_________________________________________________________________________________ Edward Brooke, in full Edward William Brooke (b. October 26, 1919, Washington, D.C. - d. January 3, 2015, Coral Gables, Florida), was an American lawyer and politician who was the first African American popularly elected to the United States Senate, where he served two terms (1967–79).
Brooke earned his undergraduate degree at Howard University (Washington, D.C.) in 1941 and served as an infantry officer during World War II, achieving the rank of captain. After being discharged, he earned two law degrees at Boston University and was editor of the Boston University Law Review.
Brooke began practicing law in 1948 and became a successful Boston attorney. Entering politics, he was defeated in attempts to win a seat in the Massachusetts legislature in 1950 and 1952. He also failed in his 1960 bid to become the Massachusetts Secretary of State. From 1961 to 1962, he served as Chairman of the Boston Finance Commission, seeking evidence of corruption in city politics.
In 1962 Brooke, a Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic state, was elected attorney general of Massachusetts. A vigorous prosecutor of official corruption, he was re-elected in 1964 by a large margin, despite the success of Democrats that year (Democratic President Lyndon Johnson captured more than 75 percent of the vote in Massachusetts against Republican Barry Goldwater).
In 1966 Brooke ran for a seat in the United States Senate and won by nearly half a million votes. That year he also published The Challenge of Change: Crisis in Our Two-Party System, which focused on self-help as a way to address the social issues facing the United States during the 1960s. He established a reputation as a soft-spoken moderate on civil rights and a leader of the progressive wing of his party. In 1972 he was overwhelmingly reelected. In 1978, however, beset by personal problems including accusations of financial misdeeds and a divorce, Brooke lost his bid for a third term. In 2008 journalist Barbara Walters revealed that she and Brooke had engaged in an affair for several years prior to his divorce.
After leaving the Senate in 1979, Brooke became chairman of the National Low-Income Housing Coalition and resumed the practice of law. The recipient of numerous honors, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2009. His memoir, Bridging the Divide (2007), explores issues of race and class as viewed from his experiences as an African American Republican politician from a largely Democratic state.
Nat King Cole, byname of Nathaniel Adams Cole, family name originally Coles (b. March 17, 1919, Montgomery, Alabama — d. February 15, 1965, Santa Monica, California), was an American musician hailed as one of the best and most influential pianists and small-group leaders of the swing era. Cole attained his greatest commercial success, however, as a vocalist specializing in warm ballads and light siwng.
Cole grew up in Chicago, where, by age 12, he sang and played organ in the church where his father was pastor. He formed his first jazz group, the Royal Dukes, five years later. In 1937, after touring with a black musical revue, he began playing in jazz clubs in Los Angeles. There he formed the King Cole Trio (originally King Cole and His Swingsters), with guitarist Oscar Moore (later replaced by Irving Ashby) and bassist Wesley Prince (later replaced by Johnny Miller). The trio specialized in swing music with a delicate touch in that they did not employ a drummer; also unique were the voicings of piano and guitar, often juxtaposed to sound like a single instrument. An influence on jazz pianists such as Oscar Peterson, Cole was known for a compact, syncopated piano style with clean, spare, melodic phrases.
During the late 1930s and early ’40s the trio made several instrumental recordings, as well as others that featured their harmonizing vocals. They found their greatest success, however, when Cole began doubling as a solo singer. Their first chart success, “Straighten Up and Fly Right” (1943), was followed by hits such as “Sweet Lorraine,” “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons,” and “Route 66.” Eventually, Cole’s piano playing took a backseat to his singing career. Noted for his warm tone and flawless phrasing, Cole was regarded among the top male vocalists, although jazz critics tended to regret his near-abandonment of the piano. He first recorded with a full orchestra (the trio serving as rhythm section) in 1946 for "The Christmas Song," a holiday standard and one of Cole’s biggest-selling recordings. By the 1950s, he worked almost exclusively as a singer, with such notable arrangers as Nelson Riddle and Billy May providing lush orchestral accompaniment. “Nature Boy,” “Mona Lisa,” “Too Young,” “A Blossom Fell,” and “Unforgettable” were among his major hits of the period. He occasionally revisited his jazz roots, as on the outstanding album After Midnight(1956), which proved that Cole’s piano skills had not diminished.
Cole’s popularity allowed him to become the first African American to host a network variety program, The Nat King Cole Show, which debuted on NBC television in 1956. The show fell victim to the bigotry of the times, however, and was canceled after one season. Few sponsors were willing to be associated with a black entertainer. Cole had greater success with concert performances during the late 1950s and early ’60s and twice toured with his own vaudeville-style reviews,The Merry World of Nat King Cole (1961) and Sights and Sounds (1963). His hits of the early ’60s—“Ramblin’ Rose,” “Those Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer,” and “L-O-V-E”—indicate that he was moving even farther away from his jazz roots and concentrating almost exclusively on mainstream pop. Adapting his style, however, was one factor that kept Cole popular up to his early death from lung cancer in 1965.
The prejudices of the era in which Cole lived hindered his potential for even greater stardom. His talents extended beyond singing and piano playing: he excelled as a relaxed and humorous stage personality, and he was also a capable actor, evidenced by his performances in the films Istanbul (1957), China Gate(1957), Night of the Quarter Moon (1959), and Cat Ballou (1965); he also played himself in The Nat “King” Cole Musical Story (1955) and portrayed blues legend W. C. Handy in St. Louis Blues (1958). His daughter Natalie is also a popular singer who achieved her greatest chart success in 1991 with “Unforgettable,” an electronically created duet with her father.
_________________________________________________________________________________ John Walter Vincent Cordice, Jr. (b. June 16, 1919, Aurora, North Carolina - d. December 29, 2013, Sioux City, Iowa) was one of the surgeon's who operated on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1958 after King had been stabbed in the chest.
On September 20, 1958, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., then emerging as the leader of the civil rights movement, was autographing copies of his new book in a Harlem department store when a woman approached to greet him. He nodded without looking up. Then she stabbed him in the chest with a razor-sharp seven-inch letter opener.
Dr. King, then 29, was taken to Harlem Hospital, where three surgeons went to work. The blade had missed his aorta by millimeters, and doctors said a sneeze could have caused him to bleed to death. After mapping out a strategy, they used a hammer and chisel to crack Dr. King’s sternum, and repaired the wound in two and a half hours.
New York’s governor at the time, W. Averell Harriman, who raced to the hospital to observe the surgery, had requested that black doctors be involved if at all possible, Hugh Pearson reported in his 2002 book, “When Harlem Nearly Killed King.” Dr. Cordice and Dr. Aubré de Lambert Maynard, the hospital’s chief of surgery, were African-American. The third surgeon, Dr. Emil Naclerio, was Italian-American.
Over the years, Dr. Maynard was widely credited with saving Dr. King — and he accepted that credit — but in a 2012 interview with the public radio station WNYC, Dr. Cordice said that he and Dr. Naclerio had performed the surgery.
“We were not going to challenge him, because he was the boss,” Dr. Cordice said of Dr. Maynard.
Alan D. Aviles, the president of the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, suggested that Dr. Cordice’s modesty may also have kept him from getting the credit he deserved. “It is entirely consistent with his character that many who knew him may well not have known that he was also part of history,” Mr. Aviles said in a statement.
At the time of the stabbing, Dr. King was promoting his book “Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story,” which recounted the successful boycott he helped lead to desegregate buses in Montgomery, Alabama. His assailant was a mentally disturbed black woman who blamed Dr. King for her woes. Dr. King forgave her and asked that she not be prosecuted. He later learned that she had been committed to a hospital for the criminally insane.
John Walter Vincent Cordice Jr. was born in Aurora, North Carolina, on June 16, 1919. His father, a physician, worked for the United States Public Health Service there, fighting the flu epidemic of 1918. The family moved to Durham, North Carolina, when John was 6. He graduated from high school a year early, and then from New York University and its medical school.
With the outbreak of World War II, he interrupted his internship at Harlem Hospital to serve as a doctor for the Tuskegee Airmen, the famed group of African-American pilots. After the war, and after completing the internship, he held a succession of residencies. In 1955-56 he studied in Paris, where he was part of the team that performed the first open-heart surgery in France.
Dr. Cordice later became chief of thoracic and vascular surgery at Harlem Hospital, the position he held when he treated Dr. King. He went on to hold the same post at Queens Hospital Center. He was president of the Queens Medical Society in 1983-84. On December 29, the last surviving surgeon from that hospital team, Dr. W. V. Cordice Jr., died at 94 in Sioux City, Iowa.
Dr. Cordice, who lived in Hollis, Queens, for many years before moving to Iowa, was survived by his wife of 65 years, the former Marguerite Smith; his daughters, Michele Boykin, Jocelyn Basnett and Marguerite D. Cordice; his sister, Marion Parhan; six grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. _________________________________________________________________________________ 8888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888
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.
Johnnie Jones Sr. at his home in Baton Rouge, La., in 2019. After participating in the Normandy invasion in 1944, he came home to be beaten in the Jim Crow South, an experience that compelled him to become a civil rights lawyer.Credit...Gerald Herbert/Associated Press
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.
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.
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Boycotters of the Baton Rouge bus system gathered to share automobile rides in 1953. The bus boycott would become a model for the more famous one in Montgomery, Ala., two and a half years later.Credit...A. E. Woolley/East Baton Rouge Parish Library
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.
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.
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.
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Mr. Jones, seated at left, in 2018, when he reunited with civil rights activists and other residents of Baton Rouge, La., on a 1953-era bus.Credit...Russell L. Kelly Sr.
“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.”
*Semei Kakungulu declared his community to be "Jewish" and formed the basis for the Abayudaya - the Ugandan "People of Judah".
The Abayudaya (Abayudaya is Luganda for "People of Judah", analogous to "Children of Israel") are a Baganda community in eastern Uganda near the town of Mbale who practice Judaism. They are devout in their practice, keeping their version of kashrut, and observing Shabbat. There are several different villages where the Ugandan Jews live. Most of these are recognized by the Reform and Conservative movements of Judaism.
The population of the Abayudaya is estimated at approximately 2,000 having once been as large as 3,000 (prior to the persecutions of the Idi Amin regime, during which their numbers dwindled to around 300). Like their neighbors, they are subsistence farmers. Most Abayudaya are of Bagwere origin, except for those from Namutumba who are Basoga. They speak Luganda, Lusoga or Lugwere, although some have learned Hebrew as well.
The sect owes its origin to Muganda military leader Semei Kakungulu. Originally, Kakungulu was converted to Christianity by British missionaries around 1880. He believed that the British would allow him to be king of the territories, Bukedi and Bugisu, that he had conquered in battle for them. However, when the British limited his territory to a significantly smaller size and refused to recognize him as king as they had promised, Kakungulu began to distance himself from them. In 1913, he became a member of the Bamalaki sect following a belief system that combined elements of Christianity, Judaism and, most notably, a refusal to use western medicine (based on a few sentences taken from the Old Testament). This led to conflict with the British when the Bamalaki refused to vaccinate their cattle. However, upon further study of the Bible, Kakungulu came to believe that the customs and laws described in the first 5 books of Moses (Torah) were really true. When, in 1919, Kakungulu insisted on circumcision as is prescribed in the Old Testament, the Bamalaki refused and told him that, if he practiced circumcision, he would be like the Jews. Kakungulu responded, "Then, I am a Jew!" He circumcized his sons and himself and declared that his community was Jewish. Kakungulu fled to the foot of Mount Elgon and settled in a place called Gangama where he started a separatist sect known as Kibina Kya Bayudaya Absesiga Katonda ("The Community of Jews Who Trust in the Lord"). The British were infuriated by this action and they effectively severed all ties with Kakungulu and his followers.
The arrival of a foreign Jew known as "Yosef" in 1920 whose ancestral roots are believed to have been European, contributed much towards the community's acquisition of knowledge about the seasons in which Jewish Festivals such as Pesach, Shavuot, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Succot, and others take place. A source in the Abayudaya community confirms that the first Jew to visit the community was Yosef, who stayed with and taught the community for about six months, and would appear to have first brought the Jewish calendar to the Abayudaya community.
Furthermore, the laws concerning Kashrut were first introduced to the community by Yosef. The community continues to practice kashrut today. Yosef's teachings influenced Semei Kakungulu to establish a school that acted as a type of Yeshiva, with the purpose of passing on and teaching the skills and knowledge first obtained from Yosef.
After Kakungulu's death from tetanus in 1928, Samson Mugombe Israeli, one of his disciples, became the spiritual leader of the community. They isolated themselves for self-protection and survived persecution, including that of Idi Amin, who outlawed Jewish rituals and destroyed synagogues. During the persecutions of Idi Amin, some of the Abayudaya community converted to either Christianity or Islam in the face of religious persecution. A core group of roughly 300 members remained, however, committed to Judaism, worshipping secretly, fearful that they would be discovered by their neighbors and reported to the authorities. This group named itself "She'erit Yisrael" — the Remnant of Israel — meaning the surviving Ugandan Jews.
In 1962, Arye Oded, an Israeli studying at Makerere University, visited the Abayudaya and met Samson Mugombe. This was the first time the Abayudaya had ever met an Israeli and the first Jew they had met since Yosef. Oded had many long interviews with Mugombe and other leaders and explained to them how Jews in Israel practiced Judaism. Oded then wrote a book ("Religion and Politics in Uganda,") and numerous articles on the community and their customs which introduced them to world Jewry. The community underwent a revival in the 1980s.
Approximately 400 Abayudaya community members were formally converted by five rabbis of the Conservative branch of Judaism in February 2002, and conversions by conservative rabbis continued during the following years.
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