A Final Farewell

Howard Manly

The last year saw the passing of some of the nation’s foremost African Americans. From Ossie Davis, the elegant actor who spoke at Malcolm X’s funeral, to Richard Pryor, the comedian who made us laugh and think at the same time, 2005 was a profoundly sad year.

Rosa Parks. Luther Vandross. August Wilson. C. Delores Tucker. Shirley Chisholm. Ellen S. Jackson. Dr. Kenneth Clark. Johnnie Cochran. John H. Johnson.

Their contributions to American society have made the world a better place and their collective wisdom and fighting spirit will be missed for generations to come.

The life of Ellen S. Jackson is symbolic of her generation. Born and raised in Roxbury, she once said that she knew her children would face all sorts of obstacles in their individual attempts to succeed in the Boston public school system during the tumultuous 1960s. Jackson did more than simply bemoan a problem. She fought for a solution and created Operation Exodus, the highly successful program that began a voluntary effort to integrate schools. That program became METCO which is still in operation today.

Dr. Smooth

In a career spanning four decades, soul singer Luther Vandross created music that millions of fans related to as their soundtrack to love, life and pain. Throughout the years he has released 14 albums, won eight Grammy awards (four of which were for his final album, “Dance With My Father”) and sold a total of 25 million records worldwide.

Vandross was born and raised in a housing project is New York City, and began writing music at an early age. By the 1970s, he was singing back-up for David Bowie, which opened him up to perform with artists such as Barbra Streisand, Ringo Starr and Chaka Khan. He released his debut album in 1981 and won his first Grammy in 1990.

Vandross battled health problems throughout his career, having trouble managing his weight as well as fighting hypertension and diabetes. He suffered a stroke in April 2003, from which he never fully recovered, and died in July of this year at the age of 54. Vandross will best be remembered for bringing back old-school romance to audiences of all ages with his smooth, mellow voice and classic love songs.

Standing tall

Rosa Parks wasn’t just tired after a long day of work. She didn’t, in a moment of exhaustion, refuse to give up her seat and inadvertently put the wheels in motion to a revolution out of fatigue. The truth is that Parks was an activist who was practicing civil disobedience as a response to the continued humiliation that decades of slavery and Jim Crow imposed on black people.

Parks, who served as the secretary of the NAACP and later as an advisor to the NAACP Youth Council, became the catalyst that led to the 381-day Montgomery bus boycott and a 1956 Supreme Court ruling that declared segregation on transportation unconstitutional.

In her 1994 book, “Quiet Strength,” Parks writes that, “Four decades later I am still uncomfortable with the credit given to me for starting the bus boycott. I would like [people] to know I was not the only person involved. I was just one of many who fought for freedom.”

Parks has won numerous awards and accolades for her civil rights work, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999, and she has traveled all over the world. She died in Oct. in Detroit at the age of 92.

Ordinary folks

The names of his clients were legendary. O.J. Simpson. Lenny Bruce. Michael Jackson. P-Diddy. Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant sodomized with a broken broomstick by two New York City policemen. But before all those highly publicized cases were what legendary lawyer Johnnie Cochran called “ordinary folks.” Cochran made his name in the late 1970s with scores of police brutality and other criminal cases. In his office he displayed copies of the multi-million dollar checks he had won for people who said police abused them. “People in New York and Los Angeles, especially mothers in the African American community, are more afraid of the police injuring or killing their children than they are of muggers on the corner,” he once said. The one case that he was particular proud involved the former Black Panther Party member Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt. Cochran’s defense of Pratt in 1972 ended with Pratt’s conviction on murder charges. But Cochran never gave up. The decision was eventually reversed in 1999 and Pratt was released after serving 25 years in prison.

First Lady of the House

Shirley Chisholm spent her life working to break down race- and gender-based discrimination. She was the daughter of Caribbean parents who had immigrated to New York and, as a Brooklyn native, she dealt with the harsh realities of being black in America.

She became a student at Brooklyn College and began fighting discrimination by organizing other students. She soon became involved in local politics, and in 1964 became the first black woman to be elected to Congress. In 1972, she campaigned as a Democratic candidate for president against Richard Nixon. Despite her loss, she stated that, “I am not the candidate of black America. I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country. I am not the candidate of any political bosses or special interests. I am the candidate of the people.”

Chisholm retired after seven terms in Congress and worked as an academic in Massachusetts for several years. She died in Jan. at the age of 80.

More than simple laughs

Given the way the two men lived their lives and acted on stage, it’s hard to believe that that Richard Pryor once looked up to Bill Cosby. Pryor readily admitted that Cosby was his role model. But Pryor had many influences, including his close friend Huey Newton, the charismatic leader of the Black Panther Party. Pryor was also influenced by the philosophy of Malcolm X. It’s no surprise then that Pryor’s routines often had a racial edge and that his comic genius enabled him to make people laugh and think at the same time. As Bill Cosby himself was later to say of him: “He finds laughter where none has a right to exist.” The Guardian newspaper said it better in its obituary shortly after Pryor died in December. “Pryor was one in a long line of black American comedians, each of whom was a little franker in his jokes, a little closer to the truth about black underground life in white American society,” the Guardian said. “But his outbursts, unique in American show business, would have been unbearable but for the brilliant satirical wit that flashed like sunlight through his angry gloom, and the human touch he displayed in his hilarious anecdotes.”

The Media Mogul

As publisher of “Jet” and “Ebony, John H. Johnson founded the world’s largest black-owned publishing company. He lived by a simple creed: “I believe…that living on the edge, living in and out through your fear is the summit of life, and that people who refuse to take that dare condemn themselves to a life of living death,” Johnson wrote in “The Soul of Success: Inspiring Quotations for Entrepreneurs.” Back in 1942, as the story goes, Johnson had a business plan to start a magazine and asked a bank for $500. He heard what most blacks heard all of the time, “No.” Johnson then went back to the bank and told them that he wanted to go on vacation instead, and used his mother’s furniture as collateral. The rest is history. Johnson had a clear vision for his magazines. “We wanted to give blacks a new sense of sombodiness, a new sense of self-respect,” Johnson would say later. “We wanted to tell them who they were and what they could do. We believed blacks needed positive images to fulfill their potentialities. Johnson wasn’t always so positive. His decision to publish the grotesque photograph of Emmett Till, the 15-year-old Chicago boy lynched in Mississippi in 1955 for supposedly whistling at a white woman, sealed Johnson’s fate as a powerful voice against racism.

The playwright

He chronicled the dreams, frustration, anguishes and hopes of black America and presented theatre-goers with the unprecedented experience of seeing racial discourse brought to life on stage. Playwright August Wilson, born Frederick August Kittel, was a high school drop-out who left school because of a teacher who thought his writing capabilities to be improbable and accused him of cheating.

Wilson, the son of an African American mother and absentee German father, grew up in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, in which nine of his ten most famous plays are set. He told an interviewer once that “Pittsburgh is a very hard city, especially if you’re black,” and another, “when I was 22 years old, each day had to be continually negotiated. It was rough.”

“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” was Wilson’s first successful play and went from premiering at the Yale Reparatory Theatre to appearing on Broadway. Each of Wilson’s plays represented a different decade in the black struggle, and the epic became known as the Pittsburgh Cycle. Wilson’s plays not only brought race to the forefront in theatre, but also created numerous opportunities for black actors.

Wilson died after battling liver cancer in Oct. of this year, but not before finishing his final installment of the Pittsburgh Cycle, “Radio Golf,” which will be performed on Broadway in the 2006-2007 season.