LENORA “DOLL” CARTER, PUBLISHER OF THE HOUSTON FORWARD TIMES
Lenora “Doll” Carter, revered NNPA publisher
Photo taken from Black Press Week held in Washington, D.C. in March, from (L to R) Lenora Doll Carter, Publisher Houston Forward Times, Houston, TX, US Congresswoman Maxine Waters of California, and Connie Harper, Cleveland Call & Post Newspaper.WASHINGTON (NNPA) Black publishers around the nation are mourning the sudden death of one of their own this week. Houston Forward Times Publisher Lenora “Doll” Carter, treasurer of the board of directors for the National Newspaper Publishers Association, and a former NNPA Publisher of the Year, was found dead of an apparent heart attack on Saturday morning, April 10. She was 69.
“It is with a profound sadness that I inform some and confirm for others, the NNPA and the entire Black Newspaper Publishing world’s great loss of our National Treasurer, Lenora “Doll” Carter,” announced NNPA Chairman Danny Bakewell Sr. in a statement released late Sunday after speaking to her Houston family by phone. “Yesterday, I spoke with Doll’s daughter Karen and gave her my sincere condolences and offered any help we could provide to both she and her family on behalf of all NNPA Publishers. As was the case with her mother, Karen is proving to be a very strong and poised Black woman during this time of sadness and challenge to her family.”
The body of the Houston journalistic icon will lie in state on Friday, April 16, starting at 12 Noon at Holman Street Baptist Church, 3501 Holman Street, Houston, Texas 77004 with a celebration to be held Friday evening from 7:00 – 9:00 p.m. The Homegoing Celebration will be held on Saturday, April 17th at Holman Street Baptist Church at 10:00 a.m.
Karen Carter Richards, the youngest of Carter’s two daughters, associate publisher of the paper who has worked alongside her mother for 28 years, said in an interview with the NNPA News Service that she went looking for her mother after she did not answer repeated calls to her cell and home phones Saturday morning. She found her in her room by the bed. “She was already gone,” she said.
She said her mother had been on a regiment of high blood pressure medication. “She believed in the Lord. That’s what helps me to continue to stand and not completely fall to pieces because all I know is that she would expect me to be there Monday morning and get this paper out like always.” Mustering spiritual strength reflective of her mother’s, she said, “I know my Mom. We have never missed an issue in 50 years and we can’t start now.”
Bakewell, NNPA Foundation Chair Dorothy R. Leavell, and other members of NNPA are shaken by the death of Carter, who less than a month ago celebrated Black Press Week alongside them in Washington.
Leavell, who has known Carter for more than 40 years, persuaded her to run for treasurer in 2003 and nominated her as publisher of the year in 2004, said this week that Carter had hinted at not feeling well during the March 17-19 festivities in Washington.
“She did not go to the Capitol with us this time because she said her feet were swollen and she couldn’t do a lot of walking. But, she did come to the NewsMaker Dinner and seemed to truly enjoy it,” said Leavell.
In their decades of working together as Black Publishers, Leavell was among the eye witnesses to Carter’s soldier- like service to the Black Press. “Doll exemplifies the publisher that is dedicated to the Black press. She is active locally, but also consistently active on the national level through the National Newspaper Publishers Association. She truly deserves this honor, the highest honor bestowed by the NNPA Foundation,” Leavell said of her colleague upon nominating her as publisher of the year.
In addition to being fellow publishers, Leavell quickly pointed out that she and Carter also “shared these serious relationships with our grandchildren. We shared those stories of our grandchildren and we kept up with what they were doing,” she noted fondly. “She will be greatly missed, no doubt about it.”
NNPA First Vice Chair John B. Smith Sr., who worked with Carter during the past four years as chair, also described the dedication of “my good friend and ‘sister in the struggle.”
He said, “’Doll’ was not only a friend toward the advancement of African-American achievement. Overall, she personified distinctive grace, character and style as a ‘chaplain for the common good’ as publisher of The Houston Forward Times.”
Lenora “Doll” CarterA publisher, mother, grandmother, and community servant, Carter was also a devoted wife to James McDaniel to whom she has been married for 22 years.
“I had to share her,” he lovingly recalled in a brief interview Sunday. “I had to share her with everybody. She was not all mine. It took me a little while to get to that point, but that was her.”
With deep admiration, McDaniel described his wife’s love for people from all walks of life. “She could talk with world leaders or she could talk with a guy unemployed. It just didn’t matter,” he said. “If you knew her and you were around her you were not a stranger long…She was like a magnet. People were drawn to her. She had a magnetic personality.”
His sentiments were echoed by her daughter, Karen: “She was so many things to so many people…So much wisdom,” she said. “We talked about anything. She was my best friend, we worked together every day, we traveled together. It is such a great loss.”
The Houston Forward Times, founded by Carter’s late husband, Julius Carter, in January 1960 will be commemorating its 50th anniversary in October this year. Carter had served as general manager and advertising director until his death in 1971. That year, she became publisher and CEO of the company. A biography on the paper’s website, www.forwardtimes.com, lists her numerous awards and accomplishments. It reads as follows:
Lenora graduated from McNary High School in McNary, Arizona and attended Arizona State University majoring in Business Administration.
Mrs. Carter is a member of Eta Phi Beta Sorority-XI Chapter, National Association of Market Developers, National Women of Achievement, National Newspaper Publishers association, Texas Press Association, Greater Houston Partnership, stockholder and presently serves on the Board of Directors of Amalgamated Publishers, Inc. She served as Secretary of National Newspaper Publishers Association for eight years and also served on the Board of Directors of NNPA. She served on the Board of Directors of Riverside National Bank, Riverside General Hospital, Eliza Johnson Home for the Aged, Society for Performing Arts, Independent State Bank, UNCF and YMCA. She is an active member of Holman Street Baptist Church where Rev. Manson Johnson is Pastor.
Mrs. Carter’s accomplishments have earned her numerous awards: Publisher of the Year (NNPA), NAACP Mickey Leland Humanitarian Award, Black Women in Journalism for Outstanding Accomplishment and Achievement in the Communication Industry (Pioneer Award), Alma Newsom Vision Award, NAMD Emphasis Award, Houston Medical Forum Recognition Award, Robert S. Abbott Award, Anheuser Busch W,I.S.E. Award for Outstanding Achievement as Publisher & Community Leader; Fred D. Patterson Leadership Award, Illustrious Potentate’s Distinguished Service Award Doric Temple #76, Ethel Ransom Art and Literary Outstanding Leadership, National Association of Media Women, United Fund Outstanding Achievement in Media, Challenge of Change, Beaumont Chamber of Commerce, Houston League of Business and Professional Women in Achievements, Eta Phi Beta Outstanding Leadership, St. Joseph Volunteer Service Award, Texas State Teachers Association Dedicated Service Award, San Jacinto Girl Scout Merit Award, TSU Tennis Club Leadership Award, as well as South Post Oak Little League Outstanding Sponsorship.
She was recently awarded the Toombs-Brown Award from Professional Black Women’s Enterprise, Inc., and the “Pace Setter” Award from Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority, Inc., Gamma Phi Sigma Chapter and received the 2002 National Council of Negro Women Pacesetters Award.
Lenora Carter was born in Corrigan, Texas. She is the mother of two daughters, Constance Yvette Carter and Karen Yvonne Carter Richards. She has three grandchildren, Jesse, Chelsea, and Nykayla. The services are under the direction of McCoy and Harrison Funeral Home located at 4918 Martin Luther King Blvd., Houston Texas 77021, 713-659-7618
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LENORA ‘DOLL’ CARTER, PUBLISHER OF HOUSTON FORWARD TIMES
Publisher showed ‘phenomenal’ drive
By ALLAN TURNER
Copyright 2010 Houston Chronicle
April 12, 2010, 11:05PM
Lenora Carter, a Houston businesswoman who became an iconic figure in the national black media after succeeding her late husband as publisher of the Houston Forward Times, died Saturday of an apparent heart attack. She was 69.
Carter, known to her friends as “Doll,” shepherded the African-American weekly to a circulation of 65,000, confounding observers who predicted she would fail, her daughter, associate publisher Karen Carter Richards, said.
“Our father (Julius Carter) started the paper in 1960. When he died in 1971, some people predicted it would be out of business in six months,” Richards said. “After a year, they gave her another time limit. This
October we will celebrate our 50th anniversary. … The drive she had for this business was just phenomenal.”
During her 39-year tenure as publisher, Carter received numerous community and professional honors including the National Newspaper Publishers Association’s Publisher of the Year Award, the NAACP’s Mickey Leland Humanitarian Award, the National Council of Negro Women Pacesetters Award and the Ethel Ransom Art and Literary Outstanding Leadership Award.
As treasurer of the National Newspaper Publishers Association she was credited with stabilizing the black press trade group’s finances.
“She was a no-nonsense person,” said Atlanta Inquirer publisher John B. Smith Sr., who worked with Carter when he was NNPA chairman. “She was an articulate, astute lady.”
A native of Corrigan, Carter graduated high school in McNary, Ariz., and attended Arizona State University, where she studied business management.
Mom, newspaperwoman
Her newspaper career began as the Forward Times’ general manager and advertising director.
Dorothy Leavell, chairwoman of the NNPA Foundation and publisher of the Crusader newspapers in Chicago and Gary, Ind., recalled the challenge Carter faced as a young widow rearing children and running a major business.
“Her husband had worked very hard and she had worked at his side and knew the value of the black press,” Leavell said. “… She rolled up her sleeves and went to modernize. Her husband left her with a pretty up-to-date newspaper. She added editions and was able to keep pace. She was a publisher, no doubt about it.”
Under Carter’s leadership, the Forward Times filled a vital role in the African-American community, covering politics, social events and community news that often were given short shrift in the mainstream daily press, said state Rep. Garnet Coleman.
“I think these newspapers are still very important and integral to change for black people in America,” he said. “The Forward Times, the black print press, are woven into the history of black Houston and also into the fabric of contemporary black Houston as well.”
‘My best friend’
Richards, who worked with Carter at the newspaper 28 years, said her mother bequeathed her a business drive.
“I’ve lost my mother. I’ve lost my best friend,” she said. “We lived right around the corner from each other. We talked four or five times before we went to the office, then we worked together all day.”
Richards discovered Carter dead in her home after the older woman failed to answer telephone calls.
In addition to Richards, survivors include James McDaniel, Carter’s husband of 22 years, and a daughter, Constance Carter.
Visitation will be 7 to 9 p.m. Friday at Holman Street Baptist Church, 3501 Holman, with a funeral at the church at 10 a.m. Saturday.
The family requests that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the Julius and Lenora Carter Scholarship and Youth Fund at Wells Fargo bank.
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DAVID SIMMONS, WHO FLEW HIGH ON EVE OF SPACE AGE
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: April 17, 2010
David G. Simons, whose ascent more than 19 miles above the Earth in an aluminum capsule suspended from a helium balloon set an altitude record in 1957 and helped put the United States on the road to manned space flight, died April 5 at his home in Covington, Ga. He was 87.
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U.S. Air Force, via Associated Press
David G. Simons in a self-portrait made during his record-setting ascent in 1957.
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U.S.Air Force, via Brainerd Dispatch
David G. Simons in the capsule for the Man High program in Minneapolis.
The cause was heart failure, his sister, Elizabeth Mason, said.
Dr. Simons, a physician turned Air Force officer, had sent animals aloft for several years before his record-breaking flight. At Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, he had launched monkeys in V2 rockets to test their reactions to weightlessness. At Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo, N.M., he had put mice and guinea pigs into balloon gondolas for a trip into the upper atmosphere to determine the hazards of primary cosmic radiation.
In August 1957, it was Dr. Simons’s turn to be experimented on. As part of Man High, an Air Force program to explore the possibilities of manned space flight, he squeezed into an air-conditioned capsule about the size of a telephone booth and, on Aug. 19, lifted off from a deep open-pit iron mine in Crosby, Minn. On one wall of the capsule hung a warning sign: “Have all the fun you want, but don’t jump up and down.”
Just before takeoff, his commanding officer, Col. John Paul Stapp, shook his hand and said, “Major, you are about to reach the high point of your career.”
As he left 99 percent of Earth’s atmosphere behind him, Dr. Simons ascended to nearly 102,000 feet. This broke the record of 96,000 feet set two months earlier by Capt. Joseph W. Kittinger Jr. in a flight, supervised by Dr. Simons, to test the capsule.
After 32 hours and 10 minutes aloft, Dr. Simons descended into a flax field in South Dakota, pressed a button to flip open the dome of the capsule and staggered out, exhausted but unharmed.
A few days later he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. On Sept. 2, Life magazine put an in-flight photograph of his face, in space helmet, on its cover. It was an unfamiliar portrait style that Americans would come to know well as the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space programs evolved in the 1960s.
“Those flights, by Simons and his colleagues, set the stage for the space age,” said Tom Crouch, the senior curator of aeronautics at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. “The Mercury capsules and the ones used by the Soviets were just one jump beyond the balloon capsules that these guys used when they tested the equipment and the suits and explored the environment. When you look at the big picture, they were the last step before you go to space.”
David Goodman Simons was born on June 7, 1922, in Lancaster, Pa., where his father was a doctor. After earning a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster in 1943, he enrolled in Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, where he received a medical degree in 1946.
A year later he joined the Army Air Force, which assigned him to the aero-medical laboratory at Wright-Patterson. There he helped developed flight monitoring and life-support systems to record the physiological responses of monkeys sent into weightlessness on rockets that rose 6o miles above the Earth.
After taking an advanced course in aviation medicine, Dr. Simons served as a flight surgeon in the Far East during the Korean War. In 1953, returning to the United States, he was put in charge of the space biology branch of the Aero-Medical Field Laboratory at Holloman Air Force Base.
The laboratory was run by Colonel Stapp, a flight surgeon known as the fastest man on earth for his experiments riding a rocket-powered sled to test the effects of rapid acceleration and deceleration. Encouraged by Dr. Simons’s animal experiments, Colonel Stapp proposed sending men into the upper atmosphere and, with Dr. Simons and Otto C. Winzen of the design and construction company Winzen Research, developed the Man High project.
Dr. Simons ascended with instructions. Surrounded by instruments, controls, an altimeter, gauges, cameras, a five-inch telescope, a tape recorder and food and drugs, he was required to carry out 25 experiments. Astronomers wanted him to observe the moon and Venus. Meteorologists asked for data on the aurora borealis and pictures of cloud formations.
To measure cosmic ray bombardment, he wore photographic track plates taped to his arms and chest. Later, when researchers aligned the plates with marks tattooed on his body before the flight, they could locate precisely where cosmic particles had hit and study any lingering effects.
A microphone taped to his chest radioed his heartbeat and breathing to the control station — and also allowed mission control to track his position.
In an article for Life, “A Journey No Man Had Taken,” Dr. Simons reported that the sky, high above Earth, was purplish black. Above the Earth’s haze layer, he saw thin bands of blue etched against the night sky. These thin shells of dust, he wrote, “hovered over the Earth like a succession of halos.” The stars, he informed readers, did not twinkle.
His most important finding was that a human being could survive, with the proper equipment, at the edge of space. He described his main contribution, tersely, as “just being there.”
After making his historic flight, which he described in the book “Man High” (1960), written with Don A. Schanche, Dr. Simons conducted studies on the use of radio telemetry for in-flight medical monitoring at the Air Force’s School of Aerospace Medicine in San Antonio.
He retired from the Air Force in 1965 with the rank of lieutenant colonel. He began doing research on neuromuscular function at Veterans Administration hospitals and spent the later part of his career investigating the cause of myofascial trigger points — tiny knots that develop in a muscle when it is injured or overworked and that cause musculoskeletal pain.
With Janet G. Travell, who treated President John F. Kennedy’s back pain, he wrote “Myofascial Pain and Dysfunction: The Trigger Point Manual” (1983), which became a standard work on the subject.
In addition to his sister, Elizabeth Mason, of Kittery, Me., he is survived by two sons, Sam, of Redwood City, Calif., and Scott, of Livonia, Mich.; two daughters, Susan Ganstrom of Pocatello, Idaho, and Sally Witters of San Jose, Calif.; four grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.
When Dr. Simons touched down after his historic flight, a farmer and his son raced across their field on horseback to greet him. “Hello, how are you today?” he said to the farmer, removing his space helmet. The boy, ignoring the aluminum space capsule at his feet, pointed to an approaching Air Force helicopter and said, “I’ve always wanted to see one of them.”
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DARYL F. GATES, L.A.P.D. CHIEF IN RODNEY KING ERA
By KEITH SCHNEIDER
Published: April 16, 2010
Daryl F. Gates, whose aggressive approach to law enforcement as chief of the Los Angeles Police Department was both admired for its innovation and criticized for the racial unrest it provoked, died Friday at his home in Dana Point, Calif. He was 83.
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Chief Daryl F. Gates of the Los Angeles police in 1992, with Mayor Tom Bradley, who was a fierce critic of Mr. Gates.
In a statement, the Police Department said he died after “a short battle with cancer.”
Mr. Gates began his police career in 1949 as a Los Angeles patrolman. It ended when he was forced to resign in June 1992, after 14 years as chief, in the wake of riots that followed the acquittal of four police officers in the highly publicized beating of Rodney King.
The years in between were a raucous era in which Los Angeles almost doubled its population while becoming overwhelmed by drugs, gangs, guns and a tide of violent crime.
Mr. Gates, who embraced the tough, principled and inflexible strategy of his mentor, William H. Parker, the former Los Angeles police chief, responded to that climate by stressing discipline in the ranks of his 8,000-strong department, enlarging the police presence in the streets and developing new policing tools.
Mr. Gates pioneered the use of police helicopters to fight crime across the nearly 470 square miles of his city, and he helped develop the Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT, unit, made up of elite mobile teams of highly trained officers.
SWAT teams deployed sophisticated surveillance equipment, assault weapons and paramilitary skills to neutralize threats. Hundreds of police departments in the United States and around the world have since developed SWAT units. In Los Angeles, they had a prominent role in maintaining order during the 1984 Summer Olympic Games, a period widely regarded as the high point of Mr. Gates’s career.
Another initiative was DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), a program, begun in the early 1980s, in which officers go into schools to teach students how to resist peer pressure to use drugs, join gangs and engage in violence. Millions of American students now receive the DARE curriculum each year.
But as Los Angeles grew more dense and diverse, as crime increased and as cultural mores and racial attitudes shifted in the ’80s, Mr. Gates’s oversight of the department came under mounting criticism. Black and Hispanic residents accused the police of treating them harshly and Mr. Gates of doing little to rein in his officers. They said the department’s emphasis on making arrests invited confrontation and discouraged good will in minority neighborhoods.
The city’s mayor, Tom Bradley, who was black and a Democrat, was a fierce critic of Mr. Gates, a conservative Republican. So were members of the Los Angeles City Council, several members of the city’s Congressional delegation and the editorial pages of the city’s two major daily newspapers, The Los Angeles Times and The Daily News.
The criticism intensified in March 1991, when Rodney King, a black convicted robber and parolee, was viciously beaten by white officers after a high-speed car chase. The beating was videotaped by a bystander and repeatedly broadcast around the world, provoking widespread revulsion and an intense national debate about police brutality, race relations, poverty and Mr. Gates’s leadership.
Mr. Gates said he was appalled by what he saw on the videotape but defended the department, contending that the officers’ conduct had been an “aberration.”
That assessment was disputed by a commission appointed by the city to investigate allegations of police brutality. The panel, led by Warren Christopher, a prominent lawyer who later became secretary of state in the Clinton administration, issued a damning report. It found that a “significant number” of officers had often used excessive force, especially against members of minorities, and that these officers had rarely been disciplined; that police reports were frequently falsified to protect abusive officers; and that messages between patrol cars — many quoted in the report — documented racial animosity, contempt for official restraints and violent attitudes among officers.
The commission also said that the department’s record in hiring and promoting minority members was insufficient.
Over the next 13 months, Mr. Gates vigorously fended off calls for his resignation while struggling to manage the department. Among those who defended him was Gov. Pete Wilson, a fellow Republican, who said the department under Mr. Gates was “one of the best.”
In April 1992, four white officers accused of assault in the beating of Mr. King were acquitted by an all-white jury. The decision set off three days of rioting, which left 53 people dead, about 2,500 injured and more than $400 million in property damage, mostly in the South-Central neighborhood.
A second commission, led by William H. Webster, the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, faulted the police, the mayor and the City Council for poor planning, poor coordination and poor reaction to the jury’s decision.
In October 1992, four months after his resignation, Mr. Gates acknowledged that he had made errors in command but remained unapologetic. “Clearly that night we should have gone down there and shot a few people,” he said. “In retrospect, that’s exactly what we should have done. We should have blown a few heads off.”
After leaving the department, Mr. Gates began a characteristically entrepreneurial new career. He published a well-received, best-selling memoir, “Chief: My Life in the L.A.P.D.” (Bantam, 1992), worked briefly as a radio talk-show host, founded a private investigations firm, made film and television appearances, developed a series of popular police-action video games, and served as the chief executive of Global ePoint, a manufacturer of digital video surveillance systems.
Daryl Francis Gates was born into a working-class family on Aug. 30, 1926, in Los Angeles, the second of three sons of Paul and Arvilla Gates. The family moved frequently during the Depression after his father, a plumber, lost his business and became a heavy drinker, often disappearing for days. Mr. Gates’s mother supported the family by taking jobs in the Los Angeles garment industry.
Mr. Gates first encountered the Los Angeles Police Department in 1942, when he punched a police officer who had been writing him a ticket for double-parking in front of a movie theater. He and a friend were arrested but released without charges after they apologized to the officers.
A year later, Mr. Gates enlisted in the Navy and served aboard the destroyer Ault in the South China Sea. When the war ended, he enrolled at Pasadena City College, where he met Wanda Hawkins, who became his first wife. He later transferred to the University of Southern California and had plans to attend law school after graduation. But married and with the first of three children on the way, he dropped out of U.S.C. in September 1949 and joined the Los Angeles force. He later finished the requirements at U.S.C. and earned an undergraduate degree.
Mr. Gates’s marriage ended in divorce in 1968. His second marriage, to Sima Lalich, a United Airlines flight attendant, ended in divorce in 1994. His survivors include two daughters, Kathy Perricone and Debby Ladesma; a son, Lowell; a brother, Steve, a retired Los Angeles police officer; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
Mr. Gates often said that working with his men was the most gratifying part of his job and his life. In an interview with The Los Angeles Business Journal in 2007, he summed up the principles of leadership and loyalty that earned him respect within the ranks.
“Sometimes officials can be too quick to assess blame, for political reasons, without realizing the damage that can be done to the rank and file,” he said. “When I was chief I coined the phrase the ‘L.A.P.D. Family.’ When my officers had problems, I had problems. Once you publicly humiliate an officer, demote or reassign them, you’ve lost them totally, so you better think twice before you take that step. There are ways you can acknowledge the public’s concerns but not rush to judgment before you have all the facts.”
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BENJAMIN L. HOOKS, CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER
By STEVEN A. HOLMES
Published: April 15, 2010
Benjamin L. Hooks, who for 15 years led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People as it struggled to remain an effective champion of minorities in an era of rising political conservatism, died Thursday at his home in Memphis. He was 85.
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George Tames/The New York Times
On becoming president of the N.A.A.C.P., Benjamin L. Hooks, shown in 1979, said, “Black Americans are not defeated.”
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Mike McMahon/The Record, via Associated Press
Mr. Hooks delivering a keynote address on the civil rights legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Albany in 2003.
Leila McDowell, a spokeswoman for the N.A.A.C.P., said the cause was heart failure.
“Black Americans are not defeated,” Mr. Hooks told Ebony magazine soon after he became the association’s executive director in 1977. “The civil rights movement is not dead.
“If anyone thinks that we are going to stop agitating, they had better think again. If anyone thinks that we are going to stop litigating, they had better close the courts. If anyone thinks that we are not going to demonstrate and protest, they had better roll up the sidewalks.”
Yet under his leadership the N.A.A.C.P. faced a growing white backlash against school busing and affirmative action programs intended to redress past discrimination. And it repeatedly tangled with the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush to preserve the gains that minorities had made in the 1960s and ’70s. When Mr. Bush selected a conservative black federal judge, Clarence Thomas, to serve on the Supreme Court, the N.A.A.C.P. ultimately opposed the nomination.
“I’ve had the misfortune of serving eight years under Reagan and three under Bush,” Mr. Hooks said in 1992, the year he stepped down as executive director. “It makes a great deal of difference about your expectations. We’ve had to get rid of a lot of programs we had hoped for, so we could fight to save what we already had.”
Mr. Hooks shifted much of the N.A.A.C.P.’s focus to increasing educational and job opportunities for blacks as recession gave way to economic recovery in the Reagan years. But the association had been weakened under the weight of declining membership and shaky finances.
It had also developed an image problem, as that of an outmoded and increasingly irrelevant civil rights group. For some who had watched the N.A.A.C.P. over the years, Mr. Hooks came to symbolize an older generation of leaders who had marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and who had fought for the passage of landmark civil rights legislation but who had become unwilling or unable to adapt to modern times and changed political circumstances.
Mr. Hooks rejected that notion, maintaining that he had succeeded in advancing a just cause, to improve the lot of African-Americans. “I have fought the good fight,” he said in his valedictory to the N.A.A.C.P. in 1992. “I have kept the faith.”
Mr. Hooks had a varied career. He was a lawyer, a businessman (he owned fried chicken franchises in Memphis that ultimately failed) and a Baptist minister, heading two separate churches. He was also a gifted orator, mixing quotations from Shakespeare and Keats with the cadence and idioms of the Mississippi Delta.
“There is a beauty in it and a power in it,” Mr. Hooks once said of black preachers’ speaking style.
Mr. Hooks was the first black to be appointed to the criminal court bench in his native Tennessee, and he was the first African-American to be named to the five-member Federal Communications Commission.
“Most people do one or two things in their lifetimes,” Julian Bond, a former chairman of the N.A.A.C.P., said of Mr. Hooks. “He’s just done an awful lot.”
Benjamin Lawson Hooks was born Jan. 31, 1925, in Memphis, the fifth of seven children of Robert and Bessie Hooks. His father’s photography business gave the family a stable middle-class grounding, allowing Mr. Hooks to attend LeMoyne College in Memphis. But he knew well the indignities blacks suffered in the segregated South.
“I wish I could tell you every time I was on the highway and couldn’t use a restroom” because it was reserved for whites, he once told U.S. News & World Report. “My bladder is messed up because of that.”
After serving three years in the Army during World War II and rising to staff sergeant, Mr. Hooks attended law school at DePaul University, graduating in 1948.
In 1951, while working as a lawyer with his own practice in Memphis, he wed Frances Dancy, a high-spirited woman whose friends, she said, could not believe she would marry such a straight arrow. Mr. Hooks made her agree that if they went to a dance one night, the next date had to include a civic meeting or a church social.
An ordained Baptist minister, Mr. Hooks was long the resident minister at two churches, one in Detroit and the other in Memphis. He insisted on preaching at some church — his own or someone else’s — every Sunday, regardless of what job he held.
“My life was built around being in those pulpits on Sunday,” Mr. Hooks said.
In the 1950s, while practicing law, he entered state politics, running unsuccessfully for the Tennessee legislature and for a judgeship on Juvenile Court. In 1965 Gov. Frank G. Clement appointed him to fill a vacancy in the Shelby County Criminal Court, making him the first black criminal court judge in Tennessee history. He won election to a full term the next year.
Mr. Hooks also became involved in the civil rights movement, participating in sit-ins, boycotts and other demonstrations sponsored by the N.A.A.C.P. Dr. King recruited him to serve on the board of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the driving force of the civil rights movement.
President Richard M. Nixon appointed Mr. Hooks, a Nixon supporter, to the Federal Communications Commission in 1972. He set out to expand opportunities for members of minorities to obtain broadcast licenses and persuaded the Small Business Administration to lift restrictions on loans to broadcast and news businesses. He also expanded a program to grant tax breaks to those who sold radio or television stations to members of minorities.
At the same time, he sided with the corporate giant AT&T in its fight to shut out upstart companies like MCI from offering long-distance telephone services.
When Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976, Mr. Hooks was so widely thought to be in line to head the F.C.C. that some commissioners began calling him Mr. Chairman. But he upended expectations when, in 1977, he accepted an offer by the N.A.A.C.P. board to take over the helm of the association from an ailing Roy Wilkins, an esteemed figure in the civil rights movement.
Mr. Hooks steered the association through some of its most difficult years. Twelve of his 15 years as executive director coincided with the Reagan and first Bush administrations, which the N.A.A.C.P. criticized as hostile to the agendas of civil rights groups.
The Reagan administration cut legal services to the poor and supported legislation banning the use of federal financing in support of school busing for the express purpose of promoting integration. And in court cases, both administrations sought to toughen standards by which to prove racial discrimination in employment.
Mr. Hooks also had to deal with an increasingly conservative political climate of growing opposition to spending on social programs. Many whites, too, were becoming openly antagonistic toward N.A.A.C.P. goals like school busing to achieve racial balance and preference programs for blacks in employment and college admissions.
During his tenure, Mr. Hooks instituted several programs to appeal to younger blacks, including the Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics, known as Act-So, an annual talent competition that involves more than 150,000 teenagers throughout the country.
In a sharp departure from past N.A.A.C.P. practices, he sought to forge closer ties with corporations. He testified before Congress on behalf of measures to limit imports, which he saw as a threat to jobs held by blacks.
During his tenure, corporate donations to the N.A.A.C.P. increased to $3.7 million in 1993 from $696,000 in 1978.
Ulysses Jones Jr., a Tennessee state representative, told The Associated Press on Thursday that Mr. Hooks had come in “at a time when the N.A.A.C.P. was struggling and gave it a strong foundation,” adding that “he brought dignity” to the organization.
Still, many friends and detractors alike said Mr. Hooks had only held the line, failing to modernize and build the N.A.A.C.P. into a more effective organization in the contentious environment for civil rights issues of the ’80s and ’90s.
Distrustful of modern research techniques like polling and focus groups, Mr. Hooks was criticized for not coming up with a strategy to make the N.A.A.C.P. more relevant to growing numbers of younger, college-educated blacks who had attained middle-class status in the 1970s and ’80s.
By the time he stepped down, membership had stalled at around 400,000, revenue from memberships had declined, and the average age of the group’s members had increased.
“Ben lacked a sense of understanding of what his marketplace was, what he was selling, or how you sell in this economy,” said George Carter, who served as Mr. Hooks’s deputy for two years.
Reflecting the social conservatism of his black Baptist roots, Mr. Hooks for years resisted entreaties to have the N.A.A.C.P. take a strong position on preventing the spread of AIDS, a growing threat to blacks in the inner cities. It was not until the basketball star Magic Johnson announced in 1991 that he was infected with the AIDS virus that Mr. Hooks allowed the organization to support programs like condom distribution in schools and health clinics.
Mr. Hooks also battled with his board over administrative disputes. At one point, in 1978, the chairwoman, Margaret Bush Wilson, suspended him, asserting that he was mismanaging the organization. Mr. Hooks emerged victorious in that power struggle when the board voted to reinstate him and to strip Ms. Wilson of her powers.
But in 1992, Mr. Hooks again became embroiled in a fight with the board, this time under the chairmanship of William Gibson, over the day-to-day running of the organization. When the board backed Mr. Gibson, Mr. Hooks resigned.
He is survived by his wife, Frances; a daughter, Patricia Gray; and his sister, Mildred Hooks Gillis.
In 1996, Mr. Hooks helped establish the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change, a public policy research center at the University of Memphis. And in his later years he drew honors for his work on behalf of minority rights. In 2007, President George W. Bush presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor.
Last July, Mr. Hooks drew a sustained ovation at the N.A.A.C.P.’s 100th anniversary convention in New York, followed by a roar from the crowd when, in his remarks, he demonstrated that his oratorical skills were undiminished.
“Let’s fight on until justice runs down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream,” he said. “Let’s fight on until there is no downsizing, until there is no glass ceiling. Let’s fight on until God shall gather the four winds of heaven; until the angel shall plant one foot on the sea and the other on dry land and declare that the time that has been will be no more.
“Fight on, until the lion shall lie down with the lamb. Fight on, until justice, righteousness, hopes, equality and opportunity is the birthright of all Americans.”
Dennis Hevesi contributed reporting.SOURCE
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HELEN RANNEY, PIONEER IN SICKLE CELL RESEARCH
By DENISE GELLENE
Published: April 14, 2010
Dr. Helen M. Ranney, a hematologist whose experiments in the 1950s elucidated the genetic basis of sickle cell disease, an inherited form of anemia that affects one in 500 African-Americans, died on April 5 in San Diego. She was 89.
Dr. Helen M. Ranney
Her death was announced by the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine.
Dr. Ranney was a faculty member there for more than 30 years and a former head of the department of medicine, the first woman at a major American medical school to hold that post.
As a postdoctoral student in hematology more than 50 years ago, Dr. Ranney developed a simple method of distinguishing normal hemoglobin, the iron-rich protein in red blood cells that transports oxygen, from the abnormal hemoglobin found in patients with sickle cell disease.
By comparing unaffected family members with relatives with the illness, Dr. Ranney provided early evidence that inherited defects in the structure of hemoglobin were responsible for sickle cell disease.
Up to this point, scientists recognized that sickle cell disease ran in families, but the underlying mechanism of it was not well understood.
Besides illuminating the genetics of sickle cell, Dr. Ranney’s research provided clinicians with a simple method of testing for the disease in newborns, who usually do not develop anemia and other symptoms of the illness until they are 5 months old.
“It immediately gave us a way to diagnose sickle cell,” said Dr. Kenneth Kaushansky, a hematologist and chairman of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Diego. “The differences in hemoglobin were an important insight from her studies.”
Helen Margaret Ranney was born on April 12, 1920, in Summerhill, N.Y. Her father was a dairy farmer; her mother, a schoolteacher.
She entered Barnard College with plans to study law, but soon shifted her sights toward medicine, drawn by the notion that physicians can fix the problems they study. After receiving her bachelor’s degree in 1941, she applied to Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons but was rejected. She took a job as a laboratory technician, acquiring the skills she would later use in her research.
She reapplied to Columbia, was accepted and received her medical degree in 1947, one of five women in a class of 120 students. She remained at Columbia for postgraduate training, and during this time conducted her groundbreaking sickle cell disease research.
She went on to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University, where she continued her hemoglobin research and became a professor in 1965. After a stint at the State University of New York, Buffalo, she moved to the University of California, San Diego, where she became chairwoman of its department of medicine in 1973. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences the same year.
Dr. Ranney headed the department of medicine for 13 years. From 1986 to 1991, she was a distinguished physician of the Veterans Administration, the first woman to hold that post. For several years after that, she was a board member and an adviser to the Alliance Pharmaceutical Corporation, a biotechnology company in San Diego working on a blood substitute. At her death she was a professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego.
Her survivors include two nieces, Alesia Ranney-Marinelli of Katonah, N.Y., and Patricia Ranney of Ballston Lake, N.Y.
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GEORGE NISSEN, FATHER OF THE TRAMPOLINE
By DENNIS HEVESI
Published: April 12, 2010
One by one, the trapeze artists topped off their routines by dropping from their high-swinging bars into the net stretched below, then rebounding into somersaults — to the roar of the crowd at the traveling circus in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. And one kid in the stands began to wonder: Hey, what if there was a contraption that made it possible to keep on bouncing and flipping?
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Ron Munn
George Nissen, a father of the trampoline, went airborne at the top of a pyramid in Egypt in 1977.
George Nissen, 16, who was a member of the gymnastics and diving teams at his high school, was soon tinkering in his parents’ garage, strapping together a rectangular steel frame and a canvas sheet. Even though it was not quite as springy as he had hoped, he called it a bouncing rig. That was in 1930.
It would be several years later, while a business major at the University of Iowa, that Mr. Nissen and his gymnastics coach, Larry Griswold, would work together to make a more flexible contraption with a nylon sheet. They still called it a bouncing rig.
Then, in 1937, Mr. Nissen and two friends formed a traveling acrobatics act called the Three Leonardos and began performing throughout the Midwest and Texas and then in Mexico. It was there that he heard the Spanish word for diving board: el trampolin.
He added an “e” and registered “Trampoline” as a trademark for what has become a joy-inducing device for backyard tumblers, fitness freaks and, since 2000, Olympic athletes.
Mr. Nissen, who devoted his life to promoting and manufacturing the trampoline — once renting a kangaroo to bounce with him in Central Park — died Wednesday at a hospital near his home in San Diego. He was 96. His son-in-law Ron Munn confirmed the death.
Dwight Normile, the editor of International Gymnast magazine, said of Mr. Nissen in a telephone interview on Friday: “He took the device all over the world and gave them as gifts. He wanted everybody to know about the health benefits of bouncing on a trampoline.”
Ten years ago, Mr. Nissen spoke of his enduring goal to see trampolining become an Olympic sport. For years, his friends told him he was just dreaming.
“They said, ‘George, it will be the year 2000 before trampoline is ever in the Olympics,’ ” Mr. Nissen said in an interview with International Gymnast.
They were right. “He was at those Sydney Olympics in 2000, 86 years old at the time,” Mr. Normile said, “and they actually invited him to bounce on the official trampoline.”
A twist was that in the early 1950s, Mr. Nissen had donated a trampoline to the Soviet Union — its first. Russia won the first Olympic gold medals for trampolining in 2000.
George Peter Nissen was born in Blairstown, Iowa, on Feb. 3, 1914, one of four children of Franklin and Catherine Jensen Nissen. His father owned a dry goods store. The family later moved to Cedar Rapids.
George started tumbling when he was a child at a local Y.M.C.A. and continued in junior high and high school. At the University of Iowa, he was a three-time winner of the intercollegiate national gymnastics championship.
After making the first prototype trampoline, Mr. Nissen and Mr. Griswold, his college coach, opened a small factory in Cedar Rapids and began marketing the device. But initial sales were slow, and Mr. Griswold, who died in 1996, went out on tour as a comedic acrobat under the name the Diving Fool.
Mr. Nissen, however, continued to make and market trampolines, even persuading the military to buy them as a training tool for pilots and divers. He served in the Navy during World War II, then returned to Cedar Rapids to expand his company. The Nissen Corporation, which he sold in 1973, eventually produced a full range of gymnastics equipment.
In 1951, Mr. Nissen married Annie De Vries, a high-wire artist from Holland who was performing with the Cole Brothers Circus in the United States. Besides his wife, he is survived by two daughters, Dagmar Munn and Dian Nissen-Ramirez; and one grandchild.
Well into his later years, Mr. Nissen remained head over heels for his sport. In 1977, with his son-in-law Ron, he scaled a pyramid in Egypt — one with a flattened top — set up a trampoline and did some flips.
Year after year, he attended the National Collegiate Athletic Association gymnastics championships.
“And at the banquet before the competition he would do a handstand,” Mr. Normile said. “It became a tradition.”
“The last time I saw him there was in 2006,” Mr. Normile continued. “He did one of those kind of yoga headstands where you’re on your head and elbows. That was only four years ago; he was 92.”
Ann
BEAUTIFUL, ALSO, ARE THE SOULS OF MY BLACK SISTERS 