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R.I.P. Frank E. Petersen, 83, 1st Black Pilot and General in the U.S. Marines Corps

Frank Petersen (photo via nytimes.com)
Frank Petersen (photo via nytimes.com)

General Frank Petersen, the U.S. Marines’ first Black pilot and general, has died at age 83.
Hoping to escape pervasive racism in his Kansas hometown, General Frank Petersen joined the U.S. Navy in 1950 as a seaman apprentice, reports The Boston Globe.
The following year, motivated by the death of the Navy’s first Black aviator Jesse Brown in the Korean War, Petersen entered the Naval Aviation Cadet Program, the report says. From there, he went on to make history himself, earning a Purple Heart for wounds suffered in Vietnam “when he was ejected after his plane was struck by anti-aircraft fire over the demilitarized zone” in 1968.
He died Tuesday at his home in Stevensville, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The cause was complications from lung cancer, according to The Globe:

President Harry S. Truman had ordered the armed forces to desegregate in 1948, but General Petersen later wrote that the Navy and Marine Corps were ‘‘the last to even entertain the idea of integrating their forces.’’ And whenever he left the flight training base in Pensacola, Fla., he was subjected to the indignities of the Jim Crow South.
Bus drivers ordered him to the back of the coach, and he was barred from sitting with white cadets in restaurants and movie theaters. He largely swallowed the treatment, he later told The Washington Post, because he could not fight two battles at once. ‘‘I knew that I couldn’t win if I were to tackle that, as opposed to getting my wings,’’ he said.
One instructor tried to minimize his performance in the air — giving him lackluster ratings — but he said white peers came to his defense. Upon completion of his flight training, he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. He flew 64 combat missions in Korea in 1953 and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross, among other decorations.

Besides his wife, Alicia Downes, of Stevensville, Maryland and Washington, he leaves behind four children from his first marriage, a brother, a sister, four grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.
Rest in peace and thank you, Gen. Petersen.
article by Lynette Holloway via newsone.com
 

Alice Walker Pens Beautiful Poem For Late Civil Rights Leader Julian Bond

WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 21: Julian Bond poses for a portrait in W
Civil Rights Leader Julian Bond (Source: The Washington Post / Getty)

The death of legendary civil rights leader Julian Bond on August 15th left a community bereft, yet grateful for a life well-lived and legacy that will inspire and inform generations of activists to come.
Author and poet Alice Walker posted a fitting tribute to Bond on her website, remembering the young, passionate activist he was in college and the icon he would become.
It’s definitely worth the read:

Julian Bond 1940-2015

Julian

The first time I sang
We Shall Overcome
Was in a circle
On the lawn of Trevor Arnett Library
At Atlanta University
And by chance
I was holding
Your hand.
We were all so young,
Julian,
And so hopeful
In our solidarity.
I stumbled over some of the words
In the new to me
Song
But you sang solemnly,
Correctly,
Devoutly,
Believing every word
You sang
With your whole
Handsome
Heart.
A friend writes
That you will be buried
At sea
And I nod
Because that is how it felt
Those years so long ago;
That we were so young,
Vulnerable,
Swimming against
An awesome tide of hatred
And despair
Definitely
At sea.

Read the rest of Walker’s powerful and beautiful tribute at AliceWalkersGarden.com.
article via newsone.com

R.I.P. Emma Didlake, 110 Year-Old Woman Believed to Be Nation's Oldest Veteran

President Barack Obama meets with Emma Didlake, 110, of Detroit, the oldest known World War II veteran, Friday, July 17, 2015, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
President Barack Obama meets with Emma Didlake, 110, of Detroit, the oldest known World War II veteran, Friday, July 17, 2015, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

WEST BLOOMFIELD, Mich. — A Michigan woman who was believed to be the nation’s oldest veteran at 110 has died, about a month after meeting President Barack Obama in the Oval Office.
Emma Didlake died Sunday in West Bloomfield, northwest of Detroit, according to the Oakland County medical examiner’s office.
Didlake was a 38-year-old wife and mother of five when she signed up in 1943 for the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. She served about seven months stateside during the war, as a private and driver.
She spent time with the president in July during a trip to Washington that was arranged by Talons Out Honor Flight, a southwest Michigan chapter of a national nonprofit that provides free, one-day trips for veterans to visit monuments and memorials in the nation’s capital.
“Emma Didlake served her country with distinction and honor, a true trailblazer for generations of Americans who have sacrificed so much for their country,” Obama said Monday afternoon in a statement. “I was humbled and grateful to welcome Emma to the White House last month, and Michelle and I send our deepest condolences to Emma’s family, friends, and everyone she inspired over her long and quintessentially American life.”
Didlake was born in Alabama and moved with her family to Detroit in 1944. She was known to her family as “Big Mama” and recently moved to an assisted living family in suburban Detroit.
She was deemed the oldest U.S. veteran based on information gleaned by Honor Flight representatives through national outreach campaigns.
Granddaughter Marilyn Horne told The Associated Press last month that when Talons Out officials presented her grandmother with a short-sleeved shirt bearing the group’s logo to wear on the trip to Washington, Didlake took a look and said: “‘I don’t have Michelle Obama arms — I’m going to need a jacket.'”
During her visit to the White House, Didlake wore a patriotic-themed neck scarf and sat in her wheelchair in the same spot in the Oval Office where foreign leaders sit when they meet with Obama.
article by Associated Press via nbcnews.com

R.I.P. Civil Rights Movement Activist, SNCC Leader and former NAACP Chairman Julian Bond

Julian Bond at the N.A.A.C.P.’s annual convention in 2007. CreditPaul Sancya/Associated Press 

Julian Bond, a former chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a charismatic figure of the 1960s civil rights movement, a lightning rod of the anti-Vietnam War campaign and a lifelong champion of equal rights for minorities, died on Saturday night, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. He was 75.

Mr. Bond died in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., after a brief illness, the center said in a statement Sunday morning.

He was one of the original leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) while he was a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta.

He moved from the militancy of the student group to the top leadership of the establishmentarian N.A.A.C.P. Along the way, he was a writer, poet, television commentator, lecturer, college teacher, and persistent opponent of the stubborn remnants of white supremacy.

He also served for 20 years in the Georgia Legislature, mostly in conspicuous isolation from white colleagues who saw him as an interloper and a rabble-rouser.

Mr. Bond’s wit, cool personality and youthful face became familiar to millions of television viewers during the 1960s and 1970s. He attracted adjectives — dashing, handsome, urbane — the way some people attract money.

On the strength of his personality and quick intellect, he moved to the center of the civil rights action in Atlanta, the unofficial capital of the movement, at the height of the struggle for racial equality in the early 1960s.

Moving beyond demonstrations, he became a founder, with Morris Dees, of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a legal advocacy organization in Montgomery, Ala. Mr. Bond was its president from 1971 to 1979 and remained on its board for the rest of his life.

When he was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1965 — along with seven other black members — furious white members of the House refused to let him take his seat, accusing him of disloyalty. He was already well known because of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s stand against the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War.

That touched off a national drama that ended in 1966, when the Supreme Court in a unanimous decision ordered the legislature to seat him, saying it had denied him freedom of speech.

He went on to serve 20 years in the two houses of the legislature. As a lawmaker, he sponsored bills to establish a sickle cell anemia testing program and to provide low-interest home loans to low-income Georgians. He also helped create a majority-black congressional district in Atlanta.

He left the State Senate in 1986 after six terms to run for that seat in the United States House. He lost a bitter contest to his old friend John Lewis, a fellow founder of S.N.C.C. and its longtime chairman. The two men, for all their earlier closeness in the rights movement, represented opposite poles of African-American life in the South: Mr. Lewis was the son of an sharecropper; Mr. Bond was the son of a college president.

In a statement Sunday, President Obama called Mr. Bond “a hero and, I’m privileged to say, a friend.”

Charleston Council Renames Library To Honor AME Shooting Victim Cynthia Hurd

Cynthia Hurd, one of the nine churchgoers killed last week in the mass shooting at Emanuel AME Church, looks over a reproduction of the original of the Charleston Messenger found inside the John L. Dart Library in 2002. (Photo via postcourier.com)
Cynthia Hurd, one of the nine churchgoers killed last week in the mass shooting at Emanuel AME Church, looks over a reproduction of the original of the Charleston Messenger found inside the John L. Dart Library in 2002. (Photo via postandcourier.com)

Renaming the Charleston library she served for 30 years is a fitting tribute to Cynthia Hurd, one of the nine churchgoers killed during the Emanuel AME Church shooting last week.
The Charleston County Council unanimously voted on Thursday to rename the St. Andrews Regional Library the Cynthia Graham Hurd St. Andrews Regional LibraryThe Post & Courier reports. Hurd worked in the city’s library system from 1990 to 2011, before being given the managerial title at the St. Andrews Regional Library. Her husband Arthur called the commemorative title fitting for the woman who dedicated her life to books and helping others.

“People will look up and see her name and remember her every day,” Arthur Hurd said. “There have been nothing but good things said about her because that’s how she lived her life.”

Hurd was the longest-serving part-time librarian in the county. In a 2003 interview, she said the best thing about being a librarian was the chance to serve others. “I like helping people find answers,” she said. “Your whole reason for being there is to help people.”
Shortly after suspected gunman Dylann Roof took the lives of Hurd and eight others in Mother AME Emanuel Church last week, friends and former classmates from her alma mater, Clark Atlanta University, paid their respects with a candlelight vigil.
The College of Charleston also showed their gratitude to Hurd by renaming their academic scholarship the Cynthia Graham Hurd Memorial Scholarship. Formally known as the Colonial Scholarship, 12 full academic scholarships are handed out every year to in-state students.

The county also has set up a fund in her honor to continue her work. Those donations may be sent to Charleston County Public Library, c/o Cynthia Graham Hurd Memorial Fund, 68 Calhoun St., Charleston, SC 29401.

article by Desire Thompson via newsone.com

President Barack Obama Delivers Moving Eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Brings Church to Its Feet By Singing "Amazing Grace" (FULL VIDEO)

President Barack Obama gives eulogy for state Senator and Reverend Clementa Pinkney in Charleston (photo via YouTube)
President Barack Obama gives eulogy for state Senator and Reverend Clementa Pinkney in Charleston (photo via YouTube)

President Barack Obama continues to lead this country with class and heart, delivering a touching and emotional eulogy for state Senator and Reverend Clementa Pinckney, an unfortunate victim in the tragic shootings at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston last week.  Obama spoke eloquently of the good works and commitment to community Pinckney had, and solemnly acknowledged by name each of the church members who lost their lives with Pinckney.  He then proceeded to talk about the history of the black church and the power of grace.

To the families of the fallen, the nation shares in your grief. Our pain cuts that much deeper because it happened in a church.  The church is and always has been the center of African American life… a place to call our own in a too-often hostile world, a sanctuary from so many hardships.
Over the course of centuries, black churches served as hush harbors, where slaves could worship in safety, praise houses, where their free descendants could gather and shout “Hallelujah…” … rest stops for the weary along the Underground Railroad, bunkers for the foot soldiers of the civil-rights movement.
They have been and continue to community centers, where we organize for jobs and justice, places of scholarship and network, places where children are loved and fed and kept out of harms way and told that they are beautiful and smart and taught that they matter.  That’s what happens in church. That’s what the black church means — our beating heart, the place where our dignity as a people in inviolate.
There’s no better example of this tradition than Mother Emanuel, a church…  built by blacks seeking liberty, burned to the ground because its founders sought to end slavery only to rise up again, a phoenix from these ashes.

Obama goes on to address the Confederate flag as a symbol of systemic oppression and racial subjugation, and calls getting rid of it as “one step in an honest accounting of America’s history. A modest but meaningful balm for so many unhealed wounds.”  To read a transcript of his incredible eulogy, which also forcefully addresses mass incarceration, police brutality, voting rights, gun violence and systemic racial bias, click here.  To see it in full, watch below:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9IGyidtfGI&w=560&h=315]
article by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (follow @lakinhutcherson)

R.I.P. Albert Evans, Former New York City Ballet Principal Dancer

In this June 20, 2010 photo released by the New York City Ballet, Albert Evans appears during his farewell performance in "The Four Temperaments," in New York. Evans, who was in his late 40s, died at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital on Monday, June 22, 2015, said Rob Daniels, a spokesman for the ballet company. (Paul Kolnik/New York City Ballet via AP)
In this June 20, 2010 photo released by the New York City Ballet, Albert Evans appears during his farewell.

NEW YORK (AP) — Albert Evans, a former New York City Ballet principal dancer and one of the most prominent African-Americans in classical dance, has died at age 46.

Evans died at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital on Monday night “following a short illness,” said Rob Daniels, a spokesman for the ballet company. He did not have further details.
Evans was one of only two African-American principal dancers in New York City Ballet’s 67-year history. The first was Arthur Mitchell, who is now 81.
As a principal, Evans danced a huge variety of roles in the City Ballet repertoire, from classical to modern, from George Balanchine to Jerome Robbins to Christopher Wheeldon. He joined the company in 1988 and quickly rose through the ranks, becoming a soloist in 1991 and a principal in 1995. Evans retired during the spring 2010 season with an emotional farewell performance, and had been serving since then as a ballet master at the company.
“The entire New York City Ballet family is heartbroken by the loss of our beloved friend and colleague Albert Evans,” said Peter Martins, the company’s ballet master in chief, in a statement. “Kind, warm, generous, and always a joy to be with, Albert is quite simply irreplaceable.”
Evans was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and trained there as a youngster. In 1986, he was awarded a full scholarship to the School of American Ballet, NYCB’s official school.
His more prominent roles in Balanchine ballets included the Cavalier in “The Nutcracker” and Puck in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” among many others. He had featured roles in Wheeldon’s “Polyphonia” and “Liturgy.” And he originated roles in a number of works by Martins, including his 1991 “Sleeping Beauty,” in which Evans danced Puss in Boots, and “Romeo + Juliet,” in which he played a commanding Prince of Verona.
Friends and colleagues in the dance world took to social media on Tuesday to praise Evans.  “Goodbye dear Albert, a beautiful soul,” wrote choreographer Alexei Ratmansky on Facebook.

“He gave us all the strength, beauty, joy, laughter, smiles, passion, and inspiration to keep going, to keep pushing onward, to be the best we could be,” wrote principal dancer Sara Mearns on Instagram.

Dancer and rising choreographer Justin Peck, also on Instagram, called Evans “such an incredible, luminous person. Albert always brought warmth, hospitality, enthusiasm, humor to any situation.”

In addition to his dance roles, Evans choreographed several works, including “Haiku,” to music by John Cage, for New York City Ballet’s 2002 Diamond Project, as well as a solo for NYCB principal Peter Boal in 2003, performed at the Joyce Theater.

Evans also appeared in the 2002 “Live From Lincoln Center” broadcast of “New York City Ballet’s Diamond Project: Ten Years of New Choreography.”

article by Jocelyn Noveck via news.yahoo.com

President Obama Heading to Charleston on Friday to Deliver Eulogy

President Obama Speaks On Immigration Reform
President Obama

Washington (CNN) President Barack Obama will head to Charleston, South Carolina, on Friday to deliver the eulogy at funeral services for Rev. Clementa Pinckney, the state senator who was one of nine people killed in the racially- motivated shooting last week in Charleston.

Vice President Joe Biden and first lady Michelle Obama will join Obama at the funeral services, the White House said Monday.  The visit will be Obama’s first to the city since the deadly shooting last week at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a historic black church.

The White House will release additional details of the visit in the coming days, White House spokesman Eric Schultz said.  The visit will come days after Obama spoke candidly about racism in America during an interview for the podcast “WTF with Marc Maron” released on Monday — even using the N-word, a word some consider offensive.

“Racism, we are not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say nigger in public,” Obama said in the interview. “That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination. Societies don’t, overnight, completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior.”

Obama’s visit to Charleston is also notable as he opted earlier this year not to visit Baltimore — which became the epicenter of the debate over race and policing issues — as protests unfurled in that city in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray, a black man who died in police custody.

article by Jeremy Diamond and Michelle Kosinski via cnn.com

R.I.P. Comedian and Actor Reynaldo Rey

Reynaldo Rey Friday 2-shotReynaldo Rey, an actor and comedian whose dozens of credits include big-screen comedies Friday and White Men Can’t Jump and a recurring role on TV’s 227, died Thursday in Los Angeles of complications from a stroke last year. He was 75. His manager Vanzil Burke confirmed the news.

Although a staple on the African-American comedy scene for years, the Oklahoma native got a late start to his screen acting career, earning his first credit at 41 for the Sanford & Son spinoff Sanford, starring Redd Foxx. He appeared in the 1982’s Young Doctors In Love and the Eddie Murphy-Richard Pryor gangster flick Harlem Nights before landing a recurring role as Ray on the popular NBC sitcom 227.  He appeared in nearly 20 episodes during its four-year run and also wrote a pair of episodes.

Born Harold Reynolds, the actor went on to appear in several film comedies during the 1990s including White Men Can’t Jump with Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson, The Breaks, House Party 3. He perhaps is best known for playing Red’s father in 1995’s Friday.
Rey also did episodes of such TV comedies as The Wayans Bros, The Parent ‘Hood and later The Bernie Mac Show and Everybody Hates Chris. He continued to appear in small films throughout the 2000s. His final project was “Hollywood P.O.”, a play he wrote, directed and financed.
article by Erik Pedersen via deadline.com

R.I.P. Grammy Award-Winning Blues Master and Musical Legend B.B. King

(Photo: Associated Press)

B. B. King, whose world-weary voice and wailing guitar lifted him from the cotton fields of Mississippi to a global stage and the apex of American blues, died Thursday in Las Vegas. He was 89.

His death was reported early Friday by The Associated Press, citing his lawyer, Brent Bryson, and by CNN, citing his daughter, Patty King.

Mr. King married country blues to big-city rhythms and created a sound instantly recognizable to millions: a stinging guitar with a shimmering vibrato, notes that coiled and leapt like an animal, and a voice that groaned and bent with the weight of lust, longing and lost love.

“I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions,” Mr. King said in his autobiography, “Blues All Around Me” (1996), written with David Ritz.

In performances, his singing and his solos flowed into each other as he wrung notes from the neck of his guitar, vibrating his hand as if it were wounded, his face a mask of suffering. Many of the songs he sang — like his biggest hit, “The Thrill Is Gone” (“I’ll still live on/But so lonely I’ll be”) — were poems of pain and perseverance.

The music historian Peter Guralnick once noted that Mr. King helped expand the audience for the blues through “the urbanity of his playing, the absorption of a multiplicity of influences, not simply from the blues, along with a graciousness of manner and willingness to adapt to new audiences and give them something they were able to respond to.”

B. B. stood for Blues Boy, a name he took with his first taste of fame in the 1940s. His peers were bluesmen like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, whose nicknames fit their hard-bitten lives. But he was born a King, albeit in a sharecropper’s shack surrounded by dirt-poor laborers and wealthy landowners.

Mr. King went out on the road and never came back after one of his first recordings reached the top of the rhythm-and-blues charts in 1951. He began in juke joints, country dance halls and ghetto nightclubs, playing 342 one-night stands in 1956 and 200 to 300 shows a year for a half-century thereafter, rising to concert halls, casino main stages and international acclaim.

He was embraced by rock ’n’ roll fans of the 1960s and ’70s, who remained loyal as they grew older together. His playing influenced many of the most successful rock guitarists of the era, including Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix.