Archie Alleyne (January 7, 1933 – June 8, 2015) was a Canadian jazz drummer. Best known as a drummer for influential jazz musicians such as Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Stan Getz, Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster, he was also prominent as a recording artist on his own and with Canadian jazz musicians such as Oliver Jones, Cy McLean and Brian Browne.

Born and raised in Toronto, Ontario, Alleyne became the house drummer at the Town Tavern jazz club in his 20s.

Involved in a serious car accident in 1967, he stepped away from music for a number of years, becoming a partner in a soul food restaurant in Toronto. He returned to music in the early 1980s with Jones' band.

In later life,, he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada, established the Archie Alleyne Scholarship Fund to provide bursaries to music students, and wrote Colour Me Jazz: The Archie Alleyne Story, an autobiography.

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Ernie Banks, byname of Ernest Banks (b. January 31, 1931, Dallas, Texas — d. January 23, 2015, Chicago, Illinois), was American professional baseball player, regarded as one of the finest power hitters in the history of the game. Banks starred for the Chicago Cubs from 1953 to 1971. An 11-time All-Star, Banks was named the National League’s (NL) Most Valuable Player for two consecutive seasons (1958–59). He hit more than 40 home runs in five different seasons, leading the NL in that category in 1958 and 1960. He also led the league in 1958–59 in runs batted in.

Banks excelled in football, basketball, track and field, and baseball at his Dallas high school. At age 17 he joined a barnstorming Negro League team at a salary rate of $15 per game. In 1950 legendary Negro League star Cool Papa Bell signed him to the Kansas City Monarchs. Soon after, Banks spent two years in the United States Army, after which he returned to the Monarchs. His stay there was short-lived, however, as the major leagues, recently integrated, were eager to take advantage of the wealth of talent in the Negro leagues.

Signed by the Chicago Cubs in 1953, Banks soon established himself as one of the league’s leading power hitters. In addition to his potent bat, he proved to be a skilled defensive player, setting a single-season mark for fielding percentage for a shortstop in 1959. After injuries limited his mobility, Banks moved to first base in 1962.

Banks was known for his enthusiasm and love of the game, his trademark cry of “let’s play two!” reflecting the pure enjoyment he took in baseball. When he retired in 1971, he was the holder of most of the Chicago Cubs’ offensive records and had earned the nickname “Mr. Cub” among the team’s fans. In his career Banks totaled 512 home runs and 1,636 runs batted in. He was elected into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1977; he was the eighth player to be elected in his first year of eligibility. In 2013 Banks was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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Willie T. Barrow (Willie Beatrice Taplin) (b. December 7, 1924, Burton, Texas - d. March 12, 2015, Chicago, Illinois) was a civil rights activist who devoted her life to championing the rights of African Americans and working to improve their circumstances, both on the front lines of public demonstrations and as a mentor to generations of young activists. Barrow engaged in her first act of protest as a child, when she sought to change the rule that required African American children to walk to school while European American children rode on school buses. When she was 16 years old, she moved to Portland, Oregon, where she worked as a shipyard welder and attended Pacific Bible College (since 1959 Warner Pacific College). She also organized and led an African American Church of God congregation. Barrow relocated (in 1945) to Chicago and attended Moody Bible Institute. By the 1950s, she had become a civil rights filed organizer for such groups as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She participated in such campaigns as the March on Washington (1963) and the Selma March (1965). In the mid-1960s, she helped found the Chicago chapter of Operation Breadbasket, which focused on increasing the hiring and promotion of African Americans. Barrow worked with civil rights leader Jesse Jackson when he founded Operation PUSH (which also had the goal of economic empowerment in black communities), and she later served as the organization's executive director. After the 1996 merger that created the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, she headed that group's governing board for 10 years. In addition, Barrow was a vocal feminist and a supporter of gay rights.

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Max Gesner Beauvoir (b. August 25, 1936 – d. September 12, 2015) was a Haitian biochemist and houngan. Beauvoir held one of the highest titles of Voudou priesthood, "Supreme Servitur" (supreme servant), a title given to Houngans and Mambos (Voudou priests and priestesses) who have a great and very deep knowledge of the religion, and status within the religion. As Supreme Servitur, Beauvoir was seen as a high authority within Voudou.

Beauvoir graduated in 1958 from City College of New York with a degree in chemistry. He continued his studies at the Sorbonne from 1959 to 1962, when he graduated with a degree in biochemistry. In 1965, at the Cornell Medical Center, he supervised a team in synthesizing metabolic steroids. This led him to a job at an engineering company in northern New Jersey, and later as an engineer at Digital Equipment Company in Massachusetts. His interest in steroids led him to experiment with hydrocortisone synthesized from plants. However, the death of his father led him to move back to Haiti in January 1973 and become a voodoo priest.

In 1974, he founded Le Péristyle de Mariani, a Hounfour (voodoo temple) in his home (which also served as a village clinic) in the village of Mariani. He had a troubled relationship with the ruling Duvalier family. While he urged that they do more to meet the medical needs of the poor, his status as a houngan kept him from being subjected to much of the wanton violence exacted by the Tonton Macoutes against critics.

During this period, he founded the Group for Studies and Research on the African Tradition (French: Groupe d'Etudes et de Recherches Traditionnelles, GERT) with a group of scholars, and later founded the Bòde Nasyonal in 1986 to counter the effects of the post-Duvalier dechoukaj violence which had targeted both Vodou practitioners and the Tonton Macoutes paramilitary, both of which had been used by the Duvalier regime to oppress the Haitian people.

In 1996, Beauvoir founded The Temple of Yehwe, a Washington, D. C. based non-profit organization for the promotion of education concerning African American religion. In 1997, he became involved with the creation of the KOSANBA group at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

^{In 2005, Beauvoir launched the Federasyon Nasyonal Vodou Ayisyen, which he later renamed in 2008 as Konfederasyon Nasyonal Vodou Ayisyen; he serves as "chef Supreme" or "Ati Nasyonal" of the organization, which is an attempt to organize the defense of Vodou in the country against defamation.}

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Leon Bibb (February 7, 1922 – October 23, 2015) was an American folk singer and actor who grew up in Kentucky, studied voice in New York, and worked on Broadway. His career began when he became a featured soloist of the Louisville Municipal College glee club as a student. He lived in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, after 1969.

Bibb was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and was one of the performers at the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959. He also had his own NBC television talk show. During the late-1950s and early-1960s, Bibb was one of a number of American entertainers, such as his good friend Paul Robeson, who were blacklisted for alleged ties to left-wing groups and causes.

Bibb became involved in the civil rights movement early on, taking part in voter-registration drives in the South and performing at the 1963 March on Washington. Bibb traveled to Mississippi to join Dick Gregory and others in the fight against racial segregation in the United States. In 1965, he performed in front of the statehouse in Montgomery with Joan Baez, Oscar Brand and Harry Belafonte, whom he had known since their acting days at the American Negro Theater in Harlem.

In addition to his civil rights activism, Bibb continued to perform, and around 1963–64 he was featured singing on the national TV show, Hootenanny, on The Ed Sullivan Show and performed with Bill Cosby on tours. Bibb also provided the soundtrack to Luis Bunuel's 1960 film The Young One. His a cappella vocals blend his classical, spiritual and blues influences.

While on tour with the revue “Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris,” Bibb became enchanted with Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and moved there in the early 1970s. For the next 40 years he performed frequently in Canada and the United States. In 2009, Bibb was made a Member of the Order of British Columbia. At the time of receiving this honor, at the age of 87, Bibb was still an active performer.

Leon Bibb died on October 23, 2015. His two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter Dorie and his son, Eric, a singer and musician, he was survived by his partner, Christine Anton; another daughter, Amy Bibb-Ford; nine grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. He was the father of the Helsinki, Finland-based acoustic singer/songwriter Eric Bibb, and grandfather of Swedish dancer and performer Rennie Mirro.

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Julian Bond, in full Horace Julian Bond (b. January 14, 1940, Nashville, Tennessee - August 15, 2015, Fort Walton Beach, Florida), legislator and civil rights leader, best known for his fight to take his duly elected seat in the Georgia House of Representatives.

The son of prominent educators, Bond attended Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, where he helped found a civil rights group and led a sit-in movement intended to desegregate Atlanta lunch counters. In 1960 he joined in creating the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and he later served as communications director for the group. In 1965 he won a seat in the Georgia state legislature, but his endorsement of a SNCC statement accusing the United States of violating international law in Vietnam prompted the legislature to refuse to admit him. The voters in his district twice re-elected him, but the legislature barred him each time. Finally, in December 1966, the United States Supreme Court ruled the exclusion unconstitutional, and Bond was sworn in on January 9, 1967.

At the Democratic National Convention in 1968, Bond led an insurgent group of delegates that won half of Georgia’s seats. He seconded the nomination of Eugene McCarthy and became the first African American man to have his name placed in nomination for the vice presidential candidacy of a major party. Younger than the minimum age required for the position under the Constitution, however, Bond withdrew his name.

Bond served in the Georgia House of Representatives from 1967 to 1975 and in the Georgia Senate from 1975 to 1987. In 1986 he ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives against his fellow civil rights activist, John Lewis.

In addition to his legislative activities, Bond served as president of the Southern Poverty Law Center and as executive chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Bond became the first president of the Southern Poverty Law Center in 1971. He served until 1979, remaining a board member and president emeritus for the rest of his life.

In 1998, Bond was selected as chairman of the NAACP. In November 2008, he announced that he would not seek another term as chairman. Bond agreed to stay on in the position through 2009, as the organization celebrated its 100th anniversary. Roslyn M. Brock was chosen as Bond's successor on February 20, 2010.

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André Philippus Brink, (May 29, 1935 – February 6, 2015) was a South African novelist. He wrote in both Afrikaans and English and was a Professor of English at the University of Cape Town. .

In the 1960s he, Ingrid Jonker and Breyten Breytenbach were key figures in the significant Afrikaans literary movement known as Die Sestigers ("The Sixty-ers"). These writers sought to use Afrikaans as a language to speak against the apartheid government, and also to bring into Afrikaans literature the influence of contemporary English and French trends.

His novel Kennis van die aand (1973) was the first Afrikaans book to be banned by the South African government. André Brink translated Kennis van die aand into English and published it abroad as Looking on Darkness. This was his first self-translation. After that, André Brink wrote his works simultaneously in English and Afrikaans.

While Brink's early novels were especially concerned with apartheid, his later work engaged the new range of issues posed by life in a democratic South Africa.

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Edward Brooke, in full Edward William Brooke (b. October 26, 1919, Washington, D.C. - d. January 3, 2015, Coral Gables, Florida), was an American lawyer and politician who was the first African American popularly elected to the United States Senate, where he served two terms (1967–79).

Brooke earned his undergraduate degree at Howard University (Washington, D.C.) in 1941 and served as an infantry officer during World War II, achieving the rank of captain. After being discharged, he earned two law degrees at Boston University and was editor of the Boston University Law Review.

Brooke began practicing law in 1948 and became a successful Boston attorney. Entering politics, he was defeated in attempts to win a seat in the Massachusetts legislature in 1950 and 1952. He also failed in his 1960 bid to become the Massachusetts Secretary of State. From 1961 to 1962, he served as Chairman of the Boston Finance Commission, seeking evidence of corruption in city politics.

In 1962 Brooke, a Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic state, was elected attorney general of Massachusetts. A vigorous prosecutor of official corruption, he was re-elected in 1964 by a large margin, despite the success of Democrats that year (Democratic President Lyndon Johnson captured more than 75 percent of the vote in Massachusetts against Republican Barry Goldwater).

In 1966 Brooke ran for a seat in the United States Senate and won by nearly half a million votes. That year he also published The Challenge of Change: Crisis in Our Two-Party System, which focused on self-help as a way to address the social issues facing the United States during the 1960s. He established a reputation as a soft-spoken moderate on civil rights and a leader of the progressive wing of his party. In 1972 he was overwhelmingly reelected. In 1978, however, beset by personal problems including accusations of financial misdeeds and a divorce, Brooke lost his bid for a third term. In 2008 journalist Barbara Walters revealed that she and Brooke had engaged in an affair for several years prior to his divorce.

After leaving the Senate in 1979, Brooke became chairman of the National Low-Income Housing Coalition and resumed the practice of law. The recipient of numerous honors, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2009. His memoir, Bridging the Divide (2007), explores issues of race and class as viewed from his experiences as an African American Republican politician from a largely Democratic state.

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Ben Cauley (October 3, 1947 – September 21, 2015) was an American trumpet player, vocalist, songwriter, and founding member of the Stax recording group, the Bar-Kays. He was the sole survivor of the 1967 plane crash that claimed the lives of soul singer Otis Redding and four members of the Bar-Kays.

Cauley was born in South Memphis, Tennessee. He learned to play trumpet when at school, and formed a band with guitarist Jimmy King, saxophonist Phalon Jones, drummer Carl Cunningham, keyboardist Ronnie Caldwell, and bassist James Alexander. The group was originally named the Imperials, and later changed to the Bar-Kays in the mid-1960s. Cauley started attending LeMoyne College in 1965, before becoming a professional musician.

The Bar-Kays joined the Stax studio by 1966, and were signed on to Stax's subsidiary Volt Records in the beginning of 1967. According to James Alexander, Cauley was the best dressed of the group, always known to wear a suit, no matter the occasion.

Al Jackson, Jr. the drummer with Booker T & the MGs, took a particular interest in the young members of the Bar-Kays and groomed them to become the second house band for Stax after Booker T and the MGs. As such they appeared as the backing band on numerous recordings for Stax artists such as Otis Redding, Carla Thomas, and Sam and Dave. In fact, Otis Redding took such a liking to the band that he chose them to be his touring back-up band in the summer of 1967.

On December 8, 1967, Otis Redding and the Bar-Kays flew in Redding's twin engine Beechcraft plane to Nashville, Tennessee for three weekend gigs and used that city as a base to commute to additional gigs. The following day, December 9, they took the Beechcraft to Cleveland where they appeared on Don Webster's 'Upbeat' TV show with Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. Later that same evening they played at a popular Cleveland club, Leo's Casino. It was on December 10, on their commute to Madison, Wisconsin, that the men would meet their fate.

At 3:28 in the afternoon, the plane carrying Otis Redding, his valet, and the majority of the Bar-Kays crashed into the icy waters of the Squaw Bay area of Lake Monona, just outside of Madison. Bar-Kays bassist James Alexander had taken a different flight as there was not enough room left on Redding's plane. Cauley, who was sitting directly behind Otis Redding in the co-pilot's seat, had fallen asleep on the flight clutching his seat cushion. He awoke when he realized he could not breathe. He said that he then saw band mate Phalon Jones look out of a window and say "Oh, no!"

Cauley then unbuckled his safety belt which ultimately allowed him to separate himself from the wreckage. Other victims, including Redding, were found still attached to their seats. As the impact tore a wing off the small Beechcraft, the fuselage was torn open and Cauley was able to bob to the surface as he clutched his seat cushion.

While bobbing and trying to swim to his band mates who weren't able to free themselves from the fuselage, Cauley witnessed their cries for help before they were pulled under the frigid water. A nearby resident of Lake Monona heard the crash and called the authorities who responded quickly with a police boat. Approximately 20 minutes after the crash, Cauley was pulled into the police boat, suffering from hypothermia and shock. According to Jet magazine, which interviewed Cauley and the authorities who assisted in the rescue attempt, the rescue divers could not be in the water for more than 15 minutes at a time due to the freezing temperature of the water. Madison Police Inspector John Harrington was quoted as saying that a person without insulated SCUBA gear "wouldn't live longer than 20 or so minutes" in the icy water. When asked why he survived, Cauley told Jet, "I guess God was with me." Cauley claimed to suffer from nightmares about the accident until his death.

After the accident, Ben Cauley and James Alexander reformed the Bar-Kays and went on to record with Stax artists such as Isaac Hayes, Rufus Thomas, and the Staple Singers, as well as appear at Wattstax, "The Black Woodstock". However, the band made little money, as they did not have much work outside of being a house band for Stax, and frequently needed to tour with the artists they backed. Cauley had two young daughters to support, so he left the group in 1971, allowing him to continue performing on his own while being able to remain home with his family.

Cauley suffered a debilitating stroke in 1989, but eventually recovered fully, aside from occasional problems with slightly slurred speech.

Into the 2000s, Cauley could be heard backing up Liz Lottmann, jazz and blues singer, or performing live at the Memphis club, Rum Boogie, located downtown on Beale Street. He also directed the choir of Calvary Longview United Methodist Church, attended by him and his wife Shirley.

On September 9, 2008, Attorney B.J. Wade donated $100,000 to Stax Records that would be used to create the Ben Cauley scholarship, in his honor and to shed light on his accomplishments. On September 12, 2008, the scholarship was founded. On June 6, 2015 Cauley was on hand to be inducted into the Official Rhythm & Blues Music Hall of Fame in Clarksdale, Mississippi, along with other Bar-Kays.

He died on September 21, 2015 at the age of 67.

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Marva Collins, née Marva Delores Knight (b. August 31, 1936, Monroeville, Alabama —d. June 24, 2015, Bluffton, South Carolina), American educator who broke with a public school system she found to be failing inner-city children and established her own rigorous system and practice to cultivate her students’ independence and accomplishment.

Marva Knight attended the Bethlehem Academy, a strict school that proved to have an influence on the development of her later educational methods. She studied secretarial sciences at Clark College in Atlanta but was unable to work as a secretary because of her race. From 1957 she taught bookkeeping, typing, shorthand, and business law at Monroe County Training School. She moved to

Chicago in 1959 and married Clarence Collins.

In 1961 Marva Collins began working for the Chicago school system. Dissatisfied with its apathy, neglect, and hostility toward inner-city students, most of whom were poor and black, Collins set high standards for her pupils and adopted unorthodox teaching methods. She relied on such traditional methods as memorization, and to inspire her students to read she assigned them classic texts that others considered too challenging.

In 1975 Collins left the Chicago school system to found the private Daniel Hale Williams Westside Preparatory School. With financial assistance from the government-funded Alternative Schools Network, she began with four students. Within a year enrollment had increased to 20 students, most of whom were considered uneducable by the standards of Chicago public schools.

In 1979 Westside Prep gained national prominence following a story and interview with Collins on the television news show 60 Minutes. Highly laudatory coverage followed in such magazines as Time, Jet, Newsweek, and Black Enterprise. In 1981, CBS aired The Marva Collins Story. Collins refused several offers for powerful positions, including United States Secretary of Education and superintendent of the Los Angeles school system, choosing to remain with her school.

In 1982 an educational magazine accused Collins of inflating test scores; she was also charged with plagiarism, harassing parents about tuition payments, and fueling right-wing attacks on public education. Despite the controversy, she retained many supporters and began a teacher-training program to impart her methods to other inner-city teachers. Collins later resigned her position at the school but continued working with the Westside Prep staff and traveled widely to promote her ideas. The school was closed in 2008 owing to a shortage of funds.

In 2004 President George W. Bush awarded Collins the prestigious National Humanities Medal. Collins recounted her career in Marva Collins’ Way (1982, reissued 1990), written with Civia Tamarkin.

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Don Covay (Donald James Randolph) (March 24, 1936 – January 31, 2015) was an American R&B, rock and roll and soul singer and songwriter most active from the 1950s to the 1970s. His most successful recordings included "Mercy, Mercy" (1964), "See-Saw" (1965), and "It's Better To Have (And Don't Need)" (1974). Other songs written by Covay included "Pony Time", a United States #1 hit for Chubby Checker, and "Chain of Fools", a Grammy-winning song for Aretha Franklin. He received a Pioneer Award from the Rhythm and Blues Foundation in 1994.

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Andraé Edward Crouch (July 1, 1942 – January 8, 2015) was an American gospel singer, songwriter, arranger, record producer and pastor. Referred to as "the father of modern gospel music" by contemporary Christian and gospel music professionals, Crouch was known for his compositions The Blood Will Never Lose Its Power, My Tribute (To God Be the Glory) and Soon and Very Soon. In secular music, he was known for his collaborative work during the 1980s with Stevie Wonder, Elton John and Quincy Jones as well as conducting choirs that sang on the Michael Jackson hit Man in the Mirror and Madonna's Like a Prayer. Crouch was noted for his talent of incorporating contemporary secular music styles into the gospel music he grew up with. His efforts in this area were what helped in paving the way for early American contemporary Christian music durng the 1960s and 1970s.

Crouch's original music arrangements were heard in the films The Color Purple and Disney's The Lion King, as well as the NBC television series Amen. Awards received by him include seven Grammy Awards, being inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 1998, and receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2004.

Crouch has won numerous awards and honors over the years including nine Grammy Awards, four GMA Dove Awards, and ASCAP, Billboard and NAACP Awards. In 2004, he became the only living Gospel artist – and just the third in history – to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Andrae Crouch was inducted into the Gospel Music Association's Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 1998.

A discography for Andrae Crouch includes the following:

Andrae Crouch and The Disciples

1969: Take the Message Everywhere (Light)
1971: Keep on Singin' (Light)
1972: Soulfully (Light)
1973: Live at Carnegie Hall (Light)
1975: Take Me Back (Light)
1976: This Is Another Day (Light)
1978: Live in London (Light)

Andrae Crouch (solo artist)

1973: Just Andrae (Light)
1979: I'll Be Thinking of You (Light)
1981: Don't Give Up (Warner Bros.)
1982: Finally (Light)
1984: No Time to Lose (Light)
1986: Autograph (Light)
1994: Mercy (Qwest)
1997: Pray (Qwest)
1998: Gift of Christmas (Qwest)
2006: Mighty Wind (Verity)
2011: The Journey (Riverphlo Entertainment)
2013: Live in Los Angeles

Andrae Crouch won seven Grammys:

1975: Best Soul Gospel Performance Take Me Back
1978: Best Contemporary Soul Gospel Album Live in London
1979: Best Contemporary Soul Gospel Album I'll Be Thinking of You
1980: Best Gospel Performance, Contemporary or Inspirational "The Lord's Prayer" (collaborative)
1981: Best Contemporary Soul Gospel Album Don't Give Up
1984: Best Soul Gospel Performance, Male "Always Remember"
1994: Best Pop/Contemporary Gospel Album Mercy

Andrae Crouch also won the following Dove Awards:

Soul/Black gospel album
- 1977 – This is another day(Light)
- 1978 – Live in London (Light)
Contemporary gospel album of the year
- 1985 – No Time To Lose (Light)
- 1998 – Pray (Qwest/Warner Bros.)
Traditional gospel album of the year
- 1993 – With all of my heart; Sandra Crouch and Friends (Sparrow)
Contemporary gospel recorded song of the year

1997 – "Take me back"; Tribute—The Songs of Andrae Crouch (songwriter) (Warner Alliance)

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Izola Curry (née Ware; June 14, 1916 – March 7, 2015) was a woman who attempted to assassinate civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. She stabbed King with a letter opener at a Harlem book signing on September 20, 1958, during the Harlem civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s. King was eventually assassinated April 4, 1968, in an unrelated incident. Curry was born near Adrian, Georgia. At age 20, she moved to New York City, where she found work as a housekeeper. Shortly after moving, she developed delusions about the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Curry was one of eight children born to sharecroppers in 1916 near Adrian, Georgia, a city about 100 miles northwest of Savannah. She left school in the seventh grade and later married a man named James Curry when she was 21. The couple separated about six months after their 1937 nuptials, and Izola moved to New York City, the beginning of an itinerant existence that would see her bounce from Georgia, Florida, St. Louis, and New York while in search of steady work as a housekeeper, short-order cook, or factory worker. According to court records, as well as law enforcement and psychiatric reports, Curry began suffering from delusions, paranoia, and illogical thinking for several years before she sought to kill King. This erratic state appears to have contributed to her difficulties in securing and maintaining employment.

King went on a tour to promote Strive Toward Freedom after it was published. During a book signing at a department store in Harlem, a well-dressed woman approached and asked him if he was Martin Luther King, Jr. When King replied in the affirmative, she said, "I've been looking for you for five years," then stabbed him in the chest with a steel letter opener.

New York City police officers Al Howard and Phil Romano were in a radio car near the end of their tour at 3:30 pm when they received a report of a disturbance in Blumstein’s Department store. They arrived to see King sitting in a chair with an ivory handled letter opener protruding from his chest. Howard was heard telling King, "Don’t sneeze, don’t even speak." Howard and Romano took King still in the chair down to an ambulance that took King to Harlem Hospital, which was already notifying chief of thoracic and vascular surgery John W. V. Cordice, Jr., who was in his office in Brooklyn, and trauma surgeon Emil Naclerio, who had been attending a wedding and arrived still in a tuxedo. They made incisions and inserted a rib spreader, making King’s aorta visible. Chief of Surgery Aubre de Lambert Maynard then entered and attempted to pull out the letter opener, but cut his glove on the blade; a surgical clamp was finally used to pull out the blade.

While still in the hospital, King said in a September 30 press release in which he reaffirmed his belief in "the redemptive power of nonviolence" and issued a hopeful statement about his attacker, "I felt no ill will toward Mrs. Izola Currey [sic] and know that thoughtful people will do all in their power to see that she gets the help she apparently needs if she is to become a free. On October 17, after hearing King's testimony, a grand jury indicted Curry for attempted murder.

Curry was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic by two psychiatrists who reported that she had an IQ of 70, “low average intelligence,” and was in a severe “state of insanity.” A Manhattan judge would later concur with the psychiatrists’ conclusion that Curry—who had been indicted for attempted murder—should be committed to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

Curry spent nearly 14 years at Matteawan before being transferred in March 1972 to the Manhattan Psychiatric Center on Ward’s Island in upper Manhattan. She spent about a year there before officials placed her in the Rosedale Queens home of a woman certified through the state’s “Family Care” program to provide residential care for those diagnosed with mental illnesses. After a fall resulting in a leg injury, Curry was placed in the Jamaica, Queens, New York nursing home. where she resided until her death. Curry died on March 7, 2015 of natural causes.

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Tony Gleaton (b. August 4, 1948, Detroit, Michigan - d. August 14, 2015, Palo Alto, California) was an African American photographer, scholar, and artist who is best known for his photographic images capturing and documenting the African influence in the American West and Central and South America. Gleaton, the youngest son of an elementary school teacher and police officer, was born into a black middle-class family on August 4, 1948 in Detroit, Michigan. His father, Leo, was a police officer; his mother, the former Geraldine Woodson, taught school. In 1959, his mother left his father and moved the family to California. Gleaton played football in high school and briefly at East Los Angeles Junior College before joining the United States Marine Corps in 1967. While on his first tour of duty in Vietnam, he became fascinated with the camera.

After serving in the Marine Corps until 1970, Gleaton returned to California and enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). While there, he took a photography class that revealed his talent for shooting photos. He left UCLA without getting a degree and studied for a semester at the Arts Center School of Design in Los Angeles before venturing to New York to pursue his aspirations of becoming a fashion photographer. Gleaton worked as a photographic assistant and performed other various jobs through the 1970s.

Dissatisfied with the fashion world, Gleaton left New York in 1980 and hitchhiked throughout the American West, photographing cowboys first in northeastern Nevada and then in Texas. He captured the lives of Native American ranch hands and black rodeo riders. His photographic ventures in Texas, Colorado, Nevada, Idaho, and Kansas formed the essence of his project titled Cowboys: Reconstructing an American Myth. This collection featured a series of portraits of African, Native, Mexican and European American cowboys.

Gleaton’s interest in the multicultural Southwest influenced his travels to Mexico. By 1981 he had begun traveling to and from Mexico, shooting photographs. In 1982 he moved to Mexico City, and from 1986 to 1992, he resided with the Tarahumara Indians in northern Mexico and then moved to Guerrero and Oaxaca. Here, Gleaton began what is now his most famous project, Tengo Casi 500 Años: Africa’s Legacy in Mexico, Central & South America. Gleaton photographed the present-day descendants of African slaves brought to the region by Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.

Africa’s Legacy gained international recognition. In 1993 the collection was placed on exhibit by the Smithsonian Museum and toured throughout Mexico and Cuba with the sponsorship of the Mexican National Council of Art. By 1996 Gleaton had expanded his project to include Central and South America, eventually traveling over fifty thousand miles with stops in sixteen countries between 1993 and 2002.

In 2002 Gleaton became a visiting professor of photography at Texas Tech University. That same year, he finished a Master’s in Art at Bard College. In 2004 Gleaton became a scholar in residence for the Texas Tech Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library in Lubbock, Texas. The collection houses the Tony Gleaton Archive.

A big man — he was well over 6 feet tall and weighed more than 300 pounds — Gleaton was known as a charmer, especially with his subjects and with students of photography. He was divorced three times before he married Lisa Ellerbee, a teacher, in 2005. She was his only immediate survivor. They lived in San Mateo, Calif.

Gleaton, who was light-skinned with green eyes, said he often had to explain to people that both his parents were black and that he was not biracial, and that the preconceptions people had of him found their way into his work.

Tony Gleaton died on August 14, 2015, in Palo Alto, California. His only immediate survivor was his wife, Lisa Gleaton.

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Hamama, Faten

Faten Hamama (Arabic: فاتن حمامة‎, Fātan Ḥamāmah), 27 May 1931 – 17 January 2015) was an Egyptian film and television actress and producer.

She made her screen debut in 1939, when she was only seven years old. Her earliest roles were minor, but her activity and gradual success helped to establish her as a distinguished Egyptian actress. Eventually, and after many successful performances, she was able to achieve stardom. Revered as an icon in Egyptian and Middle Eastern cinema, Hamama substantially helped in improving the cinema industry in Egypt and emphasized the importance of women in cinema and Egyptian society.

After a seven-year hiatus from acting, Hamama returned in 2000 in what was a much anticipated television mini-series, Wajh al-Qamar (وجه القمر, Face of the Moon). In 2000, she was selected as Star of the Century by the Egyptian Writers and Critics organization. In 2007, eight of the films she starred in were included in the top 100 films in the history of Egyptian cinema by the cinema committee of the Supreme Council of Culture in Cairo.

Faten Hamama was born in 1931 to a Muslim lower middle class family in Mansoura, Egypt (according to her birth certificate), but she claimed to have been born in the Abdeen quarter of Cairo. Her father, Ahmed Hamama, worked as a clerk in the Egyptian Ministry of Education and her mother was a housewife. She had an older brother, Muneer, a younger sister, Layla, and a younger brother, Mazhar. Her aspiration for acting arose at an early age. Hamama was influenced by Assia Dagher as a child. When she was six years old, her father took her to the theater to see an Assia Dagher film; when the audience clapped for Assia, Faten told her father she felt they were clapping for her.

When Faten won a children's beauty pageant in Egypt, her father sent her picture to the director Mohammed Karim who was looking for a young female child to play the role of a small girl with the famous actor and musician Mohamed Abdel Wahab in the film Yawm Said (يوم سعيد, Happy Day, 1939). After an audition, Abdel Wahab decided that Faten was the one he was looking for. After her role in the film, people called her "Egypt's own Shirley Temple". The director liked her acting and was impressed with her so much that he signed a contract with her father. Four years later, she was chosen by Kareem for another role with Abdel Wahab in the film Rossassa Fel Qalb (رصاصة في القلب,Bullet in the Heart, 1944) and in another film two years later, Dunya (دنيا, Universe, 1946). After her success, Hamama moved with her parents to Cairo and started her study in the High Institute of Acting in 1946.

Youssef Wahbi, an Egyptian actor and director, recognized the young actress's talent so he offered her a lead role in the 1946 film Malak al-Rahma (ملاك الرحمة, Angel of Mercy). The film attracted widespread media attention, and Hamama, who was only 15 at the time, became famous for her melodramatic role. In 1949, Hamama had roles in three films with Wahbi: Kursi Al-I'etraf (كرسي الاعتراف, Chair of Confession), Al-Yateematain (اليتيمتين, The Two Orphans), and Sït Al-Bayt (ست البيت, Lady of the House). All were successful films.

The 1950s were the beginning of the golden age of the Egyptian cinema industry and Hamama was a big part of it. In 1952 she starred in the film Lak Yawm Ya Zalem (لك يوم يا ظالم, Your Day will Come) which was nominated at the Cannes Film Festival for the Prix International award. She also played lead roles in Yousef Shaheen's Baba Ameen(بابا أمين, Ameen, my Father, 1950) and Sira' Fi Al-Wadi (صراع في الوادي, Struggle in the Valley, 1954) which was a strong nominee in the 1954 Cannes Film Festival for the Prix International award. Hamama is also known for playing the lead role in the first Egyptian mystery film Manzel Raqam 13 (منزل رقم 13, House Number 13). In 1963, she received an award for her role in the political film La Waqt Lel Hob (لا وقت للحب, No Time for Love). Hamama was also able to make it to Hollywood; in 1963 she had a role in the crime film, Cairo.

In 1947, Hamama married actor/director Ezzel Dine Zulficar while filming the Abu Zayd al-Hilali (أبو زيد الهلالي) film. They started a production company which produced the film Maw'ed Ma' Al-Hayat (موعد مع الحياة, Date with Life) in which she starred. This particular film earned her the title of the "lady of the Arabic screen". She divorced Zulficar in 1954. One year later, she married Egyptian film star Omar Sharif. Hamama continued to act in films directed by her first husband.

In 1954, while filming a Youssef Chahine film, Struggle in the Valley, Hamama refused to have the Egyptian actor Shukry Sarhan as a co-star, and Chahine offered Omar Sharif the role. Omar had just graduated from college then and was working for his father; Hamama accepted him as her co-star. Hamama had never agreed to act any scene involving a kiss in her career, but she shockingly agreed to do so in this film. The two fell in love, and Sharif converted to Islam and married her. This marriage started a new era of Hamama's career as the couple made many films together. Sharif and Hamama were the romantic leads of Ayyamna Al-Holwa (أيامنا الحلوة, Our Sweet Days), Ardh Al-Salam (أرض السلام, Land of Peace), La Anam (لا أنام, Sleepless), and Sayyidat Al-Qasr (سيدة القصر, The Lady of the Palace). Their last film together, before their divorce, was Nahr Al-Hob (نهر الحب, The River of Love) in 1960.

Hamama left Egypt from 1966 to 1971 due to the harassment by Egyptian Intelligence. She had been a supporter of the 1952 Revolution, but later became an opponent of the Free Officers and their oppressive regime. Consequently, she was forbidden to travel or participate in film festivals. She was only able to leave Egypt after many controversial disputes.

While Hamama was away, then President Gamal Abdel Nasser asked famous writers, journalists and friends to try to convince her to return to Egypt. He called her a "national treasure" and had even awarded her an honorary decoration in 1965. However, she would not return until 1971, after Nasser's death.

Hamama played roles conveying messages of democracy. She often criticized the laws in Egypt in her films. In the 1972 film Imbarotiriyat Meem (إمبراطورية ميم, The Empire of M), Hamama presented a pro-democratic point of view and received an award from the Soviet Union of Women in the Moscow International Festival. Her most significant political film was Oridu Hallan (أريد حلاً, I Want a Solution). In this film, she criticized laws governing marriage and divorce in Egypt. After the film, the Egyptian government abrogated a law that forbade wives from divorcing their husbands, therefore allowing khul'.

As Hamama became older, her acting roles declined and she made fewer films compared to earlier in her career, but nevertheless the films she was able to make tended to be successful. She made her first television appearances in her late career. She starred in the TV mini-series Dameer Ablah Hikmat (ضمير أبلة حكمت, Mrs. Hikmat's Conscience).

After 1993, her career came to a halt. It was not until 2000 that she returned in the successful TV mini-series Wajh ِِal-Qamar which was broadcast on 23 TV channels in the Middle East. In this mini-series, Hamama portrayed and criticized many problems in Egyptian and Middle Eastern society. Despite some criticisms, the mini-series received much praise and acclaim. Hamama was awarded the Egyptian Best TV Actor of the Year and the mini-series won the Best TV Series Award in the Egyptian Radio and Television Festival.

Before the 1950s, Hamama had leading roles in 30 films, in which she often played the role of a weak, empathetic, poor girl. After the 1950s, Hamama was in search of her real identity and was trying to establish herself as a distinct figure. During this period, her choice of material and roles was somewhat limited. However, film producers soon capitalized on her popularity with audiences in local and Middle Eastern markets and she began to play realistic, strong women, such as in Sira' Fi Al-Wadi (صراع في الوادي,Struggle in the Valley, 1954) where she portrayed a rich man's daughter who, contrary to stereotype, was a realistic woman who helped and supported the poor. In the 1952 film Miss Fatmah (الأستاذة فاطمة), Hamama starred as a law student who believed women were as important as men in society.

In Imbratoriyat Meem (امبراطورية ميم, The Empire of M), she played the role of a widow who takes care of her large family and suffers hardship. Her most influential film was Oridu Hallan (أريد حلا, I Want a Solution) which criticized the laws of marriage and divorce in Egypt. A law in Egypt that forbade khul' ( خلع ) – a divorce initiated by the wife.

Most critics agree that Hamama's most challenging role was in the 1959 film Dua'e Al-Karawan (دعاء الكروان, The Nightingale's Prayer), which was chosen as one of the best Egyptian film productions. It is based on the novel by the same name by the prominent Egyptian writer Taha Hussein. In this film, Hamama played the role of Amnah, a young woman who seeks revenge from her uncle for the honor killing of her sister. After this film, Hamama carefully picked her roles. In 1960, she starred in the film Nahr Hob (نهر حب, Love River) which was based on Leo Tolstoy's well known novel Anna Karenina and in 1961, she played the lead role in the film La Tutf'e al-Shams (لا تطفئ الشمس, Don't Turn Off the Sun) based on the novel by Ihsan Abdel Quddous.

Faten Hamama died on January 17, 2015, aged 83 due to health problems. Her son Tarek Sharif did not state the exact cause of death.

Hamama met director Ezzel Dine Zulficar, while filming Abu Zayd al-Hilali (أبو زيد الهلالى) in 1947, fell in love and wed. The marriage lasted for seven years. They divorced in 1954. The two remained friends, and Hamama continued to star in his films after the divorce. They had one child, a daughter, Nadia Zulficar. In 1954, Hamama chose Omar Sharif to co-star with her in a film. In this film, she uncharacteristically agreed to a romantic scene involving a kiss. During the filming, they fell in love. Sharif converted to Islam and married her. The couple co-starred in many films. However, after nearly two decades together, the couple divorced in 1974; they had one son, Tarek Sharif.

Hamama later married Dr Mohamed Abdel Wahab Mahmoud, an Egyptian physician. They resided in Cairo until her death on January 17, 2015 following a short illness.

Throughout Hamama's career, she received numerous accolades for best actress, and was nominated for the Cannes Film Festival's Prix International for her role in 1950's Your Day Will Come. She received her first award in 1951 for her role in I'm the Past. The country's Ministry of Guidance also awarded her the title of Best Actress in both 1955 and 1961. These were followed by many different awards for best actress from various national and international events. International ones included special awards for acting at the first Tehran International Film Festival in 1972 for her role in The Thin Thread, and in 1977 for her role in Mouths and Rabbits. In 1973, she received the Special Award at the Moscow International Film Festival for her role in Empire M. Other international accolades include the Best Actress awards at the Jakarta Film Festival in 1963 for her role in The Open Door, and at the Carthage Film Festival in 1988 for her role in Bitter Days, Nice Days.

Hamama was also a recipient of the Lebanese Order of Merit in 1984 for her role in The Night of Fatma's Arrest. She was later presented lifetime achievement awards, including one at the Montpellier Mediterranean Film Festival in 1993, and another at the Dubai International Film Festival in 2009. In 2001, the Egyptian Writers and Critics Organization chose her as "Star of the Century" at the Alexandria International Film Festival, honoring her lengthy career in Egyptian cinema.

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Maher Hathout (January 1, 1936 – January 3, 2015) was a leading American-Muslim community leader of Egyptian origin, and widely regarded as the Father of the American Muslim identity. Hathout helped to found the Muslim Public Affairs Council and spoke extensively against Islamic radicalism.

Born in Cairo, Egypt in 1936, Hathout eventually moved to Buffalo, New York, and then to Los Angeles. He immersed himself in volunteering at the Islamic Center of Southern California (ICSC) as Chairman and Spokesperson. One of the most progressive mosques in the country – the ICSC had a woman on its board of directors in 1952 – the Islamic Center became a vehicle for a vision of Islam in America that is rooted in what Hathout called the definition of home: "Home is not where my grandparents are buried, but where my grandchildren will be raised."

Hathout stressed throughout his life that being a faithful Muslim was entirely compatible with being a proud American, and that Islam is a religion of coexistence, reason and moderation.

He was also among the pioneers of interfaith engagement within the American Muslim community, helping found the Religious Coalition Against War in the Middle East with Reverend George Regas and Rabbi Leonard Beerman in 1991. Hathout was a charter member of the Pacific Council on International Policy, the western partner of the Council on Foreign Relations, and served on the Board of Directors of the Interfaith Alliance and Claremont Lincoln University.

Over the years, Hathout was invited repeatedly to Capitol Hill and the State Department to address a variety of topics, such as "Islam and U.S. Policy," "Islamic Democracy," "Emerging Trends in Islamic Movements," and "The Future of the Middle East." He was also the first Muslim invited to give the invocation prayer at the Democratic National Convention in 2000.

Hathout was the recipient of many awards, including the George Regas Courageous Peacemaker Award, the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California’s Lifetime Service Award, the South Coast Interfaith Council Award for his life-long commitment to interfaith work and the Los Angeles County John Allen Buggs Award for excellence in human relations. He died of cancer in Duarte, California on January 3, 2015.
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Lynn Huntlley, aka Mary Lynn Jones, (b. January 24, 1946, Petersburg, Virginia - d. August 30, 2015, Atlanta, Georgia) was a prominent civil rights lawyer. She was born on January 24, 1946, in Petersburg, Virginia. Her father, the Reverend Lawrence Jones, was active in the civil rights movement in the early 1960s, when he was associated with Fisk University in Nashville. He was dean of Howard University’s divinity school in Washington from 1975 to 1991 and died in 2009. Her mother, Mary Ellen, died in 2003.

Ms. Huntley attended Fisk University as an early entrant, received an A.B. in Sociology with honors from Barnard College, and J.D. degree with honors from Columbia University Law School, where she was a member of The Columbia Law Review. She worked as law clerk for a federal judge, Judge Constance Baker Motley; and as staff attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., where she focused on cases involving the abolition of the death penalty, prisoner rights and education. She served as general counsel to the New York City Commission on Human Rights and as section chief and deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice, where she directed a trial section to vindicate the rights of institutionalized persons, and exercised oversight of sections concerned with legislative affairs, employment, housing, federal regulatory and budgetary matters.

During her tenure at the Ford Foundation from l982-1994, where she advanced from program officer to director of Ford Foundation’s Rights and Social Justice Program, Ms. Huntley was responsible for grant making related to minority and women’s rights, refugee and migration issues, legal services for the poor, minorities and media, and coordination of field office activities related to the foregoing. In l995, Ms. Huntley joined the staff of the Southern Education Foundation as a program director, where she conceived and directed the Comparative Human Relations Initiative, an examination of race and inequality in Brazil, South Africa and the United States and strategies to reduce inequality. She is the author of several reports resultant from this effort, and served, with others, as editor of two related books, Tirando a Mascara (Removing the Mask, 2000) and Race and Inequality in South Africa, Brazil and the United States (2001). She retired from the Southern Education Foundation in 2010, having doubled the endowment and raised over $44 million from diverse donors.

Ms. Huntley has received many honors, including the Thurgood Marshall Award of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award from Tufts University, honorary doctorates from Cambridge College in Boston, Mass., and Allen University in Columbia, SC, and the Lucy Terry Prince Award of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. She also received the National Bar Association outstanding achievement award, the Unsung Heroine Award from the Atlanta Coalition of 100 Black Women, and was the Association of Black Foundation Executives’ James A. Joseph Lecturer in 2004. She served as a member of the Georgia Student Finance Commission, and on the Boards of the American Constitution Society, the Association of Black Foundation Executives (where she was counsel) Grantmakers for Education, CARE USA (where she was vice chair), the Center for Women Policy Studies, the Marguerite E. Casey Foundation, and the Interdenominational Theological Center. She was recently elected vice chair of the Board of Trustees of the Jesse Ball DuPont Fund in Jacksonville, Florida.

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Harold Johnson (August 9, 1928 – February 19, 2015) was a professional boxer. He held the World Light Heavyweight Championship from 1962 to 1963.

Johnson was born in Manayunk, Philadelphia. He started boxing while serving in the United States Navy and turned professional in 1946. He won his first twenty-four fights before losing a ten-round decision to Archie Moore in 1949. Moore would be Johnson's biggest career rival. Johnson rebounded with four straight victories, including a ten-round decision win against future Hall of Fame inductee Jimmy Bivins.

Johnson's father, Phil Johnson, was also a professional boxer. Phil and Harold Johnson became the first father/son combination to not only fight the same fighter, but lose to him as well. Both suffered third-round knockout defeats at the hands of future World Heavyweight Champion Jersey Joe Walcott in 1936 and 1950, respectively. Harold lost after suffering an injury to the intervertebral disc in the small of his back.

After five consecutive wins, Johnson resumed his rivalry with Archie Moore, fighting Moore three times in a row between September 1951 and January 1954. All three went the ten-round distance. Johnson lost the rematch, won the rubber match and lost the fourth bout.

In 1952, Johnson split two fights with Bob Satterfield, losing the first by decision and winning the second by knockout, and won a decision over heavyweight contender Nino Valdez. The following year, he defeated former World Heavyweight Champion Ezzard Charles by a split decision. Johnson would finally get a title shot eight years into his career in his fifth and final fight against Archie Moore in 1954. Moore was making the third defense of the World Light Heavyweight Championship. In an exciting fight, Johnson knocked Moore down in the 10th round and was ahead on the scorecards after 13 rounds. But Moore rallied, knocking Johnson down and stopping him in the 14th round.

Johnson outpointed Julio Mederos over ten rounds in 1954. The following year, they had a rematch in Philadelphia. Johnson collapsed after the second round and was carried from the ring on a stretcher. Tests later revealed that Johnson had been drugged with a barbiturate. As a result, the Governor of Pennsylvania suspended boxing in the state for 114 days and instructed the Pennsylvania Athletic Commission to launch a probe. Johnson said he started feeling ill in his dressing room after eating an orange that had been given to him by a stranger who said he was a long-time admirer. A chemical analysis of a piece of the orange showed no trace of a drug or barbiturate. The probe never did uncover who drugged Johnson or how the drug was administered. However, the commission ruled that Johnson knew he was not in condition to fight and should have reported that fact to commission officials on duty that night. He was suspended for six months and his purse was forfeited.

When the National Boxing Association (NBA) withdrew recognition of Archie Moore as World Light Heavyweight Champion for failure to defend, Johnson defeated Jesse Bowdry in 1961 by a ninth-round technical knockout to capture the vacant NBA title. In his first title defense, Johnson stopped Von Clay in two rounds. After defeating second-ranked heavyweight contender Eddie Machen by a ten-round decision in a non-title bout, Johnson successfully defended his title for a second time with a split decision victory over 4th-ranked light heavyweight contender Eddie Cotton.

Johnson gained universal recognition as World Light Heavyweight Champion when he defeated Doug Jones in 1962 by a decision in fifteen rounds. He successfully defended the undisputed title once, outpointing Gustav Scholz in Berlin, then lost it to Willie Pastrano by a fifteen-round split decision in 1963. Johnson would never fight for a title again and retired in 1971 with a record of 76-11 with 32 knockouts.

Johnson was inducted into the World Boxing Hall of Fame in 1992 and the Internationals Boxing Hall of Fame in 1993.

Johnson was named the 7th greatest light heavyweight of the 20th century by the Associated Press in 1999. Three years later, The Ring magazine ranked Johnson 7th on the list "The 20 Greatest Light Heavyweights of All-Time" and 80th on the list "The 80 Best Fighters of the Last 80 Years." Johnson died at the age of 86 on February 19, 2015.

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Jonathan "Johnny" Kemp (August 2, 1959 – April 16, 2015) was a Bahamian singer.

Kemp began singing in nightclubs in the Bahamas at 13. He moved to New York in 1979 with the band Kinky Fox. His self-titled debut album came out in 1986, and he scored a minor hit with Just Another Lover. True success came the following year, however, with the release of his Secrets of Flying album, which contained a pair of Top 40 hits on the US Billboard R&B chart, "Dancin' with Myself" and "Just Got Paid", the latter hitting #1.

"Just Got Paid" hit the Top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1988, and sold over a million singles in the United States. It went to top the Hot Dance Music/Club Play, and provided his only UK Singles Chart entry, peaking at #68 in August 1988. His only other Hot 100 entry was "Birthday Suit", a tune from the soundtrack to the movie, Sing which climbed to #36 in 1989.

Kemp appeared on the 2007 DVD release by Keith Sweat entitled Sweat Hotel Live. The DVD featured live performances by Sweat in a sort of reunion with other R&B/new jack swing era pioneers of the late 1980s, including Teddy Riley. Kemp appeared on the final track, an "all-star finale" rendition of "Just Got Paid", originally recorded at a February 2006 concert in Atlanta, Georgia. Incidentally, Sweat had initially passed on the instrumental track that would eventually become "Just Got Paid", when it was first offered to him in the mid-1980s. Kemp listened to it, added his own lyrics to the melody, and "Just Got Paid" was born.

Kemp was the featured performer (singing "Just Got Paid") at the NJS4E event in New York on September 8, 2007. As the name implied, the show celebrated and commemorated 20 years of new jack swing, and took place at Ashford & Simpson's Sugar Bar.

Kemp was married and the father of two sons.

According to news reports, Johnny Kemp died during the week of April 16, 2015. On Thursday morning, April 16, 2015, his body was found floating in the water of Montego Bay, Jamaica, according to Jamaica police. The cause or exact date of death has not yet been determined. He was 55 years old.

While he was scheduled to be on the Tom Joyner Foundation-hosted annual Fantastic Voyage cruise as a performer when his body was found, reports state he did not board the ship.

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Jerome Kersey (June 26, 1962 – February 18, 2015) was an American professional basketball player in the National Basketball Association (NBA). He played for the Portland Trail Blazers (1984–1995), Golden State Warriors (1995–96), Los Angeles Lakers (1996–97), Seattle SuperSonics (1997–98), San Antonio Spurs (1998–2000), and Milwaukee Bucks (2000–01).

The Trail Blazers selected Kersey in the second round of the 1984 NBA draft from Longwood University (then Longwood College) in Farmville, Virginia. He was a member of the champion Spurs during their 1999 NBA Finals victory over the New York Knicks. Following his playing career, Kersey worked with his former Portland teammate and then-head coach of the Milwaukee Bucks Terry Porter as an assistant in 2005. Kersey died from a pulmonary embolism caused by a blood clot at his home in Tualatin, Oregon, on February 18, 2015.

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Benjamin Earl King (September 28, 1938 – April 30, 2015), known as Ben E. King, was an American soul and R&B singer. He was perhaps best known as the singer and co-composer of "Stand by Me" -- a US Top 10 hit, both in 1961 and later in 1986 (when it was used as the theme to the film of the same name), a number one hit in the United Kingdom in 1987, and no. 25 on the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA's list of Songs of the Century -- and as one of the principal lead singers of the R&B vocal group the Drifters.

King was born Benjamin Earl Nelson on September 28, 1938, in Henderson, North Carolina, and moved to Harlem, New York, at the age of nine in 1947. King began singing in church choirs, and in high school formed the Four B’s, a doo-wop group that occasionally performed at the Apollo.

In 1958, King (still using his birth name) joined a doo-wop group called the Five Crowns. Later that year, the Drifters' manager George Treadwell fired the members of the original Drifters, and replaced them with the members of the Five Crowns. King had a string of R&B hits with the group on Atlantic Records. He co-wrote and sang lead on the first Atlantic hit by the new version of the Drifters, "There Goes My Baby" (1959). He also sang lead on a succession of hits by the team of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, including "Save the Last Dance for Me", "This Magic Moment", and "I Count the Tears". King only recorded thirteen songs with the Drifters—two backing other lead singers and eleven as lead vocal — including a non-single called "Temptation" (later redone by Drifters vocalist Johnny Moore). The last of the King-led Drifters singles to be released was "Sometimes I Wonder", which was recorded May 19, 1960, but not issued until June 1962.

Due to contract disputes with Treadwell in which King and his manager, Lover Patterson, demanded greater compensation, King rarely performed with the Drifters on tour or on television. On television, fellow Drifters member Charlie Thomas usually lip-synched the songs that King had recorded with the Drifters.

In May 1960, King left the Drifters, assuming the stage name Ben E. King in preparation for a solo career. Remaining with Atlantic Records on its Atco imprint, King scored his first solo hit with the ballad "Spanish Harlem" (1961). His next single, "Stand by Me", written with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, ultimately would be voted as one of the Songs of the Century by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). King cited singers Brook Benton, Roy Hamilton, and Sam Cooke as influences for his vocals. "Stand by Me", "There Goes My Baby", and "Spanish Harlem" were named as three of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll; and each of those records plus "Save The Last Dance For Me" has earned a Grammy Hall of Fame Award.

King's records continued to place well on the Billboard Hot 100 chart until 1965. British pop bands began to dominate the pop music scene, but King still continued to make R&B hits, including "What is Soul?" (1966), "Tears, Tears, Tears" (1967), and "Supernatural Thing" (1975). A 1986 re-issue of "Stand by Me" followed the song's use as the theme song to the movie Stand By Me and re-entered the Billboard Top Ten after a 25-year absence.

As a Drifter and as a solo artist, King achieved five number one hits: "There Goes My Baby", "Save The Last Dance For Me", "Stand By Me", "Supernatural Thing", and the 1986 re-issue of "Stand By Me". He also earned 12 Top 10 hits and 26 Top 40 hits from 1959 to 1986. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a Drifter. He was also nominated as a solo artist.

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B.B. King, byname of Riley B. King (b. September 16, 1925, Itta Bena, near Indianola, Mississippi — d. May 14, 2015, Las Vegas, Nevada), American guitarist and singer who was a principal figure in the development of the blues and from whose style leading popular musicians drew inspiration.

King was reared in the Mississippi delta, and gospel music in church was the earliest influence on his singing. To his own impassioned vocal calls, King played lyrical single-string guitar responses with a distinctive vibrato; his guitar style was influenced by T-Bone Walker, by delta blues players (including his cousin Bukka White), and by such jazz guitarists as Django Reinhardt and Charlie Christian. He worked for a time as a disk jockey in Memphis, Tennessee (notably at station WDIA), where he acquired the name B.B. (for Blues Boy) King. In 1951 he made a hit record of “Three O’Clock Blues,” which led to virtually continuous tours of clubs and theaters throughout the country. He often played 300 or more one-night stands a year with his 13-piece band. A long succession of hits, including “Every Day I Have the Blues,” “Sweet Sixteen,” and “The Thrill Is Gone,” enhanced his popularity. By the late 1960s rock guitarists acknowledged his influence and they introduced King and his guitar, Lucille, to a broader public, who until then had heard blues chiefly in derivative versions.

King’s relentless touring strengthened his claim to the title of undisputed king of the blues, and he was a regular fixture on the Billboard charts through the mid-1980s. His strongest studio albums of this era were those that most closely tried to emulate the live experience, and he found commercial success through a series of all-star collaborations. On Deuces Wild (1997), King enlisted such artists as Van Morrison, Bonnie Raitt, and Eric Clapton to create a fusion of blues, pop, and country that dominated the blues charts for almost two years. Clapton and King collaborated on the more straightforward blues album Riding with the King (2000), which featured a collection of standards from King’s catalog. He recaptured the pop magic of Deuces Wild with 80 (2005), a celebration of his 80th birthday that featured Sheryl Crow, John Mayer, and a standout performance by Elton John. King returned to his roots with One Kind Favor (2008), a collection of songs from the 1940s and ’50s including blues classics by the likes of John Lee Hooker and Lonnie Johnson. Joining King in the simple four-part arrangements on the T-Bone Burnett produced album were stalwart New Orleans pianist Dr. John, ace session drummer Jim Keltner, and stand-up bassist Nathan East. The album earned King his 15th Grammy Award.

In 2008 the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center opened in Indianola, with exhibits dedicated to King’s music, his influences, and the history of the delta region. King’s autobiography, Blues All Around Me, written with David Ritz, was published in 1996. Among the many awards and honors bestowed upon King in his lifetime was induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.

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Earl Lloyd, in full Earl Francis Lloyd (b. April 3, 1928, Alexandria, Virginia — d. February 26, 2015, Crossville, Tennessee), was a basketball player who was the first African American to play in the National Basketball Association (NBA).

In the spring of 1950 Lloyd, who played collegiate basketball at West Virginia State College, was the second black player to be drafted by an NBA team. Chuck Cooper had been chosen by the Boston Celtics a few picks before Lloyd’s selection by the Washington Capitols. Nate ("Sweetwater") Clifton, however, was the first African American to sign an NBA contract, joining the New York Knicks that summer. The schedule resulted in Lloyd being the first black player to take the court in an NBA game, on October 31, 1950. He scored six points in that first game.

Lloyd enjoyed a long career in the NBA and continued his pioneering role as a coach. After a brief stint in the army, he returned to the NBA, where he was a key player for the Syracuse Nationals (1952–58), helping the team win the championship in 1955. He finished his playing career with the Detroit Pistons (1958–60). He later rejoined the Pistons as the first African American assistant coach (1968–70) in the league and the second African American head coach (1971–72). He also worked as a scout for the Pistons. In 2003 he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

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Moses Malone, in full Moses Eugene Malone (b. March 23, 1955, Petersburg, Virginia — d. September 13, 2015, Norfolk, Virginia), was an American professional basketball player, who was the dominating center and premier offensive rebounder in the National Basketball Association (NBA) during the 1980s. He led the Philadelphia 76ers to a championship in 1983.

Malone, who led Petersburg High School to 50 consecutive victories and two state championships, was one of the most sought-after college basketball prospects in history. He chose to bypass college, however, and sign with the Utah Stars of the American Basketball Association (ABA) in 1974, thereby becoming the first player to enter professional basketball directly from high school. When the ABA dissolved in 1976, he was acquired by the NBA’s Buffalo Braves, who traded him to the Houston Rockets two games into the 1976–77 season.

Quick and tenacious, Malone, who stood 6 ft 10 in (2.08 m), was noted for his all-around play. An outstanding offensive rebounder with an accurate shooting eye from the floor and free-throw line, he was named the league’s Most Valuable Player (MVP) in 1979 and 1982. He signed with the Philadelphia 76ers in 1982, teaming with Julius Erving and the following year winning the NBA championship. Malone was named MVP of the championship series and of the league in 1983. For six of the seven seasons from 1978 to 1985, he led the NBA in rebounds.

Malone was a member of eight NBA teams, including the Washington Bullets and the Atlanta Hawks. During his 18 years in the league, he set records for most free throws made (8,531; since broken by Karl Malone) and most offensive rebounds (6,731). He retired in 1994, having scored 27,409 points and collected 16,212 rebounds, which ranked him among the NBA’s all-time top 10 in both categories. In 1997 the NBA named him one of the 50 greatest players in NBA history, and in 2001 he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

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Dori J. Maynard (May 4, 1958 – February 24, 2015) was the president of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education in Oakland, California, the oldest organization dedicated to helping the nation's news media accurately and fairly portray all segments of our society. The Institute has trained thousands of journalists of color. She was the co-author of "Letters to My Children," a compilation of nationally syndicated columns by her late father Robert C. Maynard, with introductory essays by Dori. She served on the board of the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation, as well as the Board of Visitors for the John S. Knight Fellowships.

As a reporter, she worked for the Bakersfield Californian, and The Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Massachusetts, and the Detroit Free Press. In 1993 she and her father became the first father-daughter duo ever to be appointed Nieman scholars at Harvard University; Bob Maynard won this fellowship in 1966.

She received the "Fellow of Society" award from the Society of Professional Journalists at the national convention in Seattle, Washington on October 6, 2001 and was voted one of the "10 Most Influential African Americans in the Bay Area" in 2004. In 2008 she received the Asian American Journalists Association’s Leadership in Diversity Award.

Maynard graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont with a bachelor of arts in American History.

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Anne Moody (aka Essie Mae Moody) (b. September 15, 1940, near Centerville, Mississippi - d. February 5, 2015, Gloster, Mississippi), was an American civil rights activist and writer whose autobiographical account of her personal and political struggles against racism in the South became a classic.

Moody, the daughter of poor African American sharecroppers, received her early education in the segregated school system of the South. In 1959, she was awarded a basketball scholarship and attended Natchez Junior College, later transferring to Tougaloo (Mississippi) College. While a student at Tougaloo, Moody became active in the Civil Rights Movement. She helped organize the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and in 1963 participated in a widely publicized sit-in demonstration at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter.

After graduating from Tougaloo in 1964, Moody worked as the civil rights project coordinator for Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, until 1965. Eventually, she became disenchanted with certain aspects of the Civil Rights Movement and moved to New York City, where she began to write her autobiography, Coming of Age in Mississippi. Published in 1968, the book provides an eloquent and poignant account of Moody's impoverished childhood, her struggle against the pervasive racism of the Deep South, and her work as a civil rights activist. It received high praise as both a historical and a personal document and is considered of major importance in the study of the Civil Rights Movement. Her only other published work is Mr. Death: Four Stories (1975).

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Everett Carlton Parker (b. January 17, 1913, Chicago, Illinois – September 17, 2015, White Plains, New York) was a media activist and reverend.

Born in Chicago, Illinois, Parker attended the University of Chicago. Upon graduation in 1935, he spent a year with the Works Progress Administration, then another with the radio station WJBW. After returning to his hometown for a job as an advertiser, Parker enrolled at the Chicago Theological Seminary, earning a doctorate in 1943. He re-entered the media world with a stint at NBC in New York, then taught a Yale Divinity School from 1945 to 1957. He was the Director of the Office of Communication of the United Church of Christ from 1954 to 1983.

He filed a successful petition to deny licensing renewal of television station WLBT in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960s. The station had a poor record with regards to civil rights for African Americans.

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Augustus Alexander "Gus" Savage (October 30, 1925 – October 31, 2015) was a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives from Illinois.

Savage was born in Detroit, Michigan, and graduated from Roosevelt University in Chicago. He served in the United States Army from 1943 to 1946 and then worked as a journalist from 1954 to 1979, owning a chain of weekly community newspapers in the Chicago area.

Savage founded Citizen Newspapers, which became the largest black-owned chain of weekly community newspapers in the Midwest. He sold the chain in 1980 and was elected that year to represent Illinois’s Second Congressional District.

Savage was unsuccessful in his candidacy for the House of Representatives in 1968 and 1970, losing the Democratic primary both times, but won election to the House in 1980, representing the 2nd District on Chicago's South Side for 6 terms, from January 1981 to January 1993.

Savage was criticized for racist and anti-Semitic statements against both white and Jewish people. Savage once gave a speech in which he listed the names of all of the Jewish donors living outside of the Chicago area who donated money to his opponent. This led to a backlash, to which Savage responded that only white people could be racist.

In 1989, Savage was accused of trying to force himself on a female Peace Corps worker in Zaire. He denied the allegations and blamed them on the "racist press." The House Ethics Committee decided that the events did indeed occur, but it did not take disciplinary action only because Savage wrote a letter of apology.

Savage had long been controversial even in his own district, never winning a primary election with more than 52% of the vote, and usually facing multiple challengers. For the 1992 election, his district had been extended further into Chicago's south suburbs by redistricting and Savage faced Mel Reynolds, who had challenged him in the 1988 and 1990 primaries. Savage claimed that "racist Jews" were donating to Reynolds, while Reynolds claimed that Savage was involved in a drive-by shooting that injured him. Although Savage accused Reynolds of staging the shooting, he lost the 1992 election to Reynolds by a margin of 63%-37%.

In one of his final acts as chairman of the House Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds, excavation and construction at the site of the African Burial Ground in New York City was temporarily halted in 1992, pending further evaluation by the General Services Administration, after Savage was able to leverage his reputation as a national political figure to bring attention to the more controversial aspects of the project.

Savage died on October 31, 2015, one day after his 90th birthday.

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Stuart Orlando Scott (July 19, 1965 – January 4, 2015) was an American sportscaster and anchor on ESPN, most notably on the network's SportsCenter. Well known for his hip-hop style and use of catchphrases, Scott was also a regular for the network in its National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Football League (NFL) coverage.

Scott grew up in North Carolina, and graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He began his career with various local television stations before joining ESPN in 1993. Although there were already accomplished African-American sportscasters, his blending of hip hop with sportscasting was unique for television. By 2008, he was a staple in ESPN's programming, and also began on ABC as lead host for their coverage of the NBA.

In 2007, Scott had an appendectomy and learned that his appendix was cancerous. After going into remission, he was again diagnosed with cancer in 2011 and 2013. Scott was honored at the ESPY Awards in 2014 with the Jimmy V Award for his fight against cancer, shortly before his death in 2015 at the age of 49.

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Jacob (Jackie) Sello Selebi was born on March 7, 1950 in Johannesburg. Selebi was the African National Congress (ANC) representative to the Soviet Union's World Federation of Democratic Youth in Budapest, Hungary, from 1983 to 1987. In 1987, he was elected as leader of the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) while in exile in Zambia. In the same year, he was appointed to the National Executive Committee of the ANC.

In 1991, Selebi was responsible for the repatriation of ANC exiles back to South Africa. After returning from exile, Selebi was one of the ANC’s acclaimed civil servants.

In 1993, he was appointed the head of the ANC’s Department of Welfare. After South Africa’s first democratic elections, in 1994, Selebi became an ANC Member of Parliament. Shortly thereafter, he was appointed South Africa’s Ambassador to the United Nations (UN) in Geneva, a post that saw him chair two key UN sessions, the 54th session of the Human Rights Commission and the Oslo Diplomatic Conference on a Convention Banning Anti-Personnel Landmines. From 1995 to 1998, Selebi served as the South African Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the United Nations.

In 1998, Selebi was appointed Director-General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Pretoria, a post he held until 1999. He had a distinguished career as a diplomat. In addition, in 1998, Selebi received a Human Rights Award from the International Service for Human Rights.

Former president Thabo Mbeki appointed him as the National Commissioner of the South African Police Service on January 1, 2000 as successor to the then National Police Commissioner, George Fivaz, whose term of office expired at the end of January 2000.

Selebi was elected Vice - President of Interpol (African region) in 2002, as post he held until 2004 and was elected INTERPOL President from 2004 and served until January 12, 2008.

On September 10, 2007, the National Prosecuting Authority issued a warrant of arrest for Selebi for corruption, fraud, racketeering and defeating the ends of justice.

In 2007, Selebi was strongly criticized for responding to concerns within the country over South Africa's rising crime rate with the comment "What's all the fuss about crime?" In March of the same year, Selebi was also criticized for his suggestion to legalize prostitution and public drinking for the duration of the 2010 Soccer World Cup to be hosted in South Africa. Opposition political parties and Doctors for Life International (a non-governmental organisation) expressed dismay at Selebi's recommendation and called on Parliament not to legalize prostitution or public drinking.

Following this, on January 12, 2008, then President Mbeki effectively suspended Selebi via an "extended leave of absence," and appointed Timothy Charles Williams as acting National Commissioner of Police. In January 2008, Selebi was put on extended leave as National Police Commissioner, and resigned as President of Interpol, after he was charged with corruption in South Africa.

After several postponements, Selebi’s trial began in earnest on April 8, 2010; nearly two years after the charges were first filed.

Selebi admitted to a friendship with convicted drug smuggler, Glenn Agliotti, who was a suspect in the murder of mining magnate, Brett Kebble, and was involved in a large drug deal and organized crime. Despite being head of police at the time, Selebi claimed that he was not aware that his friend was involved with crime.

During the trial, Agliotti told the court that he had paid Selebi over R1.2 million in bribes since 2000. He maintained that he had first met Selebi in 1990, when he (Selebi) asked for money to pay for medical bills. Agliotti further testified that he and Selebi would go shopping together and all Selebi’s purchases would be charged to Agliotti's account.

Selebi was found guilty of corruption on July 2, 2010, but not guilty of further charges of perverting the course of justice. He was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment on August 3, 2010. On December 2, 2011, the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) unanimously overturned his appeal against his sentence, and ordered that he begin his 15-year jail sentence immediately. Judge Joffe found that Selebi had shown "complete contempt for the truth", including falsely accusing a witness of lying during the trial. The Judge added that Selebi had a low moral fibre and could not be relied upon.

Selebi collapsed at his Waterkloof home while watching the ruling on television. He began his fifteen-year prison term the following day.

An 11-member medical parole advisory board met on June 20, 2012 and recommended the release of six offenders, including Selebi, who needed dialysis for kidney failure. Correctional Services Minister Sbu Ndebele made the announcement at a press conference in Pretoria. "Six offenders were recommended for medical parole. Of these, two of the offenders were respectively released on the 9th and 12 of July 2012," said Ndebele. Selebi was released on medical parole having served just 219 days of his fifteen-year sentence. He remained at home in Waterkloof where he received dialysis for his kidney illness until his death.

Jacob Sello (Jackie) Selebi died on January 23, 2015 at the age of 64.

Louis Stokes (February 23, 1925 – August 18, 2015) was an attorney and politician from Cleveland, Ohio. He served 15 terms in the United States House of Representatives  – representing the east side of Cleveland – and was the first African American congressman elected in the state of Ohio.

Born in Cleveland, Stokes and his brother Carl B. Stokes lived in one of the first federally funded housing projects, the Outhwaite Homes. Louis attended Central High School. Stokes served in the United States Army from 1943 to 1946. After attending Western Reserve University and Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, Stokes began practicing law in Cleveland in 1953.

Stokes argued the seminal "stop and frisk" case of Terry v. Ohio before the United States Supreme Court in 1968. Later, in 1968, he was elected to the House, representing the 21st District of Ohio on Cleveland's East Side. He shifted to the newly created 11th District, covering much of the same area following a 1992 redistricting. Stokes served 30 years in total, retiring in 1999.

Stokes' tenure in the House of Representatives included service on the House Appropriations Committee, where he was influential in bringing revenue to Cleveland. He was particularly interested in veterans' issues and secured funds for health-care facilities for veterans in Cleveland. In the 1970s, Stokes served as Chairman of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, charged with investigating the murders of President John F. Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. Stokes also served on the House committee that investigated the Iran-Contra Affair.

Stokes' brother, Carl B. Stokes, was the first African American mayor of a large American city. His daughter, Angela Stokes, became a Cleveland Municipal Court judge while another, Lori Stokes, became a journalist with WABC-TV New York. His son, Chuck Stokes, also became a journalist with WXYZ-TV in Detroit. Funk and soul musician Rick James was a cousin.

Stokes and his wife, Jay, have seven grandchildren. He is also a Prince Hall Freemason, and a member of the Cleveland Alumni chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity.

Stokes retired in 2012 as Senior Counsel in the law firm of Squire, Sanders & Dempsey, with offices in Cleveland and Washington.

Stokes died on August 18, 2015 at his home in Cleveland from lung and brain cancer at the age of 90.

The Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority, located in Cleveland, Ohio, opened the Louis Stokes Museum on September 13, 2007. This Museum houses Stokes memorabilia, video interviews, misc. video footage, awards and a written history about Stokes and his rise to prominence. The museum is located at Outhwaite Homes, 4302 Quincy Avenue.

From 2006 to 2008, the Western Reserve Historical Society opened an exhibition on the lives of Congressman Stokes and his brother titled "Carl and Louis Stokes: From the Projects to Politics". The exhibit uses photographs, manuscript collections, and personal items to showcase Louis Stokes' rise from the Outhwaite homes, his legal career, and his Congressional service.

The former Congressman was inducted into the Karamu House Hall of Fame in 2007 for his contributions to the continued legacy of Cleveland's African American settlement house and theatre.

Many buildings throughout the country have been named in Stokes honor including: Howard University's medical library, the Cleveland Public Library's main building expansion, GCRTA's Windermere station Louis Stokes Station at Windemere, and the greater Cleveland area Veteran's hospital was renamed the Louis Stokes Cleveland Department of Veteran Affairs Medical Center.

Clark Terry (b. December 14, 1920, St. Louis, Missouri - d. February 21, 2015, Pine Bluff, Arkansas) was a jazz musician who played trumpet and flugelhorn with a rare wit and a sense of melody and harmony that bridged the swing and bop eras. Terry, who was one of the most expressive of modern jazz trumpeters, was also noted for his humorous singing. He played trumpet (1942-1945) in the All-Star Fantasy Swing Band at Great Lakes Naval Training Station. After World War II, Terry was featured in St. Louis with the George Hudson band before he toured (1948-51) with Count Basie's popular band. While Terry performed in Duke Ellington's band (1951-59), his breadth of inflections and sound colors widened, most notably when he played the role of Puck in Ellington's Shakespearean suite Such Sweet Thunder. As the first African American musician to play (1960-72) in the studio band on NBC-TV's The Tonight Show. Terry became popular by inventing slurred, garbled nonsense vocals, and his 1964 recording "Mumbles" was especially well known. In addition, he led a quintet with trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, played in Gerry Mulligan's big band, and toured with Thelonious Monk's band. Though Terry mostly led small combos, he took (from 1978 to 1981) his own Big Bad Band on around-the-world United States State Departmennt tours. He recorded prolifically throughout his career and appeared on 905 albums as a leader or a sideman. The National Endowment for the Arts designated him a jazz master in 1991, and he received a lifetime achievement Grammy Award in 2010. Terry's autobiography, Clark, was published in 2011. Though he lost both legs owing to diabetes, he remained an effective teacher, and the 2014 documentary film Keep On Keepin' On explored Terry's mentoring of a student.

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Allen Toussaint, a record producer known for his New Orleans sound, died in Madrid, Spain (November 10, 2015).

Allen Toussaint (b. January 14, 1938, Gert Town, Louisiana – d. November 10, 2015, Madrid, Spain) was an American musician, songwriter, arranger and record producer, who was an influential figuge in New Orleans R&B from the 1950s to the end of the century described as "one of popular music's great backroom figures". Many other musicians recorded Toussaint's compositions, including "Java", "Mother-in-Law", "I Like It Like That", "Fortune Teller", "Ride Your Pony", "Get Out of My Life, Woman", "Working in the Coal Mine", "Everything I Do Gonna be Funky", "Here Come the Girls", "Yes We Can Can", "Play Something Sweet", and "Southern Nights". As a producer, his credits included Dr. John's hit "Right Place, Wrong Time", and Labelle's "Lady Marmalade".

In 1998 Toussaint was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and in 2009 into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame. On May 9, 2011, Allen Toussaint was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame. In 2013, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama.

The Americas*

Canada

Jean Alfred (March 10, 1940–July 20, 2015) was a politician in Quebec, Canada. He was a member of the National Assembly of Quebec  as a member of the Parti Quebecois from 1976 to 1981.

Alfred was born in Ouanaminthe, Haiti,to Oracius Alfred and Prunelie Occean. He completed his college studies and some university courses at Port-au-Prince before moving to Ottawa where he obtained a degree in philosophy from the University of Ottawa. He also received a master's degree in psycho-pedagogy as well as a doctorate in education.

Prior to his entry into politics, he taught for several years in Haiti and in the Outaouais region. He taught again after his political career and was a school board commissioner for the Commission Scolaire des Draveurs.

In 1975, he was elected as a councillor for the city of Gatineau and later entered provincial politics where he was elected in Papineau as a Parti Québécois candidate, becoming the first Black person to be elected to the National Assembly o Quebec. He served a full term as a PQ and Independent member but was defeated in the newly formed riding of Chapleau which portions were split from Gatineau and Papineau. He was a candidate again in 1989, but lost to the Liberal, John Kehoe. He made a brief attempt at federal politics but failed to become a Bloc Quebecois prior to the 1997 elections.

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Leon Bibb (February 7, 1922 – October 23, 2015) was an American folk singer and actor who grew up in Kentucky, studied voice in New York, and worked on Broadway. His career began when he became a featured soloist of the Louisville Municipal College glee club as a student. He lived in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, after 1969.

Bibb was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and was one of the performers at the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959. He also had his own NBC television talk show. During the late-1950s and early-1960s, Bibb was one of a number of American entertainers, such as his good friend Paul Robeson, who were blacklisted for alleged ties to left-wing groups and causes.

Bibb became involved in the civil rights movement early on, taking part in voter-registration drives in the South and performing at the 1963 March on Washington. Bibb traveled to Mississippi to join Dick Gregory and others in the fight against racial segregation in the United States. In 1965, he performed in front of the statehouse in Montgomery with Joan Baez, Oscar Brand and Harry Belafonte, whom he had known since their acting days at the American Negro Theater in Harlem.

In addition to his civil rights activism, Bibb continued to perform, and around 1963–64 he was featured singing on the national TV show, Hootenanny, on The Ed Sullivan Show and performed with Bill Cosby on tours. Bibb also provided the soundtrack to Luis Bunuel's 1960 film The Young One. His a cappella vocals blend his classical, spiritual and blues influences.

While on tour with the revue “Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris,” Bibb became enchanted with Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and moved there in the early 1970s. For the next 40 years he performed frequently in Canada and the United States. In 2009, Bibb was made a Member of the Order of British Columbia. At the time of receiving this honor, at the age of 87, Bibb was still an active performer.

Leon Bibb died on October 23, 2015. His two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter Dorie and his son, Eric, a singer and musician, he was survived by his partner, Christine Anton; another daughter, Amy Bibb-Ford; nine grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. He was the father of the Helsinki, Finland-based acoustic singer/songwriter Eric Bibb, and grandfather of Swedish dancer and performer Rennie Mirro.

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Africa

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Chenjerai Hove (b. February 9, 1956 – d. July 12, 2015), was a Zimbabwean poet, novelist and essayist who wrote in both English and Shona.

Chenjerai Hove was born on February 9, 1956, in Mazvihwa, Rhodesia. His father was a local chief with many wives and dozens of children. The younger Mr. Hove attended Roman Catholic schools run by the Marist brothers and, after graduating from a teacher training college, taught literature in rural high schools. He studied for degrees in language and literature at the University of Zimbabwe and then, in the 1980s, was a literary editor at Mambo Press and Zimbabwe Publishing House.

“Up in Arms” (1982), his first book of poetry, depicted in taut, lyrical verse the emotional devastation wrought by the independence struggle. “These poems ring with the self-evident truth of one who had suffered and survived, one who has been there,” the Zimbabwean novelist Charles Mungoshi wrote in his introduction to the book.

“Red Hills of Home,” published in 1985, reflected Mr. Hove’s inner conflict over the brutality he witnessed while teaching in the countryside. In his 1998 collection, “Rainbows in the Dust,” he lamented the broken promises of the independence movement.

He turned to prose fiction in the mid-1980s, writing, in Shona, about the plight of Zimbabwean women in the novel “Masimba Avanhu?” (“Is This the People’s Power?”), published in 1986. He followed up on the success of “Bones” with “Shadows” (1991), a harrowing tale of two lovers coping with poverty and the violence of the bush war. In the fable-like “Ancestors,” he told the story of a young boy, growing up on the eve of independence, who is haunted in his dreams by ancestral female voices.

Mr. Hove also published two collections of political essays, “Shebeen Tales: Messages From Harare” (1994) and “Palaver Finish” (2002). Speaking last year on the BBC radio program “Focus on Africa,” he said that it was his responsibility “as a citizen, as an African, as a Zimbabwean” to take a critical look at his own country — “to look at our lives and at whether our leaders are enhancing our dignity or taking it away.”

Mr. Hove was a founder and board member of the Zimbabwe Human Rights Association, and in 1984 he became the first president of the Zimbabwe Writers Union, a post he held until 1992. In addition to his wife, he is survived by six children and many siblings.

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Mathieu Kérékou (September 2, 1933 – October 14, 2015) was a Beninese politician who was President of Benin from 1972 to 1991 and again from 1996 to 2006. After seizing power in a military coup, he ruled the country for 17 years, for most of that time under an officially Marxist-Leninist ideology, before he was stripped of his powers by the National Conference of 1990. He was defeated in the 1991 presidential election, but was returned to the presidency in the 1996 election and controversially re-elected in 2001.

Kérékou was born in 1933 in Kouarfa. in north-west French Dahomey.  After having studied at military schools in modern-day Mali and Senegal, Kérékou served in the military. Following independence, from 1961 to 1963 he was an aide-de-camp to Dahomeyan President Hubert Maga, following Maurice Kouandete's seizure of power in December 1967, Kérékou, who was his cousin, was made chairman of the Military Revolutionary Council. After Kérékou attended French military schools from 1968 to 1970, Maga made him a major, deputy chief of staff, and commander of the Ouidah paratroop unit.

Kerekou seized power in Dahomey in a military coup on October 26, 1972, ending a system of government in which three members of a presidential council were to rotate power (earlier in the year MagKérékou a had handed over power to Justin Ahomadegbe).

During his first two years in power, Kérékou expressed only nationalism and said that the country's revolution would not "burden itself by copying foreign ideology ... We do not want communism or capitalism or socialism. We have our own Dahomean social and cultural system." On November 30, 1974, however, he announced the adoption of Marxism-Leninism by the state. The country was renamed from the Republic of Dahomey to the People's Republic of Benin a year later; the banks and petroleum industry were nationalized. The People's Revolutionary Party of Benin (Parti de la révolution populaire du Bénin, PRPB) was established as the sole ruling party. In 1980, Kérékou was elected president by the Revolutionary National Assembly; he retired from the army in 1987.

It has been suggested that Kérékou's move to Marxism-Leninism was motivated mainly by pragmatic considerations, and that Kérékou himself was not actually a leftist radical; the new ideology offered a means of legitimization, a way of distinguishing the new regime from those that had preceded it, and was based on broader unifying principles than the politics of ethnicity. Kérékou's regime initially included officers from both the north and south of the country, but as the years passed the northerners (like Kérékou himself) became clearly dominant, undermining the idea that the regime was not based in ethnicity. By officially adopting Marxism-Leninism, Kérékou may also have wanted to win the support of the country's leftists.

Kérékou's regime was rigid and vigorous in pursuing its newly adopted ideological goals from the mid-1970s to the late 1970s. Beginning in the late 1970s, the regime jettisoned much of its radicalism and settled onto a more moderately socialist course as Kérékou consolidated his personal control.

Kérékou survived numerous attempts to oust him, including an invasion of the port city of Cotonou by mercenaries contracted by a group of exiled Beninese political rivals in January 1977, as well as two coup attempts in 1988.

It was hoped that the nationalizations of the 1970s would help develop the economy, but it remained in a very poor condition, with the state sector being plagued by inefficiency and corruption. Kérékou began reversing course in the early 1980s, closing down numerous state-run companies and attempting to attract foreign investment. He also accepted an International Monetary Fund (IMF) structural readjustment program in 1989, agreeing to austerity measures that severely cut state expenditures. The economic situation continued to worsen during the 1980s, provoking widespread unrest in 1989. A student strike began in January of that year. Subsequently, strikes among various elements of society increased in frequency and the nature of their demands grew broader: whereas initially they had focused on economic issues such as salary arrears, this progressed to include demands for political reform.

In the period of reforms towards multi-party democracy in Africa at the beginning of the 1990s, Benin moved onto this path early, with Kérékou being forced to make concessions to popular discontent. Benin's early and relatively smooth transition may be attributed to the particularly dismal economic situation in the country, which seemed to preclude any alternative. In the midst of increasing unrest, Kérékou was re-elected as president by the National Assembly in August 1989, but in December 1989 Marxism-Leninism was dropped as the state ideology, and a national conference was held in February 1990. The conference turned out to be hostile to Kérékou and declared its own sovereignty; despite the objections of some of his officers to this turn of events, Kérékou did not act against the conference, although he did label the conference's declaration of sovereignty a "civilian coup". During the transition that followed, Kérékou remained president but lost most of his power.

During the 1990 National Conference, which was nationally televised, Kérékou spoke to the Archbishop of Cotonou, Isidor de Souza, confessing guilt and begging forgiveness for the flaws of his regime. An observer described it as a "remarkable piece of political theater", full of cultural symbolism and significance. In effect, Kérékou was seeking forgiveness from his people. Such a gesture, so unusual for the African autocrats of the time, could have fatally weakened Kérékou's political standing, but he performed the gesture in such a way that, far from ending his political career, it instead served to symbolically redeem him and facilitate his political rehabilitation, while also "securing him immunity from prosecution". Kérékou shrewdly utilized the timing and setting. Culturally as well as theologically it would prove impossible to refuse forgiveness on these terms.

World Bank economist Nicephore Soglo, chosen as prime minister by the conference, took office in March, and a new constitution was approved in a December 1990 referendum. Multi-party elections were held in March 1991, which Kérékou lost, obtaining only about 32% of the vote in the second round against Prime Minister Soglo; while he won very large vote percentages in the north, in the rest of the country he found little support. Kérékou was thus the first mainland African president to lose power through a popular election. He apologized for "deplorable and regrettable incidents" that occurred during his rule.

After losing the election in March 1991, Kérékou left the political scene and "withdrew to total silence", another move that was interpreted as penitential.

Kérékou reclaimed the presidency in the March 1996 election. Soglo's economic reforms and his alleged dictatorial tendencies had caused his popularity to suffer. Although Kérékou received fewer votes than Soglo in the first round, he then defeated Soglo in the second round, taking 52.5% of the vote. Kérékou was backed in the second round by third place candidate Adrien Houngbedji and fourth place candidate Bruno Amoussou, as in 1991, Kérékou received very strong support from northern voters, but he also improved his performance in the south. Soglo alleged fraud, but this was rejected by the Constitutional Court, which confirmed Kérékou's victory. When taking the oath of office, Kérékou left out a portion that referred to the "spirits of the ancestors" because he had become a born-again Christian after his defeat by Soglo. He was subsequently forced to retake the oath including the reference to spirits.

Kérékou was re-elected for a second five-year term in the March 2001 presidential election under controversial circumstances. In the first round he took 45.4% of the vote; Soglo, who took second place, and parliament speaker Houngbédji, who took third, both refused to participate in the second round, alleging fraud and saying that they did not want to legitimize the vote by participating in it. This left the fourth place finisher, Amoussou, to face Kérékou in the run-off, and Kérékou easily won with 83.6% of the vote. It was subsequently discovered that the American corporation Titan gave more than two million dollars to Kérékou's re-election campaign as a bribe.

During Kérékou's second period in office his government followed a liberal economic path. The period also saw Benin take part in international peacekeeping missions in other African states.

Kérékou was barred from running again in 2006 on two counts. The constitution not only limited the president to two terms, but also required that presidential candidates be younger than 70 (he turned 70 in 2003, through his second term). Kérékou said in July 2005 that he would not attempt to amend the constitution to allow him to run for a third term. "If you don't leave power," he said, "power will leave you." There was, however, speculation that he had wanted it to be changed, but faced too much opposition.

On March 5, 2006, voters went to the polls to decide who would succeed Kérékou as President of Benin. Yayi Boni defeated Adrien Houngbédji in a run-off vote on March 19, and Kérékou left office at the end of his term, at midnight on April 6, 2006.

Kérékou allegedly converted to Islam in 1980 while on a visit to Libya, and changed his first name to Ahmed, but he later returned to the use of the name Mathieu. This alleged conversion may have been designed to please the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, in order to obtain financial and military support. Alternatively, the conversion story may have been a rumor planted by some of his opponents in order to destabilize his regime. In any event, Kerekou subsequently became a born-again Christian. Some Vodun believers in Benin regarded him as having magical powers, explaining his ability to survive repeated coup attempts during his military rule.

Nicknamed "the chameleon" from an early point in his career, Kérékou's motto was "the branch will not break in the arms of the chameleon". The nickname and motto he adopted were full of cultural symbolism, articulating and projecting his power and ability. Unlike some past rulers who had adopted animal symbolism intending to project a violent, warlike sense of power, Kérékou's symbolic animal suggested skill and cleverness; his motto suggested that he would keep the branch from breaking, but implicitly warned of what could happen to "the branch" if it was not "in the arms of the chameleon"—political chaos. To some, his nickname seemed particularly apt as he successfully adapted himself to a new political climate and neo-liberal economic policies in the 1990s.

Kerekou used the campaign slogan, "Experience in the service of youth."

After leaving office in 2006, Kérékou stayed out of politics and spent time at his homes in Cotonou and Natitingou in northwestern Benin, his native region. He suffered a health crisis in 2014 and was taken to Paris for treatment. Although he recovered, he continued to suffer health problems, and he died in Benin on October 14, 2015 at the age of 82.

Pan-African Chronology VII

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

A00054 - Maher Hathout, American Muslim Leader

Monday, January 12, 2015

A00053 - Stuart Scott, ESPN's Voice of Exuberance

A00052 - Andrae Crouch, The Father of Modern Gospel Music

Andrae Crouch (solo artist)

Friday, January 9, 2015

2015

Andrae Crouch (solo artist)