I am sure by now many people are familiar with the story of the firing of Shirley Sherrod. Because of lies and slander against her, she was fired from her position as Director of Rural Development in Georgia, under the U.S. Department of Agricultural (USDA).
As for President Obama’s lameass apology on his throwing Ms. Sherrod under the bus for his and his administration’s believing in trumped-up lies from the Right: Damn man, when are you going to grow a spine?
Ms. Sherrod, you have been attacked and vilified with slanderous and libelous lies.
Sue the bastards. Sue: Andrew Brietbart, FOX NEWS network, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Cheryl Cook (USDA Deputy Undersecretary), the NAACP, the White House administration, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bill O’Reilly, et. al., for making your life a living hell, and most definitely sue Breitbart, for casting aspersion on you and twisting your words into nothing resembling what you stated. Ms. Sherrod, you should bring each of these organizations listed in this article up on slander charges immediately; and aggressively pursue civil and criminal actions for their roles in this castigation of you.
What the hell happened to checking out the source of one’s story? Whatever happened to gathering facts, evidence, and concrete proof, before grabbing onto some fabricated disinformation?
Here is a video of Ms. Sherrod’s remarks at the NAACP annual banquet:
Faux News has behaved like the dog that carries the bone, and the sick McCarthyite, Breitbart, his hate has caused a federal employee to lose her job behind his venomous hate of the NAACP.
Oh, psst, President Obama……………..
………………..I am having trouble hearing your apology to Ms. Sherrod. Your whispering it is very pathetic.
You were all gung-ho on standing up for Professor Skip Gates when he got arrested for popping off at a cop at his residence, so where is your support for Ms. Sherrod, hmm?
You need to stop being so scared shitless of the Right, Mr. President. They are going to attack you, and many in your adminstration, no matter what stand you take on an issue, or the people you appoint, so the least you can do is verify before you shitcan someone before the world when accepting on face value Vilsack’s off-the-road firing of Ms. Sherrod, especially when the source of that news is Faux News Incorporated. At least grow a backbone, Mr. President. You will garner more respect if you stop being so scared of how you will be perceived when you stand up for right and stop being a political coward.
No word yet on the Sancerre wine, Double Gloucester cheese and Carr’s Crackers summit for Ms. Sherrod, eh? As for her taking her job back, that is her final decision.
The NAACP……………now have become knee-jerk wretches in their part in this sorry sordid story, that they would listen to the likes of Breitbart, and not check their own video archives to view what Ms. Sherrod stated at the NAACP’s banquet.
……………………the spittoon purveyors of lies—–they will one day receive just retribution for all the filth and hate they vomit forth from their mouths, preferably where it really hurts them———–in the pocketbook.
Then again, many weak-minded people are so quick and willing to believe a lie, especially if it is against a Black woman.
The entire Shirley Sherrod affair is so disgusting, such a stomach-churning episode of right-wing lies, propagandists posing as “journalists,” and craven political cowardice and gullibility, that it’s hard to know who to be most enraged at.
Andrew Breitbart, a particularly vile propagandist of the American right who presented a severely edited videotape of a speech by the Agriculture Department official to falsely label her an anti-white racist? Fox News, several of whose miserable excuses for journalists relentlessly plugged the entirely false story until Sherrod was fired? Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who had a minion call Sherrod on a cell phone and insist that she pull over to the side of the road and text in her resignation before any of the relevant background facts about the “scandal” emerged? The White House, which, apparently frightened of appearing in any way linked to black racism, stood by the essentially forced resignation even when it became clear that Sherrod’s speech was nothing like what Breitbart suggested? Even the NAACP acted poorly in this sorry episode, calling for Sherrod’s firing based on what Fox News was airing. (To its credit, the civil rights group quickly recognized its error, retracting its call yesterday and saying it had been “snookered” by Breitbart and Fox’s falsehoods.)
Here’s the story in brief, for those few people who still don’t know about it. On Monday, Breitbart — the same loathsome character who publicly called Ted Kennedy a “pile of human excrement” a few hours after the senator’s death — aired a video of Sherrod speaking to an NAACP banquet in Georgia last March. In his edited version, Sherrod talks about initially not wanting to help a white man who was facing the loss of his farm because of her anger toward white racists. But Breitbart, furious about the NAACP’s recent criticism of racism within the ranks of the Tea Parties, presented an edited version of the tape that left out the crucial conclusion of what was really Sherrod’s tale of redemption — that in the course of the 1986 case she was discussing, she came to realize that “the struggle is really about poor people,” and that her anti-white feelings were wrong. She said the case changed her entire outlook. (And in fact the farmer and his wife were all over the media yesterday, saying that Sherrod had saved their farm, was a fine and caring woman, and should get her job back.)
Fox immediately picked up Breitbart’s fairy tale and began plugging it, as did a number of other right-wing media outlets. (Many of them suggested that Sherrod’s actions in the 1986 case had occurred while she was an Agriculture employee — a complete falsehood.) That prompted Vilsack to have her thrown out of her job as the department’s director of rural development in Georgia — an act that Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen rightly described today as pure political “cowardice.” Vilsack didn’t bother to hear Sherrod’s side of the story first, and he didn’t watch the full videotape. Incredibly, even as the true story began to emerge, Vilsack said he was sticking by Sherrod’s ouster, because, “rightly or wrongly,” perceptions about her comments could make her job more difficult. Then, early this morning, the Associated Press quoted an unnamed White House official saying President Obama had been briefed on the situation but was supporting Vilsack’s decision.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this kind of wilting of White House officials under pressure from the political right. They fired Van Jones, a White House environmental advisor, after Fox’s Glenn Beck made false claims that he was a “black nationalist” and former “radical communist” who was using green jobs as a form of “stealth reparations.” They repudiated an accurate 2009 Department of Homeland Security report that was leaked and then attacked by right wingers for supposedly defaming conservatives — a charge that was patently false.
Let’s take a closer look at a couple of the other actors in this nasty little episode.
Andrew Breitbart is a former editor for the right-wing Drudge Report and a columnist for the arch-conservative Washington Times who sometimes substitutes for Michael Savage, a radio talk show host who regularly makes racist remarks on the air (and who, I should say in the interest of full disclosure, has attacked me personally many times). It was one of Breitbart’s websites that aired videos made by right-wing activists of ACORN employees giving advice concerning prostitution, and that later suggested that ACORN was destroying incriminating documents. (California Attorney General Jerry Brown investigated, concluding there was no criminal activity depicted on the “severely edited” tapes Breitbart aired.) Breitbart also has claimed that Congressmen John Lewis and Andre Carson “made up” a story about being repeatedly called “niggers” during a walk through a Tea Party rally. His evidence? There was no videotape of the insults.
Breitbart recently blogged about the “insufferable assholes” he claims populate the mainstream media. Ironically enough, given the revolting role he played in the defaming of Shirley Sherrod, John Lewis and others, he described “the racket that is modern journalism,” saying that journalists “lie when they claim to be objective.” Elsewhere, in his first column about Sherrod, he crowed that “the new media will not be silenced.”
Which brings us to Fox News, that infamous purveyor of falsehoods, wildly skewed reporting and propaganda posing as real facts. As my colleague Alexander Zaitchik wrote on this blog Monday, the network has “a long history of crude and transparent race-baiting.” And Zaitchik wasn’t even talking about the Sherrod spectacle — he was writing about Fox’s current obsession with the “scandal” of the Justice Department dismissing part of a voter intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party, a black racist hate group. On MSNBC last night, Rachel Maddow did a serious takedown of Fox’s rantings about Sherrod.
The United States faces many serious problems in the year 2010, from a crashed economy to the largest oil spill in our history. But no American should ignore another serious threat to our integrity as a nation and a culture: the far-right propagandists, their media and political enablers, and the political cowardice that allows complete falsehoods to destroy perfectly innocent human beings.
1962 The Shirelles charted with “Welcome Home Baby,” a logical sequel to their last hit, “Soldier Boy.” The single made it to #20 R&B and 322 pop. Soon after, a publisher offered the group’s manager, Florence Greenberg, a new tune as a follow-up called “He’s A Rebel.” Florence turned it down, and the Crystals went on to have a #1 hit with it.
1968 James Brown Day was declared in Los Angeles to honor his sellout concert at the Great Western Forum. Unfortunately, James was not there to accept the award. He had already left the proceedings because Mayor Sam Yorty showed up late. Moral: don’t keep the “Godfather of Soul” waiting.
1977 Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” reached #1 in England and would soon be #3 pop in America. The “Queen of Disco” started out in the German productions of Hair and Godspell before being discovered by producer Giorgio Moroder at a Blood, Sweat & Tears demo session.
1983 Rick James charted with “Cold Blooded,” reaching #1 R&B for six weeks and earning him his biggest R&B hit of twenty-seven singles through 1989. The song, reportedly written about his then-girlfriend, actress Linda Blair, only made it to #40 pop as MTV was ignoring Rick’s and most Black artist’s videos.
1983 “All Night Long” by the Mary Jane Girls charted, eventually reaching #11 R&B. It was a busy and productive year for Rick James, who wrote and produced the record.
1988 After a twenty year hiatus, the original Danleers of “One Summer Night” fame regrouped at the Westbury Music Fair on Long Island.
Salvadoran Man Commits Suicide in Immigration Detention
Jose Nelson Reyes-Zelaya had been in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody for 11 days when he was found dead after what officials called “apparent asphyxiation.”
Tim Steller and Brady McCombs Arizona Daily Star | Posted: Wednesday, July 21, 2010 12:00 am |
Handout Pinal sheriff
Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu scrambled Tuesday to distance himself from a “pro-White” radio show on which he recently appeared.
On July 10, Babeu was interviewed by James Edwards and Eddie Miller of the Tennessee-based program “The Political Cesspool.”
Edwards describes the show’s ideology as “paleoconservative,” and he supports raising whites’ fertility rates to boost their proportion of the world population.
In a statement issued late Monday night, sheriff’s department spokesman Tim Gaffney apologized for the interview, saying he did not adequately vet the program and that Babeu knew nothing of the hosts’ beliefs.
But host Edwards said Babeu and Gaffney were told of the show’s approach.
“For him to act as though he had no idea of our ideology is a lie,” he said Tuesday in a written statement.
Babeu’s scramble from white separatists was the latest for Arizona politicians who support SB 1070 and other hard-line border-security efforts.
Gov. Jan Brewer’s staff is combing through contributions to the fund she established to defend the law, after a white-supremacist group said it made a donation. She promised to return money from racist groups or associated individuals, but the staff has found none so far among $1.3 million in donations.
State Sen. Russell Pearce, who authored SB 1070, apologized in 2006 after forwarding a white-supremacist e-mail.
Pearce, a Republican, and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio have also been criticized for having appeared friendly with white supremacist JT Ready in public forums.
Babeu’s appearance on The Political Cesspool was publicized Monday by Media Matters, a left-leaning news-analysis group that has reviewed Babeu’s media appearances.
Gaffney said in his statement that he set the interview while “inundated with media requests.” “I have weeded out most all requests from any outlets or groups that have any connection with possible hate groups,” Gaffney wrote. “Unfortunately, last week it appears that I may have let one such interview take place.”
Babeu, who has been featured in two ads for U.S. Sen. John McCain’s re-election campaign, also appeared July 9 on “The Alex Jones Show,” whose host is a renowned conspiracy theorist. He was scheduled to appear later on the “Free American Radio Show,” hosted by Tucsonan Clay Douglas, but Gaffney canceled that interview out of concerns about prejudice.
In 2008, the Southern Poverty Law Center called The Political Cesspool “the primary radio nexus of hate in America.”
As the hosts conversed during the July 10 show, waiting for Babeu to call in, co-host Miller said: “Of all the people we’ve interviewed on this radio show, I would say the only people that came close to getting me this excited was Dr. David Duke.”
David Duke is a former Ku Klux Klan leader who ran for U.S. Senate in Louisiana.
During the interview, Babeu lambasted the Obama administration, lamented what he called the invasion of Arizona and solicited contributions to his re-election campaign.
In a written statement, Babeu said Tuesday: “I regret ever calling into this Tennessee radio show. I had no idea about the nature of this group. Personally and professionally I reject bigotry or hate in any form.”
However, Edwards said Babeu should have known better: “Eddie Miller spoke with the Sheriff personally, a week in advance of the interview, during which it was made specifically clear (so there could be no ‘confusion’) the nature of our paleoconservative radio program.”
Babeu critic Bill Richardson, a retired Mesa police officer who has been tracking the sheriff’s career closely, doesn’t buy the sheriff’s explanation.
“He can claim ignorance; he can blame Gaffney, but the bottom line is that he is the sheriff,” he said. “He has demonstrated to everybody that he is very smart and that he’s very well studied.”
However, Cochise County Sheriff Larry Dever defended Babeu.
“We get calls by the hundred, literally every day, from people all across the country,” Dever said. “You do not always have time to explore what their agenda is. We are just answering questions they ask.”
On StarNet: Find the SB 1070 lawsuits and other court filings at azstarnet.com/pdf
1957 B.B. King charted for the first time with “Be Careful With A Fool” (#95). He had already had eighteen R&B charters; it took him six years to cross over. He would go on to have thirty-six pop singles on the hit list through 1989.
1960 Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, the Five Satins, Joe Turner, Ben E. King, Faye Adams, Nappy Brown, and Annie Laurie (who had an R&B hit with “Since I Fell For You” in 1947) appeared at Chicago’s Regal Theater.
1961 Singer and songwriter Keith Sweat was born. The balladeer began working as a Wall Street brokerage assistant and graduated to soulful love songs for a new generation. Influenced by singing groups such as the Emotions and the Sylvers, Sweat managed twenty-nine R&B charters and eighteen pop winners through 2002.
1969 Aretha Franklin was arrested and fined $50 for creating a disturbance in a Detroit parking lot. Upon leaving, she expressed her frustration by running over a road sign.
1983 Diana Ross gave a free concert in New York’s Central Park after the previous night’s concert was washed out by heavy wind and rain.
1991 Bobby Womack performed at London’s Hackney Empire.
1998 Cypress Hill, Busta Rhymes, Canibus, Wyclef Jean, and Public Enemy, among others, performed at the third annual Smokin’ Grooves tour at the Darien Lake Performing Arts Center, Darien Center, NY.
1955 The Cadets charted with their rock ‘n’ roll novelty, “Stranded in the Jungle” (#4 R&B, #15 pop). A year earlier their balladeer alter egos the Jacks had a hit with “Why Don’t You Write Me,” which reached #3 R&B and #82 pop. This Jekyll-Hyde persona would continue for several years, with the group being balladeers as the Jacks and purveyors of rock ‘n’ roll as the Cadets.
1958 The Dell-Vikings’ cover of “You Cheated” was released, along with the Miracles’ “Money” and the Videos’ classic “Trickle, Trickle.”
1961 The Supremes’ second single, “Buttered Popcorn,” was released, with Florence Ballard singing lead. The group was still more than a year from its first chart 45, “Your Heart Belongs to Me.”
1962 John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom” reached #60 pop (#16 R&B), becoming his only 45 in the pop Top 100. It was also his last of nine R&B hits starting in 1949.
1988 James Brown received a two-year suspended sentence and a $1,200 fine for resisting arrest, carrying a gun, and drug possession. (See May 18).
1990 En Vogue reached #2 pop with “Hold On,” their debut disc. Former Commodores member Thomas McElroy and partner Denzil Foster, who wanted to invent a funky, contemporary version of the Supremes, put the female quartet together.
1967 The Jimi Hendrix experience recorded at New York’s Mayfair Recording Studios with the Sweet Inspirations (Elvis Presley’s and Aretha Franklin’s background singers) doing backup vocals on “Midnight Lamp.” Hendrix played the harpsichord, but there’s no report as to whether or not he tried to burn it.
1968 The Soul Clan, a one-off recording by five of R&B’s top stars, including Ben E. King, Joe Tex, Don Covay, Arthur Conley, and Solomon Burke, charted R&B with “Soul Meeting.” Despite the star power, the record only reached #34.
1971 The Commodores were the opening act for the Jackson 5 at the Coliseum in Charlotte, NC.
1978 The O’Jays performed at Los Angeles’ Greek Theater on their twentieth anniversary.
1990 Luther Vandross performed at the Westbury Music Fair to a sold-out crowd.
1991 Patti LaBelle joined forces with Dionne Warwick and Gladys Knight for “Superwoman,” a cut on Gladys’ new Good Woman album, which charted today and eventually reached #45.
1995 TLC’s album Waterfalls headed toward nine million sales while the group (which obviously didn’t know how to manage its money) filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy today.
Here is an update on one of the EMTS who alledgedly ignored the requests of onlookers to help Ms. Eutisha Revee Rennix, a pregnant woman in distress, who later died. I first posted here on this story last year. The EMT, Jason Green, is one of a pair of paramedics who alledgedly told the co-workers of an Au Bon Pain to call 911, because they, the EMTS, were on their break.
EMT WORKER ACCUSED OF IGNORING PREGNANT WOMAN SHOT DEAD NEAR MANHATTAN NIGHTCLUB
By JOHN DOYLE and PERRY CHIARAMONTE
Last Updated: 8:22 PM, July 18, 2010
Posted: 1:28 PM, July 18, 2010
An EMT who was accused of callously ignoring a dying, pregnant woman during his coffee break at an Au Bon Pain last year was shot and killed today after a dispute near a SoHo nightclub, police said.
Embattled EMT Jason Green, 32, and a male pal were trying to get into Greenhouse, a popular club on Varick Street, about 5 a.m. when bouncers turned them away because the friend wasn’t properly dressed, officials said.
Minutes later, about a block away from the club, Green and his friend got into a dispute with an armed man who stepped out of a car at Vandam and Hudson streets and opened fire on them, police said.
DelMundo for News
EMT Jason Green, seen here outside court in January, was shot and killed outside a Manhattan nightclub early Sunday, police and FDNY officials said. (SOURCE)
Jason Green, one of two EMTs who allegedly ignored Eutisha Revee Rennix after she collapsed and died at the Brooklyn Au Bon Pain where she worked, was killed outside a nightclub today.
Eutisha Revee’ Rennix allegedly died at her job at Au Bon Pain in Brooklyn after two EMT’s allegedly ignored pleas to help her.
The man in the vehicle got off at least two shots, striking Green hit twice in the torso. He later died at New York Downtown Hospital.
Green’s friend was not injured and was being interviewed by cops.
Green of Jackson Heights had been a target of a criminal probe by the Brooklyn DA’s Office because he and his girlfriend, Melisa Jackson, 23, a fellow EMT, allegedly refused to help Eutisha Rennix, 25, a dying, pregnant mom, during their coffee break at the eatery.
Rennix’s still-grieving mother, Cynthia – stunned to learn of Green’s death yesterday – offered kind words of support for his relatives.
“As a mother who has been through this kind of loss, I have to feel for his family,” she said. “Even though what he did to my daughter was an injustice, I am sorry for him, and especially for his mother.”
Eutisha’s sister, Marva, added, “We thought what he did [to Eutisha] was inhuman. But he didn’t deserve [being fatally shot]. … You have to live your life right, because when you do wrong things, life has a way of bringing bad things back to you.”
Eutisha’s twin brother, Eudane, was scheduled to ship overseas with the military last night after getting a tattoo of his sister on his arm.
The criminal investigation into Green and Jackson’s actions began after the pair allegedly ignoring the frantic pleas of Rennix’s co-workers to help her when she suffered a seizure Dec. 9 at the Au Bon Pain shop in 1 Metrotech Center in Brooklyn.
The center is the site of the Fire Department’s headquarters, where the pair of EMTs work as dispatchers.
Rennix, who had a 3-year-old son, died at Long Island College Hospital after the incident. Her premature baby was delivered at the hospital but also died two hours later.
Witnesses said Jackson called a fellow dispatcher to report the incident but noted that she and Green did nothing to help Rennix, who was six months pregnant.
Green and Jackson were suspended for a month without pay after Rennix died. They were reinstated, but the criminal investigation is pending.
Residents who live near Greenhouse said the club is a magnet for noise and violence.
“I hate to say it, but we’ve been waiting for something like this to happen,” said Silvia Beam, president of the Vandam Street Block Association. “I’ve had numerous complaints filed with 311, and they never got back to us. It starts usually at 11 or 12 at night, and they don’t leave until 1 in the afternoon the next day.”
Additional reporting by Ginger Adams Otis and C.J. Sullivan
1958 George Treadwell, the Drifters’ manager, walked backstage at the Apollo Theater, fired his group, walked across to the dressing room of the group’s opening act, the Crowns, hired them, and then christened them the Drifters. The Crown’s lead singer was Ben E. King.
1975 George “Bad” Benson’s debut solo single, “Supership,” peaked at #98 on the R&B chart. Benson originally sang lead for a Pittsburgh vocal group the Altairs, who released the 45 “If You Love Me” (Amy Records) in 1959, when George was only sixteen years old. Despite the poor start, he would go on to have twenty-five R&B charters through 1988, including two #1s, “Give Me the Night” and “Turn Your Love Around.”
1975 Esther Phillips charted with “What A Difference A Day Makes” reaching #10 R&B and #20 pop. It was her nineteenth R&B hit and her first top ten in thirteen years since “Release Me” hit no. 1 (#8 pop) in 1962.
1990 Dionne Warwick appeared at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles alongside Johnny Mathis.
1994 Rick James was sentenced to five years plus in prison for assaulting two women and for cocaine use. He would serve his time at Folsom Prison in California.
Vonetta McGee, a film and television actress originally known for blaxploitation pictures like “Blacula,”“Hammer” and “Shaft in Africa,” died on July 9 in Berkeley, Calif. She was 65 and a Berkeley resident.
July 16, 2010
American International Pictures, via Photofest
Vonetta McGee with William Marshall in “Blacula,” from 1972.
The cause was cardiac arrest, said Kelley Nayo, a family spokeswoman.
In “Blacula” (1972), Ms. McGee portrayed the love interest of Mamuwalde (William Marshall), an African prince who, after an ill-fated trip to Transylvania centuries earlier, re-emerges in modern Los Angeles as a member of the thirsty undead.
Reviewing the film in The New York Times, Roger Greenspun called Ms. McGee “just possibly the most beautiful woman currently acting in movies.”
In “Hammer” (1972), Ms. McGee appeared opposite Fred Williamson in the tale of a young black prizefighter. In “Shaft in Africa” (1973), the third installment in the private-eye series starring Richard Roundtree, she played an emir’s daughter.
Lawrence Vonetta McGee, named for her father, was born in San Francisco on Jan. 14, 1945. While studying pre-law at San Francisco State College, she became involved in community theater. She left college before graduating to pursue an acting career.
Ms. McGee’s first film work was in Italy, where her credits include the 1968 films “Faustina,” in which she played the title role, and “Il Grande Silenzio” (“The Great Silence”). After seeing her Italian work, Sidney Poitier arranged for her to be cast in her first American film, “The Lost Man” (1969), in which he starred.
In later years Ms. McGee had recurring roles on several television shows, among them “Hell Town,”“Bustin’ Loose,” “L.A. Law” and “Cagney & Lacey,” on which she portrayed the wife of Detective Mark Petrie, played by Carl Lumbly. Ms. McGee and Mr. Lumbly were married in 1986.
Besides Mr. Lumbly, Ms. McGee is survived by their son, Brandon Lumbly; her mother, Alma McGee; three brothers, Donald, Richard and Ronald; and a sister, also named Alma McGee.
Though she was associated in public memory with the genre, Ms. McGee deplored the term “blaxploitation.” It wasn’t the “black” that troubled her — that was a source of pride. It was the “exploitation.”
“She was constantly a person who preferred roles where women got to make choices,” Ms. Nayo said on Friday. “Where women got to be strong.”
Vernon Baker, who was the only living black veteran awarded the Medal of Honor for valor in World War II, receiving it 52 years after he wiped out four German machine-gun nests on a hilltop in northern Italy, died Tuesday at his home near St. Maries, Idaho. He was 90.
July 15, 2010
Vernon Baker during World War II.
July 15, 2010
Rick Wilking/Reuters
Mr. Baker received the Medal of Honor from President Bill Clinton at age 77.
The cause was complications of brain cancer, said Ron Hodge, owner of the Hodge Funeral Home in St. Maries.
But in the segregated armed forces of World War II, black soldiers were usually confined to jobs in manual labor or supply units. Even when the Army allowed blacks to go into combat, it rarely accorded them the recognition they deserved. Of the 433 Medals of Honor awarded by all branches of the military during the war, not a single one went to any of the 1.2 million blacks in the service.
In the early 1990s, responding to requests from black veterans and a white former captain who had commanded black troops in combat, the Army asked Shaw University, a historically black college in Raleigh, N.C., to investigate why no blacks had received the Medal of Honor during World War II. The inquiry found no documents proving that blacks had been discriminated against in decisions to award the medal, but concluded that a climate of racism had prevented recognition of heroic deeds.
Military historians gave the Army the names of 10 black servicemen who they believed should have been considered for the Medal of Honor. Then an Army board, looking at their files with all references to race deleted, decided that seven of these men deserved to be cited for bravery “above and beyond the call of duty.”
Four of the men — Lt. John R. Fox of Cincinnati; Pfc. Willy F. James Jr. of Kansas City, Mo.; Staff Sgt. Ruben Rivers of Oklahoma City; and Pvt. George Watson of Birmingham, Ala. — had been killed in action. Two others — Staff Sgt. Edward A. Carter Jr. of Los Angeles and Lt. Charles L. Thomas of Detroit, who retired as a major — had died in the decades after the war. Those six received the medal posthumously at the White House ceremony in 1997.
Mr. Baker, the lone survivor among the seven, was greeted with a standing ovation as he entered the East Room to the strains of “God Bless America” played by the Marine Corps Band.
As Mr. Clinton placed the Medal of Honor around his neck, Mr. Baker stared into space, a tear rolling down his left cheek. “I was thinking about what was going on up on the hill that day,” he said later.
That day was April 5, 1945. Lieutenant Baker, a small man — 5 feet 5 inches and 140 pounds — was leading 25 black infantrymen through a maze of German bunkers and machine gun nests near Viareggio, Italy, a coastal town north of Pisa. About 5 a.m., they reached the south side of a ravine, 250 yards from Castle Aghinolfi, a German stronghold they hoped to capture.
Lieutenant Baker observed a telescope pointing out of a slit. Crawling under the opening, he emptied the clip of his M-1 rifle, killing two German soldiers inside the position. Then he came upon a well-camouflaged machine-gun nest whose two-man crew was eating breakfast. He shot and killed both soldiers.
After Capt. John F. Runyon, his company commander, who was white, joined the group, a German soldier hurled a grenade that hit Captain Runyon in his helmet but failed to explode. Lieutenant Baker shot the German twice as he tried to flee. He then blasted open the concealed entrance of another dugout with a hand grenade, shot one German soldier who emerged, tossed another grenade into the dugout and entered it, firing his machine gun and killing two more Germans.
Enemy machine-gun and mortar fire began to inflict heavy casualties among the platoon. Lieutenant Baker’s company commander had gone back for reinforcements, but they never arrived, so the remnants of the platoon had to withdraw. Lieutenant Baker, supported by covering fire from one of his soldiers, destroyed two machine-gun positions to allow the evacuation. Seventeen of the men in the platoon had been killed by time the firefight ended.
The next night, Lieutenant Baker voluntarily led a battalion advance through enemy minefields and heavy fire.
Lieutenant Baker received the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second-highest award for bravery. Asked a half-century later whether he had ever given up hope of being awarded the Medal of Honor, he seemed surprised. “I never thought about getting it,” he said.
July 15, 2010
Tom Davenport
Vernon Baker, a World War II veteran, received the nation’s highest military award in 1997.
Freddie Stowers, a black veteran of World War I nominated for the medal in 1918, finally received it posthumously from President George Bush in 1991.
Vernon Joseph Baker was born on Dec. 17, 1919, in Cheyenne, Wyo., the son of a carpenter. After his parents died in an automobile accident when he was 4, he and two older sisters moved in with their grandparents, who also lived in Cheyenne.
The youngster developed a penchant for trouble, so he was sent to Boys Town in Omaha at age 10. He stayed there for three years, then earned a high school diploma while living with an aunt in Iowa.
He joined the Army in June 1941 and was sent to Camp Wolters, Tex., for basic training — his first trip to the Deep South. When he boarded a bus to the camp after stepping off the train, the driver shouted a racial epithet and told him to “get to the back of the bus where you belong,” he recalled years later in an interview with The Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Wash.
When he began to show leadership potential, he was sent to Officer Candidate School, graduating as a second lieutenant in 1942. He went to Italy in 1944 with the 92nd Infantry Division’s 370th Regiment, which was composed of black enlisted men and black junior officers but had white officers in senior positions.
In October 1944, Lieutenant Baker was shot in the arm by a German soldier, and when he awoke from surgery he noticed that he was in a segregated hospital ward.
After the war, he remained in Italy for three years, then returned to the United States and re-enlisted. He stayed in the Army until 1968, then worked for the Red Cross at Fort Ord, Calif., counseling needy military families. After his first wife, Fern, died in 1986, he retired and moved to a rural section of Idaho to pursue his love of hunting.
Mr. Baker’s survivors include his second wife, Heidy; three children from his first marriage; a stepdaughter; and a stepgrandson.
Asked at the awards ceremony how he had felt about serving in a segregated unit, Mr. Baker replied: “I was an angry young man. We were all angry. But we had a job to do, and we did it. My personal thoughts were that I knew things would get better, and I’m glad to say that I’m here to see it.”
GEORGE STEINBRENNER, WHO BUILT YANKEES INTO POWERHOUSE
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
Published: July 13, 2010
George Steinbrenner, who bought a declining Yankees team in 1973, promised to stay out of its daily affairs and then, in an often tumultuous reign, placed his formidable stamp on 7 World Series championship teams, 11 pennant winners and a sporting world powerhouse valued at perhaps $1.6 billion, died Tuesday morning at a hospital in Tampa, Fla., where he lived. He was 80.
July 14, 2010
Robert Caplin for The New York Times
George Steinbrenner at opening day 2007. More Photos »
The cause was a heart attack, the Yankees said. Mr. Steinbrenner had been in failing health for several years.
Repeatedly arrested, imprisoned, fined, threatened and harassed, Mr. Njawé (pronounced Enn-JA-way) had a career that was seen abroad as a case study in the risks African journalists take in setting themselves up as critics of the government. At the time of his death, Mr. Njawé was in the United States attending a meeting of Cameroonian expatriates militating for change in their country.
Mr. Njawé’s career as a stubborn critic of the government coincided with the unfolding of Mr. Biya’s increasingly repressive rule. He was arrested about 126 times and jailed at least 3 times; in 1998 he was sentenced to two years in prison for reporting that Mr. Biya had had heart trouble, though he was released before serving the full sentence. He wrote about his time in jail in “Bloc-notes d’un Bagnard” (“Convict’s Notebooks”), published in 1998.
“The African media has lost a truly courageous individual whose bravery in the face of government intimidation served as an inspiration for other journalists,” David Dadge, the director of the International Press Institute, said on the institute’s Web site.
Mr. Njawé was arrested for the first time in 1981; his newspaper was seized in 1990 for reporting on the bloody suppression of a riot, and he was arrested for “insult to the head of state” later that year. In 1992, Le Messager was banned, and he was forced into exile in nearby Benin, where he put out another paper, also called Le Messager, according to the Press Institute. In 1996, he was arrested and imprisoned on charges of insulting the president and members of the National Assembly.
“He was a pioneer,” said Stephen W. Smith, professor of African studies at Duke University, who has written about Mr. Njawé’s career. “He put his whole life into being a journalist. It came out of his pores.”
Mr. Njawé was born March 4, 1957, in Babouantou, Cameroon. He is survived by his wife and eight children. Mr. Njawé was killed when the car he was riding in broke down on a Virginia highway. A truck struck his vehicle, killing him instantly, according to news media reports and Le Messager’s Web site.
His death came eight months after the Yankees won their first World Series title since 2000, clinching their six-game victory over the Philadelphia Phillies at his new Yankee Stadium, and two days after the team’s longtime public-address announcer, Bob Sheppard, died at 99.
A pioneer of modern sports ownership, Mr. Steinbrenner started the wave of high spending for players when free agency arrived, and he continued to spend freely through the Yankees’ revival in the late ’70s and early ’80s, the long stretch without a pennant and then renewed triumphs under Joe Torre as manager and General Manager Brian Cashman.
The Yankees’ approximately $210 million payroll in 2009 dwarfed all others in baseball, and the team paid out millions in luxury tax and revenue-sharing with small-market teams.
In the frenetic ’70s and ’80s, when general managers, field managers and pitching coaches were sent spinning through Mr. Steinbrenner’s revolving personnel door (Billy Martin had five stints as the manager), the franchise became known as the Bronx Zoo. In December 2002, Mr. Steinbrenner’s enterprise had grown so rich that the president of the Boston Red Sox, Larry Lucchino, frustrated over losing the pitcher Jose Contreras to the Yankees, called them the “evil empire.”
But Mr. Steinbrenner — who came to be known as the Boss — and the Yankees thrived through all the arguments, all the turmoil, all the bombast. Having been without a pennant since 1964 when Mr. Steinbrenner bought them, enduring sagging attendance while the upstart Mets thrived, the Yankees once again became America’s marquee sporting franchise.
Despite his poor health, Mr. Steinbrenner attended the opening game at the new Yankee Stadium in April 2009, sitting in his suite with his wife, Joan (pronounced Jo-ann). When he was introduced and received an ovation, his shoulders shook and he cried.
He next appeared at the Yankees’ new home for the first two games of the World Series, then made his final appearance at the 2010 home opener, when Joe Girardi, the manager, and Derek Jeter, the team captain, came to his suite to present him with his 2009 World Series championship ring.
After the World Series victory, Girardi said, “To be able to deliver this to the Boss, to the stadium he created and the atmosphere he created around here, it’s very gratifying to all of us.” Mr. Steinbrenner, the Yankees’ principal owner and chairman, had ceded increasing authority to his sons, Hal and Hank, who became co-chairmen in May 2008. Hal Steinbrenner was given control of the team in November 2008 in a unanimous vote by the major league club owners.
Mr. Steinbrenner lived year-round in Tampa, but he became a New York celebrity and a figure in popular culture. He was lampooned, with his permission, by a caricature in the sitcom “Seinfeld,” portrayed by the actor Lee Bear, who was always photographed from behind at the Boss’s desk while Larry David, the show’s co-creator, provided the voice. George Costanza (Jason Alexander) became the assistant to the team’s traveling secretary, whose duties included fetching calzones for Mr. Steinbrenner.
Mr. Steinbrenner also appeared in a Visa commercial with Jeter, calling him into his office to admonish him. “You’re our starting shortstop,” Mr. Steinbrenner said. “How can you possibly afford to spend two nights dancing, two nights eating out and three nights just carousing with your friends?” Jeter responded by holding up a Visa card. Mr. Steinbrenner exclaimed “Oh!” and the scene shifted to Mr. Steinbrenner in a dance line with Jeter at a night spot.
Rebuilding a Franchise
Mr. Steinbrenner was the central figure in a syndicate that bought the Yankees from CBS for $10 million. When he arrived in New York on Jan. 3, 1973, he said he would not “be active in the day-to-day operations of the club at all.” Having made his money as head of the American Shipbuilding Company, based in Cleveland, he declared, “I’ll stick to building ships.”
But four months later, Michael Burke, who had been running the Yankees for CBS and had stayed on to help manage the franchise, departed after clashing with Mr. Steinbrenner. John McMullen, a minority owner in the syndicate, soon remarked that “nothing is as limited as being a limited partner of George’s.”
Mr. Steinbrenner emerged as one of the most powerful, influential and, in the eyes of many, notorious executives in sports. He was the senior club owner in baseball at his death.
Yankee Stadium underwent a major renovation in the mid-1970s, but that did not satisfy Mr. Steinbrenner. He cast an eye toward New Jersey, pressed for a new stadium in Manhattan and ultimately got a $1.5 billion stadium built in the Bronx, alongside the original House That Ruth Built.
He found new revenue streams from cable television, first in a longtime deal with the Madison Square Garden network and then with the creation of the Yankees’ YES network. The franchise also engineered lucrative marketing deals, notably a 10-year, $95 million apparel agreement with Adidas.
Mr. Steinbrenner usually adored his players but at times insulted them. He called outfielder Paul O’Neill “the ultimate warrior.” (Steinbrenner idolized Generals MacArthur and Patton.) But he derided the star outfielder Dave Winfield, calling him Mr. May, pointedly contrasting him with Reggie Jackson, who had been known as Mr. October for his clutch hitting in the postseason.
Mr. Steinbrenner was twice barred from baseball, once after pleading guilty to making illegal political campaign contributions. By October 1995, when he was fined for complaining about the umpires in a playoff series with the Seattle Mariners, Mr. Steinbrenner had accumulated disciplinary costs of $645,000.
When he was not phoning his general managers and managers with complaints or advice, he meddled in the smallest matters of ballpark maintenance. He was often portrayed by the news media as a blowhard and a baseball know-nothing.
“George is a great guy, unless you have to work for him,” Lou Piniella, who managed the Yankees twice in the 1980s, told Sports Illustrated in 2004. Mr. Steinbrenner saw himself as sticking up for the everyday New Yorker, though the price of Yankees tickets kept rising.
“I care about New York dearly,” he told Sports Illustrated in 2004. “I like every cab driver, every guy that stops the car and honks, every truck driver. I feed on that.”
Drawing on Early Influences
He helped many charities and individuals in need and as a board member was a major fund-raiser for the historically black Grambling State University in Louisiana.
George Michael Steinbrenner III was born on July 4, 1930, the oldest of three children, and reared in the Cleveland suburb of Bay Village. His father, Henry Steinbrenner, graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in naval architecture and engineering and starred as a collegiate hurdler before taking over the family’s maritime shipping business.
Young George tried to please his father by taking up hurdling and running a home-based business that raised chickens and sold their eggs.
“He was a tough taskmaster,” Mr. Steinbrenner once said of his father. “You know, if I ran four races in track, won three and lost one, he’d say, ‘Now go sit down and study that one race and see why you lost it.’ ”
His mother, Rita, offered a contrasting presence. “It was my mom who gave me compassion for the underdog and for people in need,” Mr. Steinbrenner was quoted by Bill Madden in “Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball” in an apparent reference to his many charitable endeavors.
Mr. Steinbrenner attended Culver Military Academy in Indiana in the mid-1940s. His father, who idolized the Yankees’ Joe DiMaggio and Bill Dickey, took him to Cleveland to watch Indians games, especially when the Yankees came to town. “We were in awe of the Yankees,” Mr. Steinbrenner said.
Mr. Steinbrenner graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts with a degree in English. He served as an Air Force officer, coached high school football and basketball in Ohio, and was briefly an assistant football coach at Northwestern and Purdue.
He returned to Cleveland in 1957 to join the family’s shipping firm, Kinsman Marine Transit, which carried Great Lakes cargo. He also operated the Cleveland Pipers basketball team.
In 1967, Mr. Steinbrenner began obtaining stock in the American Shipbuilding Company, based in Lorain, Ohio. He eventually took it over, merging it with Kinsman. By the time he gained control of the Yankees six years later, the company had greatly strengthened its operations.
Gabe Paul, a veteran baseball executive who helped arrange Mr. Steinbrenner’s purchase of the Yankees, and Lee MacPhail, the holdover general manager from the CBS years, were expected to make the personnel decisions when Mr. Steinbrenner arrived.
But he quickly became immersed in baseball decisions, spending large sums to end the long pennant drought, starting with the acquisition of the star pitcher Catfish Hunter. Meanwhile, he ran into trouble in a matter far beyond the ball fields.
In November 1974, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn suspended him for two years — a term later reduced to 15 months — after he pleaded guilty to two charges, one a felony and the other a misdemeanor: conspiring to make illegal corporate contributions to President Richard M. Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign, and trying to “influence and intimidate employees” of his shipbuilding company to lie to a grand jury about the matter. He was fined $15,000 in the criminal case but given no jail time.
“Everybody has dents in his armor,” Mr. Steinbrenner told The New York Times in 1987. “That’s something I have to live with.” President Ronald Reagan pardoned him in January 1989, during his final days in office.
Personnel Hired to Be Fired
When free agency arrived as a result of an arbitrator’s decision in 1975 that nullified the reserve clause, which had bound players to their teams, Mr. Steinbrenner stepped up his spending.
The Yankees signed the slugger Reggie Jackson and the ace relief pitcher Goose Gossage, and they won the World Series in 1977 and 1978.
Mr. Steinbrenner changed managers and general managers with abandon, punctuated by the bizarre comings and goings of Martin. The oddest sequence began on July 24, 1978, when Martin resigned as manager, presumably a step ahead of being fired, after saying of Jackson and Mr. Steinbrenner: “The two of them deserve each other. One’s a born liar; the other’s convicted,” a reference to Mr. Steinbrenner’s guilty plea in the illegal-contributions case.
Only five days later, on Old-Timers’ Day at Yankee Stadium, Martin was introduced as the Yankees’ manager for 1980. Instead, he returned in June 1979, replacing the fired Bob Lemon, only to be fired himself a month after that season ended.
Another furor arose in 1985, this one surrounding Yogi Berra, the Yankees’ Hall of Fame catcher, who had become the manager. After declaring that “Yogi will be the manager the entire season, win or lose,” Mr. Steinbrenner fired him with the team off to a 6-10 start. Berra, furious, refused to set foot inside Yankee Stadium until Mr. Steinbrenner apologized 14 years later. By 1990, he had switched managers 18 times and hired 13 general managers.
Then came more trouble. In July 1990, Commissioner Fay Vincent ordered Mr. Steinbrenner to step aside as the Yankees’ managing partner for making a $40,000 payment to a confessed gambler named Howard Spira in return for Mr. Spira’s seeking damaging information about Winfield. Mr. Steinbrenner had been displeased with Winfield’s performance on the field, and the two had feuded over contributions Mr. Steinbrenner was to make to Winfield’s philanthropic foundation.
Mr. Steinbrenner resumed control of the Yankees in 1993, and three years later, they were World Series champions, beginning a long run of dominance.
By the 1990s, with free agents becoming ever more expensive, Mr. Steinbrenner acknowledged the need to develop the Yankees’ minor league system. The Yankees swept to championships with homegrown talent like Jeter, center fielder Bernie Williams, catcher Jorge Posada and pitchers Andy Pettitte and Mariano Rivera. But they also assumed more than $100 million in payments owed to Alex Rodriguez, who arrived in a trade with the Texas Rangers, and obtained the high-priced Jason Giambi, Roger Clemens and Randy Johnson.
In 2002, an investment group that included the Yankees formed the YES network to carry many games and broadcast Yankees-related programming. YES had $257 million in revenue in 2005, for the first time surpassing MSG as the country’s top regional sports network, according to Kagan Research.
The Yankees’ management achieved stability in the last decade as the team captured World Series championships in 1996 and every year from 1998 to 2000. But the Yankees faltered after that in their bid for another World Series title, and when they were knocked out of the playoffs by the upstart Detroit Tigers in 2006, speculation arose that Mr. Steinbrenner would fire Torre.
Torre, the manager since 1996, and Mr. Cashman, the general manager since 1998 and a frequent object of Mr. Steinbrenner’s criticism, stayed on.
But in October 2007 in a newspaper interview, Mr. Steinbrenner threatened to fire Torre if the team did not advance beyond the first round of the playoffs. The Yankees were eliminated by the Cleveland Indians in that round, and soon afterward, Torre departed after rejecting a one-year contract extension with a cut in his guaranteed salary.
Running Things His Way
Even in his earliest days running the Yankees, Mr. Steinbrenner acknowledged that he seemed to rule through fear. “Some guys can lead through real, genuine respect,” he told Cleveland magazine in 1974, “ but I’m not that kind of a leader.”
Always fastidious about his own grooming, he insisted that his players shun unruly hair and beards, displaying something of the disciplinarian he had been at home, with his children. He admitted he had been overbearing and even verbally abusive toward them. His daughter Jennifer said in 2004 that her brothers had absorbed the brunt. “Let’s put it this way: he had very high expectations of us,” she said.
In addition to his wife, Joan, his sons Hal and Hank, and his daughter Jennifer Steinbrenner Swindal, Mr. Steinbrenner is survived by his daughter Jessica Steinbrenner; two sisters, Susan Norpell and Judy Kamm, and several grandchildren.
In his later years, Mr. Steinbrenner spent most of his time in Tampa. He had divested himself of most of his business interests. American Shipbuilding filed for bankruptcy in 1993, but he owned a stud farm in Ocala, Fla., and had entered six horses in the Kentucky Derby over the years. In April 2010, Forbes magazine estimated the Yankees’ value at $1.6 billion. The Red Sox had the second-highest value among major league teams, according to Forbes, far behind the Yankees at $870 million, with the Mets third at $858 million.
In his last years, Mr. Steinbrenner seemed to mellow some. He cried in public on several occasions, including the time he walked past a group of West Point cadets who cheered for him at the Yankees’ 2004 home opener. He cried again in a television interview that day.
“This is a very important thing that we hold the string to,” he said of the Yankees, his voice cracking. “This is the people’s team.”
In building it into a fabulously successful and exceedingly lucrative enterprise, he never lost sight of his credo. As he told The New York Times in 1998: “I hate to lose. Hate, hate, hate to lose.”
Sugar Minott, a popular Jamaican singer whose joyful, lilting voice bridged four decades of transformation in reggae music, died Saturday in Kingston, the nation’s capital. He was 54.
July 15, 2010
David Corio
Sugar Minott in 1984.
The cause has not yet been determined, but Mr. Minott recently suffered heart problems, his wife, Maxine Stowe, said.
After gaining recognition as a teenager for his harmony singing with Derrick Howard and Tony Tuff as the African Brothers, Mr. Minott (pronounced my-NOT) went on to a long career as a solo artist on record and in concerts around the world. Among his early hits were “Vanity” and “Mr. DC,” recorded for Studio One, Jamaica’s first black-owned recording studio and label.
“He mastered every reggae style and made significant contributions to each of them — from roots and message music into lover’s rock to the computerized techno music of the dancehall genre in the mid-’80s,” said Roger Steffens, a co-founder of the reggae magazine The Beat, which recently ceased publication after 28 years.
From the days of Bob Marley, who died in 1981, reggae has evolved from its Rastafarian message of peace, love and justice to a style called lover’s rock and the more stripped-down dancehall style, characterized by digital rhythm tracks and harsher vocals. The rappers, or toasters, who came to dominate dancehall “turned the music into homophobic and misogynistic rants,” Mr. Steffens said. But Mr. Minott, an early practitioner of the form, shunned the harshness.
“Sugar brought his trademark sweetness and humor, even to what can be quite a violent genre,” said Vivien Goldman, the adjunct professor of reggae at the Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music at New York University. “Reggae has always been loved for its golden voices, and Sugar Minott ranked among the greatest.”
Ms. Goldman cited his 1984 hit “Buy Off the Bar” as evidence of dancehall at its sweetest: an encouragement to forget the troubles of everyday life, buy drinks and keep the party going.
Mr. Minott’s biggest hit was a cover of the Jackson Five’s “Good Thing Going,“ which reached No. 4 in the British singles chart in March 1981. But the recordings that made him famous, Ms. Goldman said, came in 1979: “Hard Time Pressure,” bemoaning the plight of the poor, and “Ghetto-Ology,” about starvation and mass brutality, in which he sang, “I got an A in starvation, I pass my grades in sufferation.”
“One of the outstanding aspects of Sugar Minott was his commitment to poor youth,” Ms. Goldman said, pointing out that he started a label, Black Roots, that featured young artists from the deprived downtown areas of Kingston. Among those who became popular were Garnet Silk, Tony Rebel, Tenor Saw and Johnny Osbourne.
In recent years Mr. Minott recorded with the Easy Star All-Stars, singing “Exit Music (for a Film)“ on their album “Radiodread” (2006), a reggae interpretation of the Radiohead album “OK Computer,” and “When I’m Sixty-Four” on Easy Star’s “Lonely Hearts Dub Band” (2009), which took a similar approach to the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and reached No. 1 on the Billboard reggae chart.
Lincoln Barrington Minott was born in Kingston on May 25, 1956, one of eight children of Austin and Lucille Minott. He attended a trade school, where he learned how to install shelves, then worked with friends who built sound systems. That led to the formation of the African Brothers and his work with Studio One, which had been founded by Coxsone Dodd.
In 1993, Mr. Minott married Mr. Dodd’s niece, Ms. Stowe. Besides his wife, he is survived by his mother, three sisters, four brothers and 14 children. Ten of his children, Ms. Stowe said, came from two previous relationships.
An animated entertainer, Mr. Minott roamed the stage to reggae’s pulsating, off-beat rhythms, acting out the roles in his songs, dancing. But another “uniquely striking” feature encapsulated his exuberance, Mr. Steffens said: “a hugely gap-toothed smile that you could drive a minibus through.”
Mr. Blackwell, the son of a railroad worker with a fourth-grade education, taught for nearly 35 years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became the first black tenured professor.
He made his mark as a free-ranging problem solver in numerous subdisciplines. His fascination with game theory, for example, prompted him to investigate the mathematics of bluffing and to develop a theory on the optimal moment for an advancing duelist to open fire.
“He went from one area to another, and he’d write a fundamental paper in each,” Thomas Ferguson, an emeritus professor of statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles, told the Berkeley Web site. “He would come into a field that had been well studied and find something really new that was remarkable. That was his forte.”
David Harold Blackwell was born on April 24, 1919, in Centralia, Ill. Early on, he showed a talent for mathematics, but he entered the University of Illinois with the modest ambition of becoming an elementary school teacher. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1938 and, adjusting his sights, went on to earn a master’s degree in 1939 and a doctorate in 1941, when he was only 22.
After being awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship, established by the clothing magnate Julius Rosenwald to aid black scholars, he attended the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton but left after a year when, because of his race, he was not issued the customary invitation to become an honorary faculty member. At Berkeley, where the statistician Jerzy Neyman wanted to hire him in the mathematics department, racial objections also blocked his appointment.
Instead, Mr. Blackwell sent out applications to 104 black colleges on the assumption that no other schools would hire him. After working for a year at the Office of Price Administration, he taught briefly at Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., and Clark College in Atlanta before joining the mathematics department at Howard University in Washington in 1944.
As a consultant to the RAND Corporation from 1948 to 1950, he applied game theory to military situations. It was there that he turned his attention to what might be called the duelist’s dilemma, a problem with application to the battlefield, where the question of when to open fire looms large.
His “Basic Statistics” (1969) was one of the first textbooks on Bayesian statistics, which assess the uncertainty of future outcomes by incorporating new evidence as it arises, rather than relying on historical data. He also wrote numerous papers on multistage decision-making.
“He had this great talent for making things appear simple,” Peter Bickel, a statistics professor at Berkeley, told the university’s Web site. “He liked elegance and simplicity. That is the ultimate best thing in mathematics, if you have an insight that something seemingly complicated is really simple, but simple after the fact.”
Mr. Blackwell was hired by Berkeley in 1954 and became a full professor in the statistics department when it split off from the mathematics department in 1955. He was chairman of the department from 1957 to 1961 and assistant dean of the College of Letters and Science from 1964 to 1968. He retired in 1988.
In 1965 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
In addition to his son Hugo, of Berkeley, he is survived by three of his eight children, Ann Blackwell and Vera Gleason, both of Oakland, and Sarah Hunt Dahlquist of Houston; a sister, Elizabeth Cowan of Clayton, N.C.; and 14 grandchildren.
Mr. Blackwell described himself as a “dilettante” in a 1983 interview for “Mathematical People,” a collection of profiles and interviews. “Basically, I’m not interested in doing research and I never have been,” he said. “I’m interested in understanding, which is quite a different thing. And often to understand something you have to work it out yourself because no one else has done it.”
Walter Hawkins, a Grammy-winning gospel composer and singer whose songs brought a sense of contemporary rhythm to the howling, pleading, God-praising tradition of churchly ecstasy, died on Sunday at the home he shared with a brother and three sisters in Ripon, Calif. He was 61.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Bill Carpenter, a spokesman for the Hawkins family.
Mr. Hawkins and his brother Edwin were self-taught keyboard players from Oakland, Calif., who were helping to organize summer events for the Church of God in Christ when they recorded their first record. It was meant to be sold locally to raise money for the church, but after one of its songs, “Oh Happy Day,” a hymnlike incantation with a funky underbeat, became a crossover hit, the brothers began their musical careers.
July 14, 2010
Robert Shanklin & Teddi Patton
Walter Hawkins performing in Richmond, Va., last year.
As he did in “Oh Happy Day” (credited to the Edwin Hawkins Singers), Edwin became known for mixing secular sounds with church traditions; Walter’s music was something else. His best-known songs — “Changed,” “Goin’ Up Yonder,” “Marvelous” and “Thank You Lord,” among others — were characterized by the supplicating tones of a preacher in full thrall to his faith.
“Walter’s music was undoubtedly church music,” Mr. Carpenter said. “It wasn’t likely to be on the pop charts. It had rock ’n’ roll in it, but it was very church.”
Mr. Hawkins founded his own church in Oakland, the Love Center Church, which he served as pastor, and with it he founded a choir, the Love Center Choir.
With the choir, with his brother and other siblings, and with his former wife, Tramaine, he recorded more than a dozen albums, including five albums collectively known as the “Love Alive” series. According to allmusic.com, a music Web site, “Love Alive III” sold more than a million copies and “Love Alive IV” was No. 1 on the gospel charts for 39 weeks. He won a Grammy for his participation, with several other top gospel performers, on the 1980 album “The Lord’s Prayer.”
Walter Lee Hawkins was born in Oakland on May 18, 1949; his father worked as a porter and a longshoreman. He dropped out of high school — he later earned a G.E.D. — and with his brother Edwin played at church events. He was often given more credit than he felt he deserved for “Oh Happy Day”; he sang on the recording, but was otherwise not responsible for it, and after it made its splash, he headed off on his own path. He attended classes in divinity at the University of California, Berkeley, and founded his church in 1972.
In addition to Edwin, who lives in Ripon, Mr. Hawkins is survived by three sisters, Carol, Feddie and Lynette, all also of Ripon; a brother, Daniel, of Oakland; a son, Walter Jamie Hawkins, of Tracy, Calif.; a daughter, Trystan Hawkins, of Vallejo, Calif., and two grandchildren. Mr. Hawkins’s marriage to the former Tramaine Davis ended in divorce, but they remained close and often performed together.
Mr. Hawkins recorded his first album, “Do Your Best,” which was produced by Tom Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival, in 1972. Though largely unknown today, it had influence in the gospel world.
“I carried that album around with me in my arms for days,” said Pastor Hezekiah Walker, a two-time Grammy-winning gospel singer and radio host who founded a church, the Love Fellowship Tabernacle, that was modeled after Mr. Hawkins’s. “It was the first gospel record where I said to myself, ‘I can do this, I can get with this.’ Churchgoing people who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, Walter Hawkins was who we looked to for music we enjoyed.”
Peter Fernandez, who provided the rat-a-tat voice of Speed Racer when that animated Japanese television series came to the United States — and who wrote the American lyrics for the show’s theme song — died Thursday at his home in Pomona, N.Y. He was 83.
July 17, 2010
Librado Romero/The New York Times
Peter Fernandez with some toys drawn from “Speed Racer.”
The cause was cancer, his wife, Noel, said.
The 52-episode “Speed Racer” series was first seen in the United States in 1967 after it appeared in Japan as “Mach Go Go Go.” Speed Racer is a high-spirited teenage race-car driver who seeks out dangerous competition; rollicks with his true love, Trixie; and wonders about his mysterious older brother, who disappears for years and returns as a rival, Racer X. Mr. Fernandez not only did the voice of Speed Racer; he also provided the ominous voice of Racer X, wrote some of the scripts and directed the dubbing cast.
“He took a quintessentially Japanese title and made it so Americans could enjoy it,” said Egan Loo, the news editor of the Anime News Network. “ ‘Speed Racer’ was one of the first titles that turned Americans into fans of Japanese animation.”
Those fans relished Mr. Fernandez’s rapid-fire delivery. “A lot of syllables were used in Japanese,” Mr. Loo said, “and to match the mouth flaps, he filled in the English dialogue with as many words as were needed.”
The most fun in writing scripts, Mr. Fernandez told The New York Times in 2008, was “thinking of the villain names,” like Light Fingers Clepto.
Born in Manhattan on Jan. 29, 1927, Mr. Fernandez was one of three children of Pedro and Edna Fernandez. Besides his wife, the former Noel Smith, he is survived by a sister, Jacqueline Hayes; his brother, Edward; two children from his first marriage, Peter and April Fernandez; a stepdaughter, Elizabeth McAlister; and nine grandchildren. His marriage to Marion Russell ended in divorce.
Mr. Fernandez appeared in the Broadway play “Whiteoaks” when he was 11 and went on to act on children’s radio shows. In 1945 he got work as a writer for pulp magazines.
Fred Ladd, a producer importing “Astro Boy,” another animated Japanese cartoon series, hired him to write English dialogue for that series. Writing and dubbing for “Gigantor” followed, leading to “Speed Racer.”
Two years ago, the directors Larry and Andy Wachowski released a live-action film adaptation of “Speed Racer.” Mr. Fernandez had a cameo as a race announcer.
When the movie came out, Mr. Fernandez and Corinne Orr, who played Trixie, traveled to anime conventions around the country. “People were excited to meet us,” Ms. Orr said. “When Peter signed those autographs he just lit up.”
To this day, I still have fond memories of the animated series Speed Racer.
The characters: Speed Racer, Pops Racer, Mom Racer,Trixie, Spritle and his sidekick, Chim-Chim, Sparky, the enigmatic Racer X (who incidentally, was Speed Racer’s brother), and we cannot forget the car that made it all happen, the Mach 5.
Even now, I can still sing the series theme song:
Here he comes
Her comes Speed Racer
He’s a demon on wheels
He’s a demon and he’s gonna be chasin’ after someone.
He’s gainin’ on you so you better look alive.
He’s busy revvin’ up a powerful Mach 5.
And when the odds are against him
And there’s dangerous work to do
You bet your life Speed Racer
Will see it through.
Go Speed Racer
Go Speed Racer
Go Speed Racer, Go!
He’s off and flyin’ as he guns the car around the track
He’s jammin’ down the pedal like he’s never comin’ back
Adventure’s waitin’ just ahead.
Go Speed Racer
Go Speed Racer
Go Speed Racer, Go!
Thanks, Mr, Fernandez for not only supplying the voice of Speed, but, also, thanks for the wonderful memories you have given me.
Slide Show 
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Interactive Feature 
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