Ross Watts-Edward, 72, of Amarillo died Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2008.

Homegoing services were at 2:30 p.m. Saturday March, 1, 2008 in Prayer Temple Church of God in Christ. Burial in Llano Cemetery by Blackburn-Shaw Funeral Directors Martin Road Chapel, 1505 Martin Road.

Ross Watts-Edward, retired physical therapist passed away Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2008, at 5 a.m. He was born to proud parents Mr. Ross Watts and Ms. Eddie Edward on March 3, 1935, in Farr. Mr. Watts-Edward attended local schools in Farr before moving to Amarillo with his mother and attending Carver School, where he was known as “The Golden Toe,” for his expertise on the field while playing football. He also attended Amarillo Price College, now known as Alamo High School, where he was the first African-American student to enroll.

At the age of 20, Mr. Watts-Edward moved to Chicago, where he became a physical therapist and worked at Hen Rotin Hospital until he retired at the young age of 47.

He married two loves of his life, Lelah Stewart and Carrie Edward, which both ended in divorces.

After retirement, he decided to leave the fast life of Chicago and settle down in Amarillo, where his mother and siblings resided at the time.

He lived a very secluded life, enjoyed his retirement and always kept his eye on the stock market. More importantly, Mr. Ross Edward spent his later years attending church services at Church of the Living God under Pastor Brian Pace.

Survivors include a daughter, Tanya Edward of Amarillo; a sister, Phyllis Davis of Amarillo; two brothers, Humphry Sloan of Amarillo and ReVac Dow of Grand Prairie; a host of other relatives which include a son-in-law, Kenney Mathes; two granddaughters, Candice Mathes and Joslyn Mathes, both of Amarillo; a grandson, Kenney Mathes Jr. of Amarillo; two nieces, Copocene Laymon of Houston and Destiny Soliz of Clovis, N.M.; a great-niece, Kaleah Willis; three great-nephews, Choya Bledsoe, Malachi Willis and Cohen Boone; a sister-in-law, Lori Dow of Grand Prairie; two nephews, Jeffrey Beasley of Chicago and Cedric Willis and wife Taylor Willis of Amarillo; three great-grandchildren, Brishiri Hatchett, JK Mills and Trevon Edward of Amarillo; and a host of friends.

Evelyn L. Newman, 79, of Amarillo died Monday, Feb. 25, 2008.

Services were at 2:30 p.m. Saturday March 1, 2008 in St. John Baptist Church with the Rev. Grover Neal, pastor, and Elder William Fifer, pastor of Holy Trinity Church of God in Christ, officiating. Burial in Llano Cemetery by Warford-Walker Mortuary, 509 N. Hughes St.

Evelyn Louise Ford was born July 8, 1928, into the union of Elbert and Malinda Patillo Ford in Tipton, Okla. She grew up in Vernon, where she graduated from Booker T. Washington High School, and continued her education at Wiley College in Marshall.

Her love of being around people led her to perform several jobs to include LVN for 15 years at Northwest Texas Hospital, working at Levi Strauss and retiring, working in the school cafeteria and serving as a school bus monitor for Laidlaw.

She was preceded in death by her parents; a son, Larry Joe; two daughters, Karen Faye and Belvery Jean; a grandson, Christopher; a sister, Erma Hudson “Fat”; and two brothers, Roy Glenn and Floyd “Bud” Ford.

Survivors she leaves to cherish her memories include her husband, Albert Newman; six daughters, Kathryn Holman and husband William, Patricia Darnes-Riddick and husband George, Doris McDaniel and husband Danny, Carolyn Darnes and husband Joe, Linda Ferguson and husband James and Erma Jean and husband Manuel; a son, Willie Darnes and wife Linda; five sisters, Lola Hicks of Jackson, Miss., Prima Herndon and husband Charlie, Billie Johnson, Barbara Ford and Winnie Lee Jones; two brothers, Coy Lynn Ford and wife Vashti of Fort Worth and Lester Ford; two special nephews, Kenneth and Donell McCallon; a niece, Genese McCallon; a daughter-in-law, Deloris Darnes; 22 grandchildren; 49 great-grandchildren; and a host of relatives and friends.

Narvie Banks Gore, 74, of Amarillo died Monday, Feb. 25, 2008.

Services were at 11 a.m. Saturday March 1, 2008 in Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church with the Rev. Morris Mitchell, pastor, officiating. Burial in Llano Cemetery by Warford-Walker Mortuary, 509 N. Hughes St.

Narvie Banks Gore was born July 30, 1933, in Curtis, Ark., to Charles H. Banks Sr., and L. Selma Banks. She attended elementery school in Curtis before the family moved to Flint, Mich., when she was 12. She attended Lowery Junior High School and graduated from Central High School in Flint. Later in life, she met and married Bill Gore and to this union four children were born. The family moved to Amarillo in 1962, and it became her home.

Narvie was an active member of Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church, were she served faithfully in many positions such as deaconess, church clerk and Sunday school teacher. She also was active in her community, serving on several boards and was a member of different organizations, including life member of NAACP, Amarillo United Citizens Forum and City of Amarillo Community Development Advisory Committee.

Survivors include a son Andrew Gore and wife Shae of McKinney; three daughters, Kimberly Gore of Amarillo, Michelle Gore of Arlington and Terrie Gore of Houston; two brothers, Rayfield Banks of Flint and Alvin Banks of Dallas; two sisters, Mary Lee McNeal of Flint and Thelma Brazle-Day and husband Fred of Grand Blanc, Mich.; six grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; and many nieces, nephews, other relatives and friends.

In lieu of flowers, the family suggests memorials be to Scholarship Fund, Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church, 1015 N. Monroe St., Amarillo, TX 79107-3515.

Candice LaVandrya Hester-Cook, 40, formerly of Amarillo died Monday, Feb. 25, 2008, in Wellington, Kan.

Services were at 10 a.m. Saturday March 1, 2008 in Warford-Walker Mortuary Chapel, 509 N. Hughes St., with the Rev. Robert Thomas, pastor of Life Tabernacle Pentecostal Church in Kansas City, Mo., officiating. Burial in Valley View Cemetery in Garden City, Kan.

Candice LaVandrya Hester-Cook was born Aug. 23, 1967, in Phoenix. She was reared in Oklahoma City, where she attended public schools and graduated from high school. She attended junior college in Garden City. She was employed as a medical tech in several cities, including Amarillo and Kansas City. For the past year, she had lived and worked in Kansas City.

Survivors include her husband, James Cook; two children, Leboni Nevins of Kansas City and Justin Nevins of Amarillo; her parents, Alvin and Doris Crosby of Amarillo; two brothers, Clifton Nevins and Daiton Nevins, both of Amarillo; a sister, Lacey Washington of Fort Worth; and a number of other relatives and friends.

GOD OUR FATHER,
WALK THROUGH MY HOME AND TAKE AWAY ALL MY WORRIES AND ILLNESS; IN JESUS’ NAME.

AMEN

Johnnie Carr, who helped lead groundbreaking 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, dies at 97
DESIREE HUNTER, Associated Press writer

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Johnnie Carr, who joined childhood friend Rosa Parks in the historic Montgomery bus boycott and kept a busy schedule of civil rights activism up to her final days, has died. She was 97.

Carr died Friday night, said Baptist Health hospital spokeswoman Melody Ragland. She had been hospitalized after a stroke Feb. 11.

Carr succeeded the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association in 1967, a post she held at her death. It was the newly formed association that led the boycott of city buses in the Alabama capital in 1955 after Parks, a black seamstress, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to whites on a crowded bus.

A year later the U.S. Supreme Court struck down racial segregation on public transportation.

“Johnnie Carr is one of the three major icons of the Civil Rights Movement: Dr. King, Rosa Parks and Johnnie Carr,” said Morris Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “I think ultimately, when the final history books are written, she’ll be one of the few people remembered for that terrific movement.”

As the Improvement Association’s president, Carr helped lead several initiatives to improve race relations and conditions for blacks. She was involved in a lawsuit to desegregate Montgomery schools, with her then-13-year-old son, Arlam, the named plaintiff.

“She hadn’t been sick up until she had the stroke,” Arlam Carr said Saturday. “It was such a massive stroke that she never was able to recover from it. She was still very active — going around and speaking — but it was just one of those things.”

She played a prominent role in 2005 on the 50th anniversary of Parks’ refusal to give up her bus seat, speaking to thousands of schoolchildren who marched to the Capitol.

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This page contains my random thoughts. They could change frequently, or seldom, as my moods suggest, depending on news items or other events that motivate me and arouse my passions.

North Amarillo beware! A knock on your door after dark could lead to an encounter with landscaper Benjamin Franklin Smith.

Benjamin is a smooth talker, introducing himself by name and delivering facts about his family, business, and address. Benjamin’s willingness to divulge so much information about himself is all a ploy to lure you into his comfort zone. One can almost see the twinkle in Benjamin’s eye as he starts his next line of questions.

What’s your name? Quid pro quo, something for something, Benjamin has already honored his side of the exchange.

What? Not feeling comfortable with giving your personal information to a stranger standing on your porch after dark? No problem Benjamin is already three steps ahead of you, hesitate responding for only a moment and Benjamin with his coy smile bates his hook.

“You look familiar, are you related to …”

And this is where Benjamin Franklin Smith slowly reels you in. He either knows someone in your family or references that he has done work for someone highly respected and visible in community.

Now Benjamin has you, hook line and sinker, he’s earned your trust.

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Obama restores ideal of America
By Harold Jackson, The Philadelphia Inquirer

African Americans born before 1960 well remember how we grew up hearing our teachers tell us: “One day you can be president of the United States.” And we believed them.

Attending segregated schools with ragged books. Our parents expecting to hear the N word when they least expected it. That was the reality. But little black boys and girls really believed they could grow up and become president.

Later generations became more cynical - after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, after Watts had been burned, after our neighborhoods became battlefields in the drug war.

But it’s 2008, and we are believers again. Even if Barack Obama doesn’t win the presidency, he has restored the ideal of America in the minds of many of its darker citizens.

Obama is expected to outdo any previous black presidential candidate in his ability to get white votes - even Jesse Jackson, who won five primaries in 1984 and 11 primaries in 1988.

But there’s one distinction Jackson has that will likely always elude Obama - being called “black leader.” I’m not trying to reignite the argument over Obama’s ethnicity. He’s black, by America’s standards. And he’s a leader. But he’s not really a “black leader.”

In elementary school, we always wrote a theme paper about a “black leader” for Black History Month - or Negro History Month, if you go back as far as I do. Our subject choices ranged from King and Malcolm X to Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

Some on the list were innovators, inventors or athletes whose success inspired African Americans, including George Washington Carver, Langston Hughes, Charles Drew, James Weldon Johnson, Percy Julian, Jesse Owens, Louis Armstrong.

Obama is different from all of them. He’s not seen as a drum major for his people. He wants to be everyone’s president; that’s how America sees him, and that’s good - it’s progress.

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Americans–The Proud
by L. Arthalia Cravin

Michelle Obama recently drew mix of reactions to her comments in Wisconsin in which she said (in part) the following: “…what I’ve learned over this year is that hope is making a comeback. It is making a comeback and let me tell you something that for the first time in my adult lifetime I am proud of my country…not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change…I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction and not just feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment. I’ve seen people who are hungry to be unified around some common issues and it’s made me proud and I feel privileged to be a part of even witnessing it, traveling around to states all over the country…that the struggles of a farmer in Iowa are no different than what’s happening on the south side of Chicago, that people are feeling the same pain, and want the same thing for their families.” In response to Michelle’s comments, Cindy McCain, wife of John McCain said the following: “I am proud of my country, I don’t know about you. If you heard those words earlier, I am very proud of my country.”

After listening to both women, I personally think that both of them need a serious lesson in “the realities of history.” I am reminded of the words of Joseph Wood Krutch in his 1919 book, The Modern Temper. “As the race matures, the universe become more and more what experience has revealed and less and less what imagination has created.” Both women need to read Patty Limerick’s “The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West,” (1987) and Richard D. White’s “It’s Your Misfortune and None of Mine Own: A New History of the American West,” (1991). Both women could learn that America’s history is an unfolding of places (geographically) and relationships (actions and attitudes) between an amalgam of peoples within those places. If both women would read these insightful books, both would have little to be proud of and lots to be proud of about America, depending on where one falls within the places and relationships of the past.

For Michelle, surely no thinking person can expect her to make an accurate assessment of her ancestral history and proudly announce that she is proud of America’s 350 year “peculiar institution of slavery” that included slave auctions within blocks of the White House. Likewise, no one expects her to proclaim her pride in the repressive Black Codes that effectively undercut the deprivations of human rights that the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 were designed to rectify. Likewise, she surely cannot be expected to express her pride in America’s Manifest Destiny that exterminated and/or orchestrated the removal of Native Americans, both in the south and in the west or the Japanese internment camps. Read more »

Harry S. Truman, yes, black history icon
by Harold Jackson, The Philadelphia Inquirer

This being Black History Month, I thought it would be a good time to talk about someone who should be recognized for his contribution to the progress of African Americans - Harry S. Truman.

I know: You thought I was going to say Lyndon Baines Johnson. But before LBJ became the president it took to bring to fruition the goals of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders, there was Truman.

His 1948 executive order desegregating America’s armed forces should be considered right along with the 1960s’ civil rights and voting-rights acts as crucial to the progress of black people in this country.

Truman made a way for blacks to use the military as a means to advancement that private business didn’t offer. Colin Powell, the first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was a legacy of Truman’s order. As were Powell’s predecessors, including Gens. Roscoe Robinson Jr. and Daniel “Chappie” James Jr., Vice Adm. Samuel L. Gravely Jr., and other black flag officers.

After Truman’s order, thousands of black enlisted men and women who served in the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force returned to their hometowns determined to gain in civilian life some semblance of the unbiased opportunities the military had provided. Many became foot soldiers in the civil rights movement.

Truman’s act, when black people were still being denied the vote in the South, cannot be dismissed as a calculation toward winning election to the office he assumed after FDR’s death. It took political bravery to write off Southern Democrats who opposed any move to treat African Americans as equals.

Truman had signaled his intent in a June 29, 1947, speech to the NAACP that deserves review today:

It is my deep conviction that we have reached a turning point in the long history of our country’s efforts to guarantee freedom and equality to all our citizens. Recent events in the United States and abroad have made us realize that it is more important today than ever before to ensure that all Americans enjoy these rights.

When I say all Americans I mean all Americans. . . .

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