GLORIA H. WILLIAMS, FILED HISD DESEGREGATION SUIT
By Roma Khanna
Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle
April 18, 2009, 8:56PM
For the Chronicle
Gloria Williams died April 8 at age 60 of complications from an infection.
Williams died April 8 of complications from an infection. She was 60.
Services were held Saturday at Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church.
Young student
Williams was a 16-year-old student at Yates High school in 1964 when she and her younger sister, Rosella Harmon, became the plaintiffs in a lawsuit seeking to immediately desegregate Houston public schools. At the time the Houston Independent School District gradually was integrating different classes.
The lawsuit argued that the city’s black schools offered inferior classes and that the girls were being denied vocational courses only available at all-white San Jacinto High School.
“We always got the used books from the white students,” said Williams’ sister, Nikita Harmon, a municipal court judge. “We wanted a fair education and the same opportunities other students were getting.”
Integration’s start
Seven years before the sisters filed suit, a federal judge had ordered HISD to integrate “with all deliberate speed.” But he set no deadline, so the district moved slowly, finally implementing a plan to integrate schools one grade level at a time.
The process began in 1960 with first grade.
By the late 1960s, the district accelerated integration, opening all grade levels to students of any race.
The change came too late for Williams, who graduated from Yates, Harmon said. But her younger sister, Rosella Harmon, was able to attend and graduate from the newly integrated San Jacinto.
“(Gloria) was really proud of that moment,” Nikita Harmon said.
The family’s role in the desegregation of Houston’s schools inspired Nikita Harmon and another of Williams’ sisters to pursue legal careers.
“The experience stayed with us and shaped our pursuits,” Harmon said.
Move to Houston
Williams was born in 1948 in Ebenezer, Miss., where her family lived until moving to Houston in the early 1950s.
Williams, the fourth of nine girls in the Harmon family, attended Texas Woman’s University.
She made a career as an administrative assistant, working most recently at Texas Southern University. Williams had two children, Guy D. Williams, of North Carolina, and Shunda Williams, of Houston, who survive her.
Williams also is survived by her father, the Rev. Rozell Harmon, eight sisters and three grandchildren.
SOURCE: The Houston Chronicle: http://www.chron.com
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JUDITH KRUG, LIBRARIAN WHO FOUGHT BOOK BAN
Judith F. Krug, who led the campaign by libraries against efforts to ban books, including helping found Banned Books Week, then fought laws and regulations to limit children’s access to the Internet, died Saturday in Evanston, Ill. She was 69.
American Library Association
Judith F. Krug in 2007.
The cause was stomach cancer, her son, Steven, said.
As the American Library Association’s official proponent of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech since the 1960s, Ms. Krug (pronounced kroog) fought the banning of books, including “Huckleberry Finn,” “Mein Kampf,” “Little Black Sambo,” “Catcher in the Rye” and sex manuals. In 1982, she helped found Banned Books Week, an annual event that includes authors reading from prohibited books.
She also fought for the inclusion of literature on library shelves that she herself found offensive, like “The Blue Book” of the ultraconservative John Birch Society. The book is a transcript of a two-day monologue by Robert Welch at the founding meeting of the society in 1958.
“My personal proclivities have nothing to do with how I react as a librarian,” Ms. Krug said in an interview with The New York Times in 1972. “Library service in this country should be based on the concept of intellectual freedom, of providing all pertinent information so a reader can make decisions for himself.”
In 1967, Ms. Krug became director of the library association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, which promotes intellectual freedom in libraries. In 1969, she was appointed executive director of its Freedom to Read Foundation, which raises money to further First Amendment issues in court cases.
The issues have changed over time. In December 1980, Ms. Krug’s observation that complaints about the content of books in public libraries had increased fivefold in the month since Ronald Reagan was elected president was widely reported. In an interview with The Times, she said that many of the complainants identified themselves as members of Moral Majority, a strongly conservative group, but the Rev. George A. Zarris, chairman of Moral Majority in Illinois, denied there was any organized effort.
But the situation illustrated a frequent conflict in issues over library censorship. Ms. Krug pushed what she often described as a pure view of the First Amendment against what her opponents often said was the democratic will.
“What the library associations are trying to do is make the voice of the people null and void,” said Nancy Czerwiec, a former primary school teacher who led the fight to ban a sex education book from the Oak Lawn Library in Illinois.
That controversy was settled when the library agreed to lend the book only to adults.
Ms. Krug later became a leader in fighting censorship on the Internet, an issue taken up by libraries because many people with no computers at home use library computers. The question involved not just a limited number of books for a particular library’s shelves, but efforts to keep theoretically unlimited amounts of indecent material from children by means of technological filters.
In 1997, an alliance of civil liberties groups, with Ms. Krug a principal organizer, persuaded the Supreme Court to strike down the indecency provisions of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.
Jerry Berman, founder and chairman of the Center for Democracy & Technology, which promotes free speech on the Internet, said in a statement, “Her legacy rests in the constitutional challenge that secured the free speech rights for the Internet that we exercise today.”
More recently, Ms. Krug fiercely fought a provision in the USA Patriot Act that allows federal investigators to peruse library records of who has read what. Former Attorney General John Ashcroft dismissed protests about the law as “baseless hysteria.”
Judith Rose Fingeret was born in Pittsburgh on March 15, 1940, graduated from the University of Pittsburgh and earned a master’s degree in library science from the University of Chicago. She worked as a librarian at the University of Chicago and elsewhere before joining the library association as a research analyst.
In addition to her son, Ms. Krug is survived by her husband, Herbert; her daughter, Michelle Litchman; five grandchildren; her two brothers; and her sister.
Ms. Krug credited her parents as inspiring her passion for free expression. In 2002, she told The Chicago Tribune about reading a sex-education book under the covers with a flashlight when she was 12.
“It was a hot book; I was just panting,” she said, when her mother suddenly threw back the bed covers and asked what she was doing. Judith timidly held up the book.
“She said, ‘For God’s sake, turn on your bedroom light so you don’t hurt your eyes.’ And that was that,” Ms. Krug said.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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JAMES D. HOUSTON, CHRONICLER OF A DIVERSE CALIFORNIA
James D. Houston, who captured the promise, the harshness and the sheer beauty of California in novels like “Continental Drift” and “Snow Mountain Passage” and in nonfiction works like “Farewell to Manzanar,” about a World War II internment camp for the Japanese, died on Thursday at his home in Santa Cruz, Calif. He was 75.
Greg Pio/Alfred A. Knopf
James D. Houston
The cause was complications of lymphoma, said his wife, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston.
Mr. Houston lived his entire life in California, most of it in Santa Cruz. The state provided the setting for nearly all his novels and the material for the nonfiction work “Californians: Searching for the Golden State,” and Mr. Houston evoked, with pinpoint precision, its redwood forests, farms and wild coastline, as well as its restless population of faddists and dreamers.
He was just as familiar with Hawaii. A passion for that state and its culture was born when his father, after being stationed there with the Navy, brought home a ukulele and a steel guitar, and Mr. Houston later explored Hawaii in several novels and in nonfiction works on surfing and Hawaiian music.
James Dudley Houston was born in San Francisco, where his parents had migrated from Quanah, Tex., a small town near the Oklahoma panhandle. Their story kindled an interest in treks and quests that intensified when he met his future wife, whose family had immigrated to California from Japan.
His lifelong inquiry extended from his early novel “A Native Son of the Golden West” (1971), about California surfers in Hawaii, to “Bird of Another Heaven” (2007), a historical novel about a half-Indian, half-Hawaiian California woman who becomes the consort of the last king of Hawaii.
Mr. Houston earned a bachelor’s degree in drama at San Jose State University in 1956 and the next year married Ms. Wakatsuki, a fellow student and, later, his collaborator on “Farewell to Manzanar” (1974), which described where she had been interned during the war. In addition to his wife, he is survived by their three children: Joshua, of Honolulu, and Corinne Houston Traugott and Gabrielle Houston Neville, both of Santa Cruz.
After three years in the Air Force as an information officer with a NATO tactical bomber unit in Britain, Mr. Houston received a master’s degree in American literature at Stanford University in 1962. He had begun writing stories while in the Air Force and in 1968 published his first novel, “Between Battles,” about a young pilot at a NATO air station in Britain.
With his second novel, “Gig” (1969), about a jazz pianist toiling in a California roadhouse, Mr. Houston found his footing, and his setting.
In various guises California would play the lead role in Mr. Houston’s work, notably in his best-known novels, “Continental Drift” (1978), about the shadow cast when a son returns to the family ranch from Vietnam, and “Snow Mountain Passage” (2001), a novel about a family traveling with the Donner Party.
Off and on, Mr. Houston earned his living playing and teaching guitar. His interest in Hawaiian music led him to write “Hawaiian Son” (2004), about the ukulele virtuoso Eddie Kamae. He also blended travel, anthropology and history in books like “Surfing: A History of the Ancient Hawaiian Sport” (1966), written with Ben R. Finney; “In the Ring of Fire: A Pacific Basin Journey” (1997); and “Where Light Takes Its Color From the Sea: A California Notebook” (2008).
Mr. Houston told The Bloomsbury Review in 2007 that his natural environment was “the valleys and ridges and towns and waterways between Mendocino and Point Conception.” Although he ventured farther afield in fiction and nonfiction, he regarded much of his home state with the same astonished eye as the rest of the country.
“As a phenomenon, as a certain kind of sociopolitical force and laboratory, it’s endlessly compelling to contemplate and write about,” he said. “But as a place to call home and identify with, there’s really too much of it.” He added, “The human nervous system wasn’t designed to embrace something as unwieldy and various as the entire state of California.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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MANNY ORQUENDO, LATIN BAND LEADER AND A STYLISTIC INNOVATOR
Jack Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos
Manny Oquendo performing with his group, Libre, in 1991.
By A. E. VELEZ
Manny Oquendo, the Latin band leader, timbale player and percussionist who was an expert with the típico Cuban rhythmic style and later infused it into Latin jazz, died on March 25 in the Bronx. He was 78.
The cause was complications from a kidney operation, said Andy González, his musical director of 35 years in their band, Libre.
Mr. Oquendo’s involvement with Cuban rhythms on the timbales and bongos dated back to his childhood. Born in 1931 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to parents from Puerto Rico, Jose Manuel Oquendo spent most of his formative years in Spanish Harlem, where he lived above Almacénes Hernández, the area’s early famed Latin record store, and later on Kelly Street in the Bronx. Also nearby on Kelly Street were Arsenio Rodríguez, the celebrated master of the tres, the Cuban guitarlike instrument, and future music stars like Joe Cuba, the Palmieri Brothers and Little Ray Romero.
Mr. Oquendo began playing a trap drum set at 15 and later took lessons, alongside the future jazz drummer Max Roach, from Sam Ulano, a well-known teacher.
By the late 1940s, he was playing with New York’s top bands along with Chano Pozo and Juan Torres, known as El Boy. When Mr. Oquendo joined Tito Puente’s orchestra as a bongo player he often used his sartorial and musical talents to attract the attention of the surging seas of dancers in places like the Palladium ballroom. In 1962, he joined Eddie Palmieri’s seminal band, La Perfecta, which challenged the big band scene with a smaller, conjunto lineup that called for fewer players and more improvisation.
Those familiar with the traditional dance hall rhythms of Cuban mambos, guarachas and rumbas could see that Mr. Oquendo’s approach to his instruments was intentionally understated.
“First of all, you shouldn’t overplay,” Mr. Oquendo said in an 1997 interview with Latin Beat magazine.
“The timbales are for providing accompaniment, backup for the group; and a good timbalero must have a strong left hand to play the tumbao and pailas or cascara,” he said, referring to different rhythmic patterns in a measure. “The timbalero must always keep the beat.”
While playing in La Perfecta, where he met Mr. González, his future musical director and a bassist, Mr. Oquendo picked up and adapted the complex carnival rhythm called Mozambique, made popular in Cuba by Pello El Afrokán, and reworked it for the timbales, introducing a hypnotic African beat to the dance halls of New York. In 1974, he and Mr. González began Libre, creating a sound outside traditional parameters.
Libre has released 12 albums, including the popular “Mejor que Nunca. ”
In a review of a 1983 concert in The New York Times, Jon Pareles called Libre a traditionalist band with infusions of modal Afro-Cuban jazz that made it progressive.
“But when Libre charges into its arrangements, which unite three trombones, Dave Valentin’s nimbly assertive flute, two singers and a sizzling rhythm section,” Mr. Pareles wrote, “those categories are lost in the beat.”
In his 1997 interview with Latin Beat, Mr. Oquendo said: “It’s important to develop the ear and get a deeper knowledge of the music, and once you become good at the instrument, you must always remember to try to be original, be yourself. You can borrow, you can take, you can even steal, but you do not imitate.”
Among Mr. Oquendo’s survivors are two sisters, Jean Vega and Lydia Crespo.
Mr. González said Libre would continue and said he was planning a tribute concert on May 30 at the Bronx Museum of the Arts for Mr. Oquendo, who played with the band until January.
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
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MARILYN CHAMBERS, ‘GREEN DOOR’ SEX STAR AND ACTRESS IN IVORY SNOW SOAP COMMERCIAL
Marilyn Chambers, whose photograph as the mother of a newborn on a laundry soap package and whose performance as a fantasy-fulfilling wanton in a pornographic movie evoked stunningly contrasting portrayals of womanhood, was found dead in her home on Sunday on the outskirts of Santa Clarita, Calif. She was 56.
Mitchell Brothers Pictures, via Photofest
Marilyn Chambers.
Fred Prouser/Reuters
Adult film star Marilyn Chambers aka Mary Ann Taylor in this April 27, 2000 file photo.
The cause was not yet determined, said Ed Winter, assistant chief of the Los Angeles County coroner’s office. He said that the death was being investigated but that foul play was not suspected.
Ms. Chambers was an aspiring actress and model in 1972 when she starred in “Behind the Green Door,” a pornographic film about a woman who is abducted to a theater and ravished in front of an audience, ultimately to her great satisfaction, by both men and women. It became especially popular when it was learned that its star was the same fresh-faced blonde who appeared beaming at a baby on boxes of Ivory Snow, a laundry soap famously described by Procter & Gamble, its manufacturer, as “99 and 44/100 percent pure.”
Ms. Chambers declared at the time that her film would help “sell a lot more soap,” though Procter & Gamble did not see it that way and replaced her.
“Behind the Green Door” was among the first X-rated films to gain wide distribution and, along with “Deep Throat,” released the same year, is generally credited with helping establish a mainstream market for pornography.
“Behind the Green Door” was more than just a parade of sex scenes, said Steven Hirsch, the co-chief executive of Vivid Entertainment Group, which makes adult films. Even though Ms. Chambers did not actually have any lines in the film, he said, she brought it to life.
“It was a movie that really dug deep into sexuality, psychologically,” Mr. Hirsch said in an interview on Monday. “It took you to a place that no other adult film had gone before, and the reason they were able to pull that off is that she was a talented actress.”
When Ms. Chambers died, she was identified by documents with her body as Marilyn Ann Taylor, evidently the name she assumed after a marriage, though along with many other details that could not be confirmed on Monday. She was born, Mr. Winter said, on April 22, 1952, though he could not confirm that her birth name was, as often reported, Marilyn Ann Briggs. She is most often said to have been born in Westport, Conn., though in a 2007 interview with The Providence Journal in Rhode Island, Ms. Chambers said she was born in Providence and grew up in Westport.
The Associated Press reported that her survivors include a daughter, McKenna Marie Taylor; a brother, Bill Briggs; and a sister, Jann Smith.
Before making “Behind the Green Door,” Ms. Chambers had hoped to establish an acting career in fully clothed roles. She had had a small part in “The Owl and the Pussycat,” a 1970 comedy starring Barbra Streisand and George Segal, and she later appeared in “Rabid” (1977), an early film by David Cronenberg, but most of her work after “Green Door” capitalized on her fame as a sex star.
“I thought there would be a chance to cross over,” she said in the Providence Journal interview. “Boy, was I wrong.”
SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com
Ann
