Lena Horne, the silky-voiced singing legend who shattered Hollywood stereotypes of African Americans on screen in the 1940s as a symbol of glamour whose signature song was “Stormy Weather,” died Sunday in New York City. She was 92. …
The death of Dorothy Height reminded America that Rosa Parks — famed for refusing to vacate a whites-only seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama — was not the first, or even the second or third, black woman, to have driven the civil rights agenda in the United States. …
Civil rights leader Benjamin L. Hooks, a lawyer, minister and pioneering judge who revived a flagging NAACP after he became its executive director in the late 1970s, has died. He was 85. …
NEW ORLEANS — Revius Ortique Jr., the first black justice on the Louisiana Supreme Court, [died Sunday] of complications from a stroke. He was 84. …
As a civil rights lawyer in the 1950s and ’60s, he helped integrate state labor unions and sued to get equal pay for black workers.
He held several presidential appointments, including a stint as an alternate delegate to the United Nations under President Clinton. …
1951 - May 3, 2008
Ngugi wa Mirii was co-author of one of the most influential works in modern African literature. His play, I Will Marry When I Want, written with Ngugi wa Thiong’o, was a searing indictment of what he considered the betrayal of the hopes of ordinary Kenyans by the country’s postindependence leaders. …
… In 1950, Henderson and 12 other black parents in Topeka challenged the city’s segregated school system. The 1954 Supreme Court decision in the case overturned segregation in the country’s public schools. …
Orangeburg [SC] native and civil rights icon James E. “Jim” Sulton died Friday. He was 84. …
Sulton played host to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Russell Street residence he called home for his entire life and where many civil rights notables gathered for strategy sessions. He traveled in to the nation’s capital for the 1963 March on Washington. …
Ester Soriano, a Filipino-American civil rights activist who was the jury foreperson in the civil damages trial of Rodney King, has died. She was 61. …
The esteemed Martinique poet and politician Aimé Césaire, a leading figure in the movement for black consciousness, died Thursday, the French president’s office and a hospital said. He was 94. …
An active opponent of apartheid, Dr Ivan Toms went on to campaign against conscription and homophobic discrimination in South Africa.
Born in Cape Town in 1953 Toms completed his medical degree at the University of Cape Town in 1976 and two years later was conscripted into the South African Defence Force (SADF). …
Dr Ivan Toms, physician and activist, was born on July 11, 1953, and was found dead on March 25, 2008, aged 54 … Read full obituary
Fannie Lee Chaney, a $28-a-week bakery worker who became a target of racial hatred herself after her son James Chaney and two other civil rights workers were killed by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964, died last week in Willingboro, N.J. She was 84. … Read full obituary
NYACK, N.Y. Hezekiah Easter, Rockland County’s first black elected official and a tireless civil rights advocate, has died. He was 85. Easter died at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. The cause of death was liver cancer. … Read full obituary
JACKSON, Miss. — Ellie Dahmer found little comfort in the death of the Ku Klux Klan leader who ordered the assassination of her husband, saying Samuel H. Bowers lived a much longer life than the man she married.
Bowers, who was serving a life sentence for the 1966 bombing death of Vernon Dahmer Sr., died Sunday in a state penitentiary, officials said. He was 82. … Read full obituary
Jane Hodgson, a prominent abortion rights advocate who in a highly publicized test case in 1970 became the only doctor in the United States to be convicted of illegally performing an abortion in a hospital, died on Oct. 23 at her home in Rochester, Minn. She was 91. … Read full obituary
Katherine Dunham, a pioneering dancer and choreographer, author and civil rights activist who left Broadway to teach culture in one of America’s poorest cities, has died. She was 96. … Read full obituary
Coretta Scott King, widow of slain civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., has died. She was 78. …
When King was assassinated outside a motel room in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968, Scott King channeled her grief into action. … Read full obituary
See also:
Coretta Scott King Appears At MLK Event (January 16, 2006)
Rosa Parks, the black woman whose 1955 arrest for saying “no” to an order to give her bus seat to a white man served as a catalyst for the U.S. civil-rights movement, died today. She was 92. Parks died of natural causes at her home, the Associated Press reported, citing Karen Morgan, a spokeswoman for U.S. Representative John Conyers of Michigan, who was Parks’ former employer. … Read full obituary
ATLANTA (AP) - Vivian Malone Jones, one of two black students whose effort to enroll at the University of Alabama led to George Wallace’s infamous “stand in the schoolhouse door” in 1963, died Thursday. She was 63. … Read full obituary
Author Susan Sontag, widely regarded as one of America’s leading intellectuals, has died aged 71.
The writer, who had suffered from leukaemia, died at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. … Read full obituary
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