SARAH E. WRIGHT, WRITER OF DEPRESSION-ERA BLACK EXPERIENCE
Sarah E. Wright
“This Child’s Gonna Live” was hailed by critics around the country and named an outstanding book of 1969 by The New York Times. Reviewing it in The Times Book Review earlier that year, the novelist Shane Stevens called it a “small masterpiece,” adding: “Sarah Wright’s triumph in this novel is a celebration of life over death. It is, in every respect, an impressive achievement.”
Ms. Wright never published another novel. She died in Manhattan on Sept. 13, at 80; the cause was complications of cancer, her husband, Joseph Kaye, said. Today “This Child’s Gonna Live” remains highly regarded in literary circles though little known outside them.
The novel centers on Mariah Upshur, the wife of a black oysterman on the Maryland shore. Set in the fictional community of Tangierneck in the early 1930s, it unsparingly depicts the hunger, disease, racism and hard labor that were the stuff of daily life.
Capable, sensual and fiercely determined, Mariah engages in an interior dialogue with Jesus throughout the book. In the opening passage, she prays for a sunny day so she can earn money in the fields, where the young potato plants “weren’t anything but some little old twigs and promises.”
Mariah is pregnant with her fifth child. She has already lost one child in infancy and before the book is out will lose another. She dreams of escaping Tangierneck, “a place of standing still and death,” and is adamant that her new child will live.
While novelists like James Baldwin, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison had explored the black male experience, Ms. Wright’s novel was among the first to focus on the confluence of race, class and sex. Republished by the Feminist Press in 1986 and again in 2002, “This Child’s Gonna Live” remains in print today.
Not every reviewer embraced the book. Writing in Harper’s Magazine in 1969, the critic Irving Howe called its style “overwrought.” But many others praised Ms. Wright’s densely interwoven poetic language, her deft use of local dialect and her ability to convey the extraordinary predicament of being black, female, rural and poor.
“It’s a very difficult novel in a lot of ways,” Jennifer Campbell, an associate professor of writing studies at Roger Williams University, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. (Professor Campbell wrote the afterword to the novel’s 2002 edition.) “It’s very, very painful to read: the pain of not being able to keep your children safe, of not being able to feed them properly, of not being able to give them two pennies for the Halloween celebration.”
Ms. Wright spent about 10 years working on a second novel but did not complete it, her husband said last week.
She scarcely seems to have had time. Besides working full-time as a bookkeeper, Ms. Wright taught, lectured and was a past vice president of the Harlem Writers Guild. She published critical essays; a volume of poetry, “Give Me a Child” (Kraft Publishing, 1955, with Lucy Smith); and a nonfiction book for young people, “A. Philip Randolph: Integration in the Workplace” (Silver Burdett, 1990). She was deeply involved in political causes, protesting everything from the Vietnam War to South African apartheid to the present war in Iraq.
There was something else, Ms. Wright’s husband said, that kept her from the second novel: the anguish of writing the first. For the story of the Upshur family, though its characters were composites, was in large measure Ms. Wright’s own.
Sarah Elizabeth Wright was born on Dec. 9, 1928, in Wetipquin, Md., a historically free black community on the eastern shore. Her father, like Mariah’s husband, was an oysterman; her mother, like Mariah, shucked oysters and picked crops. Sarah had nearly a dozen siblings, several of whom died in childhood. She began writing poetry when she was about 8.
After graduating from Salisbury Colored High School, Sarah entered Howard University, where she became editor of the newspaper. She left before graduating, her husband said, “because she was literally starving.” Her parents had no money to send her for food.
“When Sarah went off to Howard, they had no idea what it meant in terms of the financial requirements,” Mr. Kaye said last week. “They gave her oilcloth that they thought she could barter with other people to obtain what she needed.”
Ms. Wright moved to Philadelphia in the late 1940s and to New York a decade later. There, in a three-room apartment on the Lower East Side, she began work on “This Child’s Gonna Live.”
“That took such a toll on her, because she was forced to dredge up painful childhood memories that she thought she had run away from when she left the community,” Mr. Kaye said. “Death just seemed to be a constant companion in her childhood, and the spirit of death just hovered over the community.”
Besides her husband, Ms. Wright, who was known in private life as Sarah Wright Kaye, is survived by a son, Michael; a daughter, Shelley Chotai; three siblings, Wanda, Howard and Gilbert; four grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.
She also leaves behind a box containing the manuscript of her unfinished novel, the second installment in a planned trilogy about the people of Tangierneck. During the decade she worked on the book, Ms. Wright never discussed it, even with her husband.
Mr. Kaye has not opened the box. To judge from the heft, he said, it contains several hundred pages. From a chapter he found elsewhere, the novel appears to concern Bardetta Upshur, Mariah’s daughter — the child who was meant to live, and did.
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FRANK COGHLAN, CHILD ACTOR IN SILENT MOVIES
Frank Coghlan Jr., a freckle-faced child actor of silent movies who in the sound era thrilled Saturday matinee audiences by shouting “Shazam!” and mutating into the superhero Captain Marvel, died on Sept. 7 at his home in Saugus, Calif. He was 93.
Frank Coghlan Jr., billed as Junior Coghlan, around 1928.He died of natural causes, his son, Patrick, said.
Junior Coghlan, as he was usually billed, did not actually become Captain Marvel in the 12-part serial “Adventures of Captain Marvel,” which Republic Pictures released in 1941. He played Billy Batson, the boy who meets a shaman in Siam who teaches him to transform himself into the superhero.
It was actually Tom Tyler who emerged as Captain Marvel, after Billy’s “Shazam!” moment, a giant flash and a billow of white smoke. (Although Mr. Coghlan was 25 at the time, his youthful looks and rather high-pitched voice allowed him to play the younger character.) Billy the boy and Captain Marvel, in a tight red costume with a yellow lightning bolt on the chest, would morph back and forth during the episodes, each 15 to 20 minutes long.
“It’s considered by many aficionados as the best cliffhanger serial of all time,” Bruce Goldstein, the director of repertory programming at Film Forum, the movie house in the South Village, said in an interview. “What a great fantasy for kids: a kid who turns into a superhero.”
Junior Coghlan had already made his name in movies when he was really a child. Starting at 3 as a crawl-on in a Western serial called “Daredevil Jack,” he had been an extra, played bit parts or had significant roles in more than two dozen silent movies.
“If you went to the movies in those days, you couldn’t help but know him, even though he was never a major star,” the film critic and historian Leonard Maltin said in an interview.
In 1925 the director Cecil B. DeMille signed little Frank to a five-year contract. “When DeMille saw Junior’s publicity stills, he stated, ‘Junior Coghlan is the perfect example of a homeless waif,’ ” according to the Web site Goldensilents.com.
“He had a spunk and an innocence,” Mr. Maltin said. “He would not be the one playing a juvenile delinquent.”
Yet in one of his first talkies, Mr. Coghlan played James Cagney’s hoodlum as a boy in “The Public Enemy” (1931), about a criminal’s rise in the Prohibition era.
Frank Edward Coghlan Jr. was born in New Haven on March 15, 1916, the only child of Frank and Katherine Coyle Coghlan. The family moved to California when Frank Jr. was a baby and, soon after, all three were working as extras in silent films.
Mr. Coghlan’s wife of 31 years, the former Betty Corrigan, died in 1974. His second wife, Letha Schwarzrocks, died in 2001. Besides his son, Patrick, of Saugus, Calif., he is survived by three daughters, Cathy Farley of Gold Hill, Ore.; Judy Coghlan of Seal Beach, Calif.; and Libbey Gagnon of Long Beach, Calif.; and six grandchildren.
Mr. Coghlan served as a naval aviator in World War II. He later headed the Navy’s motion picture cooperation program, acting as a liaison with Hollywood studios. After 23 years in the Navy, he returned to acting in bit parts in movies, on television and in television commercials.
Mr. Coghlan often appeared at conventions and seminars for movie buffs in his later years and was pleased that many people remembered his role in the Captain Marvel series.
His license plate said “Shazam,” Mr. Maltin said.
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MR. MAGIC, DISC JOCKEY FOR EARLY HIP-HOP
Mr. Magic, right, with Grandmaster Caz on WHBI in 1981.
Mr. Magic, whose panache and persistence in bringing once-reviled rap to mainstream radio in the 1980s helped pave the way for the breakout of hip-hop culture, died on Friday in Brooklyn. He was 53.
The cause was a heart attack, said Tyrone Williams, his manager and producer.
Mr. Magic, born John Rivas, was the first host on commercial radio to devote a program exclusively to rap when his “Rap Attack” began broadcasting on WBLS-FM in New York in April 1983. Disco and funk were then fading, and rap was emerging as a rebellious new art form in the streets, housing projects and parks of New York City.
But many radio stations and music executives were wary of the frank explosiveness of the new music. Mr. Magic played a role similar to that of Alan Freed in popularizing rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s.
“Magic was the guy who carried a flag for the music on the radio, exactly as Freed had done for rock ’n’ roll,” said Bill Adler, a former director of publicity for Def Jam Recordings.
Mr. Magic looked the part of a rap impresario, wearing rings on every finger and gold rope chains. He favored a sharkskin suit.
In the 1970s Mr. Magic was an itinerant disk jockey in Brooklyn, and a few small labels were starting to release rap records. He bought some late-night time on a New York public-access radio station, WHBI (now WNWK), to broadcast the new music. A few others were doing the same thing on that and other noncommercial stations.
Mr. Williams said it was a lucrative concept: the station charged $75 an hour, and he and Mr. Magic charged advertisers $100 a minute. But their larger motive was to demonstrate a growing appetite for the music that created the culture of hip-hop, manifested in fashion, advertising, dance and other fields. A following grew.
“In no time at all a star was born,” went “Magic’s Wand,” a 1982 song by the rap group Whodini.
Mr. Magic’s big breakthrough came when WBLS-FM, a larger, mainstream New York station, decided to take a chance on rap, starting in April 1983. Soon Mr. Magic was engaged in spirited competition with a rap show on the station KISS-FM hosted by a D.J. who called himself Kool DJ Red Alert.
Mr. Magic gathered a sort of hip-hop collective that included artists like Big Daddy Kane, Biz Markie, Roxanne and Kool G Rap, and was called the Juice Crew. (Mr. Magic was Sir Juice.) Red Alert was affiliated with a rap group called Boogie Down Productions.
The two sides staged elaborate battles, recording songs as insults to respond to taunts from the other side. The exchanges were wildly popular, on and off the air.
John Rivas was born in the Bronx on March 15, 1956. In a 1995 interview with Hiphopmusic.com, he called himself something of a hoodlum as a youth, but by the time he was in his early 20s he had a van and was working as a mobile D.J. He also worked at an electronics store, where he gave up-and-coming musicians discounts on speakers.
In her book “Rap Music and Street Consciousness” (2002), Cheryl L. Keyes wrote that WBLS assigned Mr. Williams, a sportscaster known as Fly Ty, to be Mr. Magic’s manager. Marley Marl was assigned to be his sound engineer, but he soon came to be called the Engineer All Star for his provocative mixing — what the three called “the dirty basement sound.”
Many rappers they presented on the radio did not have record contracts, much less fame. That came later, often abundantly.
Together, the three toured the country to do what were often the first rap shows on many stations. They then sent tapes by mail to the stations so they could do more shows.
In 1985 KDAY in Redondo Beach, Calif., became the first radio station in the country to adapt an-all rap format.
Mr. Williams said that in 1984, WBLS wanted to abandon the rap show and offered Mr. Magic the chance to host a show playing softer music.
“If I stop playing, rap will die,” Mr. Magic said, and returned to WHBI. He came back to WBLS the next year and stayed until 1989. He then worked for WEBB in Baltimore until 1992. In 2000 he left to work for WQHT in New York, a station known as Hot-97.
For more than six years, he had been unable to get another show, Mr. Williams said. “I watched Magic become sadder, thinner and upset,” he said. Mr. Williams said that at the time of his death Mr. Magic was negotiating to return to WBLS.
Mr. Magic was separated from his wife, Lisa Rivas. He is also survived by his sons John Jr. and Jabar, and his daughter, Domonique Rivas.
Mr. Magic was often described as arrogant, although his on-the-air manner was smooth and warm. When he met Magic Johnson, the basketball great, he said, “The world is not big enough for two Magics.”
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JOHN WILD, A DEVEOPER OF ULTRASOUND IN CANCER DIAGNOSES
Dr. John J. Wild
Dr. Wild, right, in early years.
His death, at the N. C. Little Hospice, was confirmed by his daughter, Ellen Wild.
The ultrasound scans commonly used in medicine today for cancer diagnosis and for monitoring fetal development derived from the discoveries of Dr. Wild and his contemporaries, who demonstrated that ultrasonic echoes could produce images of soft tissues inside the body.
While working as a surgeon in London during World War II, Dr. Wild treated patients suffering bowel failure due to impact trauma from bomb blasts during the Blitz. He sought a noninvasive method of evaluating the bowel and drew on his familiarity with an echo-testing technique that used sound waves to detect cracks in the armor plating of tanks. The sound of the returning echoes would vary with the thickness of the tissue and its ability to contract and relax, providing information about the condition of the bowel wall.
Dr. Wild did not yet use the technique on people, but developed the idea after immigrating to the United States in 1946 and going to work in the surgery department at the University of Minnesota.
At a nearby air base, the Navy was studying the use of ultrasonic echo signals to simulate enemy terrain for pilot radar training. Dr. Wild applied this concept to tissues, first in animals, demonstrating that sound energy would echo off soft tissue. He collaborated with John M. Reid, an electrical engineer, and together they built an instrument that could translate the ultrasonic signals into visual images, providing a window into the human body.
Using the device to obtain images of breast tissue, Dr. Wild showed that ultrasonic pictures made it possible to distinguish between cancerous and noncancerous tissue, providing a noninvasive method for detecting and evaluating breast tumors. Drs. Wild and Reid expanded the technology to other tissues and later developed a hand-held rectal scanner for studying the large bowel and a vaginal scanner.
“Wild and Reid were the first to develop equipment specifically designed for breast scanning and attempted to differentiate benign from malignant disease,” Dr. Richard Gold, professor of radiological sciences emeritus at U.C.L.A. Medical Center, wrote in “Diagnosis of Diseases of the Breast” (W.B. Saunders, 2nd ed., 2005). “Furthermore, they were the first to differentiate between cystic and solid masses in the breast by means of ultrasonography.” (Other early work on ultrasound breast tissue imaging had been done independently by the Japanese researcher Toshio Wagai and his colleagues.)
Drs. Wild and Reid first published their work in the journal Science in 1952. “Theoretically it was thought possible to record soft tissue structure by tracing the information obtained from a sound beam sweeping through the tissues onto a fluorescent television screen,” they wrote. They concluded, “The immediate application of echography to the detection of tumors in accessible sites in the living intact human organism is envisaged.”
The cover of the March 1955 issue of Electronics magazine depicts the two researchers using their “cancer detector,” with the caption “Ultrasonic ranging speeds cancer diagnosis.”
Dr. Wild was awarded a Japan Prize from the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan, valued at $370,000, in 1991 for his work in ultrasonic imaging.
John Julian Wild was born Aug. 11, 1914, in Kent, England. He attended Cambridge University and received a B.A. in natural science in 1936, an M.A. in 1940, and a medical degree in 1942. In 1950, Dr. Wild moved his laboratory from the surgical department to the electrical engineering department at the university. He left the University of Minnesota in 1953 and continued his research with support from local sponsors and grants from the Public Health Service.
In 1953, Dr. Wild founded a research unit at St. Barnabas Hospital in Minneapolis, where he worked until becoming director of research at the Minnesota Foundation in St. Paul in 1960. Disagreements between Dr. Wild and the foundation, which administered his grant from the National Cancer Institute, led the foundation to discontinue support for his work in 1963. Dr. Wild sued the Minnesota Foundation and in 1972 was awarded more than $16 million in defamation damages. An appeals court later overturned the award, and the suit was settled out of court in 1981. Dr. Wild was director of the Medico-Technological Institute of Minneapolis from 1966 to 1999 and also maintained a private medical practice.
In addition to his daughter, Ellen, of Bethesda, Md., his survivors include Valerie Wild, his wife of 41 years; two sons from a previous marriage, John and Douglas, both of Minneapolis; and three granddaughters.
“Universal recognition of his achievements and vision was slow to materialize,” Ms. Wild said. He was often at odds with those overseeing the direction of his work.
Dr. Wild wrote, “I think I must have come into this world with a propensity for making chaos out of order, since I always seem to be upsetting those concerned with maintaining conventional levels of orderliness and humbleness.” He continued, “in my ultrasonic work I have met many people who did not believe the evidence of their own eyes.”
He patented his first invention at the age of 14, a valve to control the flow of cold and hot water into the bathtub.
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RAYMOND A. BROWN, CIVIL RIGHTS LAWYER
Raymond Brown in 1994.
The cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, said Thulani Davis, his sister-in-law.
Mr. Brown, a tall, slender man blessed with the courtroom gifts of a strong voice, sweeping arm gestures and a prowling gait, developed his ardor for civil rights as an African-American soldier sent to Army bases in the South and seeing firsthand how shabbily and humiliatingly blacks were treated. He honed his reputation with Southern civil rights cases in the 1960s and later defended some of the black students — including his son — arrested for taking over a building at Columbia University in 1968.
But his talent for courtroom bravado, oratory and canny legal strategies was such that clients like New Jersey politicians, organized crime figures and union officials sought him out when issues far from civil rights were involved. He defended the mayor of Camden, N.J., Angelo Errichetti, in 1980 in one of the Abscam cases involving congressmen and other politicians accused of taking bribes in what had been a sting operation by federal authorities pretending to be wealthy Arab sheiks.
In the late 1970s, he defended Mario E. Jascalevich, an Argentine-born physician identified as Dr. X in early newspaper reports, against charges that he murdered five surgical patients at Riverdell Hospital in Oradell, N.J., with overdoses of curare. Gesturing at the jury with his gold-rimmed half glasses and quoting Shakespeare, Mr. Brown contended in his opening statement that the surgeon was framed by colleagues trying to cover up their own ineptness. Dr. Jascalevich was acquitted in 1978.
In an important sideshow, Mr. Brown accused M. A. Farber, the reporter for The New York Times who revealed the mysterious deaths, of joining with the Bergen County prosecutor to advance their careers, and subpoenaed Mr. Farber and The Times for thousands of pages of investigative notes. Mr. Farber spent 40 days in jail and The Times paid $285,000 in fines in defending the right to protect news sources.
Mr. Brown helped Resorts International get one of New Jersey’s first gambling casino licenses despite allegations of ties to organized crime — allegations Mr. Brown characterized as going “to the third and fourth degree of remoteness.” Earlier, in 1964, he defended John W. Butenko, a 39-year-old American electronics engineer accused of giving defense secrets to the Soviet Union. Mr. Brown lost that one.
But it was his representation of a series of black radicals that brought him wider fame. In 1967 he successfully defended the poet Amiri Baraka, formerly known as LeRoi Jones, on charges of carrying a concealed weapon. He defended Joanne Chesimard, a member of the Black Liberation Army, who was convicted of shooting a state trooper to death on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973. She escaped prison in 1979 and made her way to Cuba. Three Black Panthers accused in 1970 of attacking a Jersey City police station with a machine gun and H. Rap Brown, the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and leader of the Black Panther Party, were also clients.
Mr. Brown defended the boxer Rubin Carter in his first trial on charges that he murdered three people in Paterson, N.J., in 1966. Mr. Carter and another man were convicted but the convictions were thrown out in 1975. With Mr. Brown participating as a witness, the men were found guilty a second time but that too was overturned. After serving 19 years, Mr. Carter was freed in 1985.
“He was a very dramatic figure in the courtroom,” said Ms. Davis. “He had a flawless memory and could carry tremendous details of a case in his head.”
Mr. Brown was born in 1915 in Fernandina Beach, Fla., the son of a railroad mechanic. When he was 2, his family moved to Jersey City. He went to college at Florida A & M University, and, paying his way by working as a longshoreman, he received his law degree from Fordham University.
At a time when few black lawyers served in large firms, he became a solo practitioner focusing on casualties of prejudice and poverty.
He also was the president of the New Jersey chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. for 12 years and worked to integrate its schools and faculty. During the riots in Newark in 1967, he was serving with the National Guard and walked the streets to quiet the disturbances. Afterward, Gov. Richard J. Hughes appointed him vice chairman of the commission that investigated the disorder.
Mr. Brown’s first wife was the late Elaine Camilla Williams Brown. He is survived by his second wife, Jennie Davis Brown; two children from his first marriage, Raymond M. Brown and Deborah Elaine Brown Bowles; two stepchildren, Clifton O’Neill Howell and Denise Louise Howell Randall; and seven grandchildren.
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BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS 