Dead Celebrity Alert

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. … Read full obituary

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. First performed in 1977, its brilliant use of song helped the play to become an immediate popular hit across Kenya, leading to a government ban and the persecution of the authors which, eventually, forced wa Miiri into exile in Zimbabwe.

There, over the course of two decades, Ngugi wa Mirii was a pioneering force in community theatre, founding a national organisation, which supported more than 300 theatre groups across the country. While his focus remained pan-Africanist and anti-imperialist, his concept of theatre was always rooted in the concerns of ordinary people, and his work played an important role in raising popular consciousness of womens’ rights and the dangers of HIV/Aids. … Read full obituary

May 21, 2008 — TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — The last plaintiff in the historic Brown versus Board of Education case has died.

Zelma Henderson died yesterday in Topeka, Kansas, at 88. She had pancreatic cancer.

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. … Read full obituary

Orangeburg [SC] native and civil rights icon James E. “Jim” Sulton died Friday. He was 84.

Sulton’s life spanned years from service in World War II through the civil rights battles of the 1960s. …

In the late 1940s, he became active in voter-registration drives, led the first march in downtown Orangeburg to the mayor’s office to make an official complaint about the city’s segregated systems and was among the first to ‘’sit in” at Kress 5&10.

Because of his actions in the move to gain equality for blacks, Sulton was the object of arrests and risked the service-station business he and his brother, Roy, ran…

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. … Read full obituary

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.

Soriano died April 3 in a Los Angeles hospital from complications after surgery for liver cancer, said her sister, Emily Deitrich.

She served as jury foreperson in the civil case that King brought against the city. King, who was black, was beaten by several white officers in 1991, an incident caught on tape that would help spark a race riot the next year. …

The jury awarded King $3.8 million (€2.41 million) in compensatory damages but no punitive damages. …

“She was trying to be fair and listen to both sides like she always did,” said Deitrich. “But later she said she thought he should have gotten more money” and punitive damages. … Read full obituary

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.

Césaire died in Fort-de-France on the French Caribbean island of Martinique, the hospital that was treating him said.

Césaire was involved in the fight for French West Indian rights, and he also served as a lawmaker in the lower house of France’s parliament for nearly 50 years. French President Nicolas Sarkozy successfully led a campaign last year to change the name of Martinique’s airport in honor of Césaire. …

Césaire’s 1950 “Discourse on Colonialism” has become a classic of French political literature and helped develop the concept of negritude, which urges blacks to cultivate pride in their heritage. … Read full obituary

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). … In the end he served as a non-combatant doctor in Namibia.

A passionate Christian, Toms set up a clinic in the Crossroads squatter camp, peopled by penniless African migrants from the Eastern Cape in 1979. He was the only doctor serving 60,000 people. …

The openly gay Toms, whose three weeks’ fast in St George’s Cathedral as a protest against the deployment of the SADF in the townships cost him his gall bladder, was the target of dirty tricks campaigns, including posters lewdly denouncing his homosexuality. …

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.

Her son Ben, James’ younger brother, confirmed the May 22 death in a telephone interview. …

Four decades after losing her son, Chaney drew national attention in June 2005 when she testified for the state of Mississippi in the murder case against one of the killers.

James Chaney, a black man from Meridian, and two white civil rights workers from the North, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, disappeared in Neshoba County on June 21, 1964, at the onset of a summer-long drive by an umbrella group of civil rights organizations to register black Mississippians to vote. … 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.

Easter was a trailblazer in Rockland County politics, paving the way for other blacks to get involved in politics and community service. …

Easter entered politics as a member of the Nyack Republican Committee. In 1965, in the middle of the civil rights movement, he ran for village trustee and won. He also served for three terms on the village board, and was the county’s first black deputy mayor and first black police commissioner. … 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. …

Bowers died of cardio pulmonary arrest, said Mississippi Department of Corrections spokeswoman Tara Booth.

Bowers was convicted in August of 1998 of ordering the hit on Dahmer, a civil rights activist in Mississippi’s turbulent struggle over racial equality.

Dahmer’s widow said the death brings little closure to a wound she has nursed for decades. … 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. …

Until January 1973, when the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision in Roe v. Wade, abortion was illegal in most states. Among them was Minnesota, where Dr. Hodgson had a busy practice as an obstetrician and gynecologist.

In April 1970, Dr. Hodgson agreed to perform an abortion in order to challenge Minnesota law. At the time, abortion was permitted in the state only to save the woman’s life. …

In later years, Dr. Hodgson remained a public champion of abortion rights, speaking widely on the subject and founding several reproductive health care clinics. She also lent her name to several abortion-related lawsuits, notably Hodgson v. Minnesota, which challenged a state law requiring both parents to be notified before a minor could have an abortion. … 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.

Dunham died Sunday at the Manhattan assisted living facility where she lived, said Charlotte Ottley, executive liaison for the organization that preserves her artistic estate. The cause of death was not immediately known.

Dunham was perhaps best known for bringing African and Caribbean influences to the European-dominated dance world. In the late 1930s, she established the nation’s first self-supporting all-black modern dance group.

“We weren’t pushing ‘Black is Beautiful,’ we just showed it,” she later wrote. … Read full obituary

Coretta Scott King, widow of slain civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., has died. She was 78.

Scott King was admitted to Atlanta’s Piedmont Hospital on Aug. 16, 2005, suffering from a stroke that left her weakened on her right side, unable to walk, and barely able to speak. …

The Kings were married in 1953, and the following year, they moved to Montgomery, Ala., where King began his ministry.

Scott King spent much of her life devoted to raising their four children — Yolanda Denise, Martin Luther III, Dexter Scott and Bernice Albertine — and to supporting her husband’s work in the civil rights movement. …

Scott King became an activist in her own right, as well, carrying messages of international peace and economic justice to organizations around the world. …

When King was assassinated outside a motel room in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968, Scott King channeled her grief into action. …

Scott King continued working for equality, peace and economic justice for the remainder of her life, both in the United States and abroad. … 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.

Jones, who went on to become the first black to graduate from the school, died at Atlanta Medical Center, where she had been admitted Tuesday after suffering a stroke, said her sister, Sharon Malone. …

Jones, a retired federal worker who lived in Atlanta, grew up in Mobile, Ala. She had enrolled at historically black Alabama A&M University in Huntsville when she transferred to the University of Alabama in 1963. The move led to then-Gov. Wallace’s infamous stand in defiance of orders to admit black students. Jones and James Hood, accompanied by then-Deputy U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, enrolled after Wallace finished his statement and left.

At an appearance last year in Mobile, she recalled meeting with Wallace in 1996, when the former governor was in frail health. … Read full obituary