles at the time.
Cambridge, along with writer Maya Angelou and actor Hugh Hurd, organized one of the first benefits for Martin Luther King, Jr. held in New York City. It was held at the Village Gate in the late 1950s and raised $9,000 for King's civil rights movement.
Cambridge married actress Barbara Ann Teer in 1962. The couple divorced three years later. During the 1970s, Cambridge remained in semi-retirement, making few public appearances and marrying Audriano Meyers in 1972.
Cambridge died of a heart attack at the age of 43 while on the Burbank, California, set of the ABC television movie Victory at Entebbe, in which he was to portray the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.
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*Joycelyn Elders, a pediatrician who became the first African American appointed Surgeon General of the United States, was born in Schaal, Arkansas (August 13).
Minnie Joycelyn Elders (b. Minnie Lee Jones, August 13, 1933, Schaal, Arkansas) is a pediatrician and public health administrator. She was a vice admiral in the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps and, in 1993, became the first African American appointed as Surgeon General of the United States. Elders is best known for her frank discussion of her views on controversial issues such as drug legalization and distributing contraception in schools. She was fired in December 1994 amidst controversy as a result of her views.
Elders was born Minnie Lee Jones in Schaal, Arkansas, to a poor farm sharecropping family. She was the eldest of eight children, and was valedictorian of her school class. The family also spent two years near a defense plant in Richmond, California. In college, she changed her name to Minnie Joycelyn Lee. In 1952, she received her B.S. degree in Biology from Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Arkansas, where she also pledged Delta Sigma Theta. After working as a nurse's aide in a Veterans Administration hospital in Milwaukee for a period, she joined the United States Army in May 1953. During her three years in the Army, she was trained as a physical therapist. She then attended the University of Arkansas Medical School, where she obtained her M.D. degree in 1960. After completing an internship at the University of Minnesota Hospital and a residency in pediatrics at the University of Arkansas Medical Center, Elders earned an M.S. degree in Biochemistry in 1967.
Elders received a National Institutes of Health career development award, also serving as assistant professor in pediatrics at the University of Arkansas Medical Center from 1967. She was promoted to associate professor in 1971 and professor in 1976. Her research interests focused on endocrinology, and she received board certification as a pediatric endocrinologist in 1978, becoming the first person in the state of Arkansas to do so. Elders also received a D. Sc. degree from Bates College in 2002.
In 1987, then Governor Bill Clinton appointed Elders as Director of the Arkansas Department of Health. Her accomplishments in this position included a tenfold increase in the number of early childhood screenings annually and almost a doubling of the immunization rate for two-year-olds in Arkansas. In 1992, she was elected President of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officers.
In January 1993, the new President Bill Clinton appointed Elders as the United States Surgeon General, making her the first African American and the second woman (following Antonia Novello) to hold the position. She was a controversial choice and a strong backer of the Clinton health care plan, so she was not confirmed until September 7, 1993. As Surgeon General, Elders quickly established a reputation for controversy. Like many of the Surgeons General before her, she was an outspoken advocate of a variety of health-related causes. She argued for an exploration of the possibility of drug legalization and backed the distribution of contraceptives in schools. President Clinton stood by Elders, saying that she was misunderstood.
Elders drew fire - and censure from the Clinton administration - when she suggested that legalizing drugs might help reduce crime and that the idea should be studied. On December 15, 1993, around one week after making these comments, charges were filed against her son Kevin, for selling cocaine in an incident involving undercover officers, four months prior. Elders believed the incident was a frame-up and that the timing of the charges was designed to embarrass her and the president. Kevin Elders was convicted, and he was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He appealed his conviction to the Arkansas Supreme Court, and that court reaffirmed the conviction. The court held that Kevin Elders failed to show that he was entrapped into making the narcotics sale. There was no further appeal.
In 1994, Elders was invited to speak at a United Nations conference on AIDS. She was asked whether it would be appropriate to promote masturbation as a means of preventing young people from engaging in riskier forms of sexual activity, and she replied, "I think that it is part of human sexuality, and perhaps it should be taught." This remark caused great controversy and resulted in Elders losing the support of the White House. Elders was fired by President Clinton in December 1994.
A collection of her professional papers are held at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland.
After leaving her post as Surgeon General, she returned to the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences as professor of pediatrics. She became a regular on the lecture circuit, speaking against teen pregnancy.
In 1991, Elders received a Candace Award from the National Coalition of 100 Black Women.
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*Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of Medgar Evers and a chairperson of the NAACP, was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi (March 17).
Myrlie Louise Evers–Williams (b. Myrlie Louise Beasley, March 17, 1933, Vicksburg, Mississippi) worked for over three decades to seek justice for the murder of her civil rights activist husband Medgar Evers in 1963. She was also chairwoman of the NAACP from 1995 to 1998, and published several books on topics related to civil rights and her husband’s legacy. On January 21, 2013, she delivered the invocation at the second inauguration of Barack Obama.
Evers was born Myrlie Louise Beasley on March 17, 1933, in her maternal grandmother’s home in Vicksburg, Mississippi, the daughter of James Van Dyke Beasley, a delivery man, and Mildred Washington Beasley, who was 16 years old. Myrlie’s parents separated when she was just a year old. Her mother left Vicksburg and had decided that Myrlie was too young to bring with her. Since her maternal grandmother worked all day in service, leaving her no time to raise a child, Myrlie was raised by her paternal grandmother, Annie McCain Beasley, and an aunt, Myrlie Beasley Polk. Both women were respected school teachers and they inspired her to follow in their footsteps. Myrlie attended the Magnolia school, took piano lessons, and performed songs, piano pieces or recited poetry at school, in church, and at local clubs.
Myrlie graduated from Magnolia High School (Bowman High School) in Vicksburg in 1950. During her years in high school, Myrlie was also a member of the Chansonettes, a girls’ vocal group from Mount Heroden Baptist Church in Vicksburg. In 1950, Myrlie enrolled at Alcorn A&M College, one of the few colleges in the state that accepted African American students, as an education major intending to minor in music. Myrlie also became a member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority. An incident on her first day on campus altered her plans, -- Myrlie met and fell in love with Medgar Evers, a World War II veteran several years her senior. The couple married on Christmas Eve of 1951. They would move to Mound Bayou, have three children, Darrell Kenyatta, Reena Denise, and James Van Dyke. In Mound Bayou, Myrlie worked as a secretary at the Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company.
When Medgar Evers became the Mississippi field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1954, Myrlie worked alongside him. Myrlie became his secretary and together they organized voter registration drives and civil rights demonstrations. She assisted him as he strove to end the practice of racial segregation in schools and other public facilities and campaigned for voting rights as many African Americans were denied this right in the South. For more than a decade, the Everses fought for voting rights, equal access to public accommodations, the desegregation of the University of Mississippi, and for equal rights in general for Mississippi's African American population. As prominent civil rights leaders in Mississippi, the Everses became high-profile targets for pro-segregationist violence and terrorism. In 1962, their home in Jackson, Mississippi, was firebombed in reaction to an organized boycott of downtown Jackson’s white merchants. The family had been threatened, and Evers targeted by the Ku Klux Klan.
In the early morning of June 12, 1963, just hours after President John F. Kennedy's nationally televised Civil Rights Address, Medgar Evers pulled into his driveway after returning from a meeting with NAACP lawyers. Emerging from his car and carrying NAACP T-shirts that read "Jim Crow Must Go", Evers was struck in the back with a bullet fired from an Enfield 1917 rifle. The bullet ripped through his heart. He staggered 30 feet (9.1 meters) before collapsing. He was taken to the local hospital in Jackson, Mississippi, where he was initially refused entry because of his race. His family explained who he was and he was admitted. He died in the hospital 50 minutes later.
After Evers was assassinated, an estimated 5,000 people marched from the Masonic Temple on Lynch Street to the Collins Funeral Home on North Farish Street in Jackson, Mississippi. Allen Johnson, Martin Luther King, and other civil rights leaders led the procession.
Mourned nationally, Evers was buried on June 19, 1963, in Arlington National Cemetery, where he received full military honors before a crowd of more than 3,000.
On June 21, 1963, Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and member of the White Citizens' Council (and later of the Ku Klux Klan), was arrested for Medgar Evers' murder. District Attorney, and future governor, Bill Waller prosecuted De La Beckwith.
The state twice prosecuted De La Beckwith for murder in 1964, but both trials ended with hung juries. The jurors were all male and all white. Mississippi had effectively disenfranchised black voters since 1890, and they were excluded from serving on juries, whose membership was limited to voters. During the second trial, the former Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett interrupted the trial to shake hands with De La Beckwith while Myrlie Evers, the widow of the activist, was testifying.
After Byron De La Beckwith's second trial, Myrlie Evers moved with her children to Claremont, California, and emerged as a civil rights activist in her own right. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in sociology from Pomona College. She spoke on behalf of the NAACP and in 1967 co-wrote For Us, the Living, which chronicled her late husband's life and work. She also made two unsuccessful bids for Congress.
From 1968 to 1970, Evers was the director of planning at the center for Educational Opportunity for the Claremont Colleges.
From 1968 to 1970, Evers was the director of planning at the center for Educational Opportunity for the Claremont Colleges.
From 1973 to 1975, Evers was the vice-president for advertising and publicity at the New York-based advertising firm, Seligman and Lapz. In 1975, she moved to Los Angeles to become the national director for community affairs for the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO). At ARCO she was responsible for developing and managing all the corporate programs. This included overseeing funding for community projects, outreach programs, public and private partnership programs and staff development. She helped secure money for many organizations such as the National Woman’s Educational Fund, and worked with a group that provided meals to the poor and homeless.
Myrlie Evers-Williams continued to explore ways to serve her community and to work with the NAACP. Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley appointed her to the Board of Public Works as a commissioner in 1987. Evers-Williams was the first black woman to serve as a commissioner on the board, a position she held for 8 years. Evers-Williams also joined the board of the NAACP. By the mid-1990s, the prestigious organization was going through a difficult period marked by scandal and economic problems. Evers-Williams decided that the best way to help the organization was to run for chairperson of the board of directors. She won the position in 1995, just after her second husband’s death due to prostate cancer. As chairperson of the NAACP, Evers-Williams worked to restore the tarnished image of the organization. She also helped improve its financial status, raising enough funds to eliminate its debt. Evers-Williams received many honors for her work, including being named Woman of the Year by Ms. Magazine. With the organization financially stable, she decided not to seek re-election as chairperson in 1998. In that same year, she was awarded the NAACP's Spingarn Medal.
Myrlie Evers-Williams continued to explore ways to serve her community and to work with the NAACP. Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley appointed her to the Board of Public Works as a commissioner in 1987. Evers-Williams was the first black woman to serve as a commissioner on the board, a position she held for 8 years. Evers-Williams also joined the board of the NAACP. By the mid-1990s, the prestigious organization was going through a difficult period marked by scandal and economic problems. Evers-Williams decided that the best way to help the organization was to run for chairperson of the board of directors. She won the position in 1995, just after her second husband’s death due to prostate cancer. As chairperson of the NAACP, Evers-Williams worked to restore the tarnished image of the organization. She also helped improve its financial status, raising enough funds to eliminate its debt. Evers-Williams received many honors for her work, including being named Woman of the Year by Ms. Magazine. With the organization financially stable, she decided not to seek re-election as chairperson in 1998. In that same year, she was awarded the NAACP's Spingarn Medal.
After leaving her post as chairwoman of the NAACP, Evers-Williams established the Medgar Evers Institute in Jackson, Mississippi. She also wrote her autobiography, titled Watch Me Fly: What I Learned on the Way to Becoming the Woman I Was Meant to Be (1999). She also served as editor on The Autobiography of Medgar Evers: A Hero's Life and Legacy Revealed Through His Writings, Letters, and Speeches(2005).
In 2009, Evers-Williams received the National Freedom Award from the National Civil rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee.
In 1976, Evers married Walter Williams, a longshoreman and civil rights and union activist who had studied Evers and his work. They moved to Bend, Oregon in 1989. Williams died in 1995.
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*Etta Zuber Falconer, an educator and mathematician who was one of the first African American women to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics, was born in Tupelo, Mississippi (November 21).
Etta Zuber (b. November 21, 1933, Tupelo, Mississippi – d. September 18, 2002, Atlanta, Georgia) was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, to Walter A. Zuber, a physician, and Zadie L. Montgomery Zuber, a musician. The Zubers had two daughters, with Etta being the younger and Alice the older. While teaching at Okolona Junior College in Okolona, Mississippi, Etta met and married Dolan Falconer, a basketball coach. They had three children – Dolan Falconer Jr., who became a nuclear engineer; Alice Falconer Wilson, a pediatrician; and Walter Zuber Falconer, a urologist. The couple's marriage lasted over 35 years, ended by Dolan's death.
Etta Falconer attended the Tupelo public school system, graduating from George Washington High School in 1949. At the age of 15, she entered Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, where she majored in mathematics and minored in chemistry, graduating summa cum laude in 1953. While at Fisk, Falconer was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society.
She went on to study at the University of Wisconsin, where she earned a Master of Science degree in mathematics in 1954. Lonely in Wisconsin, she decided not to pursue her doctorate there and returned to Mississippi to teach. After a 1965 family move to Atlanta, she entered graduate school at Emory University. At Emory she earned a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1969, with a dissertation on abstract algebra.
To assist in setting up a computer science department while mathematics department head at Spelman College, she returned to graduate school at Atlanta University, earning a Master of Science degree in computer science in 1982.
Falconer began her teaching career in 1954 at Okolona Junior College, where she met and married Dolan Falconer. She remained at Okolona until 1963, when she accepted a position at Howard High School in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she taught the academic year 1963-64. When her husband was offered a coaching position at Morris Brown College in 1965, the family moved to Atlanta, also the site of Spelman College, an historically black women's college.
Falconer's mother had studied at Spelman, and Falconer approached the head of the mathematics department, telling him that she wanted to teach there. She was appointed an instructor in 1965. Falconer advanced to associate professor, leaving Spelman in 1971 to join the mathematics department at Norfolk State University, where she taught for the academic year 1971-1972. Falconer returned to Spelman as professor of mathematics and head of the mathematics department.
Falconer devoted 37 years of her life to teaching mathematics and improving science education at Spelman College.
In 1995, Falconer was honored by the Association for Women in Mathematics, who awarded her the Louise Hay Award for outstanding achievements in mathematics education. In 2001, she received the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement.
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*Louis Farrakhan (Louis Eugene Walcott) was born in New York City (May 11). As Louis Farrakhan, he would become national representative of Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam, and upon Muhammad's death, he would lead a faction of the movement.
Louis Farrakhan, in full Louis Abdul Farrakhan, original name Louis Eugene Walcott (b. May 11, 1933, Bronx, New York), African American leader (from 1978) of the Nation of Islam, an African American movement that combined elements of Islam and black nationalism. Walcott, as he was then known, was raised in Boston by his mother, Sarah Mae Manning, an immigrant from St. Kitts and Nevis. Deeply religious as a boy, he became active in the St. Cyprian’s Episcopal Church in his Roxbury neighborhood. He graduated with honors from the prestigious Boston English High School, where he also played the violin and was a member of the track team. He attended the Winston-Salem Teachers College from 1951 to 1953 but dropped out to pursue a career in music. Known as “The Charmer,” he performed professionally on the Boston nightclub circuit as a singer of calypso and country songs. In 1953 he married Khadijah, with whom he would have nine children.
In 1955 Walcott joined the Nation of Islam. Following the custom of the Nation, he replaced his surname with an “X,” a custom among Nation of Islam followers who considered their family names to have originated with white slaveholders. Louis X first proved himself at Temple No. 7 in Harlem, where he emerged as the protégé of Malcolm X, the minister of the temple and one of the most prominent members of the Nation of Islam. Louis X was given his Muslim name, Abdul Haleem Farrakhan, by Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam. Farrakhan was appointed head minister of Boston Temple No. 11, which Malcolm had established earlier.
After Malcolm X’s break with the Nation in 1964 over political and personal differences with Elijah Muhammad, Farrakhan replaced Malcolm as head minister of Harlem’s Temple No. 7 and as the National Representative of the Nation, the second in command of the organization. Like his predecessor, Farrakhan was a dynamic, charismatic leader and a powerful speaker with the ability to appeal to the African American masses.
When Elijah Muhammad died in February 1975, the Nation of Islam fragmented. Surprisingly, the Nation’s leadership chose Wallace Muhammad (now known as Warith Deen Mohammed), the fifth of Elijah’s six sons, as the new Supreme Minister. Disappointed that he was not named Elijah’s successor, Farrakhan led a breakaway group in 1978, which he also called the Nation of Islam and which preserved the original teachings of Elijah Muhammad. Farrakhan disagreed with Wallace Muhammad’s attempts to move the Nation to orthodox Sunni Islam and to rid it of Elijah Muhammad’s radical black nationalism and separatist teachings, which stressed the inherent wickedness of whites.
Farrakhan became known to the American public through a series of controversies that began during the 1984 presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson, whom Farrakhan supported. Farrakhan withdrew his support after Jewish voters protested his praise of Adolf Hitler, and he has been embroiled in a continuing conflict with the American Jewish community because of his making allegedly anti-Semitic statements; Farrakhan has denied being anti-Semitic. In later speeches he blamed the United States government for what he claimed was a conspiracy to destroy black people with AIDS and addictive drugs.
In 1995 the Nation sponsored the Million Man March in Washington, D.C., to promote African American unity and family values. Estimates of the number of marchers, most of whom were men, ranged from 400,000 to nearly 1.1 million, making it the largest gathering of its kind in American history. Under Farrakhan’s leadership, the Nation of Islam established a clinic for AIDS patients in Washington, D.C., and helped to force drug dealers out of public housing projects and private apartment buildings in the city. It also worked with gang members in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, the Nation continued to promote social reform in African American communities in accordance with its traditional goals of self-reliance and economic independence.
In the early 21st century, the core membership of Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam was estimated at between 10,000 and 50,000—though in the same period Farrakhan was delivering speeches in large cities across the United States that regularly attracted crowds of more than 30,000. Under Farrakhan’s leadership, the Nation was one of the fastest growing of the various Muslim movements in the country. Foreign branches of the Nation were formed in Ghana, London, Paris, and the Caribbean islands. In order to strengthen the international influence of the Nation, Farrakhan established relations with Muslim countries, and in the late 1980s he cultivated a relationship with the Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi. After a near-death experience in 2000 resulting from complications from prostate cancer (he was diagnosed with cancer in 1991), Farrakhan toned down his racial rhetoric and attempted to strengthen relations with other minority communities, including Native Americans, Hispanics, and Asians. Farrakhan also moved his group closer to orthodox Sunni Islam in 2000, when he and Imam Warith Deen Mohmmed, the leading American orthodox Muslim, recognized each other as fellow Muslims.
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*Walter Fauntroy, the long-time Congressional Delegate for Washington, D. C., was born in Washington, D. C. (February 6).
Walter Edward Fauntroy was born in Washington, D.C., on February 6, 1933, to Ethel Vine and William T. Fauntroy. Graduating from Virginia Union University with a B.A. in 1955 and from Yale University Divinity School with a B.D. in 1958. The following year he became pastor of his childhood church, New Bethel Baptist Church in Washington, D.C.
In 1961, Fauntroy was appointed by Martin Luther King, Jr. as director of the Washington Bureau of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He then worked as the Washington, D.C. coordinator of the historic 1963 March on Washington and directed the 1965 Selma to Montgomery March, the 1966 Meredith Mississippi Freedom March, and the 1983 20th Anniversary March on Washington. In 1966, Fauntroy founded and served as the president of the Model Inner City Community Organization, a group committed to community and neighborhood development.
In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Fauntroy vice chairman of the White House's "To Fulfill These Rights" conference. One year later, Johnson appointed him vice chairman of the Council of the District of Columbia, and in 1971 Fauntroy was elected as the District of Columbia's delegate to Congress. He served ten terms in this role and designed and engineered many significant changes in national public policy. He was also one of the founding members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Fauntroy served for six years as chair of the Subcommittee on International Development, Finance, Trade and Monetary Policy while he was member of the House Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs Committee. In 1977 Fauntroy founded the National Black Leadership Roundtable for leaders of National African American organizations. Fauntroy was chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus Brain Trust on Black Voter Participation and Network Development.
In 1984, Fauntroy was arrested at the South African Embassy as part of the Free South Africa Movement. Fauntroy married to Dorothy Simms and they had two children.
In 2012, Fauntroy disappeared and presumably fled the United States after a bench warrant was issued for his arrest in conjunction with allegations he had written a fraudulent check for $55,000. Fauntroy's wife was eventually forced to file for bankruptcy. While his whereabouts were initially unknown to even his family, it was assumed Fauntroy was living somewhere in the Persian Gulf. In 2016, Fauntroy returned to the United States and was arrested at Washington Dulles International Airport. He had been hiding in Ajman, the capital of the Emirate of Ajman in the United Arab Emirates.
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*Tom Feelings, an illustrator and comic strip artist, was born in Brooklyn, New York (May 19).
Tom Feelings (b. May 19, 1933, Brooklyn, New York – d. August 25, 2003, Mexico) was a cartoonist, children's book illustrator, author, teacher, and activist. Through his works, he framed the African American experience. His most famous book is The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo.
Feelings was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He attended the School of the Visual Arts, and later lived in Ghana and Guyana. He was the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
His earliest known (signed) comic book work may be the story "Scandal" in Key Publication's third issue of Radiant Love (February 1953).
A skilled cartoonist, Feelings created the groundbreaking comic strip Tommy Traveler In the World of Negro History for the New York Age in 1958 after leaving the Air Force. Based on his own experience after discovering the adult section of the public library while researching a school project, Tommy Traveler is a black youth's dream adventures in American history while reading of notable black heroes. This material was released in book form in 1991.
In about 1960 Feelings illustrated the NAACP's four-color comic for voter registration, The Street Where You Live. Another early piece was for Look magazine, doing portraits of children in New Orleans in 1962.
Around 1968 he met Bertram Fitzgerald and he became one of the first contributors to Fitzgerald's new line of black history comics with the umbrella title Golden Legacy. In an interview Fitzgerald recalled at this time Feelings had done a previous biography of Crispus Attucks, the first casualty of the American Revolution, which was adapted into the Golden Legacy series. Crispus Attucks was one of the characters in the Tommy Traveler newspaper strip.
From the late 1960s through the 1990s, Feelings concentrated on children's books, illustrating other authors' works as well as writing his own. Notable titles included To Be a Slave (written by Julius Lester), Moja Means One: Swahili Counting Book, Jambo Means Hello: A Swahili Alphabet Book, and The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo.
Feelings died aged 70 in 2003, in Mexico, where he had been receiving treatment for cancer.
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*Ernest Gaines, the author of A Lesson Before Dying, was born in Oscar, Louisiana (January 15).
Ernest James Gaines (b. January 15, 1933, Oscar, Louisiana) is an African-American author whose works have been taught in college classrooms and translated into many languages, including French, Spanish, German, Russian and Chinese. Four of his works have been made into television movies.
His 1993 novel, A Lesson Before Dying, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Gaines was a MacArthur Foundation fellow, awarded the National Humanities Medal, and inducted into the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of Arts and Letters) as a Chevalier.
Gaines was among the fifth generation of his sharecropper family to be born on a plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana. This became the setting and premise for many of his later works. He was the eldest of 12 children, raised by his aunt, who was crippled and had to crawl to get around the house. Although born generations after the end of slavery, Gaines grew up impoverished, living in old slave quarters on a plantation.
Gaines' first years of school took place in the plantation church. When the children were not picking cotton in the fields, a visiting teacher came for five to six months of the year to provide basic education. Gaines then spent three years at St. Augustine School, a Catholic school for African Americans in New Roads, Louisiana. Schooling for African-American children did not continue beyond the eighth grade during this time in Pointe Coupee Parish.
When he was 15 years old, Gaines moved to Vallejo, California, to join his mother and stepfather, who had left Louisiana during World War II. His first novel was written at age 17, while babysitting his youngest brother, Michael. According to one account, he wrapped it in brown paper, tied it with string, and sent it to a New York publisher, who rejected it. Gaines burned the manuscript, but later rewrote it to become his first published novel, Catherine Carmier.
In 1956, Gaines published his first short story, The Turtles, in a college magazine at San Francisco State University (SFSU). The next year he earned a degree in literature from SFSU. After spending two years in the Army, he won a writing fellowship to Stanford University.
In 1996, Gaines spent a full semester as a visiting professor at the University of Rennes in France, where he taught the first creative writing class ever offered at the French university system.
Later in life, Gaines came to live on Louisiana Highway 1 in Oscar, Louisiana, where he and his wife built a home on part of the old plantation where he grew up. He had the church he grew up with moved to his property.
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*Artist Sam Gilliam was born in Tupelo, Mississippi (November 30).
Sam Gilliam (b. November 30, 1933, Tupelo, Mississippi) is a Color Field Painter and Lyrical Abstractionist artist. Gilliam is associated with the Washington Color School. and is broadly considered a Color He works on stretched, draped, and wrapped canvas, and adds sculptural 3D elements. He is recognized as the first artist to introduce the idea of a painted canvas hanging without stretcher bars c.1965, a major contribution to the Color Field School.
Sam Gilliam was born in Tupelo, Mississippi and was the seventh of eight children born to Sam and Estery Gilliam. The Gilliams moved to Louisville, Kentucky, shortly after Sam was born. His father worked on the railroad, and his mother cared for the large family. Gilliam began painting in elementary school and received much encouragement from teachers. In 1951, Gilliam graduated from Central High School in Louisville. Gilliam served in the United States Army from 1956 to 1958. He received his bachelor's and master's degree of Fine Arts from the University of Louisville. In 1955, Gilliam had his first solo exhibition at the University of Louisville. He initially taught art for a year in the Louisville public schools. In 1962, he married Dorothy Butler, a Louisville native and a well-known journalist. That same year, Gilliam moved to Washington, D.C.
In the 1960s, as the political and social front of America began to explode in all directions, the black artist began to take bold declarative initiatives, making definitive imagery, inspired by the specific conditions of the African American experience. Abstraction remained a critical issue for artists like Sam Gilliam. Gilliam's sense of color is modulated by his study of light, color, and its transformative and changing dynamics. He is most widely known for the large color-stained canvases he draped and suspended from the walls and ceilings during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The background for Gilliam's art was the 1950s, which witnessed the emergence of abstract expressionism and the New York School followed by Color Field painting. Gilliam's early style developed from brooding figural abstractions into large paintings of flatly applied color pushed Gilliam to eventually remove the easel aspect of painting by eliminating the stretcher.
Gilliam was influenced by German Expressionists such as Emil Nolde, Paul Klee and the American Bay Area Figurative School artist Nathan Oliveira. He also found lots of clues on how to go about his work from Tatlin, Frank Stella, Hans Hoffman, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, and Paul Cezanne. In 1963, Thomas Downing, an artist who identified himself with the Washington Color School, introduced Gilliam to this new school of thought. Around 1965 Gilliam became the first painter to introduce the idea of the unsupported canvas. He was inspired to do this by observing laundry hanging outside his Washington studio. His drape paintings were suspended from ceilings, arranged on walls or floors, and they represent a sculptural, third dimension in painting. Gilliam states that his paintings are based on the fact that the framework of the painting is in real space. He is attracted to its power and the way it functions. Gilliam's draped canvases change in each environment they are arranged in and frequently he embellishes the works with metal, rocks, and wooden beams.
In 1975, Gilliam veered away from the draped canvases and became influenced by jazz musicians such as Miles Davis and John Coltrane. He started producing dynamic geometric collages, which he called "Black Paintings" due to the hue. Again, in the 1980s Gilliam's style changed dramatically to quilted paintings reminiscent of African patchwork quilts from his childhood. His began to create textured paintings that incorporate metal forms. Gilliam's ability to move beyond the draped canvas, coupled with his ability to adopt new series kept the viewers interested and engaged. This assured his prominence in the art world as an exciting and innovative contemporary painter.
Gilliam became one of the few successful, self-supporting African American artists who viewed the teaching of art as a mission. His love of teaching developed during the one year he spent in Louisville public schools. He taught for nearly a decade in the Washington public schools, and then at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and the University of Maryland, and for several years at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In addition, Gilliam devoted time to conducting workshops, participating in panels, and delivering lectures in this country and abroad.
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Nathan Hare, 91, Forceful Founder of First Black Studies Program, Dies
Seeking to bring the ideas of Black power into the classroom — and coining the term “ethnic studies” — he clashed with a university as well as allies on the left.
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Nathan Hare, a sociologist who helped lead a five-month strike by faculty members and students at what is now San Francisco State University, resulting in an agreement in 1969 to create the country’s first program in Black studies, with him as its director, died at a hospital in San Francisco on June 10. He was 91.
His death was confirmed by the poet and playwright Marvin X, a close friend of Dr. Hare’s.
A son of Oklahoma sharecroppers who was educated in the state’s segregated schools and later at the University of Chicago, Dr. Hare was a leading figure in bringing the ideas of Black power into academic circles, first at Howard University and then at San Francisco State College (now University), and later as a co-founder of The Black Scholar, a leading interdisciplinary journal.
He considered himself a Black nationalist, and in all three roles he clashed with both the establishment administrations and other factions on the political left, particularly Marxists.
Dr. Hare was forced out of his job at Howard in 1967 after a public fight with its president, who wanted to accept more white students. The next year, he arrived at San Francisco State, which already had courses in “minority studies,” and immediately began pushing for an interdisciplinary program dedicated to studying the Black experience.
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He also bristled at the term “minority studies” and pushed back at its use by coining the term “ethnic studies.”
The administration resisted, leading to a five-month strike in 1968 and ’69 by faculty members and students — who, Dr. Hare frequently pointed out, were mostly white, though their ranks also included future Black figures like the actor Danny Glover and the politician Ron Dellums.
Two presidents were forced to resign over the strife. A third, S. I. Hayakawa, when he was interim president, cracked down on the protesters by allowing the police to arrest hundreds of them. But in early 1969 he and the protest leaders reached an agreement that included the creation of a Black studies program, to be led by Dr. Hare. (Dr. Hayakawa was later made permanent president and served as a U.S. senator from California from 1977 to 1983.)
The peace did not last long. After Dr. Hare insisted that the department was not a traditional academic unit but a revolutionary tool, Dr. Hayakawa fired him.
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Dr. Hare returned to campus that fall, asserting that he was the rightful department head; he even tried to hold his own classes. But the university eventually forced him out, and he left academia for good.
“Nathan was the agent who symbolized this great battlefront with the mainstream,” Abdul Alkalimat, a professor emeritus of African American studies and library science at the University of Illinois, said by phone. “And like the Marines, you take a hit, and you create the possibility of those who come after you.”
Later in 1969, Dr. Hare joined the poet Robert Chrisman and Allan Ross, a printer, to found The Black Scholar in Oakland (today it is published by Boston University). In interviews, he described it as a forum for connecting artists, activists and intellectuals with the emerging “ebony tower” of Black studies, feeding it ideas and arguments.
The journal quickly became one of the leading Black intellectual publications, with essays by thinkers like Amiri Baraka and Angela Davis. Dr. Alkalimat served on its board.
“The Black Scholar was the leading magazine of Black intellectual thought,” the poet and novelist Ishmael Reed, a frequent contributor, said in an interview. Part of its success, he said, was that “it didn’t come off like an academic journal.”
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Dr. Hare resigned in 1975, citing a turn toward Marxism by the rest of the journal’s leadership, at the expense of Black nationalism. “That majority is now Black Marxist, and I soon found my contribution sabotaged and almost liquidated,” he told The New York Times at the time.
Nathaniel Hare was born on April 9, 1933, in Slick, Okla., southwest of Tulsa, to Seddie and Tishia (Lee) Hare.
His parents separated when Nathan was young. During World War II, his mother moved him and his siblings to San Diego, where she worked as a janitor on a naval base and where Nathan developed an interest in boxing. When he expressed interest in going professional, his mother moved them back to Oklahoma.
Despite his continued interest in the pugilistic arts, he excelled in school and was accepted into Langston University, the only historically Black college in Oklahoma. He worked full time as a janitor to pay his way and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1955.
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Dr. Hare married a fellow Langston student, Julia Reed, in 1956. She died in 2019. He had no immediate survivors.
He went on to study sociology at the University of Chicago, receiving a master’s degree in 1957 and his doctorate in 1962.
He joined the faculty at Howard, in Washington, in 1961. The city was a center of civil rights activism, while many of his students, including the organizer Stokely Carmichael and the writer Claude Brown, were preparing to push the struggle in a radical, separatist direction.
Dr. Hare agreed with them, and soon found himself at odds with the university, which had prided itself as an engine of growth for the Black bourgeoisie. His first book, “Black Anglo-Saxons” (1965), was a searing critique of the Black middle class.
Things came to a boil in 1967, when Howard’s president, James Nabrit Jr., told The Washington Post that he aspired to boost the school’s white enrollment to well over half the student body.
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Dr. Hare wrote a cutting response that not only took Mr. Nabrit to task but also called for a new approach to Black higher education, one directed by Black faculty members and students. He also invited the boxer Muhammad Ali to speak on campus, a move opposed by Mr. Nabrit because of Ali’s antiwar stance.
Dr. Nabrit forced Dr. Hare to resign in 1967, after which San Francisco State offered him a position.
Following his departure from San Francisco State and The Black Scholar, Dr. Hare took up a career in clinical psychology, receiving a second doctorate from the California School of Professional Psychology in 1975.
Along with running a private psychology practice, Dr. Hare and his wife founded a research institution, the Black Think Tank, which published a series of books on Black life in America, several of which he wrote himself, including “The Endangered Black Family” (1984).
In 2019, Dr. Hare received a lifetime achievement honor from the American Book Awards, which cited “Black Anglo-Saxons” and “The Endangered Black Family” as keystone texts in the canon of Black studies.
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*Gene Harris, a jazz pianist known for his rendition of "Ode to Billie Joe", was born in Benton Harbor, Michigan (September 1).
Gene Harris (b. September 1, 1933, Benton Harbor, Michigan – d. January 16, 2000, Boise, Idaho) was a jazz pianist known for his warm sound and blues and gospel infused style that is known as soul jazz.
From 1956 to 1970, he played in The Three Sounds trio with bassist Andy Simpkins and drummer Bill Dowdy. During this time, The Three Sounds recorded regularly for Blue Note and Verve.
Harris was mostly retired to Boise, Idaho, starting in the late 1970s, although he performed regularly at the Idanha Hotel there. Then, Ray Brown convinced him to go back on tour in the early 1980s. He played with the Ray Brown Trio and then led his own groups, recording mostly on Concord Records, until his death from kidney failure in 2000.
Harris's rendition of "Ode to Billie Joe" is known as a jazz classic. One of his most popular numbers was his "Battle Hymn of the Republic," a live version of which is on his Live at Otter Crest album, published by Concord.
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*Richard Hatcher, a politician who became the first African American to serve as Mayor of Gary, Indiana, was born (July 10).
Richard Gordon Hatcher (b. July 10, 1933, Michigan City, Indiana) became on January 1, 1968, the first African-American Mayor of Gary, Indiana. He was the first African American candidate elected mayor of a United States city larger than 100,000 people and the first elected African American mayor in the state of Indiana. Carl Stokes was elected days later as the mayor of Cleveland, and was sworn into office prior to Hatcher's inauguration.
Hatcher was born on July 10, 1933, in Michigan City, Indiana. He received a B.S. degree in business and government from Indiana University, a bachelor of law with honors in criminal law in 1956 and a J.D. from Valparaiso University School of Law in 1959. After moving to Gary, Indiana, Hatcher began practicing law in East Chicago, Indiana. In 1961, he began serving as a deputy prosecutor for Lake County, Indiana, until he was elected to Gary's City Council in 1963. He was the first and only freshman elected president of the City Council in Gary's history.
Hatcher was inaugurated mayor of Gary in 1968 and served until 1987. During his tenure as mayor, he became internationally known as a fervent civil rights spokesman. Hatcher was known for developing innovative approaches to urban problems and for being a national and international spokesman for civil rights, minorities, the poor and America's cities. He often delivered speeches alongside Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, and other historic proponents of the civil rights movement. On April 5, 1968, Hatcher addressed President Lyndon B. Johnson, along with a collection of politicians and civil rights leaders, on the topic of the King assassination the night before and pending civil unrest.
In the 1984 United States presidential election, Mayor Hatcher served as the chairman for Jackson's campaign. He served as the Vice-Chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 1981 to 1985. In 1988, Hatcher started his own consulting firm, R. Gordon Hatcher & Associates. From 1988 to 1989, he worked as an Institute of Politics Fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. He also began teaching political science at Roosevelt University in 1989 and later became a senior research professor at Valparaiso University, in 1991. In the summer of 1996, Hatcher taught a law course at Cambridge University in England.
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*Ben Jobe, the long-time head basketball coach of Southern University, was born in Nashville, Tennessee (March 2).
Ben W. Jobe (b. March 2, 1933, Nashville, Tennessee – d. March 10, 2017, Montgomery, Alabama) was best known as the head basketball coach of the Southern University Jaguars – a position he held for 12 years. He was also head coach of the men's college basketball teams at Tuskegee University, Talladega College, Alabama State University, South Carolina State University, University of Denver and Alabama A&M University. Jobe also served as assistant coach at the University of South Carolina, Georgia Tech, and briefly served as an assistant with the NBA's Denver Nuggets.
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*Ben Jobe, the long-time head basketball coach of Southern University, was born in Nashville, Tennessee (March 2).
Ben W. Jobe (b. March 2, 1933, Nashville, Tennessee – d. March 10, 2017, Montgomery, Alabama) was best known as the head basketball coach of the Southern University Jaguars – a position he held for 12 years. He was also head coach of the men's college basketball teams at Tuskegee University, Talladega College, Alabama State University, South Carolina State University, University of Denver and Alabama A&M University. Jobe also served as assistant coach at the University of South Carolina, Georgia Tech, and briefly served as an assistant with the NBA's Denver Nuggets.
Ben Jobe was raised in Nashville, Tennessee. He attended Pearl High School in Nashville where he was a successful basketball player. In 1950, Jobe earned all-district and all-state honors and was then named to the 1951 all-national high school team.
Jobe then enrolled at Fisk University, earning All-Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference honors during his junior and senior seasons. He earned a bachelor's degree from Fisk in 1956 and later went on to earn a master's degree from Tennessee State University. In 1958, Jobe began his coaching career at Cameron High School in Nashville, Tennessee. His first (and only) Cameron team won 24 games, a school record. After the season was over, Jobe decided to move to Sierra Leone, West Africa, to coach a junior college basketball team. Jobe's coaching had a quick effect: his teams posted back-to-back undefeated seasons.
Jobe returned to the United States and began coaching at Talladega College in Alabama, a position which he held for three years.
Ben Jobe took the helm of the Southern University Jaguars in 1986. He stayed on until 1996. He returned again to Southern in 2001 for two more seasons, retiring completely from college basketball in 2003. In 12 years at Southern, Jobe compiled a 209-141 record, led the Jaguars to the NCAA tournament four times, went to the National Invitational Tournament (NIT) once, won five Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference Championships, won 11 Southwestern Athletic Conference Championships.
Perhaps his most memorable moment as a college basketball coach was the Jaguars' 93-78 win over the then ACC Champions, Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets, during the first round of the 1993 NCAA Tournament in Tucson, Arizona.
Jobe coached former San Antonio Spurs star guard (former coach of the Brooklyn Nets and Dallas Mavericks) Avery Johnson and late Charlotte Hornets player Bobby Phills.
At the time of his retirement from Southern in 2003, Jobe had accumulated 524 wins as a head coach in college basketball spread among 8 teams over 31 seasons (a 0.611 win percentage).
At the time of his retirement from Southern in 2003, Jobe had accumulated 524 wins as a head coach in college basketball spread among 8 teams over 31 seasons (a 0.611 win percentage).
Jobe died on March 10, 2017.
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*Trumpeter and record producer Quincy Delight Jones, winner of 28 Grammys, was born in Chicago (March 14).
Quincy Jones, in full Quincy Delight Jones, Jr., byname “Q” (b. March 14, 1933, Chicago, Illinois), American musical performer, producer, arranger, and composer whose work encompasses virtually all forms of popular music.
Jones was born in Chicago and reared in Bremerton, Washington, where he studied the trumpet and worked locally with the then-unknown pianist-singer Ray Charles. In the early 1950s, Jones studied briefly at the prestigious Schillinger House (now Berklee College of Music) in Boston before touring with Lionel Hampton as a trumpeter and arranger. He soon became a prolific freelance arranger, working with Clifford Brown, Gigi Gryce, Oscar Pettiford, Cannonball Adderley, Count Basie, Dinah Washington, and many others. He toured with Dizzy Gillespie's big band in 1956, recorded his first album as a leader in the same year, worked in Paris for the Barclay label as an arranger and producer in the late 1950s, and continued to compose. Some of his more successful compositions from this period include “
Back in the United States in 1961, Jones became an artists-and-repertoire (or “A&R” in trade jargon) director for Mercury Records. In 1964, he was named a vice president at Mercury, thereby becoming one of the first African Americans to hold a top executive position at a major American record label. In the 1960s, Jones recorded occasional jazz dates, arranged albums for many singers (including Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, and Billy Eckstine), and composed music for several films, including The Pawnbroker (1964), In the Heat of the Night (1967), and In Cold Blood (1967). Jones next worked for the A&M label from 1969 to 1981 (with a brief hiatus as he recovered from a brain aneurysm in 1974) and moved increasingly away from jazz toward pop music. During this time he became one of the most famous producers in the world, his success enabling him to start his own record label, Qwest, in 1980.
Jones’s best-known work includes producing an all-time best-selling album, Michael Jackson's Thriller (1982), organizing the all-star charity recording “
Quincy Jones, in full Quincy Delight Jones, Jr., byname “Q” (b. March 14, 1933, Chicago, Illinois), American musical performer, producer, arranger, and composer whose work encompasses virtually all forms of popular music.
Jones was born in Chicago and reared in Bremerton, Washington, where he studied the trumpet and worked locally with the then-unknown pianist-singer Ray Charles. In the early 1950s, Jones studied briefly at the prestigious Schillinger House (now Berklee College of Music) in Boston before touring with Lionel Hampton as a trumpeter and arranger. He soon became a prolific freelance arranger, working with Clifford Brown, Gigi Gryce, Oscar Pettiford, Cannonball Adderley, Count Basie, Dinah Washington, and many others. He toured with Dizzy Gillespie's big band in 1956, recorded his first album as a leader in the same year, worked in Paris for the Barclay label as an arranger and producer in the late 1950s, and continued to compose. Some of his more successful compositions from this period include “
Stockholm Sweetnin’,” “
For Lena and Lennie,” and “
Jessica’s Day.”
Back in the United States in 1961, Jones became an artists-and-repertoire (or “A&R” in trade jargon) director for Mercury Records. In 1964, he was named a vice president at Mercury, thereby becoming one of the first African Americans to hold a top executive position at a major American record label. In the 1960s, Jones recorded occasional jazz dates, arranged albums for many singers (including Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, and Billy Eckstine), and composed music for several films, including The Pawnbroker (1964), In the Heat of the Night (1967), and In Cold Blood (1967). Jones next worked for the A&M label from 1969 to 1981 (with a brief hiatus as he recovered from a brain aneurysm in 1974) and moved increasingly away from jazz toward pop music. During this time he became one of the most famous producers in the world, his success enabling him to start his own record label, Qwest, in 1980.
Jones’s best-known work includes producing an all-time best-selling album, Michael Jackson's Thriller (1982), organizing the all-star charity recording “
We Are the World” (1985), and producing the film The Color Purple (1985) and the television series The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (1990–96). In 1993, he founded the magazine Vibe, which he sold in 2006. Throughout the years, Jones has worked with a “who’s who” of figures from all fields of popular music. He was nominated for more than 75 Grammy Awards (winning more than 25) and seven Academy Awards and received an Emmy Award for the theme music he wrote for the television miniseries Roots (1977). Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones was published in 2001. In 2013 Jones was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Reggie Lavong, (b. Reginald Jerome Nelson, April 5, 1933, Gainesville, Florida - d. September 19, 2017, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), a velvet-voiced radio personality who played rhythm and blues and more in the 1960s on WWRL-AM in New York, was born in Gainesville, Florida (April 5).
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*Mildred McDaniel-Singleton (b. Mildred Louise McDaniel, November 4, 1933, Atlanta, Georgia – d. September 30, 2004, Pasadena, California), an athlete who competed mainly in the women's high jump event during her career and who won the gold medal at the 1956 Summer Olympics held in Melbourne, Australia, was born in Atlanta, Georgia.
After winning the AAU outdoor high jump in 1953, both the outdoor and indoor titles in 1955 and 1956, and the gold medal at the 1955 Pan American Games high jump, Millie McDaniel of Tuskegee Institute achieved the ultimate in track & field by winning an Olympic gold medal with a world record performance of 5'-9¼" (1.76 meters). For good measure she also beat the former world record holder, lolanda Balaş of Romania. She was also a basketball player for her institute.
Two world records had been set earlier in 1956. In May, Britain’s Thelma Hopkins jumped 1.74 meters (5'-8½"), while in July, Romania’s Iolanda Balaş jumped 1.75 meters (5'-8¾"). In 1954, they had placed 1-2 at the European Championships, with Hopkins winning. In Melbourne, at 1.67 meters (5'-5¾"), seven jumpers went over, with Hopkins, Millie McDaniel (USA), Mariya Pisareva (USSR), and Gunhild Larking (Sweden) clearing on their first attempts. Balaş required two jumps, and finished fifth. At 1.70 (5-7), only McDaniel remained, clearing on her second jump, with Pisareva and Hopkins tying in second place. McDaniel's personal best prior to Melbourne had been 1.69 meters (5'-6½"), but she then put the bar at the world record height of 1.76 meters (5'-9¼") and succeeded on her second effort. She then tried 1.80 meters (5'-10¾") but failed on three attempts.*****
*James Meredith, the first African American student admitted to the University of Mississippi, was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi (June 25).
James Howard Meredith (b. June 25, 1933, Kosciusko, Mississippi) gained national renown at a key juncture in the civil rights movement in 1962, when he became the first African American student at the University of Mississippi. State officials, initially refusing a United States Supreme Court order to integrate the school, blocked Meredith’s entrance, but, following large campus riots that left two people dead, Meredith was admitted to the university under the protection of federal marshals.
Meredith served in the United States Air Force (1951–60) before attending an all-black school, Jackson State College (1960–62). Inspired by President John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, Meredith decided to exercise his constitutional rights and apply to the University of Mississippi. His goal was to put pressure on the Kennedy administration to enforce civil rights for African Americans. His repeated applications to the University of Mississippi were denied solely on the basis of his race, according to the verdict of his 1961–62 court battle, which was won on appeal with the legal assistance of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In the fall of 1962, as mob violence seemed imminent, United States Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy called in federal protection so that Meredith could register for classes. Meredith’s tenure at Mississippi was brief; he graduated in 1963 and wrote a memoir about the experience, called Three Years in Mississippi (1966).
In 1966, Meredith planned a solo 220-mile March Against Fear from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi. He wanted to highlight continuing racism in the South and encourage voter registration after passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He did not want major civil rights organizations involved. The second day, he was shot by a white gunman and suffered numerous wounds. Leaders of major organizations vowed to complete the march in his name after he was taken to the hospital. While Meredith was recovering, more people from across the country became involved as marchers. He rejoined the march and when Meredith and other leaders entered Jackson on June 26, they were leading an estimated 15,000 marchers, in what was the largest civil rights march in Mississippi. During the course of it, more than 4,000 African Americans had registered to vote, and the march was a catalyst to continued community organizing and additional registration.
In 2002 and again in 2012, the University of Mississippi led year-long series of events to celebrate the 40th and 50th anniversaries of Meredith's integration of the institution. He was among numerous speakers invited to the campus, where a statue of him commemorates his role. The Lyceum-The Circle Historic District at the center of the campus has been designated as a National Historic Landmark for these events.
*****
*Lenny Moore, a football halfback who played college football at Pennsylvania State University and professionally in the National Football League (NFL) for the Baltimore Colts from 1956 to 1967, was born in Reading, Pennsylvania (November 25).
Leonard Edward Moore (b. November 25, 1933, Reading, Pennsylvania) was named the NFL Rookie of the Year in 1956 and was selected to the Pro Bowl seven times. His uniform number 24 was retired by Baltimore, and in 1969 a sportswriters' poll named him to the NFL's 50th Anniversary Team. Moore was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1975. In 1999, Moore was ranked number 71 on The Sporting News' list of the 100 Greatest Football Players. He is also the only player to have at least 40 receiving touchdowns and 40 rushing touchdowns.
Moore was both a great runner and receiver. He lined up both in the backfield as a halfback and split wide as a flanker, and was equally dangerous at both positions in the offense engineered by quarterback Johnny Unitas. Moore averaged at least 7.0 yards a carry in several seasons. He made 40 receptions for 687 yards and seven touchdowns in 1957, the first of five straight years in which he would have 40 or more catches. In 1958, he caught a career-high 50 passes for 938 yards and seven touchdowns in helping the Colts win the NFL championship. Then in 1959, Moore had 47 receptions for 846 yards and six TDs as the Colts repeated as champions.
After being injured in the 1962 season and losing his starting job, Moore had one of his best statistical seasons in 1964 when he scored 20 touchdowns, and helped lead the Colts to a 12–2 regular-season record and a trip to the NFL Championship Game for the third time in seven seasons.
Moore scored a touchdown in an NFL-record 18 consecutive appearances starting in 1963 and continuing through the entire 1964 season, ending in 1965. This record stood for 40 years until being equaled by LaDainian Tomlinson in 2005. Because his streak was interrupted by a five-game absence due to injury in 1963, he does not hold the NFL's official record for consecutive games rushing for a touchdown.
Moore retired after the 1967 season. His uniform number 24 was retired by Baltimore, and in 1969 a sportswriters' poll named him to the NFL's 50th Anniversary Team.
*Wallace Muhammad, the founder of the American Society of Muslims, was born in Hamtramck, Michigan (October 30).
Warith Deen Mohammed (b. Wallace D. Muhammad; October 30, 1933, Hamtramck, Michigan – d. September 9, 2008, Chicago, Illinois), also known as "Wallace Deen Mohammed" or "Imam Wallace Deen Muhammad", was a progressive African American Muslim leader, theologian, philosopher, Muslim revivalist and Islamic thinker (1975–2008) who disbanded the original Nation of Islam in 1976 and transformed it into an orthodox mainstream Islamic movement, the World Community of Al-Islam in the West which later became the American Society of Muslims. He was a son of Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam from 1933 to 1975.
The seventh son of Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, Muhammad was marked for leadership of the society even before his birth. The founder of the Nation of Islam, Wallace D. Fard, foretold Muhammad’s birth and his rise to leadership of the movement. As a boy, Muhammad received religious training in the tradition of the Nation, and in 1958 he was appointed minister of Temple No. 12 in Philadelphia. Although he had registered as a conscientious objector with the Selective Service, he refused, at his father’s insistence, to accept alternative service, and in 1961 he was sentenced to prison for draft evasion. While in prison, he studied the Qurʾān and the Bible.
Although devoted to his father, Muhammad began a spiritual pilgrimage that took him toward orthodox Islam. He left the Nation in 1963 over theological differences with other leaders. He rejoined the following year but was excommunicated in 1969 and again in 1971. Again rejoining in 1974, he assumed leadership of the movement when his father died in 1975. Muhammad reformulated the Nation’s teachings, rejecting the beliefs that white people were “blue-eyed devils” and that Elijah Muhammad was a prophet. In 1976, Muhammad renamed the organization the World Community of al-Islam in the West; the name was changed again to the American Muslim Mission in 1978 and to the Muslim American Society in 1985. He changed his own name to Warith Deen Mohammed and adopted the title of imam instead of Supreme Minister. His reforms were intended to bring the organization into line with traditional Sunni Islam and to move it away from the unique interpretation of Islam espoused by his father. Although these changes were welcomed by many, a dissident minority led by Louis Farrakhan split from Muhammad in 1978 and re-established the Nation of Islam according to the precepts of Elijah Muhammad.
The seventh son of Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, Muhammad was marked for leadership of the society even before his birth. The founder of the Nation of Islam, Wallace D. Fard, foretold Muhammad’s birth and his rise to leadership of the movement. As a boy, Muhammad received religious training in the tradition of the Nation, and in 1958 he was appointed minister of Temple No. 12 in Philadelphia. Although he had registered as a conscientious objector with the Selective Service, he refused, at his father’s insistence, to accept alternative service, and in 1961 he was sentenced to prison for draft evasion. While in prison, he studied the Qurʾān and the Bible.
Although devoted to his father, Muhammad began a spiritual pilgrimage that took him toward orthodox Islam. He left the Nation in 1963 over theological differences with other leaders. He rejoined the following year but was excommunicated in 1969 and again in 1971. Again rejoining in 1974, he assumed leadership of the movement when his father died in 1975. Muhammad reformulated the Nation’s teachings, rejecting the beliefs that white people were “blue-eyed devils” and that Elijah Muhammad was a prophet. In 1976, Muhammad renamed the organization the World Community of al-Islam in the West; the name was changed again to the American Muslim Mission in 1978 and to the Muslim American Society in 1985. He changed his own name to Warith Deen Mohammed and adopted the title of imam instead of Supreme Minister. His reforms were intended to bring the organization into line with traditional Sunni Islam and to move it away from the unique interpretation of Islam espoused by his father. Although these changes were welcomed by many, a dissident minority led by Louis Farrakhan split from Muhammad in 1978 and re-established the Nation of Islam according to the precepts of Elijah Muhammad.
Wallace Muhammad became the national leader (Supreme Minister) of the Nation of Islam in 1975 after his father's death. As a result of his personal studies and thinking, he had led the vast majority of the members of the original Nation of Islam to mainstream, traditional Sunni Islam by 1978. With this merger, he oversaw the largest mass conversion to Islam in the history of the United States. He rejected the previous deification of Wallace Fard Muhammad, accepted whites as fellow-worshippers, forged closer ties with mainstream Muslim communities, and introduced the Five Pillars of Islam into his group's theology.
*****
Lou Rawls, (b. December 1, 1933, Chicago, Illinois — d. January 6, 2006, Los Angeles, California), an American singer whose smooth baritone adapted easily to jazz, soul, gospel, and rhythm and blues.
As a child, Rawls sang in a Baptist church choir, and he later performed with Sam Cooke in the 1950s gospel group Teenage Kings of Harmony. In 1956 he stepped back from his burgeoning career to enlist in the army. After his discharge in 1958, he briefly performed with another gospel group, the Pilgrim Travelers, again with Cooke. However, after recovering from a 1958 car crash that sidelined him for a year, Rawls began to perform secular music.
Rawls’s debut album, Stormy Monday (1962), was a collection of jazz songs, but he did not have a hit single until the soulful “
Love Is a Hurtin’ Thing” (1966), off his first rhythm and blues album, Soulin’. Rawls won three Grammy Awards: for the single “
Dead End Street” (1967), for the track “
A Natural Man” (1971), and for the album Unmistakably Lou (1977). His biggest hit single, however, was the 1976 chart topper “
You’ll Never Find (Another Love like Mine).” In addition, Rawls ushered in the pre-rap era with spoken monologues in his songs, notably in “
Tobacco Road.” Rawls released more than 50 albums, and in later years he appeared in films and television commercials, lent his voice to children’s television shows, and helped raise more than $200 million for the United Negro College fund as the host of its annual telethon.
*****
*Mack Rice, a singer best known for his hit "Mustang Sally" was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi (November 10).
*****
*Singer Nina Simone, "High Priestess of Soul," was born in Tryon, North Carolina (February 21).
Nina Simone (b. Eunice Waymon, February 21, 1933, Tryon, North Carolina — d. April 21, 2003, Carry-le-Rouet, France), was an American singer who created urgent emotional intensity by singing songs of love, protest, and black empowerment in a dramatic style, with a rough-edged voice. Originally noted as a jazz singer, she became a prominent voice of the 1960s civil rights movement with recordings such as “Mississippi Goddam” and “Old Jim Crow”; her best-known composition was “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.” She also recorded songs by rock and pop songwriters. A precocious child, she played piano and organ in girlhood. She became sensitive to racism when at age 12 she gave a piano recital in a library where her parents had to stand in back because they were black. A student of classical music at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City, she began performing as a pianist. Her vocal career began in 1954 in an Atlantic City, N.J., nightclub when the club owner threatened to fire her unless she sang too. Her first album featured her distinctive versions of jazz and cabaret standards, including “I Loves You, Porgy,” which became a 1959 hit. In the 1960s she added protest songs, became a friend of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, and performed at civil rights demonstrations. Her popularity grew as she added folk and gospel selections as well as songs by the Bee Gees, Bob Dylan, and Screaming Jay Hawkins (“I Put a Spell on You”), to her repertoire. Angered by American racism, she left the United States in 1973 and lived in Barbados, Africa, and Europe for the rest of her life. Like her private life, her career was turbulent, and she gained a reputation for throwing onstage tantrums, insulting inattentive audiences, and abruptly canceling concerts. A 1980s Chanel television commercial that included her vocal “My Baby Just Cares for Me” helped introduce her to many new, younger listeners. Despite ill health, she continued to tour and perform, and she maintained a devoted international following to the end.
*Mack Rice, a singer best known for his hit "Mustang Sally" was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi (November 10).
Bonny "Mack" Rice (November 10, 1933 – June 27, 2016), sometimes credited as Sir Mack Rice, was an American songwriter and singer. His best-known composition, and biggest hit as a solo performer, was "Mustang Sally." He also wrote "Respect Yourself" with Luther Ingram.
Rice was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi. He began his work in the R&B field in the 1950s based in Detroit, performing with the Five Scalders in 1956 and with the Falcons, a group whose members included Eddie Floyd, Wilson Pickett, and Joe Stubbs, from 1957 to 1963. He performed as a solo vocalist in the years to follow, but his biggest successes were as songwriter for other artists on labels like Stax and others in the 1960s and following decades. He began his solo vocalist career at Stax in 1967, recording on Atco Records beginning in 1968. Rice is one of the few musicians whose career touched both Motown and Stax Records.
As a solo recording artist, he had two chart hits: "Mustang Sally", which reached number 15 on the Billboard R&B chart in 1965, and "Coal Man", which reached number 48 on the soul music chart in 1969. Besides "Mustang Sally", which also became a major hit for Wilson Pickett in 1966, and "Respect Yourself", a hit for the Staple Singers, his other songs include "Betcha Can't Kiss Me (Just One Time)", "Cheaper to Keep Her", "Cadillac Assembly Line", "Money Talks", "Cold Women With Warm Hearts", "Do the Funky Penguin, Pt. 1", "It Sho Ain't Me", and "Santa Claus Wants Some Lovin'". His compositions have been performed by many well-known artists, including the Staple Singers, Ike and Tina Turner, Albert King, Johnnie Taylor, Shirley Brown, Rufus Thomas, Etta James, Billy Eckstine, Eddie Floyd, Buddy Guy, The Rascals, The Kingsmen, Wilson Pickett, Albert Collins, Busta Rhymes, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Otis Clay and The Blues Brothers (in Blues Brothers 2000).
In 1992, backed by the soul band The Dynatones, Rice released his first solo album, Right Now on Blue Suit Records. On it, he reprised a number of his hit songs along with a mixture of new tunes.
Rice continued to live in the Detroit area. He died at home in Detroit on June 27, 2016, from complications of Alzheimer's disease.
*Singer Nina Simone, "High Priestess of Soul," was born in Tryon, North Carolina (February 21).
Nina Simone (b. Eunice Waymon, February 21, 1933, Tryon, North Carolina — d. April 21, 2003, Carry-le-Rouet, France), was an American singer who created urgent emotional intensity by singing songs of love, protest, and black empowerment in a dramatic style, with a rough-edged voice. Originally noted as a jazz singer, she became a prominent voice of the 1960s civil rights movement with recordings such as “Mississippi Goddam” and “Old Jim Crow”; her best-known composition was “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.” She also recorded songs by rock and pop songwriters. A precocious child, she played piano and organ in girlhood. She became sensitive to racism when at age 12 she gave a piano recital in a library where her parents had to stand in back because they were black. A student of classical music at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City, she began performing as a pianist. Her vocal career began in 1954 in an Atlantic City, N.J., nightclub when the club owner threatened to fire her unless she sang too. Her first album featured her distinctive versions of jazz and cabaret standards, including “I Loves You, Porgy,” which became a 1959 hit. In the 1960s she added protest songs, became a friend of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, and performed at civil rights demonstrations. Her popularity grew as she added folk and gospel selections as well as songs by the Bee Gees, Bob Dylan, and Screaming Jay Hawkins (“I Put a Spell on You”), to her repertoire. Angered by American racism, she left the United States in 1973 and lived in Barbados, Africa, and Europe for the rest of her life. Like her private life, her career was turbulent, and she gained a reputation for throwing onstage tantrums, insulting inattentive audiences, and abruptly canceling concerts. A 1980s Chanel television commercial that included her vocal “My Baby Just Cares for Me” helped introduce her to many new, younger listeners. Despite ill health, she continued to tour and perform, and she maintained a devoted international following to the end.
*****
*Maurice Stokes, a professional basketball player who was the 1956 NBA Rookie of the Year, was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (June 17).
Maurice Stokes (b. June 17, 1933, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – d. April 6, 1970, Cincinnati, Ohio) was a professional basketball player in the 1950s for the Cincinnati/Rochester Royals of the National Basketball Association (NBA) until his career — and later his life — was cut short by a debilitating injury.
Stokes was born in Rankin, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, one of four children — he had a twin sister and two brothers. His father worked in a steel mill and his mother was a domestic. When Maurice was age 8, the family moved to nearby Homewood, where he later attended Westinghouse High School. Stokes did not start his first two years at Westinghouse, but in his last two years, he helped lead the Bulldogs to back-to-back city championships in 1950 and 1951.
Stokes attended and graduated from Saint Francis College in Loretto, Pennsylvania. There he led the Saint Francis College Red Flash to the 1955 National Invitation Tournament (NIT) and was named Most Valuable Player although his team finished fourth in the tournament. Stokes remains St. Francis' all-time leading rebounder with 1,819 and is second in scoring with 2,282 points. The Red Flash were 79-30 during Stokes' four seasons. He was later inducted in the St. Francis University Athletic Hall of Fame.
Playing for the NBA's Rochester Royals (which became the Cincinnati Royals in 1957) from 1955 to 1958, Stokes averaged 16.3 rebounds per game during his rookie season and was named NBA Rookie of the Year in 1956. The next season, he set a league record for most rebounds in a single season with 1,256 (17.4 per game). Stokes was second in the NBA in rebounds and third in assists in 1957-58; a feat only Wilt Chamberlain has matched for a full season.
During his three seasons in the NBA (1955–58), he grabbed more rebounds than any other player with 3,492 (Bob Pettit was second with 3,417) and also amassed 1,062 assists, which was second in the NBA only to Boston Celtics' point guard Bob Cousy (1,583). Stokes was named an All-Star and All- NBA Second Team member three times in his tragically short career. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in September 2004.
As of 2016, Stokes was one of only six NBA players who have recorded 4 consecutive triple-doubles. (The other five are Oscar Robertson, Wilt Chamberlain, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, and Russell Westbrook.)
On March 12, 1958, in the last game of the regular 1957-58 NBA season, Stokes was knocked unconscious after he drove to the basket, drew contact, and struck his head as he fell to the court. He was revived with smelling salts and returned to the game. Three days later, after recording 12 points and 15 rebounds in an opening-round playoff game against the Detroit Pistons, he became ill on the team's flight back to Cincinnati. Stokes later suffered a seizure and was left permanently paralyzed. He was diagnosed with post-traumatic encephalopathy, a brain injury that damaged his motor-control center.
During the years that followed, Stokes would be supported and cared for by his lifelong friend and teammate, Jack Twyman, who became Stokes' legal guardian. Although permanently paralyzed, Stokes was mentally alert and communicated by blinking his eyes. He adopted a grueling physical therapy regimen that eventually allowed him limited physical movement. He spent three years typing his own autobiography, which was never published. He never missed voting, even for local elections. Stokes' condition deteriorated through the 1960s. He was later transferred to Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinnati, where Twyman continued to be a regular visitor.
Twelve years after he went into the post-injury coma, he died at age 36 from a heart attack on April 6, 1970. At his own request, he was buried in Franciscan Friar Cemetery on the campus of Saint Francis University in Loretto, Pennsylvania.
Jack Twyman organized a charity exhibition basketball game in 1958 to help raise funds for Stokes' medical expenses. That game, spearheaded by Milton Kutsher, became an annual tradition and was named the Maurice Stokes Memorial Basketball Game. It was later changed to the Maurice Stokes/Wilt Chamberlain Celebrity Pro-Am Golf Tournament due to NBA and insurance company restrictions regarding athletes.
Stokes' life, injury, and relationship with Twyman are all depicted in the 1973 National General Pictures film Maurie.
The Maurice Stokes Athletics Center (originally called the Maurice Stokes Physical Education Building when it opened in 1971) on the Saint Francis University campus is named after him.
On June 9, 2013, the NBA announced that both Stokes and Jack Twyman would be honored with an annual award in their names, the Twyman-Stokes Teammate of the Year Award, which recognizes the player that embodies the league's ideal teammate that season.
*****
*Louis Wade Sullivan, founder of the Morehouse School of Medicine and President George H. W. Bush's Secretary of Health and Human Services, was born in Atlanta, Georgia (November 3).
Louis Wade Sullivan was born on November 3, 1933, in Atlanta, Georgia, to Lubirda Priester and Walter Wade Sullivan. Sullivan served as the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, in addition to founding Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia.
Sullivan graduated from Morehouse College in 1954 with a B.S. in biology. He earned an M.D. from the Boston University School of Medicine in 1958 and completed an internship and residency at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. Sullivan focused on hematology. He began a career in education, teaching at Harvard Medical School and the New Jersey College of Medicine, while researching at the Thorndike Memorial Laboratory. In 1966, he began serving his alma mater as the Co-director of Hematology at Boston University Medical Center. The next year, he founded the Boston University Hematology Service at Boston City Hospital. He continued as a faculty member at the Boston University School of Medicine until 1975, when he moved back to Atlanta to work for Morehouse College. There, he taught biology and medicine, founding the Medical Education Program at Morehouse College.
The Morehouse School of Medicine became independent from Morehouse College in 1981, with Sullivan as president and dean. He continued as president through 1989, when he took a leave of absence after being appointed to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services. As head of HHS, Sullivan's responsibility extended to the health and welfare of the country. He battled the tobacco industry and championed victims of AIDS. In 1993, he left his government post and returned to Morehouse School of Medicine as president.
Sullivan hosted the public television show "Frontiers of Medicine."
*****
*Joe Tex, a rhythm and blues singer known for "Hold On To What You've Got", was born in Rogers, Texas (August 8).
Joseph Arrington, Jr. (b. August 8, 1933, Rogers, Texas – d. August 13, 1982, Navasota, Texas), better known as Joe Tex, was a musician who gained success in the 1960s and 1970s with his brand of Southern soul, which mixed the styles of country, gospel and rhythm and blues.
*****
*Diane Watson, the first African American woman elected to the California State Senate, was born in Los Angeles, California (November 12).
*****
*Joe Tex, a rhythm and blues singer known for "Hold On To What You've Got", was born in Rogers, Texas (August 8).
Joseph Arrington, Jr. (b. August 8, 1933, Rogers, Texas – d. August 13, 1982, Navasota, Texas), better known as Joe Tex, was a musician who gained success in the 1960s and 1970s with his brand of Southern soul, which mixed the styles of country, gospel and rhythm and blues.
The career of Joe Tex started after he was signed to King Records in 1955 following four wins at the Apollo Theater. Between 1955 and 1964, he struggled to find hits and by the time he finally recorded his first hit, "Hold On To What You've Got", in 1964, he had recorded thirty prior singles that were deemed failures on the charts. He went on to have four million-selling hits, "Hold What You've Got" (1965), "Skinny Legs and All" (1967), "I Gotcha" (1972), and "Ain't Gonna Bump No More (With No Big Fat Woman)" (1977).
Joe Tex was born Joseph Arrington Jr. in Rogers, Texas to Joseph Arrington and Cherie Sue (Jackson) Arrington. He and his sister Mary Sue were initially raised by their grandmother, Mary Richardson. After their parents divorced, Cheri Arrington moved to Baytown, Texas. Tex played baritone saxophone in the high school band and sang in a local Pentecostal church choir. He entered several talent shows, and after an important win in Houston, he won $300 and a trip to New York City. Joe Tex took part in the amateur portion of the Apollo Theater, winning first place four times, which led to his discovery by Henry Glover, who offered him a contract with King Records. However, his mother's wish was that he graduate from high school first, so Glover agreed to wait a year before signing him at age 19.
Tex recorded for King Records between 1955 and 1957 with little success. In 1958, he signed with Ace and continued to have relative failures, but he was starting to build a unique stage reputation, opening up for artists like Jackie Wilson, James Brown, and Little Richard. He perfected the microphone tricks and dance moves that would define the rest of his career.
In 1960, Tex left Ace and briefly recorded for Detroit's Anna Records label, where he scored a Bubbling Under Billboard hit with his cover version of Etta James' "All I Could Do Was Cry". By then, Tex's use of rapping over his music was starting to become commonplace.
In 1961, he recorded his composition "Baby You're Right" for Anna. Later that year, James Brown recorded a cover version, though with different lyrics and a different musical composition, gaining songwriting credit, making it a hit in 1962, and reaching No. 2 on the R&B chart. It was during this time that Tex first began working with Buddy Killen, who formed the Dial Records label behind Tex. After a number of songs failed to chart, Killen decided to have Atlantic Records distribute his recordings with Dial in 1964. By the time he signed with Atlantic, Tex had recorded 30 songs, all of which had failed to make an impact on the charts.
Tex recorded his first hit, "Hold On To What You've Got", in November 1964 at FAME Studios in Muscel Shoals, Alabama. He was unconvinced the song would be a hit and advised Killen not to release it. However, Killen felt otherwise and released the song in early 1965. By the time Tex got wind of its release, the song had already sold 200,000 copies. The song eventually peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 and became Tex's first No. 1 hit on the R&B charts, staying on the charts for 11 weeks and selling more than a million copies by 1966.
Tex would place six top 40 charted singles on the R&B charts in 1965 alone, including two more No. 1 hits "I Want To (Do Everything For You)" and "A Sweet Woman Like You". He followed that with two successive albums, Hold On To What You've Got and The New Boss. He placed more R&B hits than any artist, including his rival James Brown. In 1966, five more singles entered the top 40 on the R&B charts, including "The Love You Save" and "S.Y.S.L.J.F.M." or "The Letter Song", which was an answer song to Wilson Pickett's "634-5789".
His 1967 hits included "Show Me", which became an often-covered tune for British rock artists and later some country and pop artists, and his second million-selling hit, "Skinny Legs and All". The latter song, released off Tex's pseudo-live album, Live and Lively, stayed on the charts for 15 weeks and was awarded a gold disc by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in January 1968. After leaving Atlantic for Mercury, Tex had several more R&B hits including "Buying a Book" in 1970 and "Give the Baby Anything the Baby Wants" in 1971.
Tex recorded his next big hit, "I Gotcha", in December 1971. The song was released in January 1972 and stayed on the charts for 20 weeks, staying at No. 2 on the Hot 100 for two weeks and sold more than 2 million copies, becoming his biggest-selling hit. Tex was earned a gold disc of the song on March 22, 1972. The parent album reached No. 17 on the pop albums chart. Following this and another album, Tex announced his retirement from show business in September 1972 to pursue life as a minister for Islam. Tex returned to his music career following the death of Elijah Muhammad in 1975, releasing the top 40 R&B hit, "Under Your Powerful Love". His last hit, "Ain't Gonna Bump No More (With No Big Fat Woman)", was released in 1977 and peaked at No. 12 on the Hot 100 and No. 2 in the United Kingdom.
His last public appearances were as part of a revised 1980s version of the Soul Clan in 1981. After that, Tex withdrew from public life, settling at his ranch in Navasota, Texas.
A convert to Islam in 1966, Tex changed his name to Yusuf Hazziez, and toured as a spiritual lecturer. He had a daughter, Eartha Doucet, and four sons, Joseph Arrington III, Ramadan Hazziez, Jwaade Hazziez and Joseph Hazziez.
On August 13, 1982, Joe Tex died at his home in Navasota, Texas, following a heart attack, five days after his 49th birthday.
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*Diane Watson, the first African American woman elected to the California State Senate, was born in Los Angeles, California (November 12).
Diane Edith Watson (b. November 12, 1933, Los Angeles, California) served as a United States Representative for California's 32nd Congressional District, serving from 2001 until 2003, and for California's 33rd Congressional District, serving from 2003 until 2011. The 33rd Congressional District, is located entirely in Los Angeles County, and includes much of Central Los Angeles, as well as such wealthy neighborhoods as Los Feliz.
A native of Los Angeles, Watson is a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, and also holds degrees from California State University, Los Angeles and Claremont Graduate University. She worked as a psychologist, professor, and health occupation specialist before serving as a member of the Los Angeles Unified School Board (1975–78). She was a member of the California Senate from 1978 to 1998, and was the United States Ambassador to Micronesia from 1999 to 2000.
Watson was elected to Congress in a 2001 special election to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Representative Julian C. Dixon. After redistricting, she was re-elected four times, but retired after the end of the 111th Congress in 2011.
Born in Los Angeles, California, Watson was raised Catholic. According to a DNA analysis, some of her ancestors were from the Central African Republic. She was educated at Dorsey High School, Los Angeles City College and the University of California, Los Angeles, where she earned her bachelor's degree in Education (1956). Watson became a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha.
Watson earned an Master of Science degree from California State University, Los Angeles in School Psychology (in 1967) and a doctorate degree in Educational Administration from Claremont Graduate University in 1987. She also attended the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Watson taught elementary school and was a school psychologist in the Los Angeles public schools. She lectured at California State University, Long Beach and California State University, Los Angeles. She was also a health occupation specialist with the California Department of Education's Bureau of Industrial Education.
Watson served in the California State Senate from 1978 to 1998. The longtime chair of the Health and Human Services Committee, she gained a reputation as an advocate for health care for the poor and for children. Termed out by term limits, Watson was replaced by Kevin Murray.
When, in 1988, the United States government proposed the addition of the category of "bi-racial" or "multi-racial" to official documents and statistics, some African American organizations and African American leaders such as Watson and Representative Augustus Hawkins were particularly vocal in their rejection and opposition of the category. They feared massive defection from the African American self-designation.
In 1992, Watson ran for the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. After a hard-fought campaign that often turned negative, Watson narrowly lost to former Supervisor Yvonne Braithwaite Burke, who was supported by United States Representative Maxine Waters.
President Bill Clinton appointed Watson United States Ambassador to Micronesia in 1999.
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*Flip Wilson, a comedian and actor who, in the early 1970s, hosted his own weekly variety series, The Flip Wilson Show, was born in Jersey City, New Jersey (December 8). The series earned Wilson a Golden Globe and two Emmy Awards. In January 1972, Time magazine featured Wilson's image on its cover and named him "TV's first black superstar".
Flip Wilson, byname of Clerow Wilson (b. December 8, 1933, Jersey City, New Jersey — d. November 25, 1998, Malibu, California), was a comedian whose comedy variety show, The Flip Wilson Show, was one of the first television shows hosted by an African American to be a ratings success. The show ran from 1970 to 1974, reached number two in the Nielsen ratings, and earned two Emmy Awards in 1971.
Wilson was one of many children in a destitute household. He spent much of his early years in reform school and foster homes. In 1950 he entered the United States Air Force by lying about his age (he was 16) and soon earned his nickname from the "flipped out" stories, jokes, and colorful dialects that he assumed to entertain his fellow servicemen. After leaving the Air Force in 1954, he worked as a bellhop at a San Francisco hotel, where he made his comedic debut during the intermission between two nightclub acts. In 1959 a businessman from Miami, Fla., sponsored him for $50 a week, giving Wilson the opportunity to develop his comedy routines, and in the 1960s he became a regular at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem in New York City.
Wilson’s big break in television came in 1965, when Johnny Carson invited him to appear on The Tonight Show. He then went on to perform on other TV shows such as The Ed Sullivan Show and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. His energetic announcement on Laugh-In—"Heah come de judge!"—entered the national lexicon. After hosting a successful television special in the late ’60s, Wilson was catapulted to fame with his own program, The Flip Wilson Show. Wilson’s show was unique in that he used a theatre-in-the-round studio and minimal sets, which emphasized the talents of the performers. He fashioned a comedic style that attempted to deal honestly with social issues and perceptions, though he drew some criticism for relying too heavily on racial stereotypes. Although known for several characters, including Reverend Leroy of the Church of What’s Happenin’ Now and Sonny the White House janitor, Wilson was best known for the character Geraldine Jones, an outspoken working-class black woman with a boyfriend named "Killer." Jones made famous such one-liners as "When you’re hot, you’re hot; when you’re not, you’re not!"; "What you see is what you get!"; and "The Devil made me do it."
After the variety show ended, Wilson withdrew to private life, appearing occasionally in films or on television. His subsequent television series People Are Funny (1984) and Charlie and Co. (1985–86) were both short-lived. Throughout his career he also made numerous comedy recordings, most notably The Devil Made Me Buy This Dress (1970), for which he won a Grammy Award.
After the variety show ended, Wilson withdrew to private life, appearing occasionally in films or on television. His subsequent television series People Are Funny (1984) and Charlie and Co. (1985–86) were both short-lived. Throughout his career he also made numerous comedy recordings, most notably The Devil Made Me Buy This Dress (1970), for which he won a Grammy Award.
On November 25, 1998, Wilson died of liver cancer in Malibu, California.
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