M. Caldwell Butler, a Key Vote Against Nixon

Mr. Butler in 1973 led a group of schoolchildren to hand Nixon a letter thanking him for ending the Vietnam War, and he and his wife had been the president’s guests in the White House family quarters. 

His party’s initial response to the investigation of a possible presidential cover-up of the break-in at the Democratic Party’s headquarters in the Watergate complex in June 1972 had been dismissive.

But by the steamy summer of 1974, mounting evidence — including secretly made tapes of Oval Office conversations acquired by subpoena — prompted seven Republicans and three conservative Southern Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee to waver in their support of Nixon. They self-effacingly called themselves “the unholy alliance.”

 From his seat on the committee, Mr. Butler on July 25, 1974, dramatically announced that he would vote for impeachment — a statement that many treated as a bellwether. “For years we Republicans have campaigned against corruption and misconduct,” he said. “But Watergate is our shame.”

Mary McGrory, the syndicated columnist, called Mr. Butler’s words “the single most fiery and liberating sentence spoken” during the Watergate investigations. “He was the first Republican to slash the comforting myth that somebody else, of unknown party origin, was to blame,” she wrote.

Most of Mr. Butler’s views during his 10 years in Congress mirrored those of his conservative constituency, and he fought to prohibit an extension of the Voting Rights Act on the ground that its restrictions were no longer needed in Virginia — a position the Supreme Court accepted this year. But he favored programs to help the poor obtain legal representation and a woman’s right to have an abortion, stands many considered liberal.

Manley Caldwell Butler, a gangly, quick-witted man, was born in Roanoke, Va., on June 2, 1925. He was descended from John Marshall, the Supreme Court justice, and served on the board of the John Marshall Foundation. One of his great-grandfathers was James Alexander Walker, a Virginian whom Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate general, promoted to brigadier general from his deathbed. 

In Congress, Mr. Butler helped win legislation restoring Gen. Robert E. Lee’s American citizenship, which Lee had lost when he joined the rebelling states. “If Robert E. Lee is not worthy of being a United States citizen, then who is?” Mr. Butler said in an interview with The New York Times.

I can think of many others, myself.

Mr. Butler’s caustic wit showed in a 1982 hearing of a House subcommittee looking into the legal corporation. He attacked President Ronald Reagan’s appointees to the corporation’s board for charging the government consulting fees.

“I’m a Republican and we bring in these Republicans to take charge of this corporation in an effort to reform it,” he said, “and it sounds an awful lot like the first thing they do was to go and put all four feet and a snout in the trough.”

Amen.

Maya Angelou, Lyrical Witness of the Jim Crow South

Continue reading the main story Video

Maya Angelou, the memoirist, poet and author of “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” died Wednesday. Her manuscripts are being preserved at the Harlem-based branch of the New York Public Library. Credit Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press

 

 Ms. Angelou in 1991, dancing with the poet Amiri Baraka, who died in January. Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times 

 

Ms. Angelou goes on to recount her marriage to a Greek sailor, Tosh Angelos. (Throughout her life, she was cagey about the number of times she married — it appears to have been at least three — for fear, she said, of appearing frivolous.)

After the marriage dissolved, she embarked on a career as a calypso dancer and singer under the name Maya Angelou, a variant of her married name. A striking stage presence — she was six feet tall — she occasionally partnered in San Francisco with Alvin Ailey in a nightclub act known as Al and Rita.

But she remained best known for her memoirs, a striking fact because she had never set out to be a memoirist. Near the end of “A Song Flung Up to Heaven,” Ms. Angelou recalls her response when Robert Loomis, who would become her longtime editor at Random House, first asked her to write an autobiography.

Still planning to be a playwright and poet, she demurred. Cannily, Mr. Loomis called her again.

“You may be right not to attempt autobiography, because it is nearly impossible to write autobiography as literature,” he said. “Almost impossible.”

Ms. Angelou replied, “I’ll start tomorrow.”

 

Chuck Stone, 89, Fiery Columnist

Chuck Stone, whose columns for The Philadelphia Daily News denouncing racism, political corruption and police brutality inspired such trust that wanted criminals sometimes surrendered to him rather than to the police and the authorities called on him to mediate prison crises, died on Sunday in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 89.

The death was confirmed by his daughter Krishna, who said her father had congestive heart failure. He had been a professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina.

Mr. Stone, who was a writer and editor for The Daily News from 1972 to ‘91, was the paper’s first black columnist and among the founders, in 1975, of the National Association of Black Journalists. He was also its first president.

Mr. Stone wrote colorful, propulsive prose with a wide range of cultural references, as likely to quote Rousseau or Abraham Lincoln as to break into the argot of black youth; he had street and statehouse cred.

His subject range was expansive as well — national and local politics, black history, civic and individual morality and always issues of race. Earlier in his career, when he worked for black newspapers in New York, Chicago and Washington — he covered the White House for The Washington Afro-American during the Kennedy administration — he was a fierce advocate for civil rights and black power. As a writer and editor for The New York Age, a paper based in Harlem, he befriended Malcolm X and Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr., for whom he subsequently worked as an aide. He was fired from his job as editor in chief of The Chicago Defender when he refused to relent in his withering criticism of the city’s mayor, Richard J. Daley.

By the time he landed in Philadelphia, Mr. Stone was no less passionate, but his views had become more nuanced and independent. In the 1970s, he persistently criticized the city’s white mayor, Frank Rizzo, the former police commissioner whose department had an especially contentious relationship with the black community, and in the 1980s he persistently criticized the black mayor, Wilson Goode, for ineptitude, especially in 1985, after the mayor authorized the police bombing of a rowhouse inhabited by a radical black group known as MOVE, a calamitous event that started a destructive fire, killing 11 people, including five children.

Liberal on most social issues, Mr. Stone was in favor of the death penalty, and though he was a tenacious enemy of institutional racism, he also admonished blacks to disdain blame and seize opportunities to improve their own lives. In a 1982 column, he wrote about a coming light-heavyweight match between two local boxers, Dwight Braxton and Matthew Saad Muhammad, who had been locked up but had turned their lives around.

“I know a lot of you aren’t Dwight Braxtons or Matthew Saad Muhammads and you can’t find a job,” Mr. Stone wrote. “Hell, I’ll tell you how bad it is. Over 52 percent of all black teenagers are unemployed. ‘The world is a ghetto.’ But that’s no reason to rob a store or burglarize somebody’s home. You young brothers never think about how you would like it if another brother raped YOUR sister or burglarized YOUR home or snatched YOUR momma’s pocketbook. Black people are in terrible trouble as a race because there are not more Braxtons and Muhammads who go straight.”

“Chuck Stone was a product of his own design,” Elmer Smith, a member of The Daily News editorial board, wrote after Mr. Stone’s death, adding: “He didn’t study journalism. Objectivity was a polite convention that he didn’t have time for. He was a cause crusader because that’s what his people needed.”

Mr. Smith continued: “He was proudly and self-consciously black, which gave those of us who followed the confidence to be what we were and to cultivate our own distinctive voices.”

Civil Rights pioneer

After being struck with brass knuckles and bicycle chains, Shuttlesworth said, the doctor was amazed he wasn't in worse shape.

"I said, 'Well, doctor, the Lord knew I lived in a hard town, so he gave me a hard head,' " he said.

It was on display every time he went head to head with Birmingham's racist police commissioner, Bull Connor.

"He would lead demonstrations, and he would call Bull Connor and say, 'Bull, I will be on such and such corner; if you want to be part of history, be there,' " Huntley said.

Clara Luper

Her name does not resonate like that of Rosa Parks, and she did not garner the kind of national attention that a group of black students did when they took seats at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., in February 1960. But Clara Luper was a seminal figure in the sit-ins of the civil rights movement.

Executive Remade Westinghouse as CBS

A former Navy nuclear engineer, Michael Jordan set new courses for two of the largest companies in the country. Mr. Jordan, who died Tuesday at age 73, was a top PepsiCo Inc. executive before he transformed Westinghouse Electric Corp. in the mid-1990s from a foundering industrial giant into a leading media company. He renamed it CBS Corp. after acquiring the Tiffany network. And coaxed from retirement in 2003, Mr. Jordan led a turnaround at Electronic Data Systems Inc., an information-technology giant. In each case, the company he had led was sold once he had reshaped it. CBS Corp. went to Viacom in a 2000 deal valued at $44 billion, and EDS to Hewlett-Packard Co. in 2008 for $13.9 billion.

"What I like about a crisis situation is you don't have to pussyfoot around," he told the Dallas Morning News in 2007, shortly before retiring from EDS. "When you step into a mess like this, you just start kicking a—, taking names, and changing things."

That's leadership; we could use some of it now, indeed.

The changes at Westinghouse were profound. When Mr. Jordan was brought in as chief executive in 1993, the venerable manufacturer of consumer goods and defense and nuclear-power equipment was experiencing record losses, largely weighed down by its financial-services subsidiary. Mr. Jordan sold off large parts of the company, then in 1995 surprised analysts when he doubled down on the company's media holdings by acquiring CBS for $5.4 billion in cash. A year later, he acquired Infinity Broadcasting, a national radio giant known for its shock jocks. The transformation of Westinghouse became complete in 1997. He changed its name to CBS and moved the headquarters to New York, ensconcing himself in the office last occupied by the network's builder, William Paley. It had sat empty since Mr. Paley's death in 1990. The office choice was a dramatic gesture for a man whom Fortune had once declared charisma-challenged.

Born in Kansas City, Mo., Mr. Jordan attended Yale and studied chemical engineering at Princeton. He left before finishing his doctorate to run a soap factory for Procter & Gamble Co. Drafted into the Navy in 1959, he studied nuclear engineering and joined the staff of Adm. Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear submarine program.

In 1964, Mr. Jordan joined McKinsey & Co., where his clients included Westinghouse. He joined PepsiCo in the mid-1970s and became CEO of the company's Frito-Lay division. After serving as chief of PepsiCo's overseas operations, Mr. Jordan seemed a possible candidate for chairman of the company, but retired in 1992 to run a private-equity firm, Clayton, Dubilier & Rice. He was lured to run Westinghouse a year later. After stabilizing the company and changing its name to CBS, he declared he would continue as CEO until 2001, when he would be 65. He changed his mind and retired in 1998, amid talk of fights between Mr. Jordan and Mel Karmazin, his deputy and the former CEO of Infinity.

Could use some of this refreshing candor, as well.

"We were not dancing the tango in my office every day," Mr. Jordan told The Wall Street Journal of the two executives' relationship. But he supported Mr. Karmazin for CEO when he told the CBS board of his decision to resign.

Mr. Jordan was renowned for a photographic memory, and liked to write mystery and historical novels in his spare time. None were published. He served on numerous corporate boards, and was chairman of the United Negro College Fund for a decade starting in 1994.

He once appeared in a public service announcement for the fund, alongside another Michael Jordan. The CEO missed shot after shot while the basketball star caught nothing but net.



MAY 27, 2010 - By STEPHEN MILLER
Executive Remade Westinghouse as CBS
picture: Electronic Data Systems

Civil-Rights Leader Sought a Bigger Role for Women

While more reticent than some of her male colleagues, Dorothy Height was one of a select group of leaders who coordinated the struggle for black civil rights in the 1960s. Ms. Height, who died Tuesday at age 98, was for 40 years the president of the National Council of Negro Women and the only woman among a group of leaders that included Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, Bayard Rustin and others.

In 1963, when Mr. King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., Ms. Height was on the dais. She had tried and failed to persuade organizers that a woman should be among those to address the crowd. "Sometimes the men had trouble seeing why I was always linking desegregation with hunger and children and other social welfare issues," Ms. Height wrote in a 2003 memoir.

Ms. Height fought for civil rights from adolescence. The daughter of a contractor and a nurse in Rankin, Pa., she won a college scholarship with a speech about constitutional rights in an Elks Club elocution contest. But Barnard College, which initially had accepted her, refused to admit her because its quota of two black students for the class of 1933 had been filled. New York University then admitted her. "From that day forward," Ms. Height wrote, "I have loved every brick of that university."

While a student, Ms. Height lived in Harlem and attended nightclubs in the company of blues composer W.C. Handy. She marched in demonstrations in Times Square and on 125th Street. After working as a social worker, she switched to a job at the Young Women's Christian Association in Harlem. In 1937, she coordinated a visit to the YWCA by first lady Eleanor Roosevelt to speak before the National Council of Negro Women.

Ms. Height went on to become a regular visitor to the White House, where she advised Ms. Roosevelt and presidents starting with Dwight Eisenhower. She led an effort to desegregate the YWCA after World War II, and in 1957 became president of the NCNW.

Ms. Height was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, as well as several honorary doctorates.

"Dr. Height devoted her life to those struggling for equality," President Barak Obama said in a statement Tuesday.

Ms. Height prized civility and in the 1960s spoke out against the "black power" movement, though she later came to embrace its goal of increased economic power. In 1995, she addressed the Million Man March. She continued to work until recently.

Starting in 2005, a musical biography titled "If This Hat Could Talk" toured the nation, including a repeat booking at Harlem's Apollo Theater.

"I came up at a time when young women wore hats, and they wore gloves," Ms. Height told a Denver audience in 2003. "Too many people in my generation fought for the right for us to be dressed up and not put down."

—Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A8
* REMEMBRANCES
* APRIL 21, 2010
By STEPHEN MILLER
Dorothy Height 1912 - 2010
Civil-Rights Leader Sought a Bigger Role for Women

Civil Rights Leader Long Led NAACP

Benjamin Hooks 1925-2010

He was fond of describing himself as "a poor little ol' country preacher," but that belied Benjamin Hooks's formidable advocacy as head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People during the 1980s and '90s.

Mr. Hooks, who died Thursday at age 85, brought substantial rhetorical skills to bear in advocating a Martin Luther King national holiday, sanctions on South Africa and fighting what the NAACP saw as rollbacks of the civil rights gains of the 1960s in the more conservative political times of presidents Reagan and Bush.

"He fought tirelessly to tear down walls that make today's bridges possible," the Rev. Jesse Jackson said.

Among Mr. Hooks's professions was country preacher, and at his death he was pastor emeritus of Greater Middle Baptist Church in Memphis, Tenn. But he was also a lawyer, public defender, judge, fried-chicken company executive and a commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission in a career spent pushing the boundaries for what an African-American could achieve.

Mr. Hooks resigned as an FCC commissioner in 1977 to become executive director of the NAACP. It was a chaotic period for the civil-rights group, which was indebted and facing a declining membership.

"The civil rights movement is not dead," he said in a 1977 speech. "If anyone thinks that we are going to stop agitating, they had better think again. If anyone thinks that we are going to stop litigating, they had better close the courts. If anyone thinks that we are not going to demonstrate and protest, they had better roll up the sidewalks."

Mr. Hooks stabilized the NAACP's finances and membership, but was faced in his 15 years with repeated clashes with the board over issues of strategy and programs.

Under Mr. Hooks's leadership, the NAACP reached out to black prisoners, parolees and to students. But some criticized him for failing to make the group seem relevant to the young, who he thought didn't appreciate the strides made in civil rights. Mr. Hooks, a veteran of lunch counter sit-down protests of the 1950s, told U.S. News and World Report in 1991, "I have to begin at the fundamental issue that I can drive from Houston to my home in Memphis and stop for a hamburger."

Raised in Memphis, where his father ran a photography business, Mr. Hooks aspired to be a Baptist minister. But his father was not a fan of organized religion, and Mr. Hooks opted instead to study law. He returned from World War II having served in a still-segregated Army, earned a law degree at Chicago's DePaul University, and returned to Memphis determined "to be part of the crowd to break up the segregation of the South," as he told the New York Times in 1979. Conditions for a black lawyer in the South were anything but welcoming.

"At that time you were insulted by law clerks, excluded from white bar associations," he told Jet magazine in 1972. "I was lucky to be called 'Ben.' Usually it was just 'boy.' "

Mr. Hooks was ordained a minister in 1956, and became part of the leadership of Mr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He rose quickly to become one of the first criminal-court judges in the South in 1965.

Appointed by President Richard Nixon to the FCC in 1972, he called for more positive black role models on TV. But he surprised some observers by supporting the right to free speech in the case of a political advertisement in a Georgia Senate race that used a racial epithet. And years later, he came out against the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court.

REMEMBRANCES - APRIL 16, 2010

By Stephen Miller

—Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A6

Mankiller

A veteran of the 1960s Native American rights movement, Wilma Mankiller became the first female principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, one of the largest tribes in the U.S. Ms. Mankiller, who died Tuesday at age 64 of pancreatic cancer, led the Cherokee Nation as elected chief for a decade starting in 1985. During that period, she led a drive to institute health and social services on tribal lands and marshalled a self-governance agreement with the federal government. Enrollment in the tribe tripled during her leadership, in part after Ms. Mankiller streamlined the registration process.

"Her gift to us is the lesson that our lives and future are for us to decide," the current principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, Chad Smith, said in a statement.

As her stature grew, Ms. Mankiller became a symbol of the revival of Indian cultural heritage and the women's rights movement. She insisted that the Cherokee had historically been matrilineal and that her leadership was a return to tradition. "Early historians referred to our government as a petticoat government because of the strong role of the women in the tribe," Ms. Mankiller told Ms. Magazine in 1988. "So in 1687 women enjoyed a prominent role, but in 1987 we found people questioning whether women should be in leadership positions anywhere in the tribe."


Born in Tahlequah, Okla., the heart of Cherokee Nation tribal land, Ms. Mankiller was the daughter of a Cherokee father and a white mother. After their farm failed, the family was moved under a federal Bureau of Indian Affairs relocation program that sought to assimilate Indians into wider society. Instead, the Mankiller family found themselves living in a San Francisco housing project with few prospects. "I guess they figured we could open a liquor store," she told the Associated Press in 1985.

In 1969, Ms. Mankiller became involved in a growing Native American rights movement when she helped support a group who occupied Alcatraz, the former federal prison in San Francisco Bay.

After training as a social worker in her 20s, she divorced the non-Indian husband whom she had married at 17 and moved with her two daughters back to her family's land in Oklahoma. She became a community organizer, helping to implement water projects and other community works. She was elected deputy chief in 1983, and became the Cherokee Nation's first principal chief when the sitting chief resigned to work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In 1986, she married Charlie Soap, a Cherokee who championed tribal language and tradition.

She won two further elections, in 1987 and 1991, then retired. In 1998, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Charismatic and insistent, Ms. Mankiller reveled in her unconventional name, which derived from an 18th Cherokee warrior.

"Sometimes I tell people it's a nickname and I earned it," she told the Christian Science Monitor in 1992.

The Wall Street Journal - REMEMBRANCES - APRIL 7, 2010


First Woman to Lead Cherokee Nation
By STEPHEN MILLER

Civil Rights Photographer's Documentary

In some stories, you have more material than you know what to do with. That was the case yesterday as I worked on an obituary for legendary photographer Charles Moore, who shot the civil rights movement from 1958 to 1965 in his native South.

Luckily, a filmmaker made a 30-minute documentary, "I Fight With My Camera," in which Moore tells some of his great stories and many of his photos are shown. This film was shown on PBS, I'm told, but I missed it. It's incredibly moving and worth your time.

Included in the obituary itsef are some  amazing photos, including this iconic image:

Charles Moore photographed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1958 arrest in Montgomery, Ala. King's wife, Coretta, is second from right. (© Charles Moore/black Star)

Charles Moore, 79, dies; photographed civil rights violence
By Patricia Sullivan
Tuesday, March 16, 2010


Charles Moore, 79, whose searing Life magazine photographs of the civil rights struggle helped change American public opinion about the movement, died March 11 at a nursing home in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. He had kidney disease and other illnesses.

His photos of patrol officers roughing up the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., snarling police dogs attacking protesters, white civilians and police beating black demonstrators and the fierce spray of fire hoses pinning a trio of teenagers against a brick-walled building shocked the nation's conscience when the images began appearing in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

"The photographs of Bull Connor's police dogs lunging at the marchers in Birmingham did as much as anything to transform the national mood and make legislation not just necessary . . . but possible," historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once said. Jacob Javits, the former Republican senator from New York, said Mr. Moore's photos "helped to spur passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964."


Traveling throughout the South, often with writer Michael S. Durham, Mr. Moore documented the violence and hope of the civil rights movement from 1958 until 1965. A piece of hurled concrete injured him in Birmingham, Ala., but he kept shooting. He was thrown in jail with a dozen angry white men who had been locked up for vagrancy and drunkenness. Enraged whites forced their way into his motel room at the University of Mississippi, where he had gone to cover the enrollment of James Meredith, the school's first black student, and began pounding on the former Golden Gloves boxer.

"I've never seen such hate in anyone's face before," he later said, according to John Kaplan, a professor at the University of Florida, who wrote his master's degree project on Mr. Moore. "It was like I were vermin."


At the time, half of the adults in the United States read Life magazine and its photography was world-renowned. Mr. Moore shot multiple cover photos and photo spreads that brought the civil rights struggle into starkly personal focus. His graphic coverage of the 1963 riots in Birmingham was spread over 11 pages, and its impact was immediate, provoking reactions from President John F. Kennedy, black activist Malcolm X and others. Artist Andy Warhol created "Mustard Race Riots," a silkscreen version of Mr. Moore's photograph of police dogs.

"In Birmingham when I saw the dogs I don't think anything appalled me more, and I've been to Vietnam," Mr. Moore told the New York Times in 1999. "I photographed it, and the world rushed in. I realized the power of even one image. . . . What changed was my awareness. I wanted to show how awful, how vulgar, how terrible this whole thing was."


Charles Lee Moore was born in Hackleburg, Ala., and grew up in Tuscumbia, Ala., the son of a Baptist minister who did not believe in racial epithets. Mr. Moore served in the U.S. Marine Corps as a photographer and attended the Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, Calif. He returned to his native state in 1957 to work at a portrait studio, and soon made his way to the local paper, the Montgomery Advertiser.

He quickly met King at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. "I photographed him at the pulpit with a cross behind his head. I got down low to get the power of this man," Mr. Moore told Kaplan. "From then on, I wanted to cover him. I wanted every assignment I could get." "I did not know at the time my pictures might make a difference. But I knew this man would make a difference," Mr. Moore said in the 1995 documentary "Charles Moore: I Fight with My Camera."


Mr. Moore was the only photographer on hand in 1958 when King was arrested after trying to attend a court hearing for his aide Ralph Abernathy. He jumped behind a police booking station counter to shoot a photo of King being manhandled by the police. The photograph went out on the Associated Press wires, and Life magazine included it in its next issue, launching his career.

He told The Washington Post about another incident in Montgomery a few years later. "I saw the guy pull that bat out of a bag. I shot while I was still running. I got three or four quick shots off. He's swinging that bat at that woman, right at her head. If you look closely, someone else has a thick chain and maybe a Coke or beer bottle.


"It makes me sick every time I see it," he said. "It was a pretty powerful statement about what lengths white people in the South could go to stop integration."


In 1962, he tried to leave Alabama for New York, but returned to the South when the founder of the Black Star photo agency gave him a small retainer to cover the civil rights movement.


Trading on his Southern heritage, Moore was the only Life magazine photographer able to persuade Mississippi's defiant governor, Ross Barnett, to pose for a picture. As Meredith tried to enroll at the university, Moore talked his way inside the administration building, where 200 unarmed federal marshals were holed up. After a night of violence, in which a French reporter and a local man were killed, he had the only photos of the mayhem inside: 28 marshals had been shot and 160 others injured.


He moved on to cover the Ku Klux Klan and the Selma to Montgomery marches, including a violent clash at the Edmund Pettus Bridge that became known as "Bloody Sunday." Mr. Moore became so well-known for finding the story that Durham, his Life magazine journalist partner, said, "At one point . . . a well known TV reporter said that when trouble starts happening on the civil rights story, find out where Charles Moore is." Durham wrote "Powerful Days: The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore" (1991).

In 1965, sick of the violence he had experienced, Mr. Moore left the country for most of a year. When he returned, he resumed freelancing, focusing on conflicts in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela and Vietnam. He was a freelancer for numerous magazines, doing travel stories and corporate portraiture.


In 1968, when King was assassinated, Mr. Moore was in Palo Alto, Calif., on a magazine assignment. "We had on the radio and heard the flash," he told Kaplan. "I just pulled the car over to the side, listened to the news and cried. After all I'd done, I felt bad I couldn't be there on that day in Memphis in 1968. I knew him and he knew me."


After he won the first Kodak Crystal Eagle Award for Impact in Photojournalism in 1989, there was new interest in his civil rights photos. In addition to his book of civil rights photos, he also published "The Mother Lode," a book on Gold Rush country in California's Sierra Mountains.


His six marriages ended in divorce.


Survivors include four children from his second marriage, Michael Moore and April Marshall, both of Dothan, Ala., Gary Moore, of Lewisville, Tex., and Michelle Moore Peel of West Palm Beach, Fla.; a brother; seven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Civil Rights trailblazer dies forgotten

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Neighbors were chagrined last week when the police here found the body of a 75-year-old woman who had frozen to death, alone in her house, during unexpectedly frigid weather. But they were shocked this week when they learned that the woman, Juanita W. Goggins, had been a civil rights trailblazer who in 1974 became the first black woman elected to the South Carolina legislature.

Now residents of this normally neighborly Southern capital say they are feeling regretful, and slightly guilty, for allowing one of its most revered figures to disappear into a sleepy ranch house with little company. Possibly mentally ill, living without running water or heat, Ms. Goggins is believed to have died on Feb. 20 — when temperatures dropped below freezing — but her body was not discovered for 11 days.


Several neighbors in her elderly, mostly black community in downtown Columbia said they had learned the full scope of Ms. Goggins’s accomplishments only from her obituaries. At the peak of her political career, in the 1970s, she twice visited President Jimmy Carter at the White House and was the first black woman appointed to the United States Civil Rights Commission.


In the legislature, where she represented Rock Hill, on the northern border of the state, for three terms in the 1970s, Ms. Goggins, a Democrat, helped pass key legislation for improving elementary school education and public health. Last year, a stretch of Highway 5 was renamed in her honor. “She was truly a mover and a shaker, so well-liked and so well-loved by so many,” said Representative John King, 33, who holds her former seat in the General Assembly.

Politicians are shameless; they will say anything, quote any cliche. If she was so well loved, why did she die the way she did?


Family members suspect that Ms. Goggins had developed dementia or Alzheimer’s disease in her final years. She rarely left her small, cluttered house on Carousel Circle, except occasionally to ride the bus to Bi-Lo for groceries. In 16 years as her next-door neighbor, Erskine Hunter, 83, said he was allowed inside only once, to fix a water heater.


When he dropped off groceries every month, Mr. Hunter said, Ms. Goggins asked that he ring the doorbell and leave the food on her front stoop. “She didn’t let nobody in that house,” he said. “She just wasn’t the type to stop and talk.” So it came as a surprise when neighbors this week found Ms. Goggins’s obituary in newspapers across the South.

“When I read it in the newspaper and learned everything she had done, I was like, ‘Wow,’ ” said Linda Martin, the longtime property manager for Ms. Goggins’s rented house. “I really didn’t know anything about her.” But that pride was tempered with sadness and regret. Her death might have been prevented, family members say, if only Ms. Goggins had been more receptive to help. Her son, Horace W. Goggins Jr., and Ms. Martin had both asked Richland County’s department of adult protective services to monitor Ms. Goggins, but she had refused their assistance.

“It’s just so sad,” Ms. Martin said. “You reach out to help a person, and they reject you. What else can you do?”

She added, “I always dreaded that something of this nature would happen.”

Ms. Goggins’s body was discovered on March 3, when the police entered through a window after neighbors reported that she had been unusually reclusive, even by her own standards. It had snowed recently, and temperatures were still in the 30s. Ms. Goggins was found wearing several layers of pants, socks and shirts.

Her thermostat and stove were working, but were turned off, said the county coroner, Gary Watts.

Ms. Goggins’s utility company shut off her electricity for nonpayment on Feb. 23. But the police found $2,500 in cash and uncashed retirement checks in her house, Mr. Watts said.

“This wasn’t a matter of not having money,” he said. “She appears to have been in the early stages of dementia and not taking care of herself.”

A funeral will be held Friday in Rock Hill. Mr. Goggins, 42, of Powder Springs, Ga., called it a “homecoming celebration of life,” adding, “We’re going to focus on her achievements and the positive part of her life, not on her death.”

Those achievements include teaching public school, founding a tutoring company and in 1972 becoming the first black woman from South Carolina to be a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. Ms. Goggins was elected to the State House in 1974, defeating a white male incumbent.

“I am going to Columbia to be a legislator, not just a black spot in the House chambers,” she told The Associated Press at the time. Voters, she said, “were ready to accept a person who was sincere and concerned about things. Those feelings go beyond color.”

In the legislature, Ms. Goggins helped expand kindergarten classes, reduced student-teacher ratios and approved sickle-cell anemia testing in county health departments.

“She had an amazing life,” said Mr. Hunter, her neighbor, before adding, “I just wish I’d knocked on her door more often.”

March 11, 2010
A Trailblazer of Civil Rights Dies Forgotten
By ROBBIE BROWN