Died

Jet, May 31, 1999

Wynona M. Lipman, 67, who became the first Black woman to be elected to the New Jersey Senate in 1971, of cancer at her home in Newark, NJ ... Mae Bertha Carter, 76, who who defied gunfire and the loss of employment to send her children to previously all-White public schools in Mississippi, eventually winning a legal battle, and recounted the family's battle in the book Silver Rights, of cancer at her home in Drew, MS....

William H. Armstrong, 87, a teacher and writer best known for his 1969 children's novel Sounder, at his home in Kent, CT ... William Bowen, 70, a former state senator who spent nearly 25 years in the Ohio senate before he left the Legislature in 1995, of cancer in Columbus, OH ... Herbert Young, 112, who in February received France's highest award, the Legion of Honor, for his service in World War I, at his home in Harlem ... Melba Liston, 73, a pioneering jazz trombonist, composer and arranger who worked with bands led by Dizzy Gillespie and Quincy Jones and shared a long collaboration with pianist Randy Weston, following a series of strokes in Los Angeles ... Leon Thomas, 61, an Illinois-born jazz singer known for his wordless yodeling style who developed the technique which he later called "soularphone," of heart failure as a result of leukemia, in a hospital in the Bronx, NY.