14
Paris, France
September 8, 1995
Stretch was not able to write the final chapter. We often talked about his plans for the book and his hopes of its being useful to others. Always the soldier, when diagnosed with prostate cancer, he was determined to fight the fight of the decade for him.
From Hawaii, in 1991 he and Ann moved to Saint Croix, where Stretch became very active as a counselor in an antidrug campaign and a rehabilitation center for young people. With the progress of the cancer, Stretch wanted to be on the mainland for treatment and closer to family members, of course. He and Ann then settled in Galveston, Texas, where they were living in a big house not too far from the Gulf. Some time after that my sisters and I went to see him. All the while documenting his disease and his angle of attack on it, Stretch had once again set down his radical roots to do work in the Black community with young people. He gave talks and was often invited for radio broadcasts. He founded an association to encourage children to continue their education. He was, no matter the place, always ready to be at the head of the march before they could run him out of town. Later I remember our going to see him at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, where he had radiation therapy, hormone treatment, and then surgery. This radical course of action gave Stretch a remission of nearly ten years. During this time he was able to travel to Paris and see his first great-granddaughter the day she was born. He met with Julia Wright, Richard Wright’s daughter, and put his organizing skills to the service of mobilizing for the protests she was leading against the U.S. Embassy in Paris over the threat of Mumia Abu-Jamal’s execution. At the age of eighty, Stretch marched again at the head of demonstrations with Julia, gathering American expatriates and French citizens concerned for the life of a militant believed to have been wrongly accused, convicted of murder, and sentenced to death. We worked together with members of the African diaspora living in Paris and African American expatriates here to foster unity through the vehicle of a cultural association we baptized Harambe, or “unity” in Swahili. We staged events and held a Kwanzaa party in celebration of harvest, education, family, and community. Then came the time when Stretch had to return home to New York, where doctors at Sloan-Kettering helped him for the last battle. The cancer had returned and metastasized to the bones.
Stretch died on May 25, 2000. He had so wanted to celebrate the new year and indeed he did. I was with my sisters when we joined hands with our father and he asked, “Well, girls, are you ready for this?” We were and, for someone who loved life as he did, surprisingly so was he. We are living at a time when our stories are being told. I share his story, his legacy of activism, in the hope that one of our lesser-known everyday heroes will continue to be of use to folks and that Stretch will be with us for generations ahead. In his New York Times obituary by Douglas Martin a few lines say it well. In his glorious tap dance of a life, “Stretch had a ball.”