Lives

New Crisis, The, May/Jun 2001 by Petrie, Phil

John Thomas Biggers, 76, an artist and educator who chronicled the African American experience in paintings, murals and illustrations, died in Houston on Jan. 25. Widely acclaimed for his symbolic murals based on African American and African cultural themes, Biggers founded and worked in the art department at Texas Southern University in Houston. He studied under famed art educator Viktor Lowenfeld at Hampton Institute and Pennsylvania State University. In 1995, a retrospective of Biggers' work traveled to a number of art museums across the United States.

Annie Martin Gibson, 90, the last surviving petitioner who in 1949 signed the document that began the legal action Leading to the desegregation of American public schools, died in South Carolina on March 6. Gibson, the Late Eliza and Harry Briggs and 18 others, sued for the right to send their children to schools with the same resources as their white neighbors. The suit, Briggs v. Elliott, eventually merged with Brown v. Board of Education.

Charles Jackson, 55, editor-at-- large for the Oakland Tribune, died in San Francisco on March 7. The 35-- year news veteran was a mentor to young reporters and a firebrand who challenged the status quo in newsrooms. A graduate of Wichita State University, while he was a student he worked at the Wichita Eagle-Beacon in Kansas. Jackson was an editor at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, his hometown paper, The Washington Post and the Dallas Times Herald. For 13 summers he taught a minority journalism workshop at Texas Christian University and in 1986 became managing editor of the Dallas Weekly, an African American community newspaper. Jackson was director of the NewsWatch project for San Francisco State University's Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism and taught minority journalists at the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education in Oakland, Calif.

John Lewis, 80, pianist and musical director of the Modern Jazz Quartet (MJQ) from its inception in 1952 until its temporary breakup in 1974, died March 29 in New York City. A prolific composer, Lewis used the MJQ, one of the most influential groups in jazz, as an outlet for his blend of bop, blues and Bach. Lewis can be heard on the Miles Davis classic "Birth of Cool."

Willie Stargell, 61, the Legendary Pittsburgh Pirate and Baseball Hall of Famer, died in North Carolina on April 9. Stargell was a seven-time All Star who hit 475 homers and drove in more than 1,500 runs. No Pirate in the team's 115-year history posted greater numbers or had more extra-base hits. Stargell was the MVP of the 1979 World Series, the Last in which the club competed. His seven extra-base hits in that series remains a record. Stargell played 21 seasons, from 1962 to 1982, aLL as a Pittsburgh Pirate, with career totals including 11 grand slams and 2,232 hits.

Leon Sullivan, 78, the retired Philadelphia minister who led the movement for U.S. businesses to divest from apartheid-era South Africa, died on April 24 in Scottsdale, Ariz., where he had lived for the past 20 years. In the 1960s Sullivan organized boycotts of Philadelphia companies that refused to hire Black workers, using the slogan, "Don't buy where you don't work." When the companies relented, Sullivan started a training facility, the Opportunities Industrialization Center (OIC), to train city residents for the jobs. Opened in 1964, the successful center eventually expanded to 142 locations in the United States and abroad. (Earlier this year, Sullivan turned the operations of the OIC over to Rev. Staccato Powell, who now serves as the organization's president and CEO.)

Sullivan was the first African American named to a major corporate board when General Motors, then the biggest company in the United States and the largest employer of Blacks in South Africa, appointed him a director. After a 1975 trip to South Africa, he drafted the Sullivan Principles, a corporate code of conduct that called on companies to pledge equal treatment and fair employment practices and access to training and promotion opportunities for Black workers in the country. Top firms, including GM, adopted the principles and more than 100 withdrew from South Africa. In 1986, Congress passed the Anti-apartheid Act, which embodied Sullivan's principles, over President Ronald Reagan's veto. Sullivan's many honors include the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award.

During a one-week period four members of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), the organization of Black newspaper publishers, died. Les Humphrey, 75, publisher of the Pensacola Voice in Florida, died on Jan. 28; Mary Simpson, 77, publisher of the Florida Star News, died Jan. 29; Virginia Taylor, 62, founder and publisher of the Kirsat County Dispatch, the Northwest Dispatch and the Thurston County Dispatch in Washington state, died February 1; and Lecia SwannRoss, 39, who founded the Ebony Tribune in Oklahoma, died Feb.3.

Also, Danzine Kent, 51, a nationally known, Washington D.C.-based photographer whose work appeared in a number of Black newspapers, died on Jan. 31.