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Clifford L. Alexander, Adviser to Presidents, Is Dead at 88
He was the first Black secretary of the Army — just one of many jobs, both high- and low-profile, that he held over nearly 20 years in government.
Clifford L. Alexander Jr., whose long career as a leading adviser to Democratic presidents ranged from working behind the scenes on landmark legislation like the Voting Rights Act to high-profile roles like serving as the first Black secretary of the Army, died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.
His daughter, the poet Elizabeth Alexander, said the cause was heart failure.
Mr. Alexander was a lifelong devotee of the promises held out by President Lyndon B. Johnson and his Great Society, in particular the idea that government could do much to alleviate racial and economic inequality. And he was among the generation of young Black leaders who, in the 1960s and ’70s, brought the civil rights movement from the streets into the machinery of the federal government.
As chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under President Johnson and, briefly, his successor, Richard M. Nixon, Mr. Alexander turned what had been a relatively powerless agency into a central player in fighting workplace discrimination. He resigned after Nixon demoted him from chairman to commissioner, criticizing the president for “a crippling lack of administration support.”
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Later, as the secretary of the Army under Jimmy Carter, he opened the doors for Black officers to rise to the rank of general, including a particularly promising young colonel named Colin Powell.
“Cliff saw his role as secretary of the Army as a key extension of the civil rights movement, and he inaugurated and enforced policies that were spectacularly effective in achieving his goal,” the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., a longtime friend, said in a phone interview. “The fact that the United States military is, perhaps, the most integrated institution in our society can be traced to the foresight of Clifford Alexander.”
Mr. Alexander was among the few Black leaders to be openly critical of President Bill Clinton, arguing that he engaged with race superficially and only when it was politically expedient. But he was a major supporter of Barack Obama, both as an adviser and as a campaign surrogate during Mr. Obama’s run for the White House in 2008.
Coincidentally, his daughter, who was then a professor of poetry at Yale and a longtime friend of the Obamas, read her poem “Praise Song for the Day” at Mr. Obama’s inauguration in 2009.
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“Cliff was an American original — a civil rights trailblazer whose eyes were never shut to injustice but whose heart was always open,” Michelle Obama said in a statement. “He was like a father to me and an inspiration to Barack. We admired the way he fought and learned from the way he led.”
Clifford Leopold Alexander Jr. was born on Sept. 21, 1933, in Harlem. His father was a Jamaican immigrant who managed the Riverton Houses, a sprawling residential development in Harlem financed by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Unlike other Met Life developments, including Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village in Manhattan, Riverton was integrated, and most of its residents were Black.
Mr. Alexander’s mother, Edith (McAllister) Alexander, was also active in the city’s life and politics. She served several mayors as an adviser on civil rights. She is believed to have been the first Black female delegate at a Democratic National Convention, in 1948.
After attending the Fieldston School, a private high school in the Bronx, Mr. Alexander studied government at Harvard, where he was elected the first Black president of the student council. He graduated in 1955 and received his law degree from Yale in 1958.
Back in New York, he worked for a time as an assistant district attorney and as the executive director of Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, an antipoverty organization founded by Kenneth Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark.
He married Adele Logan, a historian, in 1959. Along with their daughter, she survives him, as do their son, Mark, and seven grandchildren.
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Both of Mr. Alexander’s children went on to successful careers: Elizabeth is now the president of the Mellon Foundation, and Mark is the dean of the Charles Widger School of Law at Villanova University.
Mr. Alexander arrived in Washington in 1963 to serve on the staff of the National Security Council under President John F. Kennedy. Almost immediately, he was also acting as an informal adviser on race, and Kennedy sent him as an observer to the March on Washington.
“The White House was in a state of clear apprehension,” Mr. Alexander told The New York Times in 2003. “If you get in a position like the one I was in, you have a responsibility to say to the people in power what you think about race. So I went out to see what was happening.”
Not long after Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson brought Mr. Alexander into his circle to act as a liaison to the civil rights movement and, in particular, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Mr. Alexander soon became Johnson’s closest adviser on race relations, entrusted with lining up support in the Black community for the president’s legislative priorities and helping shepherd Black nominees through Congress, including Robert C. Weaver as the secretary of housing and urban development and Thurgood Marshall as a Supreme Court justice.
Even after Johnson appointed Mr. Alexander chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1967, he continued to rely on him as a conduit to the Black community. When Dr. King was assassinated and violence erupted across Washington, Johnson sent Mr. Alexander into the streets to meet with Black leaders and to assess the damage.
After leaving the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Mr. Alexander became the first Black person to achieve the rank of partner at a major Washington law firm when he joined Arnold & Porter. He hosted a syndicated TV talk show, “Black on White,” from 1972 to 1976, and ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Washington in 1974.
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As secretary of the Army, he was charged with continuing to rebuild the armed forces after the disaster of the Vietnam War. It was a herculean task that involved reorienting the Army around volunteers, ending racial discrimination and bringing in more women.
His time in that post, which ended in 1981, was his last official stint in government service. But he continued to serve as an informal adviser to politicians and policymakers. He served on several corporate boards and, in the late 1990s, as the interim chairman and chief executive of the advisory firm Dun & Bradstreet.
He and his wife founded a consulting firm, Alexander & Associates, that advised major corporations on how to reduce racial inequality. Among their most notable clients was Major League Baseball, which they helped address racial disparities in the organization’s front offices.
Among his tidbits of advice was the following, on the importance of getting people to pay attention to you.
“Very few senators or members of Congress do things just because it’s right, or we’d have a far better world than we have today,” he said in a 2017 interview for the Kunhardt Film Foundation. But, he added, “If you can show somebody why it is in their interest, they may do some things.”
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Marion Barber III, Bruising Running Back for Cowboys, Dies at 38
Nicknamed “Marion the Barbarian,” he had a nose for the end zone, leading the N.F.C. in touchdowns in 2006. But his post-playing years were troubled.
Marion Barber III, a bruising running back for the Dallas Cowboys who regularly busted into the end zone but whose life took a downward turn after his playing days were over, was found dead on Wednesday in his home in Frisco, Texas, north of Dallas. He was 38.
A Frisco police spokesman said that officers responded to an unspecified “welfare concern” at Barber’s rented apartment and found him dead. In recent years he had run-ins with the police and was once hospitalized for a mental health evaluation.
Barber, whose father, Marion Jr., was a running back for the Jets in the 1980s, had a seven-year career in which he was known for bulling his way through defenders and squeezing out yardage in small spaces. A teammate, the Cowboys wide receiver Terrell Owens, told The Associated Press in 2007: “He kind of challenges people and dares not to be stopped. It’s sort of barbaric.”
Owens said he gave him the nickname “Marion the Barbarian,” and it stuck.
Bill Parcells, who coached the Cowboys from 2003 to ’06, told The Dallas Morning News on Thursday that Barber “was almost like a perfect player,” adding, “He could run, block, he could catch, he was tough and he was always there.”
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Barber rarely started in his first three seasons but soon made himself an integral part of the Cowboys’ offense. In 2006, his second season, he gained 654 yards and led the National Football Conference in touchdowns with 14, nine of them from three yards or less.
In 2007, he ran for 975 yards and 10 touchdowns and was chosen for the Pro Bowl after a season in which he never started a game but outgained the Cowboys’ starting running back Julius Jones by nearly 400 yards. In the postseason, Barber started in the Cowboys’ 21-17 playoff loss to the Giants, running 27 times for 129 yards.
“When Marion Barber III runs,” Greg Bishop wrote in The New York Times in 2008, “dreadlocks flap past his shoulders from behind his helmet. His legs churn at a frightening speed, twin jackhammers working in tandem to punish and propel.”
Barber had solid seasons in 2008 and ’09 but with Felix Jones the primary running back the next season, Barber gained only 374 yards. He was released before the 2011 season and signed with the Chicago Bears, for whom he played his final season as a reserve.
Overall, he gained 4,780 yards on 1,156 rushes. His 47 rushing touchdowns with the Cowboys place him fourth on the team’s career list.
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His post-playing years were troubled. In 2014, Barber was detained by the police in Mansfield, Texas, also outside Dallas, and hospitalized for a mental health evaluation.
And according to police reports, he was arrested in 2019 on two misdemeanor counts of criminal mischief for incidents that occurred the year before in which, while he was out jogging, Barber approached two different cars and struck and damaged them. He pleaded no contest, and his sentence included 12 months of probation.
Last year, the former Dallas wide receiver Dez Bryant posted a highlight reel of Barber’s plays on Twitter and wrote that “he’s down and out bad … we are just a stat and moments to most people.”
On Monday, Bryant wrote on Twitter: “Too much to digest, so much too say … This is real life, it can be any of us. We need each other, we need unity.”
Marion Sylvester Barber III was born on June 10, 1983, in Plymouth, Minn., west of Minneapolis. Like his father, Barber played at the University of Minnesota, where he was part of a powerful backfield with Laurence Maroney. Barber rushed for 1,196 yards and 1,269 yards in 2003 and 2004.
The Cowboys selected him in the fourth round of the 2005 N.F.L. draft.
Football was a family business for the Barbers. In addition to his father, Barber’s brothers Thomas and Dominique also played for the University of Minnesota Gophers. Dominique was a defensive back with the N.F.L.’s Houston Texans.
In a statement on Thursday, P.J. Fleck, the Gophers’ head coach, said, “Marion was one of the best to ever play at Minnesota, and he is a big reason many people are Gopher fans today.”
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Taurean Blacque, Actor Best Known for ‘Hill Street Blues,’ Dies at 82
He received an Emmy nomination for his work as Detective Neal Washington, a character he strove to portray as something other than “that hip, jive Black man.”
Taurean Blacque, the actor best known for his Emmy-nominated performance as a detective on the critically acclaimed NBC drama series “Hill Street Blues,” died on Thursday in Atlanta. He was 82.
His family announced the death in a statement. It did not specify a cause, saying only that he died after a brief illness.
Mr. Blacque, who began his career as a stage actor in New York, had several television appearances under his belt when, in 1981, he landed his breakthrough role: the street-smart Detective Neal Washington on “Hill Street Blues,” which drew praise for its realistic portrayal of the day-to-day reality of police work and was nominated for 98 Emmy Awards in its seven seasons, winning 26.
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The part of Washington, Mr. Blacque later recalled, was sketchily written, and it was his choice to play the character as quiet and reflective. “I think the original concept was that hip, jive Black man, you know,” he told TV Guide. “But I wanted to turn it around a little, give him some depth, not get into that stereotype.”
Mr. Blacque was nominated for a 1982 Primetime Emmy for best supporting actor in a drama series, but he lost to his fellow cast member Michael Conrad. (All the nominees in the category that year — the others were Charles Haid, Michael Warren and Bruce Weitz — were members of the “Hill Street Blues” cast.)
“Hill Street Blues” ended its run in 1987, and two years later Mr. Blacque starred with Vivica A. Fox and others on the NBC soap opera “Generations.” Probably the most racially diverse daytime drama of its era, “Generations” dealt with the relationship over the years between two Chicago families, one white and one Black. Mr. Blacque played the owner of a chain of ice cream parlors.
He later moved to Atlanta, where he was active on the local theater scene, appearing in productions of August Wilson’s “Jitney,” James Baldwin’s “The Amen Corner” and other plays. He was also involved in the National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, N.C.
Taurean Blacque was born Herbert Middleton Jr. on May 10, 1940, in Newark. His father was a dry cleaner, his mother a nurse.
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He graduated from Arts High School in Newark but did not decide to pursue an acting career until he was almost 30 and working as a mail carrier. He enrolled at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York in 1969 and, he told USA Today, “Once I found out that acting was my niche, I poured all my energies into it.”
He said he chose the stage name Taurean Blacque (Taurus was his astrological sign) in part as a way to get casting directors’ attention. Eventually, after several years of paying dues, he did.
Work in community theater in New York led to roles with the Negro Ensemble Company and eventually to Hollywood, where he landed guest roles on “Sanford and Son,” “Taxi,” “Charlie’s Angels,” “The Bob Newhart Show” and other TV series before being cast on “Hill Street Blues.”
In addition to being an actor, Mr. Blacque, who had two biological sons and adopted 11 other children, was an adoption advocate. He was the spokesman for the Los Angeles County adoption service. In 1989, President George Bush appointed him the national spokesman for adoption.
Mr. Blacque’s survivors include 12 children, 18 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
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Oris Buckner, Detective Who Blew Whistle on Police Abuse, Dies at 70
The only Black man on the New Orleans homicide squad, he provided key testimony in one of the city’s most notorious civil rights cases.
Oris Buckner, who as New Orleans’s only Black homicide detective in the early 1980s exposed one of the worst cases of police violence in the city’s history, leading to the conviction of three officers on civil rights charges, died on June 1 in Houston. He was 70.
His sister, Adrienne Jopes, confirmed his death, in a hospital. She said the cause was complications of leukemia and diabetes.
By the late 1970s, police officers in New Orleans were killing more civilians per capita than in any other city in America, even those with comparable crime rates — 7.7 people per 1,000 officers, or 9.5 times higher than it was in New York City, according to a study by the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
The homicide division was especially notorious, not only for its violent record but also for its strict code of silence. Every killing by a police officer was labeled a “justifiable homicide,” with no questions asked.
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Mr. Buckner joined the division in April 1980. A rising star in the department with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, he sought the assignment even though his father had died in New Orleans police custody decades before.
That November, the body of a young officer named Gregory Neupert was found in a ditch in Algiers, a predominantly Black neighborhood across the Mississippi River from downtown New Orleans. Even though witnesses said that two white men had been seen running from the scene of Officer Neupert’s murder, the police flooded the Black sections of Algiers, kicking down doors and hauling in witnesses, including two young Black men, Robert Davis and Johnny Brownlee.
The police wanted them to identify a pair of Black men, James Billy Jr. and Reginald Miles, as the suspects, but they refused. Mr. Buckner, who was on duty that night, watched as police officers tied Mr. Davis to a chair with cloth bandages and beat him. They then placed a plastic bag over his head and held it tight so that he couldn’t breathe.
Before the interrogation started, another officer had taken Mr. Buckner aside and told him that the other detectives didn’t trust him. Not only was he Black, the officer said, but he had only yelled at witnesses; he never beat them. Now, the implication went, was his chance to prove himself.
And so, during the questioning, Mr. Buckner approached Mr. Davis, still seated, and slapped him hard across the face.
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Mr. Buckner immediately felt remorse, even disgust, he later said, and when the other officers resumed beating Mr. Davis, he tried to stop them. They kicked him out of the room.
Leaving Mr. Buckner behind, the rest of the officers took Mr. Davis and Mr. Brownlee separately to a swampy area outside the city. They hung them over a bridge and fired shotgun blasts around their heads until both men agreed to identify Mr. Billy and Mr. Miles.
A few hours later, dozens of police officers descended on the homes of Mr. Billy and Mr. Miles. Mr. Buckner was assigned to stand in the back of Mr. Miles’s house, in case Mr. Miles or his pregnant girlfriend, Sherry Singleton, tried to run.
Mr. Buckner later testified that he heard officers burst into the home and immediately start shooting. He also heard Ms. Singleton running; she was naked and had gone to the bathroom to hide. One officer followed and shot her with a shotgun blast to the stomach and a pistol shot to the head, killing her.
The police also killed Mr. Miles, while the other squad killed Mr. Billy. Another Black man, Raymond Ferdinand, had been killed by police officers earlier that evening. Mr. Buckner never drew his weapon.
A few days later Morris Reed, an assistant district attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana and the head of its civil rights unit, got a call from a friend of his on the police force. Mr. Buckner wanted to testify.
In exchange for immunity, he broke the homicide division’s code of silence, telling prosecutors about everything — the interrogations, the beatings, the killings.
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But despite Mr. Buckner’s testimony, a majority-white grand jury in Orleans Parish twice refused to hand up homicide indictments in the case, which was brought by District Attorney Harry Connick Sr., the father of the musician Harry Connick Jr.
It was, Mr. Reed said, simply unthinkable at the time for a white jury to indict white officers for killing Black people.
“In any other scenario they would have easily been indicted for murder,” he said in a phone interview. “But you’re talking about 1980 in the South.”
The city erupted in protest. The police chief, James Parsons, whom Mayor Ernest Morial had brought in to reform the department, resigned. Demonstrators occupied Mayor Morial’s office at City Hall.
In July 1981, a federal grand jury handed down indictments against seven officers for conspiring to violate the civil rights of Mr. Davis and Mr. Brownlee. Concern about a fair trial ran high: It was moved to Dallas, and a judge tried to block “60 Minutes” from airing a segment about the case before the proceedings began. (He failed.)
Mr. Buckner’s lengthy testimony was damning. Defense lawyers tried to paint him as unreliable, given his own participation in the beating, but jurors were sufficiently persuaded to convict three of the seven officers. Each received a five-year sentence, and each was fired from the department.
As a result of Mr. Buckner’s testimony, lawyers also brought a series of civil suits against 55 defendants, resulting in a $2.8 million settlement by the city in 1986, the largest in New Orleans at the time.
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Mr. Buckner suffered for his decision to come forward. He was ostracized by his colleagues. He received death threats. He was demoted from homicide detective to traffic cop. Though he was finally promoted to sergeant in 1995, his career was effectively over.
On Monday, the Louisiana State Senate unanimously passed a resolution honoring his decision to testify.
“Despite an awareness of what it would mean for him personally,” it read, “in one of the most pivotal moments of his life, he honored his oath as a law enforcement officer to uphold the Constitution and as a witness to testify honestly, and for his actions, he and his family paid a heavy price.”
Oris Benny Buckner III was born on July 16, 1951, in New Orleans. His parents, Oris Buckner Jr. and Marguerite (Bush) Buckner, had divergent experiences with the law — his father died in police custody when Oris III was young, while his mother was the first Black woman on the New Orleans police force.
He received a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Loyola University in New Orleans in 1978, and in 1991 he was ordained as a Baptist minister.
Along with his sister, he is survived by his wife, Stephanie Buckner; his son, Oris Buckner IV; his daughter, Amiya Lewis; his stepson, Ronnie Gilmore; his stepdaughters, Stephanie Powell and Tonette Vasquez; and several grandchildren. Another sister, the actress Carol Sutton, died in 2020. His daughter Angel Buckner died in 2010.
After Mr. Buckner and his wife lost their home in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina, they moved to Houston. He retired from the New Orleans Police Department and later taught criminal justice at Lee College, a community college in nearby Baytown, Texas.
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Mr. Buckner’s decision to come forward may have derailed his career, but it exposed the widespread corruption and abuse within the New Orleans police force, which helped pave the way for later civil rights cases and reforms, Mary Howell, a longtime civil rights lawyer in New Orleans, said in a phone interview.
“Oris had deep regret that he succumbed to hitting Robert Davis,” she said, “but didn’t regret telling the truth.”
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John L. Canley, Belated Medal of Honor Recipient, Dies at 84
He was the first living Black Marine to be awarded America’s highest military decoration — 50 years after he demonstrated valor in Vietnam.
Sgt. Maj. John L. Canley, who rescued more than 20 fellow Marines under enemy fire in Vietnam in 1968 and, 50 years later, became the first living Black Marine to be awarded the Medal of Honor, died on May 11 in Bend, Ore. He was 84.
He died at the home of his daughter Patricia Sargent, who said the cause was complications of prostate cancer.
In 1953, John Canley, then just 15, borrowed his older brother’s credentials to enlist in the Marines. By January 1968, when his company of mostly teenage troops was deployed to the city of Hue in central Vietnam during the Tet offensive, he had already served in Japan and South Korea.
When his commanding officer in Vietnam, Capt. Gordon Batcheller, was severely wounded, Sergeant Major Canley led the 150-man Alpha Company, First Battalion, First Marine Regiment, during three days of successful counterattacks against North Vietnamese positions, bringing relief to his surrounded comrades.
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Twice in full view of the enemy, the 6-foot-4, 240-pound sergeant major scaled a wall to draw fire and expose the North Vietnamese positions. Then, armed with grenades, he charged enemy machine gun nests, allowing his comrades to escape while he rescued the wounded.
He was joined in his heroics by Sgt. Alfredo Gonzalez, who was mortally wounded and awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously. Sergeant Major Canley sustained shrapnel wounds and later received the Navy Cross.
After being reminded at an Alpha Company reunion nearly two decades ago of the valor shown by Sergeant Major Canley, John Ligato, a retired F.B.I. special agent and former Marine who had served under him during the Tet offensive, began a campaign to upgrade Sergeant Major Canley’s Navy Cross to a Medal of Honor.
Mr. Ligato enlisted Representative Julia Brownley, a California Democrat, who won the support of Defense Secretary James N. Mattis and successfully lobbied for legislation to waive the requirement that the Medal of Honor be awarded within five years of the actions it recognizes.
President Donald J. Trump personally bestowed the medal in a White House ceremony in 2018.
“Sergeant Major Canley was a leader and a war fighter who undoubtedly contributed to the battles won in Vietnam,” said Sgt. Maj. Troy E. Black, the senior enlisted leader of the Marine Corps.
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According to the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, all previous Black Marines given the medal had received it posthumously.
John Lee Canley was born on Dec. 20, 1937, in Caledonia, Ark., and raised in nearby El Dorado. His father, J.M. Canley, worked at a chemical plant. His mother, Leola (Cobb) Canley, managed a restaurant.
Sergeant Major Canley’s marriage to Viktoria Fenech ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter and a stepson, David Fenech, from that marriage, his survivors include two children from a relationship with Toyo Adaniya Russeau, Ricky Canley and Yukari Canley; two sisters; a brother; and three grandchildren.
Inspired to enlist in the Marines after watching the 1949 John Wayne movie “Sands of Iwo Jima,” he served three combat tours in Vietnam as a rifle platoon leader, company gunnery sergeant and company first sergeant.
Sergeant Major Canley’s other awards included the Bronze Star, the Purple Heart, the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal (each with the combat “V,” signifying valor in combat) and the Combat Action Ribbon. In 2020, the U.S.S. John L. Canley, a mobile sea base, was named in his honor.
He retired from the Marines in 1981 and settled in Oxnard, Calif., where he ran a textile import business.
“This honor is for all of the Marines with whom I served,” Sergeant Major Canley said in an interview with Military.com on the occasion of receiving the Medal of Honor. “The only thing I was doing was taking care of troops best I could. Do that, and everything else takes care of itself.”
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Even after he was belatedly awarded the medal, he continued to take care of his troops.
“He felt badly that during all that time they weren’t recognized for the sacrifices they made,” his daughter said in an interview.
Sergeant Major Canley was instrumental in securing the approval of Bronze Stars for five members of his company and a Navy Commendation Medal for another, all of which are scheduled to be awarded next month.
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Johnnie A. Jones Sr. Dies at 102; a Civil Rights Lawyer Early On
In 1953, he represented defendants in the Baton Rouge bus boycott, a model for later activism, after returning from World War II as a wounded veteran of D-Day.
Two weeks after Johnnie A. Jones Sr. graduated from law school in 1953, he was thrust into a case that would set a template for the civil rights movement, and for his own legal career: He was recruited to help represent people who had been arrested during a bus boycott in Baton Rouge, the Louisiana capital.
Lasting eight days, it was the first large-scale bus boycott of the civil rights era. And it served as a model for other nonviolent resistance protests, especially the more famous yearlong bus boycott that began in December 1955 in Montgomery, Ala., spurred by the arrest of Rosa Parks. The Montgomery organizers, led by a charismatic young preacher named the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., consulted with Mr. Jones and others on tactics and strategy.
The Baton Rouge boycott also marked the beginning of Mr. Jones’s 57-year career as a persistent challenger to the race-based codes of the Jim Crow South. He was the first Black member of the Baton Rouge Bar Association.
Mr. Jones was 102 when he died on April 23. A goddaughter, Mada McDonald, told WAFB-TV in Baton Rouge that he had died at the Louisiana War Veterans Home in Jackson, La.
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In addition to his civil rights history, Mr. Jones had a brush with military history. During World War II he was the first Black warrant officer in the Army. And he participated in Operation Overlord, in which Allied forces landed more than 150,000 troops on Normandy beaches in 1944 as part of the largest amphibious assault in the history of warfare.
As for his career as a litigator, Mr. Jones became involved in numerous civil rights cases, often working with the N.A.A.C.P. and the Congress of Racial Equality. He sought to remove racial identification from election ballots and fought to integrate Baton Rouge’s schools, parks and pools, all the while facing threats of arrest and disbarment; bombs were twice planted under his car.
After the United States Supreme Court outlawed segregation in public schools in the landmark 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education, Mr. Jones still had to accompany Black children to school for their own protection, he said.
He also defended several students from Southern University, the historically Black institution in Baton Rouge, after they staged nonviolent lunch-counter sit-ins in the city but were arrested anyway and charged with disturbing the peace. By the time the sit-in cases reached the Supreme Court in 1961, they were being argued, successfully, by Thurgood Marshall, then a prominent civil rights lawyer, who later became the first Black justice of the Supreme Court.
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Johnnie Anderson Jones was born on Nov. 30, 1919, in Laurel Hill, a tiny town in northern Louisiana, and raised on a plantation, where his parents, Henry Edward and Sarah Ann (Coates) Jones, were farmers on 75 acres of rented land.
After he enrolled at Southern University, Mr. Jones was drafted into the Army in 1942 and assigned to a unit responsible for unloading equipment and supplies on Omaha Beach during the D-Day invasion.
He was almost killed twice, the first time when a mine exploded below his ship, blowing him onto an upper deck. Then, as he waded ashore as part of the Allied assault, he came under fire from a German sniper. Before the war was over, he had fought in the Battle of the Bulge.
While most of the soldiers on D-Day were white, roughly 2,000 of them were Black service members. By the end of the war, more than a million African Americans were in uniform, including the famed Tuskegee Airmen. But the military was still segregated by race, and these soldiers encountered discrimination both in the service and when they came home.
When he was honorably discharged from the Army, Mr. Jones was described as white, he recalled in an oral history in 1993. He said the clerks filling out his papers had assumed he was white because they didn’t think a Black person could have performed the tasks that he was listed as having performed.
“Right now I’m white, as far as my discharge paper, because I didn’t go back to have it corrected,” he said, laughing at the recollection.
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Back in Louisiana, by his account, he was driving to a medical appointment in New Orleans one day, to have wartime shrapnel removed from his neck, when he was pulled over and beaten by a white police officer.
“He knocked me down and started kicking me,” Mr. Jones told the Department of Veterans Affairs in a 2021 interview. The incident helped compel him to become a lawyer, he said.
“Things weren’t right,” he said. “‘Separate but equal’ was unconstitutional, and I wanted to fight it and make it better.”
Mr. Jones resumed his college studies at Southern and earned his bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1949. He worked for the Postal Service as a letter carrier, then earned his law degree from Southern University School of Law (now Southern University Law Center). He was asked to head the civil rights division of the Department of Justice by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, he said, but the appointment never materialized in the wake of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination shortly thereafter.
Mr. Jones continued to practice law into his 90s.
His marriage, to Sebell Chase, ended in divorce. His four children and his seven siblings all died before he did. He is survived by numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Only last year, 77 years after being wounded during the war, Mr. Jones was belatedly awarded the Purple Heart at the Old State Capitol in Baton Rouge.
“I want to express our deepest respect for your distinguished service, and long overdue recognition of your wounds received during the invasion of Omaha Beach on D-Day,” Gen. James C. McConville, the Army chief of staff, wrote in a letter to Mr. Jones accompanying the award.
“We owe you a debt of gratitude,” he added, “both for your sacrifices during World War II and for being a role model for African Americans aspiring to serve.”
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Mwai Kibaki, Kenya’s Third President, Dies at 90
He came to power promising to root out corruption and improve government transparency. But his tenure was blighted by widespread graft and a violent upheaval.
NAIROBI, Kenya — Mwai Kibaki, who helped transform Kenya’s economy and usher in a new Constitution as its third president, but whose tenure was marred by high-profile corruption cases and election-related violence, has died. He was 90.
His death was announced in a televised speech by President Uhuru Kenyatta, who did not specify a cause or provide any other details.
Mr. Kenyatta said that flags would be flown at half-staff in the country and at diplomatic missions worldwide, and that a period of national mourning would be observed until sunset on the day Mr. Kibaki is buried. He said Mr. Kibaki would be accorded a state funeral but did not say when.
Mr. Kibaki was the last surviving former leader who had participated in Kenya’s struggle for independence from British colonial rule. He was preceded by Daniel arap Moi, who died in 2020, and Jomo Kenyatta, who died in 1978.
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An economist by training, Mr. Kibaki was a university professor, a lawmaker, a cabinet minister, vice president and leader of the opposition before ascending to the highest office in the land in 2002.
Mr. Kibaki, who was known as a scholarly and cerebral figure in academia, became adroit at navigating Kenya’s twisting and tense political eras. Even though he could come across as aloof and impatient, he managed to maneuver in the political sphere for five decades, becoming an establishment insider whose election ended decades of one-party rule.
His election as president was a hopeful moment for Kenya, coming after Mr. Moi’s 24-year rule, which had been defined by widespread graft and repression.
As president, Mr. Kibaki helped revive the country’s stagnant economy and began efforts to improve access to health care. He pushed vast improvements of the country’s highways and was lauded for introducing free primary school education nationwide.
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But his efforts to transform the country were undermined by graft, which remained rife even at the highest levels of government. Even as corruption scandals continued to surface, Mr. Kibaki’s government failed to properly prosecute those involved. His own anticorruption czar, John Githongo, fled the country, fearing that his life was in danger.
But it was the 2007 elections that put Mr. Kibaki’s leadership to the test. After the electoral commission declared him the winner in a tightly contested election, the country descended into a wave of violence and bloodshed that pushed it to the brink of civil war.
During the upheaval, more than 1,100 people were believed to have been killed and more than 300,000 others displaced. The violence subsided only weeks later, when the feuding political leaders settled on a power-sharing agreement.
The crisis pushed Kenya and Mr. Kibaki to revive efforts to draft a new Constitution — voters rejected an earlier effort in a 2005 referendum — to tackle longstanding imbalances in power and competition for resources. In 2010, a Constitution promising greater freedoms and rights for Kenyans was approved with an almost 70 percent majority.
In a move that was a first for independent Kenya, Mr. Kibaki sent Kenyan troops to Somalia in 2011 to fight Al Shabab, an affiliate of Al Qaeda, and to protect Kenya’s northeast border.
Emilio Mwai Kibaki was born on Nov. 15, 1931, in Gatuyaini village in central Kenya. After completing high school in Kenya, he studied economics, history and political science at Makerere University in Uganda and public finance at the London School of Economics.
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Following Kenyan independence in 1963, he was a lawmaker with the Kenya African National Union party, which preached what it called African socialism. He later served as finance minister for more than a decade, from 1969 to 1981, and was Mr. Moi’s vice president from 1978 to 1988.
As Kenyans agitated for multiparty democracy in the 1990s, Mr. Kibaki broke ranks with Mr. Moi and challenged him in the 1992 and 1997 elections, both of which he lost. In 2002, with Mr. Moi unable to run for re-election because of term limits, Mr. Kibaki ran for president again.
He defeated Mr. Kenyatta, the current president, whom Mr. Moi had picked as his preferred successor. He stayed in office for two terms, leaving in April 2013.
Mr. Kibaki was an avid golfer. He was also known for his sense of humor; his quips and witty remarks were repeatedly played on television and printed on the front pages of newspapers.
He was married to Lucy Muthoni Kibaki until her death in 2016. His survivors include his children, Judy Wanjiku, Jimmy Kibaki, David Kagai and Tony Githinji.
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Bob Lanier, a Dominant Center of the 1970s and ’80s, Dies at 73
Playing for the Detroit Pistons and the Milwaukee Bucks, he held his own against titans of the era like Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Willis Reed.
Bob Lanier, who as a center for the Detroit Pistons and Milwaukee Bucks in the 1970s and ’80s parlayed a deft left-handed hook shot, a soft midrange jumper and robust rebounding skills into a Hall of Fame career, died on Tuesday in Phoenix. He was 73.
The N.B.A. said he died after a short illness but provided no other details.
Lanier, who stood 6-foot-11 and weighed about 250 pounds, excelled in an era of dominant centers like Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Nate Thurmond and Wes Unseld.
“Guys didn’t change teams as much, so when you were facing the Bulls or the Bucks or New York, you had all these rivalries,” he told NBA.com in 2018. “Lanier against Jabbar! Jabbar against Willis Reed! And then Chamberlain and Artis Gilmore and Bill Walton! You had all these great big men, and the game was played from inside out.”
He added: “It was a rougher game, a much more physical game that we played in the ’70s. You could steer people with elbows. They started cutting down on the number of fights by fining people more. Oh, it was a rough ’n’ tumble game.”
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As a Pistons rookie in the 1970-71 season, Lanier shared time at center with Otto Moore. In his second season, as a full-time starter, he averaged 25.7 points and 14.2 rebounds a game, putting him in the league’s top 10 in both categories.
“He understood the small nuances of the game,” Dave Bing, a Pistons teammate and fellow Hall of Famer, said in a video biography of Lanier shown on Fox Sports Detroit in 2012. “He could shoot the 18-to-20-footer as well as any guard. He had a hook shot — nobody but Kareem had a hook shot like him. He could do anything he wanted to do.”
Lanier wore what were believed to be size 22 sneakers. In 1989, however, a representative of Converse disputed that notion, saying that they were in fact size 18 ½. Whatever their actual size, a pair of Lanier’s sneakers, bronzed, is in the collection of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass.
During nine full seasons with the Pistons, Lanier played in seven All-Star Games. He was elected most valuable player of the 1974 All-Star Game, in which he led all scorers with 24 points.
But the Pistons had only four winning seasons during his time with the team and never advanced very far in the playoffs. The roster was often in flux. Coaches came and went. Lanier dealt with knee injuries and other physical setbacks.
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“It was like a life unfulfilled,” he told Fox Sports Detroit.
In early 1980, with the Pistons’ record at 14-40, the team traded Lanier to the Milwaukee Bucks for a younger center, Kent Benson, and a first-round 1980 draft pick. Frustrated by the Pistons’ lack of success, Lanier had asked to be sent to a playoff contender.
“I’m kind of relieved, but I’m kind of sad, too,” he told The Detroit Free Press. “I’ve got a lot of good memories of Detroit.”
Lanier averaged 22.7 points and 11.8 rebounds a game with the Pistons.
Robert Jerry Lanier Jr. was born on Sept. 10, 1948, in Buffalo to Robert and Nannie Lanier. Young Bob was 6-foot-5 by the time he was a sophomore in high school, and he played well enough there to be wooed by dozens of colleges. He chose St. Bonaventure University in upstate Allegany, N.Y.
He was a sensation there, averaging 27.6 points and 15.7 rebounds over three seasons.
In 1970, the Bonnies defeated Villanova to win the East Regional finals of the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament, sending them to the Final Four. But Lanier injured his knee during the game, forcing the Bonnies to face Jacksonville in the national semifinal game without him. St. Bonaventure lost, 91-83.
“I didn’t even know at the time I tore my knee up,” Lanier told The Buffalo News in 2007. “But when I ran back down the court and tried to pivot, my leg collapsed. I didn’t know at the time I had torn my M.C.L.”
Lanier was still recuperating from knee surgery when the Pistons chose him No. 1 overall in the N.B.A. draft; he was also chosen No. 1 by the New York (now Brooklyn) Nets of the American Basketball Association. He quickly signed with Detroit.
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Although he had statistically better years with the Pistons, Lanier enjoyed more team success with the Bucks (and also played in one more All-Star Game). Under Coach Don Nelson, the Bucks won 60 games during the 1980-81 season, and they advanced to the Eastern Conference finals in 1982-83 and 1983-84.
Lanier was also president of the players’ union, the National Basketball Players Association, and helped negotiate a collective bargaining agreement in 1983 that avoided a strike.
Early in the 1983-84 season, his last as a player, Lanier became angry with Bill Laimbeer, the Pistons’ center, for riling him under the boards at the Silverdome in Pontiac, Mich. Lanier retaliated with a left hook that leveled Laimbeer and broke his nose.
The act not only earned Lanier a $5,000 fine; it also delayed the retirement of his No. 16 jersey by the Pistons until 1993. The Bucks retired his number in late 1984.
He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1992.
In retirement, he owned a marketing firm and worked extensively with the N.B.A. as a global ambassador and special assistant to David Stern, the league’s longtime commissioner, and Adam Silver, his successor. Lanier was also an assistant coach under Nelson with the Golden State Warriors during the 1994-95 season and replaced him as interim coach for the final 37 games of the season after Nelson’s resignation.
Information on survivors was not immediately available.
Lanier said that after he retired, he was less likely to be recognized by the public than when he was a player. After Shaquille O’Neal, one of the league’s most dominating centers, came along in the early 1990s, people figured he must have been O’Neal’s father, he told NBA.com in 2018.
“‘You’re wearing them big shoes,’” he said people would tell him. “I just go along with it. ‘Yeah, I’m Shaq’s dad.’”
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Samella Lewis, Artist and Activist for Art World Diversity, Dies at 99
In addition to painting, she was a historian who pushed for a more inclusive definition of art, in part by founding her own museum devoted to Black artists.
Samella Lewis, a Black artist and art historian who did more than just decry the racial blinders of the white art establishment, in part by founding a museum dedicated to promoting Black arts, died on May 27 in Torrance, Calif., near Los Angeles. She was 99.
Her son Claude Lewis said the cause was renal failure.
Keasha Dumas Heath, executive director of the Museum of African American Art, the institution Dr. Lewis founded in Los Angeles in 1976, noted her wide-ranging impact, calling her, in an email, “a leading voice in the scholarship on Black art, and a promoter of new pathways for Black artists.”
“She envisioned opportunities that did not yet exist for Black artists,” she added, “and then she created them.”
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In a remarkably varied career, Dr. Lewis also co-founded an arts journal, helped run galleries, made films about Black artists, taught at universities and wrote well-regarded books, most notably “Art: African American,” first published in 1978. That book (later republished as “African American Art and Artists”) remains influential, said Kellie Jones, a noted art historian at Columbia University, which, she said, is characteristic of Dr. Lewis’s various efforts: They have endured.
“She starts a magazine: Still in print,” she said in a phone interview. “The museum: still there.”
“She did it all,” Dr. Jones added. “She really did it all.”
Samella Sanders was born on Feb. 27, 1923, in New Orleans to Samuel and Rachel Sanders. (Two oral histories give her birth year as 1924, but her son said that she came to believe that 1923 was correct.) Her father was a farmer, and her mother was a domestic worker.
She grew up in Ponchatoula, La., northwest of New Orleans, and was drawing from a young age. In an oral history recorded in 1992 by the Center for Oral History Research at the University of California, Los Angeles, she said her first sale of an artwork was to her kindergarten teacher, who was impressed with how she had handled an assignment to draw a pig.
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“All the other children were doing brown pigs, white pigs, so I drew a purple one,” she said. “And I was determined that, in doing that pig, that I was not going to stay within anybody’s lines. I just drew lines, but then I moved outside of them. It was like the pig was vibrating.”
She enrolled at Dillard University in New Orleans intending to study history, she said, but at the urging of her high school art teacher, she took a freshman art course. Her professor was the artist Elizabeth Catlett, who became an important influence artistically and in terms of activism. When they would ride the bus together, for instance, Ms. Catlett would do things like grab the “For Colored Patrons Only” sign demarcating the Black seats and throw it out the window — a revelatory action for a young student who had simply accepted the racial situation in Louisiana as the way things are.
“There I am sitting there, having grown up under these circumstances, and here this woman comes and disrupts the whole situation,” Dr. Lewis said in the oral history.
Ms. Catlett changed her approach to art as well.
“One of the important things I learned in Elizabeth’s class is that you don’t paint people without knowing something about them and who they are and where they are,” she said. “I was painting these portraits, and she would say, ‘Who is this?’ And I would say, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Well, what are you painting it for?’”
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After two years she transferred to the Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) in Virginia, earning a bachelor’s degree in art history there in 1945.
She went on to do graduate work at Ohio State University, first studying printmaking, then sculpture, although she encountered some resistance in that genre.
“I ran into problems of not only racism but also sexism,” she said, “where my professors felt that women shouldn’t do welding” because of the heavy equipment involved. So she focused on painting and on broadening her study of art history, developing particular expertise in Asian and pre-Columbian art. She earned a master’s degree there in 1948 — the year she married Paul G. Lewis, a mathematician — and in 1951 became the first Black woman to receive a Ph.D. in fine arts and art history at the university. A posting on a university website once called her “the godmother of African-American art.”
In 1953 Dr. Lewis was appointed head of the art department at Florida A&M University, which needed bolstering. According to the book “African Americans in the Visual Arts” (2003), by Steven Otfinoski, she once told the university president that she would paint his portrait in exchange for more funding for her department.
The Lewises became active in civil rights issues, and harassment by the Ku Klux Klan and others led them to leave Florida in 1958, when Dr. Lewis took a teaching post at the State University of New York in Plattsburgh. In 1966 she took a post at California State University at Long Beach. That same year she made the first of several short documentaries, “The Black Artists,” a survey of African American art.
Though she was vocal about Black art and artists, Dr. Lewis said that, especially in her teaching, she tried to draw on her expertise in Asian art and other areas to make connections.
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“I never taught courses where I closed the door: ‘This is African art and this is Caribbean art,’” she said in the oral history. “I tried to show interrelationships.”
But as the 1960s turned more strident, so did she on the subject of white domination of the art world. In late 1968 she left academia to be the coordinator of education at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, hoping to elevate Black art there.
“Anybody can have a quick Black show,” she told The Los Angeles Times at the time, but she sought more substantive change. She lasted a little more than a year before quitting, so frustrated at the lack of progress that she picketed her own museum.
“We have gone through several periods — slavery, emancipation, underpaid and overworked, pacification, integration, trying to prove something instead of dwelling in our own household,” she told The Progress-Bulletin of Pomona, Calif., in early 1972. “I’m fed up with this proving of self.”
In 1969, with Ruth Waddy, she published “Black Artists on Art,” forming her own publishing house, Contemporary Crafts, to do it. In it, Black artists spoke out, some vehemently, about their work and the obstacles they faced. The book (which was followed by a second volume in 1971) rattled the art establishment and the people who covered it, including William Wilson, art critic for The Los Angeles Times.
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“Statements by artists range from modest affirmations of a desire to make art of worth, to frankly militant rejections ‘of the intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals who dominate the art scene’ and of white culture in general,” Mr. Wilson wrote in a review, in which he seemed to find the challenge thrown down by the book to be off-putting.
Dr. Lewis was also looking for ways around the white establishment. She had already helped establish the National Conference of Artists, a professional organization for Black artists, which continues today. And after leaving the Los Angeles museum, she was a founder of the Multi-Cul Gallery in Los Angeles, which focused on Black art and on selling works at prices almost anyone could afford.
In 1975 she and two others founded Black Art: An International Quarterly, which continues today under the name International Review of African American Art. Then, in 1976, came her Museum of African American Art, which has mounted exhibitions and run educational programs ever since.
Dr. Lewis resumed teaching in 1969 at Scripps College in Claremont, Calif., where she remained for 15 years and which now houses the Samella Lewis Contemporary Art Collection. Over the years she curated numerous exhibitions at galleries and museums.
And throughout her busy life, she found time to make her own art. Her paintings and prints have been exhibited in solo and group shows all over the country.
Her husband died in 2013. In addition to her son Claude, she is survived by another son, Alan, and three grandchildren.
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During a talk in Columbus, Ohio, in 2000, Dr. Lewis had a simple explanation for why people should respect artists of all races and backgrounds and try to hear what they are saying.
“They can tell us what will happen in the future,” she said. “They can tell us what we should have seen in the past.”
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Kwaku Ohene-Frempong, Expert in Sickle Cell Disease, Dies at 76
When his baby boy was diagnosed with the illness, he made it his mission to combat it. He later took his expertise back to his native Ghana.
Soon after his first child, Kwame, was born on May 13, 1972, Dr. Kwaku Ohene-Frempong discovered that the boy had a fatal genetic disease.
“I was holding Kwame, and he came upstairs with tears in his eyes,” Dr. Ohene-Frempong’s wife, Janet Ohene-Frempong, said in an interview, recalling the moment her husband broke the news. “He said, ‘Our son, Kwame, has sickle cell disease.’ He knew what that meant.” Sickle cell can result in searing pain, organ damage, strokes, susceptibility to infections and premature death.
Dr. Ohene-Frempong, a medical student at Yale at the time, then called his mother at their family home in Ghana. “God is telling you something,” she told him. The message, she said, was to use his medical training to help combat the disease. And that is what he did “until he drew his last breath,” Ms. Ohene-Frempong said.
“The most important thing that happened to us is Kwame’s birth,” she added. “It changed the trajectory of our lives and of hundreds and hundreds of people around the world. All the work he did — every bit of it — he did because of Kwame.”
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Dr. Ohene-Frempong, familiarly known by his initials, Kof (pronounced cough), died on May 7 in Philadelphia. He was 76. His wife said the cause was metastatic lung cancer.
Dr. Ohene-Frempong worked for decades at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, an affiliate of the University of Pennsylvania. At CHOP, as it is known, he established the hospital’s Comprehensive Sickle Cell Center.
Dr. Alexis Thompson, a colleague and sickle cell expert there, said in an interview: “I relied on his wisdom at almost every turn in my career. Part of it was watching with this tremendous awe what his vision was and the things he thought to do to move this field forward.”
Dr. Ohene-Frempong was a leader of a large federally funded study, the Cooperative Study of Sickle Cell Disease, that helped answer an important question: What is the natural course of the disease?
Analyzing the study’s data, he found that the disease could result in blockages in blood vessels in the brain, leading to a high rate of strokes in children with sickle cell. That led other researchers to be able to predict which children were most at risk, and to discover that regular transfusions could prevent most strokes in those children.
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In his native Ghana, Dr. Ohene-Frempong established a pilot program to provide screening for sickle cell disease among newborns in the southern city of Kumasi. It was the first such program in sub-Saharan Africa. In addition to identifying children with the illness, the program referred them to specialized clinics that provided treatments like antibiotics to prevent infections, routine immunizations and a drug, hydroxyurea, that can reduce the risk of complications from sickle cell.
Kwaku Ohene-Frempong was born on March 13, 1946, in Kukurantumi, in eastern Ghana, to Kwasi Adde Ohene and Adwoa Odi Boafo. His father was a cocoa farmer and a prominent member of a royal family.
Kwaku attended a boarding school, Prempeh College, then went to Yale University, where he majored in biology and was captain of the track and field team, setting indoor and outdoor records in the high hurdles. While a student, he met Janet Williams, who was attending Cornell University. They married on June 6, 1970, one week after they had both graduated.
Dr. Ohene-Frempong said in an interview in 2019 that he first found out about sickle cell when he and some friends attended a lecture about the disease at Yale. As he sat listening, he said, he suddenly recognized the disease: It was in his family but had gone undiagnosed. One of his cousins had the symptoms and died at 14.
“He was in pain,” he said of his cousin. “His eyes were very yellow, and he was very skinny.”
Dr. Ohene-Frempong continued on to medical school at Yale, then went to New York Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan for his residency. He studied pediatric hematology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia before moving to the Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans, where he was associate professor of pediatrics.
In his six years at Tulane, he established the Tulane Sickle Cell Center of Southern Louisiana, a medical care facility, and helped the state health department develop a newborn-screening program for the disease.
Dr. Ohene-Frempong returned to Children’s Hospital in 1986 and remained there for 30 years before leaving to work full time in Ghana, at the Kumasi Center for Sickle Cell Disease, a research and treatment center. He was still based there when he returned to Philadelphia for cancer treatment.
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“He was very, very aware of the limitations of working in Africa,” Ms. Ohene-Frempong said. “His goal was to raise the standards of care. He said, ‘It can be done in America, and that is our goal here.’”
As part of that mission, Dr. Ohene-Frempong became president of the Sickle Cell Foundation of Ghana and the national coordinator for the American Society of Hematology’s Consortium on Newborn Screening in Africa.
His honors and accolades were many, including, from Ghana, the Order of the Volta in 2010 and the Millennium Excellence Award in Medicine in 2015. In the United States in 2020, he received the Assistant Secretary of Health Exceptional Service Medal, the highest civilian award given by the Public Health Service, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. The American Society for Hematology honored him in 2021 with its Stratton Award for Translational and Clinical Science.
But despite the progress that Dr. Ohene-Frempong and others had made in caring for people with sickle cell disease, his son, Kwame, did not survive it: He died in 2013 at age 40, the father of two young children.
In addition to his wife, Dr. Ohene-Frempong is survived by his daughter, Afia Ohene-Frempong; three brothers, Kwabena Ohene-Dokyi, Kwasi Ohene-Owusu and Reynolds Twumasi; a sister, Ama Ohene-Agyeiwaa Boateng; a grandson; and a granddaughter.
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Bill Russell, Who Transformed Pro Basketball, Dies at 88
A Hall of Famer who led the Celtics to 11 championships, he was “the single most devastating force in the history of the game,” his coach Red Auerbach said.
Even before the opening tipoff at Boston Celtics games, Bill Russell evoked domination. Other players ran onto the court for their introductions, but he walked on, slightly stooped.
“I’d look at everybody disdainfully, like a sleepy dragon who can’t be bothered to scare off another would-be hero,” he recalled. “I wanted my look to say, ‘Hey, the king’s here tonight.’ ”
Russell’s awesome rebounding triggered a Celtic fast break that overwhelmed the rest of the N.B.A. His quickness and his uncanny ability to block shots transformed the center position, once a spot for slow and hulking types, and changed the face of pro basketball.
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Russell, who propelled the Celtics to 11 N.B.A. championships, the final two when he became the first Black head coach in a major American sports league, died on Sunday. He was 88.
His death was announced by his family, who did not say where he died.
When Russell was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1975, Red Auerbach, who orchestrated his arrival as a Celtic and coached him on nine championship teams, called him “the single most devastating force in the history of the game.”
He was not alone in that view: In a 1980 poll of basketball writers (long before Michael Jordan and LeBron James entered the scene), Russell was voted nothing less than the greatest player in N.B.A. history.
Former Senator Bill Bradley, who faced Russell with the Knicks in the 1960s, viewed him as “the smartest player ever to play the game and the epitome of a team leader.”
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“At his core, Russell knew that he was different from other players — that he was an innovator and that his very identity depended on dominating the game,” Bradley wrote in reviewing Russell’s remembrances of Auerbach in “Red and Me: My Coach, My Lifelong Friend” (2009) for The New York Times.
In the decades that followed Russell’s retirement in 1969, when flashy moves delighted fans and team play was often an afterthought, his stature was burnished even more, remembered for his ability to enhance the talents of his teammates even as he dominated the action, and to do it without bravado: He disdained dunking or gesturing to celebrate his feats.
In those later years, his signature goatee now turned white, Russell reappeared on the court at springtime, presenting the most valuable player of the N.B.A. championship series with the trophy named for him in 2009.
Russell was remembered as well for his visibility on civil rights issues.
He took part in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and was seated in the front row of the crowd to hear the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech. He went to Mississippi after the civil rights activist Medgar Evers was murdered and worked with Evers’s brother, Charles, to open an integrated basketball camp in Jackson. He was among a group of prominent Black athletes who supported Muhammad Ali when Ali refused induction into the armed forces during the Vietnam War.
President Barack Obama awarded Russell the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, at the White House in 2011, honoring him as “someone who stood up for the rights and dignity of all men.”
In September 2017, following President Donald J. Trump’s calling for N.F.L. owners to fire players who were taking a knee during the national anthem to protest racial injustice, Russell posted a photo on Twitter in which he posed taking a knee while holding the medal.
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“What I wanted was to let those guys know I support them,” he told ESPN.
A Much-Decorated Man
Russell was the ultimate winner. He led the University of San Francisco to N.C.A.A. tournament championships in 1955 and 1956. He won a gold medal with the United States Olympic basketball team in 1956. He led the Celtics to eight consecutive N.B.A. titles from 1959 to 1966, far eclipsing the Yankees’ five straight World Series victories (1949 to 1953) and the Montreal Canadiens’ five consecutive Stanley Cup championships (1956 to 1960).
He was the N.B.A.’s most valuable player five times and an All-Star 12 times.
A reedy, towering figure at 6 feet 10 inches and 220 pounds, Russell was cagey under the basket, able to anticipate an opponent’s shots and gain position for a rebound. And if the ball caromed off the hoop, his tremendous leaping ability almost guaranteed that he’d grab it. He finished his career as the No. 2 rebounder in N.B.A. history, behind his longtime rival Wilt Chamberlain, who had three inches on him.
Russell pulled down 21,620 rebounds, an astonishing average of 22.5 per game, with a single-game high of 51 against the Syracuse Nationals (the forerunners of the Philadelphia 76ers) in 1960.
He didn’t have much of a shooting touch, but he scored 14,522 points — many on high-percentage, short left-handed hook shots — for an average of 15.1 per game. His blocked shots — the total is unrecorded, because such records were not kept in his era — altered games.
Beyond the court, Russell could appear aloof. He was bruised by the humiliations his family had faced when he was young in segregated Louisiana, and by widespread racism in Boston. When he joined the Celtics in 1956, he was their only Black player. Early in the 1960s, his home in Reading, Mass., was vandalized.
Russell’s primary allegiance was always to his teammates, not to the city of Boston or to the fans. Guarding his privacy and shunning displays of adulation, he refused to sign autographs for fans or even as keepsakes for his teammates. When the Celtics retired his No. 6 in March 1972, the event, at his insistence, was a private ceremony in Boston Garden. He ignored his election to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame — situated squarely in Celtics country, in Springfield, Mass. — and refused to attend the induction.
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“In each case, my intention was to separate myself from the star’s idea about fans, and fans’ ideas about stars,” Russell said in “Second Wind: The Memoirs of an Opinionated Man (1979),” written with Taylor Branch. “I have very little faith in cheers, what they mean and how long they will last, compared with the faith I have in my own love for the game.”
Racial Scars, a Mother Lost
William Felton Russell was born on Feb. 12, 1934, in Monroe, La., where his father, Charles, worked in a paper bag factory. He remembered a warm home life but a childhood seared by racism. He recalled that a police officer once threatened to arrest his mother, Katie, because she was wearing a stylish outfit like those favored by white women. A gas-station attendant sought to humble his father, while Bill was with him, by refusing to provide service, an episode that ended with Charles Russell chasing the man while brandishing a tire iron.
When Bill was 9 years old, the family moved to Oakland, Calif. His mother died when he was 12, leaving his father, who had opened a trucking business and then worked in a foundry, to bring up Bill and his brother, Charles Jr., teaching them, as Russell long remembered, to work hard and covet self-worth and self-reliance.
At McClymonds High School in Oakland, Russell became a starter on the basketball team as a senior, already emphasizing defense and rebounding. A former basketball player for the University of San Francisco, Hal DeJulio, who scouted for his alma mater, recognized Russell’s potential and recommended him to the coach, Phil Woolpert.
Russell was given a scholarship and became an All-American, teaming up with the guard K.C. Jones, a future Celtic teammate, in leading San Francisco to N.C.A.A. championships in his last two seasons. Following a loss to U.C.L.A. in Russell’s junior year, the team won 55 straight games. He averaged more than 20 points and 20 rebounds a game for his three varsity seasons.
“No one had ever played basketball the way I played it, or as well,” Russell told Sport magazine in 1963, recalling his college career. “They had never seen anyone block shots before. Now I’ll be conceited: I like to think I originated a whole new style of play.”
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In the mid-1950s, the Celtics had a highly talented team featuring Bob Cousy, the league’s greatest small man, and the sharpshooting Bill Sharman at guard and Ed Macauley, a fine shooter, up front. But lacking a dominant center, they had never won a championship.
The Rochester Royals owned the No. 1 selection in the 1956 N.B.A. draft, but they already had an outstanding big man, Maurice Stokes, and were unwilling to wage what their owner, Les Harrison, believed would be a bidding war for Russell with the Harlem Globetrotters, who were reportedly willing to offer him a lucrative deal. So the Royals drafted Sihugo Green, a guard from Duquesne.
The St. Louis Hawks had the No. 2 draft pick, but they, too, did not think they could afford Russell. Auerbach persuaded them to trade that selection to the Celtics for Macauley, a St. Louis native, and Cliff Hagan, a promising rookie. That enabled Boston to take Russell.
Russell did meet with the Globetrotters that spring but, as he stated in a January 1958 collaboration with Al Hirshberg for The Saturday Evening Post, he did not seriously consider signing with them. He found the prospect of yearlong worldwide travel unappealing and wrote how “their specialty is clowning and I had no intention of being billed as a funny guy in a basketball uniform.”
Russell led the United States Olympic team to a gold medal in the 1956 Melbourne Games, then joined the Celtics in December. Playing in 48 games as a rookie, he averaged 19.6 rebounds.
That Celtic team — with Russell, Cousy, Sharman, the high-scoring rookie Tom Heinsohn, the bruising Jim Loscutoff and Frank Ramsey — won the franchise’s first N.B.A. title, defeating the Hawks in the finals.
Enter Chamberlain
Russell captured his first M.V.P. award in his second season, but this time the Hawks beat the Celtics for the championship, pulling away after Russell injured an ankle in Game 3 of the finals. The next year, the Celtics won the title again, beginning their run of eight straight championships.
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In Russell’s fourth season, 1959-60, the 7-foot-1, 275-pound Chamberlain entered the N.B.A. with the Philadelphia Warriors. Chamberlain led the league in scoring as a rookie with 37.6 points per game and eclipsed Russell in rebounding, averaging 27 per game to Russell’s 24, but the Celtics were champions once more.
Russell was agile, Chamberlain the epitome of strength and power. Russell was usually outscored and out-rebounded by Chamberlain in their matchups, but the Celtics won most of those games.
“If I had played for the Celtics instead of Russell, I doubt they would have been as great,” Chamberlain was quoted as saying in 1996 when the N.B.A.’s 50 greatest players were selected to mark the league’s 50th season, though not ranked in any particular order.
As Chamberlain put it, “Bill Russell and the Celtics were the perfect fit.”
Russell, friendly with Chamberlain off the court, was complimentary in turn. “I know they talk about me winning more championships, but I don’t know how that can be held against Wilt,” he said. “We beat everybody. It wasn’t just Wilt.”
The Russell-Chamberlain rivalry was fierce. “Russell intimidated him,” Cousy recalled in “Cousy on the Celtic Mystique” (1988), written with Bob Ryan. “Wilt can say what he wants, but I used to watch Wilt muscle in against everyone else, but not against Russell.”
Russell’s tactic was to play close to Chamberlain, forcing him to lean away from the basket, change the angle of his fadeaway jump shots and release them farther from the basket than he liked.
Russell bested Chamberlain in another way: In his prime, as he told it, his annual salary was $100,001, $1 more than Chamberlain was making.
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Russell was an intense competitor, and though he contended that he was not nervous in the moments before games, he engaged in an often remarked upon ritual in the locker room.
“I threw up, but I was never sick,” he told The Boston Globe in 2009. “It was a way for my body to get rid of all excesses.”
As described by the Celtics’ forward John Havlicek, it was “a tremendous sound, almost as loud as his laugh.”
“He doesn’t do it much now, except when it’s an important game or an important challenge for him — someone like Chamberlain, or someone coming up that everyone’s touting,” Havlicek told Sports Illustrated in December 1968. “It’s a welcome sound, too, because it means he’s keyed up for the game, and around the locker room we grin and say, ‘Man, we’re going to be all right tonight.’”
“Russell made shot-blocking an art,” Auerbach recalled in “Red Auerbach: An Autobiography” (1977), written with Joe Fitzgerald. “He would pop the ball straight up and grab it like a rebound, or else redirect it right into the hands of one of his teammates, and we’d be off and running on the fast break. You never saw Russell bat a ball into the third balcony the way those other guys did.”
Russell was not the first Black head coach in professional sports, but he had the greatest impact as the first to be chosen, in 1966, to lead a team in one of America’s major sports leagues. Fritz Pollard, a star running back, had coached in the National Football League, but that was in the 1920s, when it was a fledgling operation. John McLendon coached the Cleveland Pipers of the American Basketball League in 1961-62, but the A.B.A. was a secondary attraction.
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The Celtics’ streak of eight consecutive titles was snapped in Russell’s first year as coach, but it took one of the N.B.A.’s greatest teams to do it. The 1966-67 Celtics had a 60-21 regular-season record, but they lost in the Eastern Conference playoff finals to the Philadelphia 76ers, who had gone 68-13 with a lineup that included Chamberlain, Luke Jackson, Chet Walker, Hal Greer and Billy Cunningham.
A Changed View of Boston
As the Celtic players from Russell’s rookie year retired, Auerbach found superb replacements, most notably Havlicek at forward and, at guard, Sam Jones and K.C. Jones, Russell’s old college teammate.
The Celtics won N.B.A. titles in Russell’s last two seasons, when he was their player-coach. He capped his career with a triumph in the 1969 N.B.A. finals over a Laker team that had obtained Chamberlain and also featured Jerry West and Elgin Baylor.
Russell could not easily shake his memories of Boston during his playing days, when the fate of the city’s de facto segregated schools became a national story.
“To me, Boston itself was a flea market of racism,” Russell wrote in “Second Wind.” “It had all varieties, old and new, and in their most virulent form. The city had corrupt, city-hall-crony racists, brick-throwing, send-’em-back-to-Africa racists, and in the university areas phony radical-chic racists (long before they appeared in New York).”
But as time passed the city changed, and so did his perception of it.
Russell helped promote Boston with a radio spot in the weeks leading up to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, which was held there. “I think there are a lot of things that are happening to make it an open city, where everybody’s included and there’s nobody that’s deemed unworthy,” he said.
Boston honored Russell in 2013 with a bronze statue in City Hall Plaza.
In his late years, Cousy became remorseful over his failure to speak out against the racism Russell faced when they were teammates, and in February 2016 he sent him a letter expressing regret.
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As related by Gary M. Pomerantz in his book “The Last Pass: Cousy, Russell, the Celtics, and What Matters in the End” (2018), Cousy did not hear from Russell until two and a half years had passed. Then Russell phoned him.
Cousy asked Russell if he had received the letter.
“Russ said he had,” Pomerantz wrote. “Nothing more was said about it. Cooz had hoped their conversation would rise to a more substantive level. Still, he had made his last pass to Russ. He felt at peace.”
Russell worked as an ABC Sports commentator for N.B.A. games in the early 1970s, his high-pitched cackling laugh on the air showing viewers a side of him that only his teammates had seen. Then he returned to coaching.
He became coach and general manager of the Seattle SuperSonics in 1973, taking over a team that had never been in the playoffs in its six seasons, and led them to a pair of playoff berths in his four seasons there.
He became the coach of the Sacramento Kings in 1987, but was removed in March 1988 with the team mired at 17-41; he was named vice president in charge of basketball operations. He was fired from that post in December 1989.
Long after his N.B.A. career had ended, Russell made himself more accessible and capitalized on commercial opportunities.
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In 1999, he agreed to a public ceremony at the Fleet Center — the successor to Boston Garden — for the 30th anniversary of his last championship team and his retirement as a player as well the second retirement of his number. The event was also a fund-raiser for the National Mentoring Partnership, whose programs he had helped develop as a board member.
“There are no other people’s kids in this country,” he told the crowd. “They’re the children of the nation, and I refuse to be at war with them. I’ll always do anything I can to make life better for a kid.”
He made commercials, signed autographs for serious collectors (for a fee) and delivered motivational speeches.
Russell married for the fourth time, to Jeannine Fiorito, in 2016. His first marriage, to Rose Swisher, ended in divorce, as did his second marriage, to Dorothy Anstett. His third wife, Marilyn Nault, died in 2009 at 59.
Russell had three children from his first marriage — William Jr., Jacob and Karen Kenyatta Russell. William Jr., known as Buddha, died in 2016 at 58. Russell’s brother, a playwright and screenwriter under the name Charlie L. Russell, died in 2013 at 81. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
Russell was uncompromising when it came to his principles. “There are two societies in this country, and I have to recognize it, to see life for what it is and not go stark, raving mad,” he told Sport magazine in 1963, referring to the racial divide. “I don’t work for acceptance. I am what I am. If you like it, that’s nice. If not, I couldn’t care less.”
He was also an immensely proud man.
“If you can take something to levels that very few other people can reach,” he told Sports Illustrated in 1999, “then what you’re doing becomes art.”
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Adam Wade, Network Game Show Pioneer, Is Dead at 87
As a singer, he had three Top 10 hits in 1961. As an actor, he had a long career in film and on television. As an M.C., he broke a racial barrier.
Adam Wade, a versatile, velvet-voiced crooner who scored three consecutive Billboard Top 10 hits in a single year, appeared in scores of films, plays and TV productions, and in 1975 became the first Black host of a network television game show, died on Thursday at his home in Montclair, N.J. He was 87.
His wife, Jeree Wade, a singer, actress and producer, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.
In May 1975, CBS announced that it would break a network television racial barrier by naming Mr. Wade the master of ceremonies of a weekly afternoon game show, “Musical Chairs.”
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Staged at the Ed Sullivan Theater in Manhattan and co-produced by the music impresario Don Kirshner, the program featured guest musical performances, with four contestants competing to complete the lyrics of songs and respond to questions about music. (Among the guest performers were groups like the Spinners and singers like Irene Cara.)
The novelty of a Black M.C. was not universally embraced: A CBS affiliate in Alabama refused to carry the show, and hate mail poured in — including, Mr. Wade told Connecticut Public Radio in 2014, a letter from a man “saying he didn’t want his wife sitting at home watching the Black guy hand out the money and the smarts.”
The show was canceled after less than five months. Still, Mr. Wade said, “It probably added 30 years to my career.”
That career began while he was working as a laboratory technician for Dr. Jonas E. Salk, the developer of the polio vaccine, and a songwriter friend invited him to New York to audition for a music publisher. He first recorded for Coed Records in 1958 and two years later moved to Manhattan, where he performed with the singer Freddy Cole, the brother of his idol Nat King Cole, and, rapidly ascending the show business ladder, opened for Tony Bennett and for the comedian Joe E. Lewis at the fashionable Copacabana nightclub.
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“Two years ago, he was Patrick Henry Wade, a $65-a-week aide on virus research experiments in the laboratory of Dr. Jonas E. Salk at the University of Pittsburgh,” The New York Times wrote in 1961. “Today he is Adam Wade, one of the country’s rising young singers in nightclubs and on records.”
That same year, he recorded three songs that soared to the upper echelons of the Billboard Hot 100 chart: “Take Good Care of Her” (which reached No. 7), “The Writing on the Wall” (No. 5) and “As if I Didn’t Know” (No. 10).
Patrick Henry Wade was born on March 17, 1935, in Pittsburgh to Pauline Simpson and Henry Oliver Wade Jr. He was raised by his grandparents, Henry Wade, a janitor at the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research (now part of Carnegie Mellon University), and Helen Wade.
He attended Virginia State University on a basketball scholarship, but, although he had dreamed of playing for the Harlem Globetrotters, dropped out after three years and went to work at Dr. Salk’s laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh. Undecided about whether to accept the recording contract that Coed offered, Mr. Wade consulted Dr. Salk.
“He told me he had this opportunity,” Dr. Salk told The Times at the time. “I told him he must search his own soul to find out what is in him that wants to come out.”
He changed his first name — because his agent said there were too many Pats in show business — and had his first hit with the song “Ruby” early in 1960. His smooth vocal style was often compared to that of Johnny Mathis, but Mr. Wade said he was primarily influenced by an earlier boyhood idol, Nat King Cole.
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“So I guess that tells you how good my imitating skills were,” he said.
He appeared on TV on soap operas including “The Guiding Light” and “Search for Tomorrow” and sitcoms including “The Jeffersons” and “Sanford & Son.” He was also seen in “Shaft” (1971), “Come Back Charleston Blue” (1972) and other films, and onstage in a 2008 touring company of “The Color Purple.”
He and his wife ran Songbird, a company that produced African American historical revues, including the musical “Shades of Harlem,” which was staged Off Broadway at the Village Gate in 1983.
The couple last performed at an anniversary party this year.
In addition to Ms. Wade, whom he married in 1989, he is survived by their son, Jamel, a documentary filmmaker; three children, Sheldon Wade, Patrice Johnson Wade and Michael Wade, from his marriage to Kay Wade, which ended in 1973; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
For all his success in show business, Mr. Wade said he was particularly proud that 40 years after dropping out of college he earned a bachelor’s degree from Lehman College and a master’s in theater history and criticism from Brooklyn College, both constituents of the City University of New York. He taught speech and theater at Long Island University and at Bloomfield College in New Jersey.
“I was the first one in my family to go to college,” he told Connecticut Public Radio. “I promised my grandmother back then that I would finish college someday. Many years later, I kept that promise.”
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Albert Woodfox, Survivor of 42 Years in Solitary Confinement, Dies at 75
His term in solitary was perhaps the longest in American history. He described how he kept his sanity, and dignity, in an acclaimed memoir.
Albert Woodfox, who spent 42 years in solitary confinement — possibly more time than any other prisoner in all of American history — yet emerged to win acclaim with a memoir that declared his spirit unbroken, died on Thursday in New Orleans. He was 75.
His lead lawyer, George Kendall, said the cause was Covid-19. Mr. Kendall added that Mr. Woodfox also had a number of pre-existing organ conditions.
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Mr. Woodfox was placed in solitary confinement in 1972 after being accused of murdering Brent Miller, a 23-year-old corrections officer. A tangled legal ordeal ensued, including two convictions, both overturned, and three indictments stretching over four decades.
The case struck most commentators as problematic. No forensic evidence linked Mr. Woodfox to the crime, so the authorities’ argument depended on witnesses, who over time were discredited or proved unreliable.
“The facts of the case were on his side,” The New York Times editorial board wrote in a 2014 opinion piece about Mr. Woodfox.
But Louisiana’s attorney general, Buddy Caldwell, saw things differently. “This is the most dangerous person on the planet,” he told NPR in 2008.
Mr. Woodfox’s punishment defied imagination, not only for its monotony — he was alone 23 hours a day in a six-by-nine-foot cell — but also for its agonies and humiliations. He was gassed and beaten, he wrote in a memoir, “Solitary” (2019), in which he described how he had kept his sanity, and dignity, while locked up alone. He was strip-searched with needless, brutal frequency.
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His plight first received national attention when he became known as one of the “Angola Three,” men held continuously in solitary confinement for decades at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, which is commonly called Angola, after a slave plantation that once occupied the site.
In 2005, a federal judge wrote that the length of time the men had spent in solitary confinement went “so far beyond the pale” that there seemed not to be “anything even remotely comparable in the annals of American jurisprudence.”
Mr. Woodfox would spend more than another decade in solitary before becoming, in 2016, the last of the three men to be released from prison.
His first stint at Angola came in 1965, after he was convicted of a series of minor crimes committed as a teenager. The prison was notoriously harsh, even to the point of conjuring the days of slavery. Black prisoners, like Mr. Woodfox, did field work by hand, overseen by white prison guards on horseback, shotguns across their laps. New inmates were often inducted into a regime of sexual slavery that was encouraged by guards.
Released after eight months, he was soon charged with car theft, leading to another eight months at Angola. After that, he embarked on a darker criminal career, beating and robbing people.
In 1969, Mr. Woodfox was convicted again, this time for armed robbery, and sentenced to 50 years. By then a seasoned lawbreaker, he managed to sneak a gun into the courthouse where he was being sentenced and escape. He fled to New York City, landing in Harlem.
A few months later he was incarcerated again, this time in the Tombs, the Manhattan jail, where he spent about a year and a half.
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It proved to be a turning point, he wrote in his memoir. At the Tombs, he met members of the Black Panther Party, who governed his tier of cells not by force but by sharing food. They held discussions, treating people respectfully and intelligently, he wrote. They argued that racism was an institutional phenomenon, infecting police departments, banks, universities and juries.
“It was as if a light went on in a room inside me that I hadn’t known existed,” Mr. Woodfox wrote. “I had morals, principles and values I never had before.”
He added, “I would never be a criminal again.”
He was sent back to Angola in 1971 thinking himself a reformed man. But his most serious criminal conviction — for murdering the Angola corrections officer in 1972, which he denied — still lay ahead of him, and with it four decades in solitary, a term broken for only about a year and a half in the 1990s while he awaited retrial.
The other two members of the Angola Three, Robert King and Herman Wallace, were also Panthers and began their solitary confinement at Angola the same year as Mr. Woodfox. The three became friends by shouting to one another from their cells. They were “our own means of inspiration to one another,” Mr. Woodfox wrote. In his spare time, he added, “I turned my cell into a university, a hall of debate, a law school.”
He taught one inmate how to read, he said, by instructing him in how to sound out words in a dictionary. He told him to shout to him at any hour of the day or night if he could not understand something.
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Albert Woodfox was born on Feb. 19, 1947, in New Orleans to Ruby Edwards, who was 17. He never had a relationship with his biological father, Leroy Woodfox, he wrote, but for much of his childhood he considered a man who later married his mother, a Navy chef named James B. Mable, his “daddy.”
When Albert was 11, Mr. Mable retired from the Navy and the family moved to La Grange, N.C. Mr. Mable, Mr. Woodfox recalled, began drinking and beating Ms. Edwards. She fled the family home with Albert and two of his brothers, taking them back to New Orleans.
As a boy, Albert shoplifted bread and canned goods when there was no food in the house. He dropped out of school in the 10th grade. His mother tended bar and occasionally worked as a prostitute, and Albert grew to loathe her.
“I allowed myself to believe that the strongest, most beautiful and most powerful woman in my life didn’t matter,” he wrote in his memoir.
His mother died in 1994, while he was in prison. He was not allowed to attend her funeral.
The first of the Angola Three to be let out of prison was Mr. King, whose conviction was overturned in 2001. The second, Mr. Wallace, was freed in 2013 because he had liver cancer. He died three days later.
In a deal with prosecutors, Mr. Woodfox was released in 2016 in exchange for pleading no contest to a manslaughter charge in the 1972 killing. By then he had been transferred out of Angola.
His incarceration over, the first thing he wanted to do was visit his mother’s grave.
“I told her that I was free now and I loved her,” he wrote. “It was more painful than anything I experienced in prison.”
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Mr. Woodfox is survived by his brothers, James, Haywood, Michael and Donald Mable; a daughter, Brenda Poole, from a relationship he had in his teenage years; three grandchildren; four great-grandchildren; and his life partner, Leslie George.
Ms. George was a journalist who began reporting on Mr. Woodfox’s case in 1998 and met him in 1999. They became a couple when he was released from prison.
Ms. George co-wrote Mr. Woodfox’s book, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction. In a review in The Times, Dwight Garner called “Solitary” “uncommonly powerful”; in The Times Book Review, the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams described it as “above mere advocacy or even memoir,” belonging more “in the realm of stoic philosophy.”
After being released, Mr. Woodfox had to relearn how to walk down stairs, how to walk without leg irons, how to sit without being shackled. But in an interview with The Times right after his release, he spoke of having already freed himself years earlier.
“When I began to understand who I was, I considered myself free,” he said. “No matter how much concrete they use to hold me in a particular place, they couldn’t stop my mind.”
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Zawahiri, Ayman al-
Ayman al-Zawahiri, also spelled Ayman al-Ẓawāhirī, also called ʿAbd al-Muʿizz, (b. June 19, 1951, Giza, Kingdom of Egypt — d. July 31, 2022, Kabul, Afghanistan), was an Egyptian physician and militant who became one of the major ideologues of al-Qaeda. Zawahiri led al-Qaeda from 2011 until his death in 2022.
Zawahiri was raised in Maʿādī, Egypt, several miles south of Cairo. Although his parents were from prominent families, Zawahiri and his siblings were raised in a relatively humble environment. Zawahiri was a pious youth. As a student, he was greatly influenced by the work of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian writer who was one of the foremost figures in modern Sunni Islamic revivalism. By the age of 15, Zawahiri had established a group dedicated to the overthrow of the Egyptian government in favor of Islamic rule.
Zawahiri then studied at Cairo University’s medical school, where he specialized in surgery. There he also continued his clandestine cactivities. He graduated in 1974 and then served for three years as an army surgeon. In 1980–81 he traveled as a relief worker with the Red Crescent to Peshawar, Pakistan, where he treated refugees affected by the Afghan War. During that time he made several cross-border trips into Afghanistan, where he witnessed the warfare firsthand.
After returning to Egypt, Zawahiri was one of several hundred militants arrested in the wake of the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in October 1981. Zawahiri was convicted of illegal arms possession and imprisoned for three years. During that time he was subjected to torture by intelligence officers interested in information about his contacts, an experience that intensified his militancy. In 1984, Zawahiri was released from prison. The following year he left for Saudi Arabia. From Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, he returned to Peshawar and then moved on to Afghanistan. During this period, Zawahiri became acquainted with Osama bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi who had joined the Afghan resistance to the Soviets. In 1988, Zawahiri was present at the founding of al-Qaeda.
In the early 1990s, Zawahiri assumed leadership of the militant group Egyptain Islamic Jihad (EIJ). Bin Laden had departed for Sudan in 1992, and Zawahiri ultimately joined him there. Sudan served as a base for the training of militants and for attacks on Egyptian targets, including attacks on government officials and on the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan. In June 1995, an unsuccessful attempt was made to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Under international pressure, the Sudanese eventually expelled Zawahiri and bin Laden, along with their followers.
Zawahiri’s next movements are unclear. he appears to have traveled to European countries that included Switzerland, Bulgaria, and the Netherlands. In late 1996 he was arrested by Russian officials while illegally crossing the border en route to Chechnya, where he planned to launch a new base for EIJ. Although he was jailed for six months, Russian agents were apparently unaware of his identity until after his release.
In 1998, Zawahiri and bin Laden forged a formal alliance, and in June 2001 EIJ and al-Qaeda were merged. Zawahiri was closely affiliated with both the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000 and the attacks of September 11, 2001. Zawahiri gradually became al-Qaeda’s chief spokesman, issuing commentary on issues such as the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the 2006 warfare between Hezbollah and Israel. In 2009, the United States Department of State determined that Zawahiri appeared to be al-Qaeda’s leading decision maker, while bin Laden reportedly occupied a figurehead status.
Zawahiri assumed formal leadership of al-Qaeda in June 2011, following bin Laden’s death during an American commando raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, the previous month. The group struggled to reclaim its relevance and maintain its organizational integrity after Zawahiri took the reins. Al-Qaeda's affiliate in Iraq, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL); also called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria [ISIS]), bucked Zawahiri’s management in 2013. The Nusrah Front, al-Qaeda’s most prominent affiliate in the Syrian Civil War, rejected Zawahiri’s command in 2016. Both groups ultimately severed ties with al-Qaeda.
After the Taliban gained control of Afghanistan in 2021, and after the United States withdrew its remaining troops, Zawahiri took up residence in Kabul, the capital city of Afghanistan. The United States, after learning his whereabouts, killed Ayman al-Zawahiri with a drone strike on July 31, 2022.
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