Lives

Herbert Aptheker, 87, Black history scholar and W.E.B. Du Bois' literary executor, died March 17 in Mountain Home, Calif., after a stroke. He was a resident of San Jose.

Clarence Blount, 81, who served 31 years in the Maryland Senate, died of complications from a stroke April 12 in Baltimore. Blount's service in the Senate began in 1971, and in 1983 he was elected the first Black majority leader.

Lloyd L. Brown, 89, a journalist and novelist who helped Paul Robeson write his 1958 autobiography, Here I Stand, died April 1 in New York.

Valerie Parks Brown, 90, who taught French in Washington, D.C., public schools and at Howard University from the 1940s to the 1970s, died of cardiac arrest Dec. 29 in Washington.

Virna Canson, 81, a civil rights activist who headed the NAACP's western region during the 1970s and 1980s, died of kidney cancer April 14 in Sacramento, Calif.

Walter Decoster Dennis, 70, a retired suffragan bishop (top aide to the bishop) who served the Episcopal Diocese of New York, civil rights advocate and lawyer, died of an embolism March 30 in Hampton, Va.

Celes King III, 79, a California civil rights activist and the first state chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality (serving from 1975 to 2000), died April 12 of gangrene and kidney failure, among other ailments, in Los Angeles.

August Meier, 79, a respected scholar who focused on the intersection of Black intellectual history and the Civil Rights Movement, died March 19 at his home in New York City. He suffered from a progressive neurological disorder.

Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji, 76, who helped introduce African music to the United States, died of complications from diabetes April 6 in Salinas, Calif. In 1959, he recorded "Drums of Passion," a top-selling record. At the time of his death, Olatunji was teaching at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Calif.

Edwin Starr, 61, a soul singer and Nashville native whose antiwar song, "War - what is it good for? Absolutely nothing," topped American music charts in 1970, died April 2 at his home outside Nottingham, England, after a heart attack.

Naftali Temu, Kenya's first Olympic gold medalist, died March 10 in Nairobi, after a lengthy hospitalization for kidney problems. Temu, who was in his mid-fifties at the time of his death, won the 10,000 meters in track and field at the 1968 games in Mexico City.

Actress Lynn Thigpen, 54, died in her Los Angeles home March 12. She played the role of Ella Farmer, a statistics clerk, on The District, a TV police drama set in Washington, D.C.

Robert L. Woodson Jr., 39, senior vice president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise and son of the center's founder and president, was killed in a car accident in Silver Spring, Md., Feb. 8. Woodson was a campaign adviser to President Bush and a former chief of staff at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated May/Jun 2003
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