Dead, Not Forgotten

Marie Hicks made things happen for her community and her family.

Her fame for this trait had its genesis in an incident that occurred when she first visited the campus of Girard College. Her eldest son Junius Jr., was to receive a badge in a Boy Scout ceremony in front of Founders Hall.

The private boarding school was established in 1848 for white males who were orphaned or had lost their father. The school took in boys grades 1-12 at no cost to their family.

Though for years from the outside she had always thought that the place must be a prison, Marie Hicks looked at this 40 acre paradise in the middle of Philadelphia and she got mad. Her sons Charles and Theodore had lost their father, Junius Hicks Sr, to cancer in 1964. A decade before, the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision held that separate cannot be equal, and ordered schools to integrate to help achieve equality of the races. But still, black children could not get the educations they had been promised because states and their schools were not quick to comply with the decision. There were no black students at Girard College.

So in 1965 Marie Hicks became one of the leaders of a year-long protest outside the walls of Girard College. She led thousands of protesters, including Martin Luther King, until the gates opened and her son and others were admitted to the school. In September 1968, Theodore, then 9, and three other black students began classes at Girard. By this time Charles, then 12, was over the maximum age accepted. The school made an exception and Charles enrolled four months later.

Her efforts proved worthwhile for both the community and her family. Charles became the first black graduate of the school. In 1977 Theodore graduated as the school’s first African American valedictorian. The College now has 85% black students, and, 55% of the student body are female.

After securing her children’s primary education Marie eventually got a job as a maid at La Salle University. She attended night classes there and in 1980 earned a bachelors degree in sociology. She counseled homeless women at Mercy Hospice in Center City and worked for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. She retired 10 years ago.

Sometimes called the “Rosa Parks of Girard College,” Marie Hicks died in Germantown, PA on April 19, 2007 at age 83. She last visited the Girard campus when her funeral procession drove through the school and stopped in front of Founders Hall on the way to her final resting place.

For more information:
U.S. Government Archives

Popularity: 47%

Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, died April 13, 2007 at age 88. Described by Gerald Haslam as, “tough, bright and sweet,” McDaniel’s poetry relates the experiences of the Dust Bowl migrants who came to California’s San Joaquin Valley with a grit that comes both from the dust of the Great Depression and the fertile soil that fed the futures of the refugees described in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.

Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel was first published at age 56 and wrote about her experiences in the Great Depression and its aftermath when her family of sharecroppers from central Oklahoma were driven to Buttonwillow in Kern County California. Her poetry not only speaks to the residents of California’s central valley, but it speaks about them in a way that everyone can hear.

The lives of agricultural workers are transformed from the mundane to the universal in this excerpt from Living With the Land:

This will be a hard season
not another drop of rain
until November
she said

Not spoken bitterly
but as a mother knows
her own child’s weakness
and loves it anyway

Her own life was transformed by her writing, as she relates in Poets In Their Boats

When I arrived overland
at the bustling port
Proudwater

There were great harbormasters
on the pier
their names on fancy boats

I wobbled
when I looked at water
and feared all harbormasters

After many years
sea legs came to me
with courage

I can cross the raging river
in my silly paper boat

Since I know for certain
it is watertight
plugged with rejection slips

I will dip my pen in ink
and write with all
my words

In the weeks before her death she dictated Apparitions

“It was peach time August

And we worked so gladly

And the dim packing shed

Was full of the fragrance

Of thousands of ripe peaches

We stood at the packing tables

Gladly

I say because time had not erased

The Great Depression

I felt a crick in my neck

I tried to shake it away

I felt a presence

And there stood Our Lady

In our midst”

Though she only returned to Oklahoma twice her voice resonates in both Oklahoma and California, the bookends of the “Okie” experience in the Great Depression.

Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, who jotted her prose on paper bags and milk cartons, wrote 25 books of poetry and was featured in the film Down an Old Road, by Chris Simon. Her poems, the core of the film, are illuminated with images from the Dust Bowl and life in rural California today.

For more information:
Read more of Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel’s poetry -
note the additional great links on the left sidebar.

Popularity: 28%

The James Bond 007 franchise is so well developed, and the actors associated with it so well known, that I was surprised to find out that Barry Nelson was the first ever to play the spy. Except, in the version he acted in, 007 was American and his name was Jimmy, Jimmy Bond.

The presentation was a live television production of Casino Royale that aired Oct. 21, 1954 on CBS and featured Peter Lorre as the villain.

Barry Nelson’s career lasted from the early 1940s through the 1980s and included success on stage, the big screen and television. Despite his starring roles in the ’70s hit movies Airport and The Shining, his star was brightest on Broadway where he appeared in Cactus Flower with Lauren Bacall in the ’60s and The Act with Liza Minnelli. For the latter he received a Tony Award nomination as best actor in a musical in 1978.

Barry Nelson, born Robert Haakon Nielsen on April 16, 1920, in Oakland, California, died at age 89 on April 7, 2007, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, USA.

For more information:
Filmography

Popularity: 23%

Tyrone Hill was all about music. No matter if he was playing in Europe with Billy Paul, performing to an intimate crowd with the Sun Ra Arkestra, or cheering on Eagles fans at the gates of Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia, he was all about music until the end. According to the Sun Ra Arkestra press release, “Tyrone Hill, trombone player for the Sun Ra Arkestra under the direction of Marshall Allen, left the planet on March 11, 2007 at age 58.”

An active orchestra and band player throughout junior high and high school, Tyrone Hill attended the Combs School of Music in Chestnut Hill, PA, leaving one semester short of graduation to begin performing professionally. In 1972 he was hired as music director for Billy Paul who was riding the wave of success with his Grammy winning hit “Me and Mrs. Jones.”

In the late 1970s he joined the Sun Ra Arkestra where he thrived for 28 years. He said of Sun Ra, “Something else that attracted me to him was his philosophy. He used to say, ‘Music soothes the savage beast.’ You could change the world with the right kind of music. Its in the Bible where they talk about how Joshua blew the walls of Jericho down. He did it with 4 trumpet players. Blew the walls down with music! Sun Ra believed if you play the right kind of music, that positive music could change everything. We’d be playing a concert. People were dancing. (Someone asked,) ‘How you gonna get them to outer space? How you gonna take them to outer space?’…with Music.”

Hill also fronted his own group, Deep Space Posse, who performed his own music and the music of Sun Ra. Though Sun Ra left the planet in 1993, Hill and others have carried on for him. I am sure there will be more to come who will carry on for Tyrone Hill.

For more information:
Interview with Tyrone Hill
The Sun Ra Arkestra website

Popularity: 13%

Bahamian actor, Calvin Lockhart, died March 29, 2007 in Nassau of complications of a stroke at age 72.

At 18 he moved to New York City to pursue his education but he quickly became attracted to the boards and dropped out of college to act. He supported himself with carpentry jobs and taxi driving.

One of his fares gave him his first break. Playwright Ketti Frings, while a passenger in Calvin Lockhart’s cab, was so impressed with his arrogance that she cast him as a gang leader in her play The Cool World in 1960. The show lasted only two performances. Soon after he performed in a controversial Broadway production where he played a sailor in love with a white girl in A Taste of Honey opposite Angela Lansbury.

Finding limited options for a black actor in the U.S., Lockhart left for Europe where he first landed in Italy. There he owned a restaurant and opened an acting school where he acted and directed. After a brief stay in Germany, Calvin Lockhart moved to England where he began to establish himself as a TV and film actor including his roll in the film Joanna (1968) which centered around an interracial romance with Genevieve Waite set in London’s “mod” counterculture.

Lockhart was soon back in New York working in black urban dramas (Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970) and Halls of Anger (1970)) and comedies (Uptown Saturday Night and Let’s Do It Again) as well as in “blaxploitation” films (Melinda (1972), Honeybaby, Honeybaby (1974) and The Baron (1977)). Among those he worked with are Sidney Poitier, Ossie Davis, Bill Cosby, Godfrey Cambridge, Mae West, and Raquel Welch.

In 1954 Calvin Lockhart became the first black actor-in-residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon where he appeared in productions such as Julius Caesar and Titus Andronicus.

After years more of recurring and bit parts on American TV Calvin Lockhart returned to the Bahamas where he worked with the Freeport Players Guild as a director. In 2007 he returned to film, completing Rain on location in the Bahamas shortly before he suffered a major stroke.

For more information:
Filmography

Popularity: 26%