DRED SCOTT

ca. 1799–September 17, 1858

It is not well to let the great pass away without note and worthy honor. Dred Scott is dead in St. Louis. That illustrious personage carried his case to the Supreme Court, not doubting, we may believe, that the adverse decision he encountered will meet with reversal, and that he will be at once admitted to a better freedom and more equal citizenship. It is only now and then that we are called to regret the loss of the truly eminent.

Dred is of these. His name will live when those of Clay, and Calhoun, will be wholly forgotten. Posterity will make inquiry about the subject of that great leading case, decisive of human right, upon which the fate of the Union was in his day presumed to depend. So let the noted Negro have his obituary and monument with the rest.

Dred Scott died at a very advanced age. Longer ago than anybody can remember, he was born, in Virginia, on the property of the Blow family, which we may judge to be connected with the first families. Captain Peter Blow, while our hero was of tender years, moved away from the home of his race to Missouri, carrying Dred with him; and there succumbed to the common fate.

After accepting the claims of several reputable gentlemen to the ownership of his soul, the Negro, in 1834, came into the hands of Dr. Emerson, a surgeon in the Army, who carried him to Rock Island, in Illinois, and subsequently to Fort Snelling, in the Northwest Territory. At the latter point, in 1836, the Negro married Harriet, another chattel of the migratory surgeon, by whom he had two children, Eliza and Lizzie, who still live.

Dr. Emerson, in 1838, settled down in Missouri, where some dozen years ago he died, leaving the slaves in trust to Mr. John F. A. Sandford, the executor of his will, and the defendant in the famous suit. It is ten years ago since Dred brought suit for his freedom, and that of his wife and family, in the Circuit Court of St. Louis, on the ground of their owner having voluntarily taken them to soil declared free by the ordinance of 1787 and then to soil acquired by treaty with Louisiana, north of 36° 30’, and therefore free by the terms of the Missouri Compromise.

His claim was held valid by the local Court, but upon appeal it was denied by the Supreme Court of the State, which sent the case back to the lower tribunal. It passed thence into the Circuit and the Supreme Courts of the United States, where, at the December term of 1856, it was finally decided against Dred and his pretensions.

The majority of the Court were of opinion that “A negro held in Slavery in one State, under the laws thereof, and taken by his master, for a temporary residence, into a State where Slavery is prohibited by law, and thence into a Territory acquired by treaty, where Slavery is prohibited by act of Congress, and afterwards returning with his master into the same Slave State, and resuming his residence there, is not such a citizen of that State as may sue there in the Circuit Court of the United States, if by the law of that State a negro under such circumstances is a Slave.”

This decision extinguished the hopes of the hapless Dred. The freedom he sighed for was not, however, so remote as he supposed. Shortly after the judgment, his owner proceeded, to consummate the emancipation of the Negro and his family. The owner was the Hon. Calvin C. Chaffee of Massachusetts. But, as under the laws of Missouri the act of emancipation can only be performed by a citizen of that State, the four items of personal property were made over to Mr. Taylor Blow, a son of Capt. Peter Blow, who, on the 26th of May, 1857, gave liberty to the happy captives.

The transaction was probably as gratifying as it was becoming to Mr. Blow, who a half century before had been a playmate of the colored hero. Charitable hands have smoothed the later path of Dred and his Harriet, so that a freedom so tardily come by has not been attended by its usual abuse and suffering.

Few men who have achieved greatness have won it so effectually as this black champion. He belongs to a class whose names are accidentally but ineffably associated with memorable facts in history. The “Dred Scott Decision” is to be classed with the “Lex Julia” and the “Code Napoleon,” to which chance rather than merit has attached names, which they shall perpetuate indefinitely. It shall always be remembered that in the person of the old Negro who died yesterday the highest tribunal of America decided that an African was not a man, and could not therefore be a citizen of the United States.

JOHN BROWN

May 9, 1800–December 2, 1859

John Brown has paid the penalty of his crime. He was executed yesterday, according to appointment, with due solemnity and under an imposing display of the military strength of the State of Virginia.

The event created a good deal of feeling throughout the country. Our columns contain notices of meetings and other indications of sympathy, held in various sections of the Northern States. In this City, two churches were opened for public service. No other public demonstrations took place here, and even at these churches the attendance was not large.

In other places, only a small minority of the people took part in these public proclamations of sympathy. It is but just to add, however, that hundreds and thousands of persons, in this City and throughout the North, were deeply moved by personal sympathy for Brown, but were still too thoroughly convinced of the legal justice of his execution to make any outward show of their commiseration.

There is not any general sympathy in the North with Brown’s invasion of Virginia or with the object which took him there. But there is a wide and profound conviction in the public mind that he was personally honest and sincere, that he deemed his motives honorable and righteous, and that he believed himself to be doing a religious duty.

We do not believe that one-tenth of the people of the Northern States would deny that he merited the penalty which has overtaken his offense. But we have just as little doubt that most of them pity his fate and respect his memory, as that of a brave, conscientious and misguided man.

Now that the curtain has fallen upon this tragedy, we trust the public feeling will resume a healthier tone, especially in the Southern States, where it has risen to a perilous heat. We take it for granted that the authorities of Virginia will not deem it necessary to continue their formidable display of military force, or further agitate the public mind by apprehensions of invasion.

We can make just allowance for the circumstances which have surrounded them, and for the distrust and dread they have evinced. But the mass of the people in the North cannot understand and do not appreciate either. Knowing how narrow and feeble is the sympathy felt at the North for such movements as that of Brown, our people deem it weak and puerile for the South to clothe herself in military array against imaginary dangers. At this moment, throughout the North, the conviction is well-nigh universal that the Virginians have been needlessly panic-stricken, or that they have been victimized by political demagogues, who have sought to promote their own selfish ends by playing upon the fears and resentments of the mass of the people.

So far as this outbreak of violent sentiment has been the work of partisans, it is useless to protest against it. Some of these men aim at disunion, and they avail themselves of every opportunity to stimulate the distrust, resentment and hatred of the two sections towards each other. Others among them aim only at the ascendancy of their own sectional party, and they use these incidents merely to unite the South and coerce the North into conformity to their desires.

As these men are thoroughly and recklessly selfish in their aims, no considerations of the public good would check their insane endeavors. It is their determination to goad the South into the conviction that the whole North is bent on waging war upon Slavery in the Southern States, and that John Brown’s troop was only the advanced guard of the general army. They represent the Northern people as all Abolitionists, all fanatics, all reckless of Southern rights and interests.

Whatever ministers to this belief is lavishly used for that purpose; whatever corrects it is ignored or discredited. The diatribes of our Abolition orators and journalists are greedily copied in Southern prints and put forward as illustrations of Northern sentiment, while the conservative declarations which emanate from our pulpits, our rostrums and our presses are unnoticed. We cannot wonder that the people of the South come to regard every Northern man as their enemy.

The remedy, we believe, lies with the conservatives of the South. They must give signs to the North that reason and patriotic feeling have not wholly fled from the Southern States, and that the Union is worth preserving. If the whole South desires disunion, she can probably have it. If she expects her own condition to be bettered by it, a brief experiment will dispel that delusion.

BRIGHAM YOUNG

June 1, 1801–August 29, 1877

SALT LAKE CITY—Brigham Young died at 4 o’clock this afternoon at the age of 76.

He was born at Whittingham, Windham County, Vt., on the 1st of June, 1801. His father, John Young, was a farmer in different circumstances, with a family of five sons and six daughters, Brigham being the fourth son and ninth child. At the age of 16 John Young joined the Revolutionary Army, and served in three campaigns under Gen. Washington.

In 1785 he married Nabby, a daughter of Phineas and Susannah Howe, the mother of Brigham, and settled down as a farmer in Hopkinton, Middlesex County, Mass.

In the earlier years of his life, Brigham Young worked with his father on the farm in Sherburn, Chenango County, N.Y., whither his father had removed in 1804. Brigham afterward learned the trade of painter and glazier, an occupation which he followed till he was 31 years of age, when the whole current of his life was changed in consequence of his conversion to Mormonism.

In 1833 he was converted by Samuel H., a brother of Joseph Smith. At Kirtland, Ohio, where he joined the Saints, he became intimate with Joseph Smith, was ordained an Elder, and began to preach, his shrewdness, knowledge of character, and strength of will quickly acquiring for him some measure of that influence and power in the Church which afterward became so absolutely overwhelming.

On the 14th of February, 1835, Brigham was ordained one of the Twelve Apostles of the Church, of whom he became President in the following year, on the apostasy of Thomas B. Marsh. The persecution of the Mormons soon came, and Joe Smith and Brigham Young fled for their lives.

After many hairbreadth escapes and trials they succeeded in rallying together the brethren and sisters who had not apostatized, and they founded a new Mormon colony in Missouri, Brigham securing a still greater share of influence and power. Again persecution came upon the Saints, and they returned to Illinois. In 1840 Brigham was sent to England as a missionary. He commenced preaching in Liverpool immediately, issued an edition of the Book of Mormon, and started a periodical called the Millennial Star.

In 1844 came the riot at Nauvoo, the shooting of Smith, the scattering of the Twelve Apostles, and the assumption of the Mormon Presidency by Sidney Rigdon. Brigham was in Boston at the time; but he hurried off to Nauvoo immediately, knowing well that his opportunity had arrived. Four persons were ambitious of the Mormon Presidency, though, according to Mormon law, it belonged of right to Rigdon. Brigham, however, secured this position for himself by a bold coup d’état.

He summoned the people together, denounced the other aspirants and their adherents as children of the devil—especially Rigdon—and even went so far as to curse Rigdon and hand him over “to the buffetings of Satan for a thousand years.” It silenced all his enemies. In his new office, he set to work to complete the great temple; he built a mansion house, and in increasing the prosperity of Nauvoo, increased his own popularity and power.

Even before the completion of the temple, in 1845, Brigham foresaw the necessity of a migration further westward. In 1846, thousands of the Saints left their homes—all of them poor and many of them destitute—to seek an indefinite home somewhere in the Rocky Mountains.

They crossed the Mississippi on the ice in February, with about as vague an idea of the locality of their ultimate destination as the Israelites had of the land of Canaan, except that they were assured by Brigham that it was to be a land flowing with milk and honey. In the following Winter the Mormons established themselves at Kanesville, now Council Bluffs, in Iowa.

In the Spring of 1847 an expedition, consisting of Brigham and 143 men, left Kanesville. On the 24th of July they reached Salt Lake. Brigham determined to move the entire body of the Church there, a gigantic undertaking.

To carry this intention into effect he felt that he must have more power. That could only be obtained by his assumption of the attributes of Smith, as the Prophet, Seer, and Revelator of the Mormon people. This he did on the 24th of December, 1847, during the delivery of one of the most remarkable and impassioned sermons he ever preached. Women screamed, and fainted, the male Saints wept, and all exclaimed, “The mantle of Joseph has fallen upon Brigham!” When quiet was restored Brigham Young was elected “President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in all the World.”

In 1848, Brigham moved his people to Salt Lake. His restless energy kept down any more marked demonstrations of discontent, and when they at last reached Salt Lake he kept them so hard at work that they had little time to complain.

The termination of the Mexican war gave Brigham Young the opportunity of securing for his people the protection and recognition of the United States Government, and of adding to the glory, importance, and stability of his own position. A Mormon convention was held on the 15th of March, 1849, the Constitution of the proposed State of Deseret was drawn up, and delegates were sent to Washington to ask that Deseret might be admitted into the Union.

The question was brought up in Congress, and eventuated on the 9th of September, 1850, in the grant of a Territorial Government under the name of Utah. Brigham Young was appointed by President Fillmore to be the first Governor of the new Territory for a term of four years. The Tabernacle was built, and the Mormons began to see prosperity in the future.

Socially, the Mormons were no better off than a horde of peasants, bound to obey the bidding of the suzerain. This is directly shown in the action of the first Utah Territorial Legislature. After passing a code of laws for the government of the Territory, and sending innumerable memorials to Congress, mostly asking for appropriations of public moneys, that body divided up the canons, ferries, pasture lands, woodlands, water privileges, and all the most valuable parts of the State domain among the most prominent of the saints, Brigham Young always coming in for the lion’s share.

By tricks and stratagems, Brigham Young succeeded in ridding the Mormon Territory of all Federal authorities, till at last Utah was virtually in a state of rebellion against the Federal Government. The Mormon war of 1857 was the result. In the Summer of 1857, President Buchanan dispatched 3,000 troops to Utah. Brigham Young retaliated by issuing a proclamation which was substantially a declaration of war against the United States, and which placed the Territory of Utah under martial law; at the same time every man who could bear arms was drilled as a soldier.

The “Army of Utah” reached the scene of its operations late in the Fall, and went into encampment. During the Winter negotiations were brought about by Col. [Thomas] Kane, a quasi-Mormon, between Brigham and the Government, which ended in Gov. [Alfred] Cumming visiting Salt Lake City, being received by Brigham with a hypocritical show, and having the Territorial records and papers placed in his possession. In the meantime Federal soldiers were in the city, and Brigham, in the face of such a humiliation, promulgated an order, purporting to come direct from the Almighty, commanding the people to leave their homes and migrate to the South.

They halted at Provo, 50 miles from Salt Lake City. Six days later Mr. Buchanan sent Commissioners to Utah with a proclamation of pardon. They arrived at Salt Lake City on the 7th of June, 1858, and a conference was held, resulting in Brigham agreeing to receive peaceably the civil officers of the Government. On the 5th of July the Mormons were ordered to return to their homes, and the Mormon war was brought to a close without any bloody encounter on the battlefield.

In 1862 Stephen S. Harding, of Indiana, was appointed Governor of Utah by Mr. Lincoln, and in his first message to the Territorial Legislature he gave great offense to Brigham Young and the Mormons by his denunciations of polygamy. The message was suppressed by the Legislature by the order of Brigham, but was afterward printed and published by order of the United States Senate. Brigham and the Mormons were furious. Meetings were held, the most inflammatory speeches were made by Brigham and others, and an insolent message was dispatched to Mr. Lincoln, requesting him to recall the Governor and other Federal officers.

Mr. Lincoln’s hands were fully occupied at the time, and Brigham achieved a decided victory, making him more powerful than ever. He became still more arbitrary and still more reckless in his greed for wealth, and unscrupulous as to his actions and relations. He developed to the last degree the great idea of Mormonism—that “the iniquity of the preacher makes no difference in the principle; that the vices of the administrator cannot affect the acceptability of the ordinance if he only possesses the priesthood.”

During the war of the rebellion Brigham and his coadjutors remained almost entirely quiescent, though having a leaning toward secession. Though not a slave Territory, Utah was committed to the purchasing and holding of slaves, by an act passed by the Territorial Legislature on Jan. 31, 1852.

But during the last 10 years, Brigham has principally occupied himself in carrying out as far as possible his favorite idea that Utah contained the elements of everything needed by civilized man, and that by the establishment of manufactories and the production of silk and cotton, both of which have been started, the Mormon Territory might be independent of the world. His great aim was to prevent the Saints from trading with the Gentiles.

The last years of Brigham Young’s life were sorely tried by the action directed by the United States Courts against polygamy.

Brigham Young’s family relations are matters of common notoriety. He married early in life in his own State of Vermont, but was soon left a widower with two daughters, both of whom subsequently embraced the Mormon faith and contracted polygamic marriages. Shortly after his wife’s death he married Mary Ann Angell, who was, as he claimed in his answer to the petition for divorce and alimony of his 19th wife—Ann Eliza—his only lawful wife. She bore Brigham five children.

Lucy Decker Soely was his first wife in “plurality,” and the first child, Brigham Heber, was the first-born in Mormon polygamy. Amelia Folsom was the favorite wife of his old age. She occupied till his death a queenly position among the Saints. In all, Brigham Young is credited with having been married or sealed to 40 wives, the majority of whom lived, with their children, a life of drudgery, impecuniosity, and misery.

In appearance, Brigham Young resembled much a New England farmer, as he originally was. He was of rather large figure, broad-shouldered and stooping slightly; hair light in color, somewhat narrow forehead, gray eyes (the lid of one drooping), fleshy cheeks, imperfect teeth, rather sharp-pointed nose, peaked chin, and generally somewhat irregular features.

Illiterate, yet not without talent; fluent in speech, and still without the first elements of the genius of an orator, he held his listeners easily, combining in his preaching a forcible pretension to heavenly revelation with a thorough knowledge of the willing subserviency of one part of his audience and the fervid superstition of the remainder.

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

December 12, 1805–May 24, 1879

William Lloyd Garrison expired at 11 o’clock last night, at the Westmoreland Apartment-house in New York, where he has been lying in a critical condition for the last week.

His physician, Dr. Leonard Weber, defined Mr. Garrison’s illness as nervous prostration consequent upon paralysis of the bladder and kidney trouble of long standing. Only his four sons and his daughter were present around his death-bed.

The active public life of William Lloyd Garrison began in 1828, when he established the Journal of the Times in Bennington, Vt., in which he announced his intention to labor, so long as he had strength, for the gradual emancipation of every slave in the Republic, and it may be said to have closed with the last number of the Liberator, on the 1st of January, 1866.

When he began his career as an advocate of emancipation the Missouri Compromise was eight years old. The second Adams was in the third year of his term, and the questions which the statesmen of the day believed to be of the highest and most lasting importance were the currency, banks, the tariff, internal improvements.

In this arid political wilderness a voice was raised, crying out that liberty, not low tariffs or high, the rights of man and not the issue of paper money, were the things to which the country must turn its mind if it would live and not die.

Mr. Garrison was born in the little coast town of Newburyport, Mass., on the 12th of December, 1805 His father abandoned his wife and the children to lead a life of dissipation, giving good cause for Mr. Garrison’s life-long hatred of intemperance. After an abortive effort to learn the shoe-maker’s trade at Lynn, where his mother had removed, young Garrison was happily apprenticed in 1818—at the age of 13—to the printer of the Newburyport Herald.

He remained with his employer for eight years, gradually learning the art of composition, and offering contributions to the local journals. Garrison early formed the habit of polemic and proselyting writing. He had little conception of a newspaper, but a keen sense of the value of an organ of personal expression.

His first independent effort was made at 22, as the proprietor and editor of the Newburyport Free Press. It was a dead failure within a year. He journeyed to Boston, where, after a severe struggle with poverty, he made his way to be editor of the National Philanthropist, in whose columns he first set his hand publicly in favor of total abstinence. He soon quitted this field, however, to take part with a friend, in 1828, in editing the Journal of the Times.

The first phase of work for the oppressed negroes which enlisted Mr. Garrison’s support was the scheme of the Colonization Society, the object of which was to found a black Republic on the shore of Africa to which negroes could be removed. Its advocates were numerous and eloquent in the South, and in the North they painted the evils and wrongs of slavery in vivid colors.

On the 4th of July, 1828, he delivered the annual address before the society in Boston. It was almost the last time that for at least 30 years he was to receive general approbation in his own country. Shortly after, he met Benjamin Lundy, an amiable, but withal courageous Quaker, who had constituted himself a preacher of liberty. One of his instrumentalities was a journal called the Genius of Universal Emancipation.

In 1828 this wandering publication was settled in Baltimore, and from that city Mr. Lundy journeyed on foot all the way to Vermont to invite Mr. Garrison to come and aid in its management. Mr. Garrison went, but, as he said, “I wasn’t much help to him, for he had been all for gradual emancipation, and as soon as I began to look into the matter I became convinced that immediate abolition was the doctrine to be preached, and I scattered his subscribers like pigeons.”

Garrison was not long in discovering that it was far from a dove-like community into which he had come. He had been in Baltimore but a few months when, learning that a vessel was about to sail for New Orleans with a cargo of slaves, he denounced the act as one of “domestic piracy.”

He was promptly indicted for libel, tried, convicted (doubtless fairly enough as Maryland laws then were), and sentenced to a fine of $1,000 and imprisonment until it was paid. The incident created a good deal of excitement in the North, and John G. Whittier, then an admirer of Henry Clay, wrote to that gentleman urging him to pay the fine.

It is said that Mr. Clay was about to do so when he was anticipated by Mr. Arthur Tappan, of this City, who released Mr. Garrison after seven weeks’ imprisonment. He left his cell devoted heart and soul to the cause of “immediate emancipation” as “the right of the slave and the duty of the master.”

He wrote from prison an open letter to the Judge who had sentenced him. “So long as a good Providence gives me strength and intellect,” he said, “I will not cease to declare that the existence of slavery in this country is a foul reproach to the American name; nor will I hesitate to proclaim the guilt of kidnappers, slavery abettors, or slave-owners, wherever they may reside or however high they may be exalted.

“I expect and I am willing to be persecuted, imprisoned, and bound for advocating the rights of my colored countrymen; and I should deserve to be a slave myself if I shrank from that danger.”

He first went to Washington, intending to establish a paper there, but he made up his mind that the field where his labor was most needed was in the North. On the 1st of January, 1831, he published the first number of the Liberator. His only associate was Mr. Isaac Knapp, like himself, a printer. Too poor to hire an office, they got the friendly foreman of the Christian Examiner to give them the use of his type in payment for their labor, and then, after their day’s task was over, they labored far into each night on the Liberator.

“A greater revolution was to be effected in the free States—and particularly in New England—than [in] the South,” Mr. Garrison said. “I found contempt more bitter, opposition more active, detraction more relentless, prejudice more stubborn, and apathy more frozen than among slaveholders themselves.”

And he thus explained the temper with which he entered on his work: “I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think or speak, or write with moderation. I am in earnest. I will not equivocate, I will not excuse. I will not retreat a single inch. And I will be heard.”

He soon received convincing evidence that he was heard. James Foster (colored), of Philadelphia, sent him $50 and the names of 25 subscribers. This was his first recognition. His next was quite different. The Vigilance Association of Columbia, S.C., offered “a reward of $1,500 for the apprehension and conviction of any white person detected in circulating in that State the newspaper called the Liberator.”

The corporation of Georgetown, D.C., passed an ordinance against any free person of color taking it from the Post Office, the penalty being $20 fine or 30 days’ imprisonment. The Legislature of Georgia passed an act offering a reward of $5,000 for the arrest, prosecution, and conviction of the editor or publisher of “a certain paper called the Liberator.”

During 1831 Mr. Garrison made an effort to start a National Anti-Slavery Society, but at first his views as to immediate and unconditional emancipation were unacceptable. Later, on the 1st of January, 1832, he succeeded, with 11 others, in completing an organization, of which he was chosen President, a position he held almost continuously for 33 years.

The society plied every corner of the land with tracts and pamphlets. It sought expression in the newspapers. It established branches throughout the North. It held numerous meetings, and its members frequently delivered public addresses.

On Oct. 2, 1833, a meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society was broken up by a mob. Luckily for him, Mr. Garrison was not well known, and actually accompanied the men who were looking for him to give him a coat of tar and feathers.

Entering again on the work which he had laid out for himself, he attracted the attention of many of the leading men of the country. But his unqualified denunciation, his unflinching use of opprobrious epithets, his unsparing criticism of everybody and everything not in harmony with his view of right, frightened most of those to whom he appealed.

In 1834, Mr. Garrison married Helen Eliza Benson, of Brooklyn, Conn. She too was an ardent abolitionist. [She died in 1876.]

Gradually he yielded to the logic which demanded that a Union which existed in name only should cease to exist at all. He declared that the “most important question” for the Anti-slavery Party was “the duty of making the repeal of the union between the North and the South the grand rallying point until it be accomplished or slavery cease to pollute our soil.”

In 1845, Massachusetts politics were stirred by the audacious scheme of the annexation of Texas, to furnish new territory for slavery. The Abolitionists joined in the opposition, but with no thought of limiting their efforts to ordinary political measures. An Anti-annexation Convention was held in Faneuil Hall in January, 1845.

Mr. Garrison urged that it should be declared that “if our protest and remonstrance shall be disregarded, and Texas be annexed, then shall the committee of the convention call another at the same place; that then and there Massachusetts shall declare the Union of these States dissolved, and invite all the States that may be disposed to reunite with her as a Republic based truly upon the grand principles of the Declaration of Independence.”

The Abolitionists’ proposals were voted down, though there was considerable sentiment in favor.

Mr. Garrison, who also spoke in favor of women’s suffrage, recognized the hand of God in the course of events which made the Proclamation of Emancipation a war measure. On the 18th of December, 1865, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was proclaimed. And on the 1st of January following, Mr. Garrison issued the last number of the Liberator.

SOJOURNER TRUTH

ca. 1797–November 26, 1883

Sojourner Truth, the well-known colored lecturer, died at Battle Creek, Mich., yesterday. For almost three-quarters of a century she delivered lectures from the East to the West upon temperance, politics, and the woman’s rights question.

She was born a slave, in the State of New York, and spent the early part of her life—until 1817, when slavery was abolished in this State—in hard work in the fields of her many masters. Her parents were brought from the coast of Guinea, and sold as slaves on arriving in the United States.

Her real name—or that which had been given to her by her first master—was Isabella Hardenburg, but, becoming dissatisfied with it, it is said that she went out into a wilderness and prayed to the Lord to give her an appropriate name. After praying for some time she heard, she said, the name “Sojourner” whispered to her, as she was to travel “up and down,” and afterward “Truth” was added to it to signify that she should preach nothing but truth to all men.

Sojourner had a tall, masculine-looking figure—she was almost 6 feet high—and talked in a deep, guttural, powerful voice that made many people who heard her think that she was a man, and was imposing upon them by masquerading as a woman. Upon one occasion, while she was preaching to an audience, doubts as to her sex were freely expressed, and she satisfied them that she was a woman. She could neither read nor write, but on her lecturing tours took with her her grandson, who attended to her business affairs.

Sojourner knew many prominent men—her favorite statesman being Abraham Lincoln—and her narratives and descriptions of those whom she had known showed that she had judged their characters exceedingly well. During her later life, or for the past 10 years, her avowed object in traveling around was to obtain names to a petition which she intended presenting to the Government, asking that a portion of the public lands in the West be set apart for the establishment of a negro colony, where she proposed that the negro youth should be educated.

Sojourner undoubtedly did a great deal of good work during her lifetime, for she was instrumental in reclaiming hundreds of men and women from a bad life and by her own life set a splendid example to the colored population.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS

ca. February 1818–February 20, 1895

WASHINGTON—Frederick Douglass dropped dead in the hallway of his residence on Anacostia Heights this evening at 7 o’clock. He had been in the highest spirits, and apparently in the best of health, despite his 78 years, when death overtook him.

This morning he was driven to Washington, accompanied by his wife. She left him at the Congressional Library, and he continued to Metzerott Hall, where he attended the sessions of the Women’s Council in the forenoon and the afternoon, returning to Cedar Hill, his residence, between 5 and 6 o’clock. After dining, he had a chat in the hallway with his wife about the doings of the council. He grew very enthusiastic in his explanation of one of the events of the day, when he fell upon his knees, with hands clasped.

Mrs. Douglass, thinking this was part of his description, was not alarmed, but as she looked he sank lower and lower, and finally lay stretched upon the floor, breathing his last. Realizing that he was ill, she raised his head, and then understood that he was dying. She rushed to the front door with cries for help. Some men who were nearby quickly responded, and attempted to reassure the dying man. One of them called Dr. J. Stewart Harrison, and while he was injecting a restorative into the patient’s arm, Mr. Douglass passed away, seemingly without pain.

Mr. Douglass had lived for some time at Cedar Hill with his wife. He had two sons and a daughter, the children of his first wife, living here.

The last hours of his life were given in attention to one of the principles to which he has devoted his energies since his escape from slavery. This morning he drove into Washington from his residence, about a mile out from Anacostia, a suburb just across the eastern branch of the Potomac, and at 10 o’clock appeared at Metzerott Hall, where the Women’s National Council is holding its triennial. Mr. Douglass was a member of the National Women’s Suffrage Association, and had always attended its conventions.

When the meeting had been called to order by Mrs. May Wright Sewall, the President of the Council, she appointed Miss Susan B. Anthony and the Rev. Anna H. Shaw to escort him to the platform.

Miss Anthony and Mr. Douglass formed an intimate friendship when both resided in Rochester, N.Y., and that friendship had continued for many decades.

Frederick Douglass has been often spoken of as the foremost man of the African race in America. Though born and reared in slavery, he managed, through his own perseverance and energy, to win for himself a place that made him beloved by all members of his own race in America and won for himself the esteem and reverence of all fair-minded persons, both in this country and in Europe.

He became well known, early in his career, as an orator upon subjects relating to slavery. He had become known before the Civil War also as a journalist. So highly were his opinions valued that he was often consulted by President Lincoln, after the war began, upon questions relating to the colored race. He held important offices almost constantly from 1871 until 1891.

Mr. Douglass, perhaps more than any other man of his race, was instrumental in advancing the work of banishing the color line.

The exact date of his birth is unknown. It was about the year 1817. His mother was a negro slave and his father was a white man. Mr. Douglass’s birthplace was on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. He was reared as a slave on the plantation of Col. Edward Lloyd. He was sent, when 10 years old, to one of Col. Lloyd’s relatives in Baltimore. Here he was employed in a shipyard.

Mr. Douglass, according to his own story, suffered deeply while under the bonds of slavery. His superior intelligence rendered him keenly sensitive to his condition. He learned his letters, it is said, from the carpenters’ marks on planks and timbers in the shipyard. He used to listen while his mistress read the Bible, and he asked her to teach him to read it for himself.

It was while here that he heard of the abolitionists, and began to formulate plans for escaping to the North. He made his escape from slavery Sept. 3, 1838, and came to New York. Thence he went to New Bedford, where he married. He supported himself for several years by day labor on the wharves and in the workshops.

He made a speech in 1841 at an anti-slavery convention, held at Nantucket, that made a favorable impression, and he became the agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. He then traveled four years through New England, lecturing against slavery.

He went to England in 1845, where his lectures in behalf of the slave won a great deal of attention. Mr. Douglass often met with many unpleasant experiences while traveling about, owing to the prejudice against his race. On one occasion, when the passengers on a boat would not allow him to enter the cabin, his friend Wendell Phillips refused to leave him, and the two men spent the night together on deck.

William Lloyd Garrison had also become interested in young Mr. Douglass, and before Mr. Douglass went to England had done all he could to assist him in gaining an education.

On returning from England Mr. Douglass founded Frederick Douglass’s Paper, a weekly journal, at Rochester. The title was changed to The North Star. He continued its publication for several years.

Mr. Douglass and John Brown were friends, and had the same objects in view. Mr. Douglass, however, did not approve of Brown’s plan for attacking Harper’s Ferry, and the men parted two weeks before the attack.

Mr. Douglass was in Philadelphia the night the Harper’s Ferry episode occurred. It became plain to him immediately afterward that he could scarcely hope to escape being implicated in the trouble, and at the earnest solicitation of his friends he made his way to Canada. He went to Quebec, and thence to England, where he remained six or eight months. He afterward returned to Rochester, and again took charge of his paper.

Mr. Douglass urged upon President Lincoln, when the Civil War began, the employment of colored troops and the proclamation of emancipation. Permission for organizing such troops was granted in 1863, and Mr. Douglass became active in enlisting men to fill the colored regiments, notably the 54th and the 55th Massachusetts.

Mr. Douglass returned to the lecture field after slavery had been abolished. He attracted great crowds wherever he went. His appearance on the platform was imposing. His height was over 6 feet and his weight was 200 pounds. His complexion was swarthy rather than black. His head was covered with a great shock of white hair. A large head, low forehead, high cheekbones, and large mouth, with gleaming white teeth, were some of the noticeable characteristics of his appearance. As a speaker he was characterized by his earnestness. He made but few gestures and used simple language.

He received the appointment in 1871 as Assistant Secretary to the commission to San Domingo, and on his return from that mission President [Ulysses S.] Grant appointed him one of the Territorial Council of the District of Columbia. He was elected Presidential Elector at Large for the State of New York in 1872.

Mr. Douglass was appointed United States Marshal for the District of Columbia in 1876, and retained that office till 1881, when he became Recorder of Deeds in the District of Columbia.

President Harrison made Mr. Douglass Minister to Haiti in 1889. He resigned this office in August, 1891. Mr. Douglass’s administration in Haiti was not entirely satisfactory, and unfavorable reports of the affairs of his office had reached Washington. The Haitians did not take kindly to Mr. Douglass, because of his race.

Mr. Douglass wrote several books that have met with considerable sale. Among them are “Narrative of My Experience in Slavery,” 1844; “My Bondage and My Freedom,” 1855; and “Life and Times of Frederick Douglass,” 1881.

Of recent years he has been prominent in all movements having in view the social and political advancement of women.

Frederick Douglass was married twice, his second wife being Miss Pitts, a white woman from New York State. For a time this lost him some case among the people of his own race, but his personal standing and overpowering intellectuality quickly dissipated the sentiment that some sought to disseminate to his discredit.

There is no end of stories about Mr. Douglass. One of his most marked characteristics was his intense dislike of being spoken of as Fred Douglass. It is told of him that one day, when in the East Room of the White House, on overhearing a woman say, “There’s Fred Douglass,” he turned to her, bowed, and said, “Frederick Douglass, if you please.”

In addressing a colored school, March 24, 1893, at Easton, Md., Mr. Douglass said:

“I once knew a little colored boy whose mother and father died when he was but six years old. He was a slave and had no one to care for him. He slept on a dirt floor in a hovel, and in cold weather would crawl into a mealbag head foremost and leave his feet in the ashes to keep them warm. Often he would roast an ear of corn and eat it to satisfy his hunger, and many times has he crawled under the barn or stable and secured eggs, which he would roast in the fire and eat.

“That boy did not wear pantaloons, as you do, but a tow linen shirt. Schools were unknown to him, and he learned to spell from an old Webster’s spelling book and to read and write from posters on cellar and barn doors, while boys and men would help him. He would then preach and speak, and soon became well known. He became Presidential Elector, United States Marshal, United States Recorder, United States diplomat, and accumulated some wealth. He wore broadcloth and didn’t have to divide crumbs with the dogs under the table. That boy was Frederick Douglass.

“What was possible for me is possible for you. Don’t think because you are colored you can’t accomplish anything.”

SUSAN B. ANTHONY

February 20, 1820–March 13, 1906

ROCHESTER—Miss Susan B. Anthony died at 12:40 o’clock this morning. The end came peacefully. Miss Anthony had been unconscious for more than 24 hours. Only her wonderful constitution kept her alive.

Dr. M. S. Ricker, her physician, said Miss Anthony died of heart disease and pneumonia.

Miss Anthony was taken ill while on her way home from the National Suffrage Convention in Baltimore. She stopped in New York, where a banquet was to be given Feb. 20 in honor of her 86th birthday, but she had an attack of neuralgia and hastened home.

On Wednesday she said to her sister: “Write to Anna Shaw immediately, and tell her I desire that every cent I leave when I pass out of this life shall be given to the fund which Miss Thomas and Miss Garrett are raising for the cause. I have given my life and all I am to it, and now I want my last act to be to give it all I have, to the last cent.”

Miss Shaw, a women’s suffrage leader, said:

“On Sunday, about two hours before she became unconscious, I talked with Miss Anthony, and she said: ‘To think I have had more than 60 years of hard struggle for a little liberty, and then to die without it seems so cruel.”

Susan Brownell Anthony was a pioneer leader of the cause of woman suffrage, and worked tirelessly for what she considered the best interests of womankind. In recent years her age made it impossible for her to continue active participation in all the movements for the enfranchisement of women with which she had been connected, but she was at the time of her death the Honorary President of the National Woman Suffrage Association, the society she and Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized in 1869.

Miss Anthony possessed a firm but pleasing face, clear hazel eyes, and dark hair which she wore combed over the ears and bound in a coil at the back. She paid much attention to dress and advised those associated in the movement for woman suffrage to be punctilious in all matters pertaining to attire. For a time in the fifties she wore a bloomer costume, consisting of a short skirt and Turkish trousers gathered at the ankles. So great an outcry arose against the innovation that she was forced to abandon it.

Miss Anthony was born at South Adams, Mass., on Feb. 15, 1820. Daniel Anthony, her father, a liberal Quaker, was a cotton manufacturer. Susan Anthony was instructed at home and then sent to finish her education at a Friends’ boarding school in Philadelphia. At 17 she received a dollar a week with board by teaching in a private family. She continued to teach until 1852.

Miss Anthony had become impressed with the idea that women were suffering great wrongs, and when she abandoned teaching, she determined to enter the lecture field.

People of today can scarcely understand the strong prejudices Miss Anthony had to live down. In 1851 she called a temperance convention in Albany, admittance to a previous convention having been refused to her because it was not the custom to admit women. The Women’s New York State Temperance Society was organized the following year. Through Miss Anthony’s exertions and those of Mrs. Stanton, women soon came to be admitted to educational and other conventions, with the right to speak, vote, and act upon committees.

Miss Anthony’s active participation in the movement for woman suffrage started in the fifties. As early as 1854 she arranged conventions throughout the State and bombarded the Legislature with messages and appeals. She was active in obtaining the passage of the act of the New York Legislature in 1860 giving married women the possession of their earnings and the guardianship of their children. During the war she was devoted to the Women’s Loyal League, which petitioned Congress in favor of the 13th amendment. She was also interested in the 14th amendment, seeking the omission of the word “male.”

To test the application of the 14th and 15th amendments, she cast ballots in the State and Congressional election in Rochester in 1872. She was indicted and ordered to pay a fine, but the order was never enforced.

Miss Anthony succeeded Mrs. Stanton as President of the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1892. This office she held until February, 1899. For years she averaged 100 lectures a year. She engaged in eight different State campaigns for a Constitutional amendment enfranchising women, and hearings before committees of practically every Congress since 1869 were granted to her.

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

May 12, 1820–August 13, 1910

LONDON—Florence Nightingale, the famous nurse of the Crimean war, and the only woman who ever received the Order of Merit, died yesterday afternoon at her London home. Although she had been an invalid for a long time, rarely leaving her room, her death was unexpected.

During recent years, owing to her feebleness and advanced age, Miss Nightingale had received but few visitors. On May 12 last, she celebrated her 90th birthday, and was the recipient of a congratulatory message from King George.

Not even the death of a royal personage could have called forth more universal expressions of regret and tributes of love and affection than appear in the English papers.

“The Queen of Nurses” and “The Soldier’s Friend” are titles which have stuck to Florence Nightingale since her memorable service in behalf of the wounded and dying in the Crimean war. Though she had been an invalid since she returned from the Levant in the stirring times following the heroic struggle of the British in the Russian Empire, she retained her mental faculties to the last.

Florence Nightingale, the daughter of William Shore Nightingale, a wealthy English landowner in Florence, Italy, was born in that city in 1820 and from that city she took her given name. When a mere child, she returned with her parents to England, where she lived on her father’s estate of Lea Hurst, Derbyshire. She was highly educated, being thoroughly at home in the French, German, and Italian languages. Her inclination toward philanthropy manifested itself early in life and she did much for her poor neighbors.

She began her life work by entering as a pupil in the Lutheran Hospital of Pastor Fleidner at Kaiserwerth, near Düsseldorf-on-the-Rhine. Here she acquitted herself in such a manner as to draw the highest praise from her teacher. In the early fifties she returned to London and devoted herself to labor in a hospital for sick governesses. Soon after the greatest undertaking of her life was thrust upon her.

The Crimean war had opened. England was engaged in the formidable task of trying to clip the claws of the Russian bear. Thousands of Englishmen were sent away to the Black Sea, where the rigors of Winter on that iron coast were such that the campaign almost failed through the breakdown of the chain of supplies, while in 1854 there were 18,000 men in the military hospitals.

In the first stage of the Crimean not a woman nurse was employed in any of the military hospitals, for the class of women who had in the past been employed was so notoriously bad that the War Office decided not to send any women nurses to the Crimea. After the battle of the Alma, however, the country rang with indignation at the neglected condition of the sick and wounded soldiers. Stirred into action, Sir Sydney Herbert, Secretary for War, wrote to Miss Nightingale saying that she was the one woman to take charge of the organization of a corps of nurses. A few days later she sailed for the Crimea with 34 nurses.

The women arrived just after the battle of Inkerman. There were 4,000 men in the hospitals, some wounded, but most of them sick.

Few veterans of the war of the Crimea are still alive, yet some remember the sweet and sympathetic face of Florence Nightingale, and were never tired of telling about her noble work in the hospitals. It was not only in the details of nursing, but in the gentle and watchful care for his comfort that Miss Nightingale made herself a beautiful memory to the soldier. She lent her aid to the surgeons when strong men turned away in horror, and sustained the courage of the wounded by her appeals to the ties which bound them to home.

Nor was it in the hospitals alone that her unselfish energy and untiring devotion were felt. There was an invalids’ kitchen, where appetizing food for the sick who could not eat ordinary fare was provided under Miss Nightingale’s eye. She provided also laundries, where clean linen could be obtained. In company with the army Chaplains she established a library and a school room. She personally attended to the correspondence of the wounded, and in many ways fully earned the title conferred upon her by the soldiers—“The Angel of the Crimea.”

For a year and a half she labored in this field until her work there was no longer necessary. In August, 1856, she returned to Lea Hurst. She arrived when she was least expected and eluded those who would have honored her.

The Queen, however was not to be denied. She sent for Miss Nightingale to visit her at Balmoral and decorated her with her own hand.

Miss Nightingale made herself still more popular by refusing to keep a gift of $250,000 from the English Government for her own needs, turning it over for the establishment of St. Thomas’s Hospital. In this is the Nightingale Training School for Nurses.

Miss Nightingale at this time was the heroine of the hour. Poems were written in her honor, songs and pianoforte pieces were dedicated to the “good angel of Derbyshire,” playbills displayed her name beside that of Hamlet, grocers put her portrait on their bags as an advertisement, broadsheet ballads on “The Nightingale” were the fashion in Seven Dials, and young ladies in ringlets played the “Nightingale Varsoviana” in drawing-room circles.

Although Miss Nightingale’s health was never robust after her Crimean experience, she contrived to write much that was of value. Her “Hospital Notes” have been remarkably successful, and her “Notes on Nursing” have had a circulation reaching into the hundreds of thousands.

In her youth Miss Nightingale had a great desire to study medicine, but the profession was closed to women. The injustice of the exclusion ranged her on the side of those who later started the propaganda for opening the professions to women.

CLARA BARTON

December 25, 1821–April 12, 1912

WASHINGTON—Miss Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross Society, died this morning at her home in Glen Echo, Md. The cause of her death was chronic pneumonia.

Miss Barton, who celebrated her 90th birthday anniversary Dec. 25, was President for 23 years of the Red Cross Society, which was established in this country through her efforts. She retired in May, 1904, on account of factional quarrels within the organization. But long before the society was founded she had become famous for her work on battlefields in the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian war.

She was born in North Oxford, Mass., on Christmas Day, 1821. She began teaching school at sixteen. In 1853 she visited relatives in Washington, D.C., and was persuaded to take charge of a division of the Patent Office, whose work had been disorganized by betrayal of secret information regarding patents. In a short time she had transformed her department into a model of efficiency and discretion.

Miss Barton was in Washington when the first blood of the war was shed. The soldiers killed and injured in the Baltimore riot were from her own State. Her great career as a nurse began when she saw 40 of the soldiers, wounded at Baltimore, taken to the infirmary in Washington. After visiting them and giving what aid she could, she distributed thousands of baskets of food to the soldiers.

During the Peninsula campaign, she made daily trips down the river, leaving Washington in a boat carrying a cargo of provisions and returning with a load of wounded men, for whom she cared at her own expense. She also wrote letters home for the wounded under her charge.

Her father died in 1861, leaving her an ample fortune. On his death bed they discussed her plan of going to the front and attending soldiers on the battlefield. Her father said: “Go, if you feel it your duty to go. I know what soldiers are, and I know that every soldier will respect your errand.”

She had difficulty getting a hearing from officers to whom she first applied for a pass beyond the army lines. She finally met a friend in Assistant Quartermaster General [Edmund] Rucker, who gave her means of transportation and the freedom to go to the relief of soldiers in battle whenever she wished. She spent large sums on a train of army wagons loaded with provisions and medical supplies.

Before the war ended she was appointed Superintendent of the 10th Army Corps Hospital, near City Point. Shortly before he was assassinated, President Lincoln appointed her to trace captured Union troops who were missing after prisoners of war had been exchanged. Of the 1,300 graves of soldiers who died at Andersonville Prison, she was able to identify all except 400.

In 1869 she went to Europe to rest. While she was at Berne she was called upon by representatives of the International Committee of Relief. They asked her to take part in their convention, which led to the organization of the International Red Cross Society. While she was in Europe the Franco-Prussian war broke out, and she went to the front and served as she had done during the Civil War.

In 1877 a few men and women in Washington had formed an American National Committee of the Red Cross. It was incorporated under the title of the American Association of the Red Cross, and Miss Barton was appointed President by President [James A.] Garfield. At her suggestion the work of the society was broadened to include, in addition to work on the battlefield, the object of relieving suffering in times of great National calamity. In 1893 Miss Barton organized a relief corps which was sent to Russia to the relief of peasants during the famine of that year.

In 1898 she headed a party which went to Armenia after the Armenian massacre. And during the Spanish-American war Miss Barton, who was then nearly 80 years old and for years had borne a large share of the expenses of the organization, went to Cuba and directed the work of the society on the field.

HARRIET TUBMAN

ca. 1822–March 10, 1913

Harriet Tubman Davis, an ex-slave, known as the “Moses of her people,” who before the Civil War took 300 slaves to Canada through her “underground railroad,” died on Monday night at the home she founded for aged and indigent negroes at Auburn, N.Y. She was said to be 91 years old, and her death was caused by pneumonia.

Harriet Tubman Davis was esteemed by such men as Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Lloyd Garrison, Phillips Brooks, Horace Mann, Frederick Douglas[s], Gerrit Smith, and John Brown, while on the other hand planters and slave owners offered rewards of from $12,000 to $40,000 for her capture during the fifties, at the time when she was taking slaves out of the United States. She had served as scout, nurse, and spy in the Union Army.

MARCUS GARVEY

August 17, 1887–June 10, 1940

LONDON, June 11—Marcus Garvey, West Indian Negro, who once set himself up as “Emperor of the Kingdom of Africa” in New York’s Harlem and later appeared before the League of Nations as representative of “the black peoples of the world,” died here yesterday.

—United Press

Marcus Garvey was a short, stout, ebony-colored firebrand who styled himself a “world-famous orator.” He was a promoter who sold hundreds of thousands of American Negroes on the idea of a nation for themselves, an African empire. He preached racial solidarity, racial enterprise and race segregation. Until some of his promotions landed him in jail, they paid him at least $22,000 a year, and probably much more.

Where Father Divine of a later day created “angels” and “archangels” among the colored population of Harlem, Garvey in his time sprinkled the area with princes and princesses, barons, knights, viscounts, earls and dukes, and kept for himself for a time the comparatively humble designation of “Sir Provisional President of Africa.”

There was no evidence that he had ever set foot on that continent, and the Republic of Liberia was, by announcement of its government, closed to him and his followers. He blamed the British and French Governments for that. His proposed hegira of black men and women back to the continent of their origin remained to the last simply a proposal.

Exact information about the origins of Marcus Aurelius Garvey, as he sometimes proudly named himself, was never forthcoming. It appeared, however, that some time about 1887 he was born in Jamaica, B.W.I., which fact made him a British citizen. According to his own story he was the editor of a Catholic newspaper in Jamaica at the age of 15, and thereafter edited papers in Jamaica and Costa Rica. He also said that he spent a year traveling through Europe before coming to the United States as the World War was about to begin.

His career in this country began as a journalist and lecturer to Negro audiences. It appeared to him that the Negroes in this country were in a state of semi-serfdom and he proposed to do something about it. The first step was the formation, in July 1914, of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, with an original membership of 15.

The next five or six years were his firebrand period. He made inflammatory attacks upon white people; suggested that for every Negro lynched in the South a white man should be similarly treated by the Negroes in New York. The trickle of dues into his “parent body,” as he began to call the U.N.I.A., swelled into a stream, and Garvey began to dream other dreams than race fighting. He had learned that small sums contributed by many persons may reach an impressive total.

So he organized the Black Star Steamship Line and the Black Star Steamship Company, to establish a world shipping firm staffed wholly by Negroes. He called a convention of his U.N.I.A. and offered some 5,000 Negroes who attended at Madison Square Garden an opportunity to buy stock at $5 a share. The money rolled in and he bought several ships. One was the Yarmouth, another the Kanawha, which had been the pleasure yacht of the late colonel Henry Huddleston Rogers.

The first job the Yarmouth had was to haul a $3,000,000 cargo of liquor from Brooklyn to Cuba for a firm that wanted to get it out of the country before Prohibition became effective on Jan. 15, 1920. All that whisky was too much temptation for the crew, who got drunk and put in at Norfolk, where the ship was seized under the Prohibition law. A total loss.

The black skipper of the Kanawha also had bad luck at Norfolk. On his first voyage he rammed a pier there, his boiler exploded, and the Kanawha, too, became a total loss.

Nothing, meanwhile, had happened in Harlem except the multiplication of Garvey’s notions. He had organized the African Community League, incorporated at $1,000,000; the Negro Factories Corporation and, on the non-commercial side, the Order of the Nile; the Black Cross Nurses and the Universal African Legion.

In February, 1925, three years after he had been arrested on a charge of using the mails to defraud in soliciting funds for one of his ship companies, Garvey went to Atlanta penitentiary, where he stayed until the middle of 1927, when his sentence was commuted, so that he could be deported. Sent back to Jamaica, he tried to carry on with the mission he had inaugurated in the United States. Back within the British Empire, his pleas were less well received, financially, and, after a futile effort to raise funds to rescue Ethiopia from the Italians, he sank into obscurity.

MALCOLM X

May 19, 1925–February 21, 1965

By Peter Kihss

Malcolm X, the 39-year-old leader of a militant black nationalist movement, was shot to death yesterday afternoon at a rally of his followers in a ballroom in Washington Heights.

Shortly before midnight, a 22-year-old Negro, Thomas Hagan, was charged with the killing. The police rescued him from the ballroom crowd after he had been shot and beaten.

Malcolm, a bearded extremist, had said only a few words of greeting when a fusillade rang out. The bullets knocked him over backward.

Pandemonium broke out among the 400 Negroes in the Audubon Ballroom at 166th Street and Broadway. As men, women and children ducked under tables and flattened themselves on the floor, more shots were fired. Some witnesses said 30 shots had been fired.

The police said seven bullets had struck Malcolm. Three other Negroes were shot.

The police said the shooting had apparently been a result of a feud between followers of Malcolm and members of the extremist group he broke with last year, the Black Muslims.

As Hagan fired at Malcolm, a follower of Malcolm shot Hagan in the left thigh, and his left leg was broken, apparently by kicks. Two other Negroes, described as “apparent spectators,” were shot.

Malcolm, a slim, reddish-haired six-footer with a gift for bitter eloquence against what he considered white exploitation of Negroes, broke in March, 1964, with the Black Muslim movement called the Nation of Islam, headed by Elijah Muhammad.

James X, New York spokesman for the Black Muslims, denied that his organization had had anything to do with the killing.

Just one week before the slaying, Malcolm was bombed out of the small brick home in East Elmhurst, Queens, where he had been living. James X suggested that Malcolm had set off firebombs “to get publicity.”

Assemblyman Percy Sutton, Malcolm’s lawyer, said the murdered leader had planned to disclose at yesterday’s rally “the names of those who were trying to kill him.”

Gene Simpson, a WMCA newsman, said he was sitting in the front row when Malcolm was introduced. He said Malcolm gave the traditional Arabic greeting, “Salaam Aleikum”—“Peace be unto you.”

“The crowd responded, ‘Aleikum Salaam,’” Mr. Simpson said, “and then there was some disturbance about eight rows back. Everybody turned, and so did I, and then I heard Malcolm saying, ‘Be cool now, don’t get excited.’

“And then I heard this muffled sound, and I saw Malcolm hit with his hands still raised, and then he fell back over the chairs behind him. And everybody was shouting, and I saw one man firing a gun from under his coat behind me as I hit it [the floor] too.

“And he was firing like he was in some Western, running backward toward the door and firing at the same time.”

Extra policemen were on duty in Harlem and upper Manhattan yesterday and last night.

By Philip Benjamin

He was Malcolm Little, alias Big Red, a marijuana-smoking, cocaine-sniffing, zoot-suited, hip-talking hoodlum when he went to prison in 1946.

When he went free seven years later he was Malcolm X, an ascetic, a Black Muslim, a highly articulate man who hated the white world—a world he never made, but by whose standards he said he had lived.

“Christianity took me to prison and Islam brought me out,” Malcolm X used to say. He had no apologies for his criminal record, he said, “because it was all done when I was part of the white man’s Christian world.”

He was born in Omaha, on May 19, 1925, the son of the Rev. Earl Little, a 6-foot, 4-inch man who preached the back-to-Africa movement of Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican Negro who died in 1940.

His mother was a West Indian whose father was white. From this “white devil” grandfather Malcolm X got his reddish-brown complexion and reddish-brown hair.

“I hate every drop of that white rapist’s blood that is in me,” Malcolm once wrote.

The Little family, including 11 children, moved to Lansing, Mich. Malcolm’s earliest vivid memory was seeing, at the age of four, his house being burned to the ground by white racists. When he was six his father was killed under the wheels of a streetcar. Malcolm always believed his father had been murdered—first bludgeoned and then laid across the tracks.

The family broke up and Malcolm was sent to a state institution and was enrolled in the local public school at Mason, Mich. He was the only Negro student and his grades were among the highest in his class.

But after the eighth grade he left school and took a bus to Boston to live with a sister. In Boston and later in New York he drifted into the “cool” world; he drank, smoked marijuana and had an affair with a white woman. He became a waiter at Small’s Paradise, a Harlem night club.

He was Big Red because he stood well over 6 feet and his hair was rust-colored. Big Red steered white men to Negro prostitutes and Negro men to white prostitutes; he sold marijuana, ran numbers, carried a pistol—in short, he was a hustler.

His cocaine habit cost him $20 a day and to support it he became a burglar. He was arrested in Boston after a series of burglaries there and was sent to the state prison at Charlestown. He was not quite 21 years old.

While he was in prison his sisters and brothers wrote to him about a “new” religion, Islam, preached to black men in the United States by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, formerly Elijah Poole. The core of his teaching was the superiority of the black man, who was the first man on earth; the whites came later, a “devil” race.

Malcolm began to correspond with Elijah Muhammad, and when he left prison he was a Black Muslim. He no longer bore the surname of Little, because, as with nearly all American Negro surnames, it belonged to the white slave owners.

He went to Chicago, where Elijah Muhammad had his headquarters, and as eagerly as he had entered the “cool” world he entered the ascetic world. He gave up pork, tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, gambling, dancing, movies, sports and promiscuity.

Elijah Muhammad recognized almost at once that he had in Malcolm a man of intelligence and authority. He sent him on speaking tours, and eventually Malcolm came to New York to take over Mosque No. 7, then a small, voiceless and ineffectual group.

In conversation he was quiet, pleasant, articulate and even humorous. His accent was Midwestern. On the public platform his quality was cold fury; his eyes burned behind horn-rimmed glasses. In a few years he built up Mosque Seven and in 1958 he married a member of the mosque, Sister Betty X, and they had four children.

By his own admission, he had once been a racist, an advocate of black separatism. But after he broke with Elijah Muhammad last year, he said he had turned away from racism. That break came after the assassination of President Kennedy. Malcolm X had said the assassination was a case of “chickens coming home to roost.”

For this remark Elijah Muhammad suspended Malcolm X, and the break was never healed. Malcolm set up the Muslim Mosque, Inc., with headquarters at the Theresa Hotel at 125th Street and Seventh Avenue. Last year he went to Mecca as a pilgrim. There, he said, he had been impressed by the “brotherhood, the people of all races, all colors coming together as one.”

Two weeks ago he visited Britain and went to Smethwick, a town near Birmingham with a large colored population. His tour of Smethwick was criticized by some residents as an attempt to fan racism.

His home in Queens was bombed a week ago, and he accused the Black Muslims of doing it.

Writing in the Saturday Evening Post last year he said: “Some of the followers of Elijah Muhammad would still consider it a first-rank honor to kill me. Also I know that any day, any night, I could die at the hands of some white devil racists.… I dream that one day history will look upon me as having been one of the voices that perhaps helped to save America from a grave, even possibly fatal catastrophe.”

CHE GUEVARA

June 14, 1928–October 9, 1967

By Paul Hofmann

VALLE GRANDE—The Army High Command officially confirmed today that Ernesto Che Guevara, the Latin revolutionary leader, was killed in a clash between guerrillas and Bolivian troops in southeastern Bolivia yesterday.

The Armed Forces commander General Alfredo Ovando Candia said Mr. Guevara, who was 39, had admitted his identity before dying of his wounds.

Mr. Guevara, a maverick Communist whom Moscow distrusted, gained a reputation as a political adventurer imbued with the notion that the lonely man of action could revolutionize a people and shape history. An Argentine of Spanish and Irish ancestry who became a “natural-born” Cuban citizen by special law, he strove almost from adolescence to destroy what he saw as Yankee domination of Latin America.

Mr. Guevara’s picture of himself was that of a successor to the 19th-century liberators, Simón Bolivar and José de San Martin, who broke Spanish dominance south of the Isthmus of Panama in dashing campaigns that started with daring attacks by ragtag troops and who suffered disastrous defeats before final triumph.

As a boy he was so puny that his family sent him to a resort in the Andes mountains to strengthen him. Asthmatic attacks left him exhausted and laboring for breath. Yet he braved hardship in his student days, battled the Buenos Aires police in street clashes, underwent secret military training in Mexico, survived the perilous rise to power in Cuba with Fidel Castro, directed guerrilla actions in the Sierra Maestra and rode into a delirious Havana at Mr. Castro’s side.

He became one of the leaders of the Cuban revolutionary regime, repeatedly visited Moscow, Peking and African capitals, and addressed the United Nations.

After another voyage that started with a sojourn in New York in December, 1964, and that led him to Africa and Communist China, Mr. Guevara returned to Havana in March of 1965. A few days later, he gave a lecture at the Industries Ministry that was to be his last public appearance in Cuba. He then dropped out of sight.

Inevitably, rumors flitted around Havana. Mr. Guevara was said to have been confined in a sanitarium, deported to the Soviet Union or executed after a quarrel with Premier Castro.

Castro waited until October of 1965 before announcing that his former right-hand man was no longer in Cuba. The Premier told a Havana rally that Mr. Guevara left in April after having relinquished his posts in the Government.

Mr. Guevara was reported to have written in a letter to the Premier: “I have fulfilled my duty’s role that tied me to the Cuban revolution. Other lands in the world demand my modest efforts. I can do what is denied to you because of your responsibility to Cuba, and the hour of parting company has come for us.”

Those who accepted the theory that he had left the island voluntarily theorized that there had been mounting Soviet pressure to have him removed from economic posts and that his friendship with the Premier had cooled.

Mr. Guevara, who was born June 14, 1928, in Rosario, was married twice. His second wife was Aleida March, a Cuban and a former teacher. His first wife, a Peruvian leftist named Hilda Gadea, was once quoted as having said, “I lost a husband to a revolution.”

By Reuters

VALLE GRANDE, Bolivia—The army high command officially confirmed today that Ernesto Che Guevara, the Latin revolutionary leader, was killed in a clash between guerrillas and Bolivian troops in southeastern Bolivia last Sunday.

The armed forces commander, Gen. Alfredo Ovando Candia, said Mr. Guevara had admitted his identity before dying of his wounds. General Ovando said at a news conference that the guerrilla leader had also admitted that he failed in the seven-month guerrilla campaign he organized in Bolivia.

The identification of the body was made after fingerprinting by the Eighth Army command.

[United States officials in Washington reacted cautiously to the Bolivian reports that Mr. Guevara had been killed, but there was an increasing tendency to regard them as true.]

The body was flown here yesterday, lashed to the landing runners of a helicopter that brought it from the mountain scene of the clash. The army said yesterday that it had received a report that Mr. Guevara had been killed near Higueras, but it declined to make immediate positive identification at the time.

After the body, dressed in bloody clothes, arrived here, it was fingerprinted and embalmed.

[The Guevara fingerprints are on file with the Argentine federal police. As an Argentine citizen, Mr. Guevara was required to be fingerprinted to obtain a passport when he left his homeland in 1952. These official records have provided the basis for comparison with the fingerprints taken by the Bolivians from the body said to be that of Mr. Guevara.]

The scanty beard, shoulder-length hair and shape of the head resembled the features of Mr. Guevara as shown in earlier photographs. He was 39 years old.

An Englishman in the crowd, which except for the press was kept away at bayonet point, said that he had seen Mr. Guevara in Cuba and that he was “absolutely convinced” it was the long-sought revolutionary leader.

The body appeared to bear wounds in at least three places—two in the neck and one in the throat.

It was dressed in a green jacket with a zippered front, patched and faded green denim pants, green woolen socks and a pair of homemade moccasins.

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

January 15, 1929–April 4, 1968

MEMPHIS—The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who preached nonviolence and racial brotherhood, was fatally shot here last night by a distant gunman who then raced away and escaped.

Four thousand National Guard troops were ordered into Memphis by Gov. Buford Ellington after the 39-year-old Nobel Prize–winning civil rights leader died.

A curfew was imposed on the shocked city of 550,000 inhabitants, 40 percent of whom are Negro.

But the police said the tragedy had been followed by incidents that included sporadic shooting, fires, bricks and bottles thrown at policemen, and looting that started in Negro districts and then spread over the city.

Police Director Frank Holloman said the assassin might have been a white man who was “50 to 100 yards away in a flophouse.”

Chief of Detectives W. P. Huston said a late model white Mustang was believed to have been the killer’s getaway car. Its occupant was described as a bareheaded white man in his 30’s, wearing a black suit and black tie.

Dr. King was shot while he leaned over a second-floor railing outside his room at the Lorraine Motel. He was chatting with two friends just before starting for dinner.

Dr. King had come back to Memphis Wednesday morning to organize support once again for 1,300 sanitation workers who have been striking since Lincoln’s Birthday. He was apparently still living when he reached the St. Joseph’s Hospital operating room for emergency surgery. He was borne in on a stretcher, the bloody towel over his head.

It was the same emergency room to which James H. Meredith, the first Negro enrolled at the University of Mississippi, was taken after he was ambushed and shot in June, 1965, at Hernando, Miss., a few miles south of Memphis. Mr. Meredith was not seriously hurt.

The Rev. Andrew Young, executive director of Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, recalled there had been some talk Wednesday night about possible harm to Dr. King in Memphis.

Mr. Young recalled: “He said he had reached the pinnacle of fulfillment with his nonviolent movement, and these reports did not bother him.”

—Earl Caldwell

By Murray Schumach

To many millions of American Negroes, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was the prophet of their crusade for racial equality. He was their voice of anguish, their eloquence in humiliation, their battle cry for human dignity. He forged for them the weapons of nonviolence that withstood and blunted the ferocity of segregation.

And to many millions of American whites, he was one of a group of Negroes who preserved the bridge of communication between races when racial warfare threatened the United States in the nineteen-sixties, as Negroes sought the full emancipation pledged to them a century before by Abraham Lincoln.

To the world, Dr. King had the stature that accrued to a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, a man with access to the White House and the Vatican; a veritable hero in the African states that were just emerging from colonialism.

In his dedication to nonviolence, Dr. King was caught between white and Negro extremists as racial tensions erupted into arson, gunfire and looting in many of the nation’s cities during the summer of 1967.

Militant Negroes, with the cry of, “burn, baby burn,” argued that only by violence and segregation could the Negro attain self-respect, dignity and real equality in the United States.

Floyd B. McKissick, when director of the Congress of Racial Equality, declared in August of that year that it was a “foolish assumption to try to sell nonviolence to the ghettos.”

And white extremists, not bothering to make distinctions between degrees of Negro militancy, looked upon Dr. King as one of their chief enemies.

At the time he was assassinated in Memphis, Dr. King was involved in one of his greatest plans to dramatize the plight of the poor and stir Congress to help Negroes.

He called this venture the “Poor People’s Campaign.” It was to be a huge “camp-in” either in Washington or in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention.

In one of his last public announcements before the shooting, Dr. King told an audience in a Harlem church on March 26:

“We need an alternative to riots and to timid supplication. Nonviolence is our most potent weapon.”

His strong beliefs in civil rights and nonviolence made him one of the leading opponents of American participation in the war in Vietnam. To him the war was unjust, diverting vast sums away from programs to alleviate the condition of the Negro poor in this country.

Inevitably, as a symbol of integration, he became the object of unrelenting attacks and vilification. His home was bombed. He was spat upon and mocked. He was struck and kicked. He was stabbed, almost fatally, by a deranged Negro woman. He was frequently thrown into jail. Threats became so commonplace that his wife could ignore burning crosses on the lawn and ominous phone calls. Through it all he adhered to the creed of passive disobedience that infuriated segregationists.

The adulation that was heaped upon him eventually irritated some Negroes in the civil rights movement who worked hard, but in relative obscurity. They pointed out—and Dr. King admitted—that he was a poor administrator. Sometimes, with sarcasm, they referred to him, privately, as “De Lawd.”

The doctrine of “black power” threatened to split the Negro civil rights movement and antagonize white liberals who had been supporting Negro causes, and Dr. King suggested “militant nonviolence” as a formula for progress with peace.

At the root of his civil rights convictions was an even more profound faith in the basic goodness of man and the great potential of American democracy. These beliefs gave to his speeches a fervor that could not be stilled by criticism.

Scores of millions of Americans—white as well as Negro—who sat before television sets in the summer of 1963 to watch the awesome march of some 200,000 Negroes on Washington were deeply stirred when Dr. King, in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial, said:

“Even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.’”

For the poor and unlettered of his own race, Dr. King embraced the rhythm and passion of the revivalist and evangelist. It was said that so devoted was his vast following that even among illiterates he could, by calm discussion of Platonic dogma, evoke deep cries of “Amen.”

Dr. King also had a way of reducing complex issues to terms that anyone could understand. Thus, in the summer of 1965, when there was widespread discontent among Negroes about their struggle for equality of employment, he declared:

“What good does it do to be able to eat at a lunch counter if you can’t buy a hamburger?”

The enormous impact of Dr. King’s words was one of the reasons he was in the President’s Room in the Capitol on Aug. 6, 1965, when President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act that marked the growth of the Negro as a political force in the South.

Dr. King’s effectiveness was enhanced and given continuity by the fact that he had an organization behind him. Formed in 1960, with headquarters in Atlanta, it was called the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Allied with it was another organization formed under Dr. King’s sponsorship, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

This minister, who became the most famous spokesman for Negro rights since Booker T. Washington, was not particularly impressive in appearance. There was little of the rabblerouser in his oratory. He was not prone to extravagant gestures or loud peroration. In private gatherings, Dr. King lacked that laughing gregariousness that often makes for popularity. He also did not have the cool strategic brilliance of Roy Wilkins, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

What Dr. King did have was an instinct for the right moment to make his moves. It was this sense of timing that raised him in 1955, from a newly arrived minister in Montgomery, Ala., with his first church, to a figure of national prominence.

Negroes in that city had begun a boycott of buses to win the right to sit where they pleased instead of being forced to move to the rear of buses or to surrender seats to white people when a bus was crowded.

The 381-day boycott by Negroes was already under way when the young pastor was placed in charge of the campaign. However, it was Dr. King who dramatized the boycott by making it the testing ground of his belief in the civil disobedience teachings of Thoreau and Gandhi.

Even more dramatic, in some ways, was his reaction to the bombing of his home during the boycott. He was away at the time and rushed back fearful for his wife and children. They were not injured. But when he reached the modest house, more than a thousand Negroes had already gathered and were in an ugly mood. The police were jittery. Quickly, Dr. King pacified the crowd and there was no trouble.

Dr. King was even more impressive during the “big push” in Birmingham, which began in April, 1963. With the minister in the limelight, Negroes there began a campaign of sit-ins at lunch counters, picketing and protest marches. Hundreds of children were jailed.

The entire world was stirred when the police turned dogs on the demonstrators. Dr. King was jailed for five days. While he was in prison he issued a 9,000-word letter that created considerable controversy among white people, alienating some sympathizers who thought Dr. King was being too aggressive.

In the letter he wrote:

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace, which is the absence of tension, to a positive peace, which is the presence of justice.”

The role of Dr. King in Birmingham added to his stature and showed that his enormous following was deeply devoted to him.

But some critics—Negroes as well as white—noted that sometimes, despite all the publicity he attracted, he left campaigns unfinished or else failed to attain his goals.

Dr. King was aware of this. But he pointed out, in 1964, in St Augustine, Fla., one of the toughest civil rights battlegrounds, that there were important intangibles.

“Even if we do not get all we should,” he said, “movements such as this tend more and more to give a Negro the sense of self-respect that he needs. It tends to generate courage in Negroes outside the movement. It brings intangible results outside the community where it is carried out. There is a hardening of attitudes in situations like this. But other cities see and say: “‘We don’t want to be another Albany or Birmingham,’ and they make changes. Some communities, like this one, had to bear the cross.”

The enormous influence of Dr. King’s voice in the turbulent racial conflict reached into New York in 1964. In the summer racial rioting exploded there and in other Northern cities with large Negro populations. There was widespread fear that the disorders, particularly in Harlem, might set off unprecedented racial violence.

At this point Dr. King became one of the major intermediaries in restoring order. He conferred with Mayor Robert F. Wagner and with Negro leaders. A statement was issued, of which he was one of the signers, calling for “a broad curtailment if not total moratorium on mass demonstrations until after Presidential elections.”

The following year, Dr. King was once more in the headlines and on television—this time leading a drive for Negro voter registration in Selma, Ala. Negroes were arrested by the hundreds. Dr. King was punched and kicked by a white man when he became the first Negro to register at a century-old hotel in Selma.

Martin Luther King Jr. was born Jan. 15, 1929, in Atlanta. His father, the Rev. Martin Luther King Sr. was pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church.

Young Martin went to Atlanta’s Morehouse College and decided, in his junior year, to be a clergyman.

He pursued his studies in the integrated Crozier Theological Seminary, in Chester, Pa. He was one of six Negroes in a student body of about a hundred. He became the first Negro class president. After winning a fellowship to study for a doctorate at the school of his choice, he enrolled at Boston College in 1951.

For his doctoral thesis he sought to resolve the differences between the Harvard theologian Paul Tillich and the neo-naturalist philosopher Henry Nelson Wieman. He took courses at Harvard, as well.

While he was working on his doctorate he met Coretta Scott, a graduate of Antioch College, who was doing graduate work in music. He married the singer in 1953. They had four children, Yolanda, Martin Luther King 3d, Dexter Scott and Bernice.

In 1954, Dr. King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala. Few of Montgomery’s white residents seemed to realize how deeply the city’s Negroes resented segregated seating on buses.

On Dec. 1, 1955, they learned, almost by accident. Mrs. Rosa Parks, a Negro seamstress, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger. She was arrested, convicted and fined $10 and costs, a total of $14. Almost as spontaneous as Mrs. Parks’s act was the rallying of many Negro leaders in the city to help her.

From this protest Dr. King began his public career.

In 1959, he and his family moved back to Atlanta, where he became a co-pastor, with his father, of the Ebenezer Baptist Church.

As his fame increased, public interest in his beliefs led him to write books. It was while he was autographing one of these books, “Stride Toward Freedom,” in a Harlem department store that he was stabbed by a Negro woman.

The possibility that he might someday be assassinated was considered by Dr. King on June 5, 1964, when he reported, in St. Augustine, that his life had been threatened. He said:

“Well, if physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.”

HELEN KELLER

June 27, 1880–June 1, 1968

WESTPORT, Conn.—Helen Keller, who overcame blindness and deafness to become a symbol of the indomitable human spirit, died this afternoon in her home here. She was 87 years old.

“She drifted off in her sleep,” said Mrs. Winifred Corbally, Miss Keller’s companion for the last 11 years.

She is survived by a brother and a sister.

By Alden Whitman

For the first 18 months of her life Helen Keller was a normal infant. Then, as she recalled later, “came the illness which closed my eyes and ears and plunged me into the unconsciousness of a newborn baby.”

The illness, perhaps scarlet fever, vanished quickly, but it erased not only the child’s vision and hearing but also, as a result, her powers of articulate speech.

Her life thereafter became a triumph over crushing adversity and shattering affliction. In time, Miss Keller learned to circumvent her blindness, deafness and muteness; she could “see” and “hear” with exceptional acuity; she even learned to talk passably. Her remarkable mind unfolded, and she was in and of the world, a full and happy participant in life.

What set Miss Keller apart was that no similarly afflicted person before had done more than acquire the simplest skills. But she was graduated from Radcliffe, she became a writer, she led a vigorous life, and she energized movements that revolutionized help for the blind and the deaf.

Her tremendous accomplishments and force of personality were released through the devotion and skill of Anne Sullivan Macy, the teacher through whom she largely expressed herself. Mrs. Macy was succeeded, at her death in 1936, by Polly Thomson, who died in 1960.

Miss Keller’s life was so long and so crowded with improbable feats—from riding horseback to learning Greek—and she was so serene yet so determined that she became a legend.

Many found it difficult to believe that a person so handicapped could acquire the profound knowledge and the sensitive perception and writing talent that she exhibited when she was mature. Yet no substantial proof was ever adduced that Miss Keller was anything less than she appeared—a person whose character impelled her to perform the seemingly impossible.

Miss Keller always insisted that there was nothing mysterious or miraculous about her achievements. Her dark and silent world was held in her hand and shaped with her mind.

Tall, handsome, gracious, poised, Miss Keller exuded vitality and optimism. “My life has been happy because I have had wonderful friends and plenty of interesting work to do,” she once remarked, adding, “I seldom think about my limitations, and they never make me sad. Perhaps there is just a touch of yearning at times, but it is vague, like a breeze among flowers.”

Helen Adams Keller was born on June 27, 1880, on a farm near Tuscumbia, Ala. Her father was Arthur Keller, who had served in the Confederate Army. Her mother was the former Kate Adams.

After Helen’s illness, her infancy and early childhood were a succession of days of frustration, manifest by outbursts of anger and fractious behavior. “A wild, unruly child” who kicked, scratched and screamed was how she afterward described herself.

A Baltimore eye physician put her parents in touch with Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone and an authority on teaching speech to the deaf. Bell advised the Kellers to ask his son-in-law, Michael Anagnos, director of the Perkins Institution, about finding a teacher for Helen.

The teacher Mr. Anagnos selected was 20-year-old Anne Mansfield Sullivan, who was called Annie. Miss Sullivan had learned at Perkins how to communicate with the deaf and blind through a hand alphabet signaled by touch into the patient’s palm.

“The most important day I remember in all my life is the one on which my teacher came to me,” Miss Keller wrote later. “It was the third of March, 1887, three months before I was 7 years old.”

It was days before Miss Sullivan, whom Miss Keller called “Teacher,” could calm the child and begin to spell words into her hand. The problem was of associating words and objects or actions: What was a doll, what was water? Miss Sullivan’s solution was a stroke of genius. Recounting it, Miss Keller wrote:

“We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout.

“As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me.

“I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free.”

Once Helen began to learn, her hunger for knowledge was insatiable. Abstractions proved difficult, but her teacher’s patience and ingenuity prevailed.

Helen’s next opening into the world was learning to read. “As soon as I could spell a few words my teacher gave me slips of cardboard on which were printed words in raised letters,” she recalled. “I quickly learned that each printed word stood for an object, an act or a quality.”

Helen’s progress was so rapid that in May, 1888, she made her first trip to the Perkins Institution in Boston, where she learned to read Braille. It was in the spring of 1890 that Helen was taught to speak by Sarah Fuller of the Horace Mann School.

“Miss Fuller’s method was this,” Miss Keller recalled. “She passed my hand lightly over her face, and let me feel the position of her tongue and lips when she made a sound. I was eager to imitate every motion and in an hour had learned six elements of speech: M, P, A, S, T, I. I shall never forget the surprise and delight I felt when I uttered my first connected sentence: ‘It is warm.’”

At the same time the child learned to lip-read by placing her fingers on the lips and throat of those who talked with her. Her crude speech and her lip-reading facility further opened her mind.

Each of the young girl’s advances brought pressure on her for new wonders and this inevitably fed public skepticism. This was intensified when, in 1892, a story appeared under her name that was similar to a published work. Although she denied the charge of plagiarism, the episode hurt Miss Keller.

When she was 14, with Miss Sullivan at her side and spelling into her hand, Miss Keller prepared herself for admission to Radcliffe, which she entered in the fall of 1900. Her acceptance was an amazing feat, but no more astonishing than her graduation cum laude in 1904, with honors in German and English.

While still in Radcliffe, Miss Keller wrote her first autobiography. “The Story of My Life” was published in 1902, as a book. It consisted largely of themes written for an English composition course.

Most reviewers found the book well written, but some critics scoffed. “All of her knowledge is hearsay knowledge,” The Nation said. “Her very sensations are for the most part vicarious and she writes of things beyond her power of perception and with the assurance of one who had verified every word.”

Miss Keller’s defenders replied that she had ways of knowing things not reckoned by others. When she wrote of the New York subway that it “opened its jaws like a great beast,” it was noted that she had stroked a lion’s mouth and knew whereof she spoke.

In the twenties, Miss Keller, Miss Sullivan and her husband moved from Wrentham, Mass., to Forest Hills, Queens, in New York. Miss Keller used this home as a base for her fund-raising tours for the American Foundation for the Blind.

Miss Keller toured the world with Miss Sullivan in the years before World War II. Everywhere she went she lectured in behalf of the blind and the deaf.

In adulthood she was subjected to criticisms and crises that sometimes unsettled her. The most frustrating such episode occurred in 1916.

Miss Keller, then 36, fell in love with Peter Fagan, a Socialist and newspaperman who was her temporary secretary. The couple took out a marriage license, intending a secret wedding. But a Boston reporter found out about the license, and his article on the romance horrified Mrs. Keller, who broke up the affair.

“The love which had come, unseen and unexpected, departed with tempest on his wings,” Miss Keller wrote in sadness.

JOHN L. LEWIS

February 12, 1880–June 11, 1969

WASHINGTON—John L. Lewis, a giant of the American labor movement and for decades a top figure on the American scene, died tonight at Doctors Hospital.

The president emeritus of the powerful United Mine Workers Union was 89 years old.

Through the nineteen-thirties and nineteen-forties few names were more frequently in headlines than Mr. Lewis’s. Except for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, few in those years did more to shape the economic face of the United States.

Through formation of the Committee for Industrial Organization he changed the structure and orientation of the labor movement. His influence helped fashion much of the labor legislation enacted by Congress.

Mr. Lewis, a self-educated man, sharp of wit and tongue, lived in suburban Alexandria, Va. His wife, Myrta, died in 1942. A son survives him.

—The Associated Press

By Alden Whitman

For 40 years, and especially during the turbulent nineteen-thirties, forties and early fifties, John Llewellyn Lewis, a pugnacious man of righteous wrath and rococo rhetoric, was a dominant figure in the American labor movement. He aspired to national political and economic power, but both largely eluded his grasp. He nudged greatness as a labor leader only to end in isolation from the mainstream of trade unionism.

But in his headline years Mr. Lewis, with his black leonine mane and outthrust-jaw stubbornness, was an idol to millions of workers and the symbol of blackest malevolence to millions in the middle and upper classes. As the thunderer for labor he was unexcelled.

Starting in 1935, when coal was the country’s kingpin fuel and he was president of the United Mine Workers of America, Mr. Lewis shattered the complacent craft-union American Federation of Labor by setting up the Committee for Industrial Organization to organize workers into single unions for each big industry.

He went on to lead convulsive sitdown strikes, to humble the auto industry and Big Steel, to endorse and then break bitterly with President Roosevelt, to defy the Government in coal-mine disputes in World War II, and to battle President Harry S. Truman in two coal strikes in which he was twice held in contempt of court.

In the course of tumultuous labor politics, Mr. Lewis’s wealthy and influential union left the American Federation of Labor and then rejoined it after leaving the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Finally, Mr. Lewis took his union out of the A.F.L. and went it alone. Addressing the miners, he summed up his efforts in their behalf:

“I have never faltered or failed to present the cause or plead the case of the mine workers of this country. I have pleaded your case not in the quavering tones of a mendicant asking alms, but in the thundering voice of the captain of a mighty host, demanding the rights to which free men are entitled.”

Soot-smirched miners heeded Mr. Lewis without question. If he called for a shutdown, the pits were deserted. If he wanted the mines run on a three-day week, that was how they operated. For their unswerving loyalty the miners received wage increases, vacation pay, pensions at age 60, and improved mine safety.

A superb orator, Mr. Lewis swayed thousands of emotion-hungry audiences. With mine operators in wage negotiations Mr. Lewis was equally effective.

C. L. Sulzberger, in his book “Sit Down with John L. Lewis,” described this Lewis speech during contract talks in the early thirties:

“‘Gentlemen,’ he said, speaking in a slow, tricky way. ‘Gentlemen, I speak to you for my people. I speak to you for the miners’ families in the broad Ohio Valley, the Pennsylvania mountains and the black West Virginia hills.

“‘There, the shanties lean over as if intoxicated by the smoke fumes of the mine dumps.… The little children are gathered around a bare table without anything to eat. Their mothers are saying, ‘We want bread.’”

The operators, according to Mr. Sulzberger’s book, squirmed, and one of them muttered, “Tell him to stop. Tell him we’ll settle.”

Mr. Lewis was often pictured as a radical. Basically, however, Mr. Lewis’s economic and political views tended to be conservative. He supported President Roosevelt in 1936 and was on close personal terms with him until the outbreak of World War II in Europe in 1939.

Although much of the public may have equated Mr. Lewis with bellicosity, he was an amiable and courtly person, possessed of a nimble wit and a pleasant laugh.

John Lewis was born to the coal mines and to unionism. His father was Thomas Lewis, a miner who had emigrated from Wales to Lucas, Iowa. His mother, Louisa Watkins Lewis, was the daughter of a miner. John, their first child—there were, in all, six sons and two daughters—was born Feb. 12, 1880, in Lucas.

For his role in a Knights of Labor strike, Thomas Lewis was blacklisted for several years, and talk of militant trade unionism and the miners’ hazardous lot filled John’s childhood.

He left school after the seventh grade and was toiling in the mines at 15. He also read, guided by Myrta Bell, who later became his wife.

As a miner in Lucas, he was elected a delegate to the national convention of the United Mine Workers, which traced its history to 1849. The next move was to Panama, Ill., and in a year he was president of the local mine union.

In 1911, he was named general field agent for the A.F.L. by Samuel Gompers, then its president. Mr. Lewis built a large personal following in the mine union, for which he became chief statistician in 1917 and later that year vice president. In 1920 he became president, an office he held for 40 years.

The genesis of the C.I.O. was in the plague years of the Depression, when unemployment mounted to 15 million workers. Union working and wage standards were toppled, and the A.F.L. lost thousands of members. The mine union dropped to 100,000 members.

At the same time, it became evident that organization of workers by skilled crafts, which was the basis of the A.F.L., was unrealistic in most major industries, where unskilled or semiskilled workers constituted the bulk of employees. This situation led to the C.I.O.’s efforts to organize the unorganized.

The C.I.O. came into being after the A.F.L. convention of 1935, in which tensions between industrial and craft unions erupted in a fistfight between William Hutcheson of the Carpenters Union and Mr. Lewis. When the convention adjourned, Mr. Lewis met to form the C.I.O. with, among others, Charles P. Howard of the International Typographical Union, David Dubinsky of the International Ladies Garment Workers, Thomas McMahon of the Textile Workers, and Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers.

Subsequently these and other unions backing the C.I.O. were expelled from the A.F.L., but it was an empty gesture, for workers responded to the C.I.O. campaigns in the basic industries. First autos capitulated, then Big Steel, then others, until 4 million workers were enrolled in C.I.O. unions. The procession of successes was interrupted in late 1937 by Little Steel, representing the smaller fabricators.

The Little Steel strike was marked by violence. In Chicago on Memorial Day the police shot and killed 10 strikers and sympathizers. In the course of the strike, which was lost, President Roosevelt was asked what he thought of the dispute. “A plague on both your houses,” he replied, a remark that enraged Mr. Lewis, whose union had contributed $500,000 to the President’s 1936 campaign. His retort was:

“It ill behooves one who has supped at labor’s table and who has been sheltered in labor’s house to curse with equal fervor and fine impartiality both labor and its adversaries when they become locked in deadly embrace.”

Mr. Lewis followed this excoriation with others equally acerbic in the campaign of 1940, in which he sought to rally organized labor against the Roosevelt third-term bid. After Mr. Roosevelt won the election Mr. Lewis resigned as head of what was then the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and Philip Murray, a Lewis lieutenant, took over. In 1942, Mr. Lewis broke with Mr. Murray, and the mine union left the C.I.O.

Four years later he and his union were back in the A.F.L., but their stay lasted less than two years. Again there was a battle of words, this time over a provision of the Taft-Hartley Act requiring union officials to swear they were not Communists. The A.F.L. was willing to comply, Mr. Lewis was not. To him the law was “damnable, vicious, unwholesome and a slave statute,” and the mine union went its independent way.

Then in the spring of 1946 he called a soft-coal strike in a bid for royalties on each ton of coal mined, the money to go into the union’s health and welfare fund. President Truman ordered the mines seized, and the strike ended on May 29 with a wage increase and a royalty arrangement. A hard-coal strike followed but ended on about the same terms.

Peace was short-lived. In November Mr. Lewis denounced the contract under which the Government had been running the mines. An order was issued restraining Mr. Lewis from maintaining the contract-termination notice. President Truman ordered the Justice Department to seek a contempt citation if Mr. Lewis disobeyed the court. When the union chief made no move to halt the walkout, the judge found him and the union guilty of contempt and fines were imposed.

Three days later, Mr. Lewis sent the miners back to work, pending appeal of the contempt ruling to the Supreme Court. That tribunal upheld the contempt judgment and the fine against Mr. Lewis, although the fine against the union was reduced.

In 1948, after the Government had returned the mines to the operators, Mr. Lewis was again in court. The miners were idle in a pension dispute, and Mr. Lewis and the union were ordered to end the walkout. He declined and both were fined.

By his flair for dramatizing the problem of his miners, Mr. Lewis also won a long struggle for Federal mine inspection in 1952. When 119 miners perished in a West Frankfort, Ill., mine explosion in 1951, he flew to the scene, inspected the shafts and assailed Congress for failing to enact safety legislation. In testimony before a Senate subcommittee, he called on Congress to give the Federal Government power to close unsafe mines.

The Federal Mine Safety Law was enacted, setting up a board of review of which the union’s safety director was a member.

When Mr. Lewis announced in 1959 that he was preparing to retire, the operators expressed regret, praising him for his “outstanding ability” and as “an extraordinarily fine person.”

In his farewell address to his union he said:

“The years have been long and the individual burdens oppressive, yet progress has been great.

“At first, your wages were low, your hours long, your labor perilous, your health disregarded, your children without opportunity, your union weak, your fellow citizens and public representatives indifferent to your wrongs.

“Today, because of your fortitude and your deep loyalty to your union, your wages are the highest in the land, your working hours the lowest, your safety more assured, your health more guarded, your old age protected, your children equal in opportunity with their generation and your union strong with material resources.”

CESAR CHAVEZ

March 31, 1927–April 23, 1993

By Robert Lindsey

Cesar Chavez, the migrant worker who emerged from the poverty of an agricultural valley in Arizona to found America’s first successful union of farm workers, died yesterday in San Luis, Ariz. He was 66.

Mr. Chavez, who lived in Keene, Calif., and was in Arizona on union business, died in his sleep, the police said.

Blending the nonviolent resistance of Gandhi with the organizational skills of his mentor, the social activist Saul Alinsky, Mr. Chavez captured worldwide attention in the 1960’s. Leading an initially lonely battle to unionize the fields and orchards of California, he issued a call to boycott grapes that soon became a cause celebre.

Mr. Chavez, whom Robert F. Kennedy once called “one of the heroic figures of our time,” was widely acknowledged to have done more than anyone else to improve the lot of the migrant farm worker.

Fighting growers and shippers who for generations had defeated efforts to unionize field workers, and later fighting rival unionists, Mr. Chavez for the first time brought a degree of stability and security to the lives of some migrant workers. Largely because of him, the California Legislature in 1975 passed the nation’s first collective bargaining act outside Hawaii for farm workers, who are largely excluded from Federal labor law coverage. “For the first time,” Mr. Chavez said of the union’s achievement, “the farm worker got some power.”

Asked what had motivated his stubborn fight, he said, “For many years I was a farm worker, a migratory worker, and, well, personally—and I’m being very frank—maybe it’s just a matter of trying to even the score.”

But he ultimately failed to realize his dream of forging a nationwide organization. In most of America, farm workers continue to toil for low wages, without job security, vulnerable to exploitation. Even in California, the union Mr. Chavez founded, the United Farm Workers of America, was unable to organize more than 20 percent of the state’s 200,000 farm workers. The tactics he used so effectively in the 1960’s and early 70’s—strikes, boycotts and fasting—lost their magic. The United Farm Workers were no longer seen as a social cause but as a conventional labor union.

In 1965, when he formed the union, farm workers in California averaged less than $1.50 an hour. They had no fringe benefits and no way to challenge abuses by employers. Unionization brought sharp pay increases. For the first time, migrant workers were eligible for medical insurance, employer-paid pensions and unemployment insurance.

Cesar Estrada Chavez was born on March 31, 1927, near Yuma, Ariz., one of five children of Juana and Librado Chavez. His father’s parents migrated from Mexico in 1880.

His early years were spent on the family’s 160-acre farm. But in the seventh year of the Depression, when he was 10, the family fell behind on mortgage payments and lost its farm.

Along with thousands of other families in the Southwest, they sought a new life in California. They found it picking carrots, cotton and other crops.

Mr. Chavez never graduated from high school, and once counted 65 elementary schools he had attended “for a day, a week or a few months.”

Unions had tried for decades to organize immigrant unskilled immigrant workers on whom California growers depended. But the field hands found themselves fighting both powerful growers and the police and government officials.

In 1939 Mr. Chavez’s family settled in San Jose. After serving in the Navy in World War II, Mr. Chavez resumed his life as a migrant. He married Helen Fabela in Delano, which he later made famous far beyond its dusty corner of the San Joaquin Valley. He is survived by his wife, eight children, three brothers and two sisters.

The pivotal role in Mr. Chavez’s emergence as a labor leader was played by Mr. Alinsky, the Chicago-based organizer who called himself a “professional radical.” In the early 1950’s he helped Mexican-Americans organize into a political bloc.

Mr. Alinsky sent an aide to recruit potential leaders, and among the first people he met was Mr. Chavez, then working in a San Jose apricot orchard.

Mr. Chavez joined Mr. Alinsky’s Community Service Organization, helping Mexican-Americans deal with government agencies. But in 1958 he quit, went to Delano and formed the National Farm Workers Association.

By 1965 Mr. Chavez had organized 1,700 families and persuaded two growers to raise wages moderately. Eight hundred workers in a moribund A.F.L.-C.I.O. group, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, struck grape growers in Delano, and some members of his group demanded to join the strike.

That was the beginning of five years of La Huelga—“the strike”—in which the labor leader became familiar to people in much of the world as he battled the economic power of the farmers and corporations in the San Joaquin Valley.

In 1968 Mr. Chavez began his most visible campaign, urging Americans not to buy table grapes produced in the San Joaquin Valley until growers agreed to union contracts. The boycott proved a huge success. A public opinion poll found that 17 million Americans had stopped buying grapes because of the boycott.

On July 30, 1970, growers agreed to sign the contracts.

But soon many of the largest growers, in an effort to stave off Mr. Chavez’s union, invited the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to organize their workers. His gains in Delano seemed to be slipping away.

But two things kept Mr. Chavez’s dream alive. First, the teamsters’ leaders, smarting from charges of corruption, made a truce. Second, Edmund G. Brown Jr., a Democrat, won adoption of a landmark bill establishing collective bargaining for farm workers and granting the union various concessions.

The United Farm Workers subsequently signed occasional contracts with growers but never attained the dominance that Mr. Chavez envisioned. A decade after the Delano strike, fewer than 10 percent of the grapes in that community were harvested by his union’s members.

MOTHER TERESA

August 26, 1910–September 5, 1997

By Eric Pace

Mother Teresa, the Roman Catholic nun who won the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize for her work among the poorest of the world’s poor, died yesterday in Calcutta, India, where she had lived since her work with the destitute began five decades ago. She was 87.

Her physician in Rome said she suffered cardiac arrest during the evening at her convent in Calcutta. As her health deteriorated over the past year, Mother Teresa stepped aside and her order, the Missionaries of Charity, chose a new leader, Sister Nirmala, in March.

Mother Teresa, an ethnic Albanian born in what is now Macedonia, was revered in India, where she worked for 68 years. She also came to be honored around the world for the compassionate, effective way she set up and oversaw projects to provide care and comfort to the very poor and the very sick, orphans, lepers and the dying.

Traveling widely even in her later years, she became known to millions as a slight, brown-eyed figure—she was only 5 feet tall—dressed in the plain white sari with blue trim of her order.

The Nobel Committee said its award to her in 1979 was “for work undertaken in the struggle to overcome poverty and distress in the world, which also constitute a threat to peace.”

But she came in for criticism, too. A British television documentary in 1994 contended that perceptions of her were colored by “hyperbole and credulity.”

Mother Teresa, who had been a school administrator in a suburb of Calcutta, began working in the slums of that poverty-ridden city in 1948. She had received what she described as a divine “call within a call” two years earlier. “The message was quite clear,” she recalled. “I was to help the poor while living among them.”

In 1950 she established the Order of the Missionaries of Charity, becoming its Superior General. She went on to organize far-flung programs for the impoverished, eventually reaching more than 90 countries.

Her chief task, as she defined it, was to provide “free service to the poor and the unwanted, irrespective of caste, creed, nationality or race.”

Mother Teresa set up orphanages, schools in slums and Pure Heart Homes for sick and dying homeless people. She set up mobile health clinics, centers for the malnourished, rehabilitation hospices for lepers, homes for alcoholics and drug addicts, and shelters for the homeless. Her centers in the United States included the Gift of Love Hospice for men with AIDS, in Greenwich Village.

By the time Mother Teresa won the Nobel Prize, her order had attracted 1,800 nuns and 120,000 lay workers, running more than 80 centers in India and more than 100 others elsewhere in the world. The order’s patients included 53,000 lepers.

By 1988, her order was operating 600 mobile health clinics where almost 4 million people received treatment. That year Mother Teresa visited South Africa, which was still under apartheid rule, to set up a hostel in a black township. By early 1992, members of her order—4,000 nuns and novices, 400 priests and brothers and hundreds of thousands of lay volunteers—worked at 450 sites worldwide, including in Albania and Iraq.

Mother Teresa often paid tribute to the stricken people she cared for. Speaking to a gathering at the United Nations in 1975, she recalled a woman she had found dying on a Calcutta street.

“I knew she was dying,” she said softly. “After I did what I could, she took my hand, gave me a beautiful smile and thanked me. She gave me more than I gave her.”

Mother Teresa put particular emphasis on giving the deprived and the sick a sensation of dignity through personal contact. “Ours is a humble service,” she once said. “We try to remain right down on the ground.”

But she said pity did not help the poor. “They need love and compassion,” she said.

On certain social questions, Mother Teresa adhered outspokenly to the doctrine of her church. She voiced strong opposition to contraception, abortion and divorce. In accepting the Nobel Prize, she declared: “To me the nations with legalized abortion are the poorest nations. The greatest destroyer of peace today is the crime against the unborn child.”

Criticism of her came from various quarters. Christopher Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair and The Nation, voiced particularly strong criticism of her in a 1995 book, “The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.” Her success, he said, “depends on the exploitation of the simple and the humble by the cunning and the single-minded.”

Mother Teresa was born Agnes Bojaxhiu on either Aug. 26 or 27, 1910, to Albanian parents in Skopje, about 200 miles south of Belgrade. The city is today the capital of Macedonia, but was then ruled by Ottoman Turks, before becoming part of Serbia in 1913. An authorized biography of her published in Britain in 1992 said her father was a building contractor.

At the age of 12 she first felt the desire to become a nun. At 18 she decided to do so and got in touch with the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish Catholic order with missions in Bengal. She joined the order in Rathfarnham, a suburb of Dublin, in 1928 and spent more than a year in Darjeeling, north of Calcutta, where the order ran a girls’ school.

She then became a teacher at St. Mary’s High School, on the grounds of the Entally Convent outside Calcutta. In time she learned Bengali and Hindi and became the school’s principal.

It was while riding on a train on Sept. 10, 1946, that she received her “call within a call,” she said. She left her school and learned nursing skills from other nuns. Then she began her good works among Calcutta’s poor.

In 1950 she won canonical recognition for her new order, the Missionaries of Charity. The religious sisters who joined took vows of chastity, obedience, poverty and service.

One day in 1952, as her longtime associate Sister Agnes recalled years later, “she found an old woman dying in the streets.”

“We tried to get someone to take her to a hospital,” Sister Agnes said, “but before we could, she died. Mother said there should be a place where people can die with dignity and know that they are wanted.”

And so Mother Teresa set about establishing a home for the dying destitute. She persuaded Calcutta’s municipal authorities to give her a shabby one-story building, which stood next to a complex of Hindu shrines. In that humble structure, she created a place where those who died would do so with dignity and the dying were cared for with compassion. The establishment was called Nirmal Hriday, the place for the pure of heart.

Mother Teresa’s undertakings continued. There was a home for abandoned children, a leper colony and an old people’s home. She went on to set up welfare institutions ranging from a family clinic to mobile leprosy clinics to nurseries for abandoned children.

One of her biographers, Eileen Egan, reported in the book “Such a Vision of the Street: Mother Teresa—the Spirit and the Work” that a Red Cross official who helped her observed later: “What stunned everyone was her energy. We didn’t expect a saint to be so efficient.”

In 1971 Mother Teresa’s order opened its first house in the United States, in Harlem. It was soon moved to the Bronx, where, on a visit to the United States in 1980, she helped open a soup kitchen and declared her thanks to the poor people of New York “for allowing themselves to be taken care of” by her order.

Her work brought in donations. She recalled that when her order opened a house in New York, “Terence Cardinal Cooke was very anxious that he should give every month a maintenance for the sisters.”

“I didn’t want to hurt him,” she said, “but I didn’t know how to explain to him that our services are purely for the love of God and that we cannot accept maintenance. I expressed it the only way I could: ‘Your Eminence, I don’t think God is going to become bankrupt in New York City!’”

ROSA PARKS

February 4, 1913–October 24, 2005

By E. R. Shipp

Rosa Parks, a black seamstress whose refusal to relinquish her seat to a white man on a city bus in Montgomery, Ala., almost 50 years ago grew into a mythic event that helped touch off the civil rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s, died yesterday at her home in Detroit. She was 92 years old.

For her act of defiance, Mrs. Parks was arrested, convicted of violating the segregation laws and fined $10, plus $4 in court fees. In response, blacks in Montgomery boycotted the buses for nearly 13 months while mounting a successful Supreme Court challenge to the Jim Crow law that enforced their second-class status on the public bus system.

The events that began on the bus helped transform a young preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. into a major civil rights leader. It was Dr. King, the new pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, who was drafted to head the Montgomery Improvement Association, the organization formed to direct the nascent civil rights struggle.

“Mrs. Parks’s arrest was the precipitating factor rather than the cause of the protest,” Dr. King wrote in his 1958 book, “Stride Toward Freedom,” adding, “The cause lay deep in the record of similar injustices.”

Over the years myth tended to obscure the truth about Mrs. Parks. One legend had it that she was a cleaning woman with bad feet who was too tired to drag herself to the rear of the bus. Another had it that she was a “plant” by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The truth, as she later explained, was that she was tired of being humiliated, of having to adapt to the byzantine rules, some codified as law and others passed on as tradition, that reinforced the position of blacks as something less than full human beings.

Mrs. Parks was very active in the Montgomery N.A.A.C.P. chapter, and she and her husband, Raymond, a barber, had taken part in voter registration drives. But as she rushed home from her job as a seamstress at a department store on Dec. 1, 1955, the last thing on her mind was becoming “the mother of the civil rights movement,” as many would later describe her. She had to send out notices of the N.A.A.C.P.’s coming election of officers. And she had to prepare for the workshop that she was running for teenagers that weekend.

“So it was not a time for me to be planning to get arrested,” she recalled years later.

On Montgomery buses, the first four rows were reserved for whites. The rear was for blacks, who made up more than 75 percent of the bus system’s riders. Blacks could sit in the middle rows until those seats were needed by whites. Then the blacks had to move to seats in the rear, stand or, if there was no room, leave the bus. Even getting on the bus presented hurdles: If whites were already sitting in the front, blacks could board to pay the fare but then they had to disembark and re-enter through the rear door.

For years blacks had complained. “My resisting being mistreated on the bus did not begin with that particular arrest,” Mrs. Parks said. “I did a lot of walking in Montgomery.”

After a confrontation in 1943, a driver named James Blake ejected Mrs. Parks from his bus. As fate would have it, he was driving the Cleveland Avenue bus on Dec. 1, 1955. He demanded that four blacks give up their seats in the middle section so a lone white man could sit. Three of them complied.

Recalling the incident for “Eyes on the Prize,” a 1987 public television series on the civil rights movement, Mrs. Parks said: “When he saw me still sitting, he asked if I was going to stand up, and I said, ‘No, I’m not.’ And he said, ‘Well, if you don’t stand up, I’m going to have to call the police and have you arrested.’ I said, ‘You may do that.’”

Her arrest was the answer to prayers for the Women’s Political Council, which was set up in 1946 in response to the mistreatment of black bus riders, and for E. D. Nixon, a leading advocate of equality for blacks in Montgomery.

Blacks had begun to build a case around a 15-year-old girl’s arrest for refusing to give up her seat, but when they learned that the girl was pregnant, they decided that she was an unsuitable symbol. Mrs. Parks, on the other hand, was regarded as “one of the finest citizens of Montgomery—not one of the finest Negro citizens—but one of the finest citizens of Montgomery,” Dr. King said.

While Mr. Nixon met with lawyers and preachers to plan an assault on the Jim Crow laws, the women’s council distributed handbills that urged blacks to boycott the buses on Monday, Dec. 5, the day of Mrs. Parks’s trial. On Sunday, Dec. 4, the announcement was made from many black pulpits.

Some blacks rode in carpools that Monday. Others rode in black-owned taxis that charged only the bus fare, 10 cents. But most black commuters—40,000 people—walked, some more than 20 miles.

At a church rally that night, blacks unanimously agreed to continue the boycott until these demands were met: that they be treated with courtesy, that black drivers be hired, and that seating in the middle of the bus go on a first-come basis.

The boycott lasted 381 days, during which many blacks were harassed and arrested. Churches and houses, including those of Dr. King and Mr. Nixon, were dynamited.

Finally, on Nov. 13, 1956, the Supreme Court outlawed segregation on buses. The court order arrived in Montgomery on Dec. 20; the boycott ended the next day. But the violence escalated: snipers fired into buses as well as Dr. King’s home, and bombs were tossed into churches and ministers’ homes.

Early the next year, the Parkses moved to Hampton, Va. Then they moved to Detroit, where Mrs. Parks worked for a time as an aide to Representative John Conyers Jr. Mrs. Parks’s husband, Raymond, died in 1977. There are no immediate survivors.

Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Ala., on Feb. 4, 1913, the elder of Leona and James McCauley’s two children. Although the McCauleys were farmers, Mr. McCauley also worked as a carpenter and Mrs. McCauley as a teacher.

Rosa McCauley dropped out of high school to care for her ailing grandmother. It was not until she was 21 that she earned a diploma.

Mrs. Parks was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, but her final years were troubled. She was hospitalized after a 28-year-old man beat her in her home and stole $53. She had problems paying her rent, relying on a local church for support until last December, when her landlord stopped charging her rent.

Mrs. Parks often appeared uncomfortable with the near-beatification bestowed upon her by blacks. She would say that she hoped only to inspire others “to be dedicated enough to make useful lives for themselves and to help others.”