Henry Jenkins, who just recently retired after 32 years as President of the Retail, Wholesale, Department Store Union of Alabama and the Mid-South Council, died on November 7 after a short illness. He was 82.
Jenkins leaves behind a vibrant legacy of helping countless thousands of working families build better lives for themselves, according to this memorium. His life’s work spans decades and influenced generations in the south. And while Jenkins found his home in the labor movement which he loved, his commitment to justice went beyond even his union activism, embracing the civil rights movement that changed America forever.
It is no exaggeration to say that Henry Jenkins put his life at risk to help others as he fought for economic justice in the south in the 1960s and beyond.
Just now getting set up in the campground on the mountain top and taking in all the tributes to Apple’s Steve Jobs.
Below is an original Mac ad we ran in The Southerner magazine online back in the late 1990s, before the dot com bubble burst. Click on the ad for a sample story, in this case, a science piece for the Lab & Field section.
The Rev. Free Shuttlesworth outside the federal courthouse in Montgomery
Civil Rights pioneer and warrior, the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, died today in Birmingham, Ala. at 10:28 a.m. after a long illness. He was 89.
Shuttlesworth was a leader in the Civil Rights movement in Birmingham during the 1950s and ’60s, and survived several attempts on his life, including at least one bombing of his home in West Birmingham.
“We have lost a true American hero,” said Dr. Lawrence Pijeaux, President and CEO of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, who described Shuttlesworth as a mentor and “a man whose efforts during the ’50s and ’60s still have a positive impact on human relations around the world.”
Matt and Mark Kimbrell performing Lolly’s Lee’s “Rain” at Marty’s in Birmingham
Birmingham musician Matt Kimbrell died unexpectedly on Thursday, Oct. 14, according to friends and family. No cause of death has been released yet. He was 51.
Kimbrell, the son of local bandleader Henry Kimbrell and brother of jazz guitarist Mark Kimbrell, played percussion and drums in some of the best known bands around town over the past 30 years, including the Tim Boykin Blues Band and Jim Bob and the Leisure Suits. He released a self-titled CD in 2001.
According to the Newhouse Website, he also taught at the Birmingham Percussion Center and was part of Get Rhythm! programs organized by Birmingham’s John Scalici.
According to the Locust Fork Band’s e-mail announcement, Matt was a close personal friend to many of the LFB band members and “shared many good times together.”
I got to know Matt very well in the 1980s while operating the NewsBreak bookstore, newsstand and coffee bar on Birmingham’s Southside. This comes as a shock and is a great loss to this town.
Funeral arrangements are being handled by Ridout’s in Homewood, but details are not complete at this time. (We will post details in the comments when they become available).
Fess Parker, a baby-boomer idol in the 1950s who launched a craze for coonskin caps as television’s Davy Crockett, died Thursday of natural causes. He was 85.
Family spokeswoman Sao Anash said Parker, who was also TV’s Daniel Boone, died at his Santa Ynez Valley home on the 84th birthday of his wife of 50 years, Marcella, according to the AP.
Of course like many American boys growing up in the suburbs in the 1950s and ’60s, I was a big fan of the Daniel Boone television series that aired from September 24, 1964 to September 10, 1970 on NBC.
This brings back many memories, and strikes me as a perfect example of how new Web technology such as YouTube, Wikipedia and Facebook can be used to collect reliable information and pass it on to friends.
Russel Lanier, the son of the late Russel D’Lyon Lanier Jr. and Eleanor Gaines Boykin Lanier and the self-described “Barbecue Man from Alabam’,” died from esophageal cancer in a Birmingham hospital January 11. He was 57.
Lanier was famous in the Alabama barbecue business for his Ol’ Hickory barbecue restaurant in Talladega.
I got to know Lanier on the Southside of Birmingham in the 1980s through his brother, James B. “Jimmy” Lanier, who worked in production for The Crimson White newspaper at the University of Alabama the same time I did in the early 1980s, Bear Bryant’s final two years.
Russel was an avid University of Alabama football fan.
“Russel fought a long, hard fight against cancer and never complained,” Jimmy said.
Russel was partial to the Benjamin Franklin quote, “Those who give up essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
I am still scratching my head as I re-read the New York Times feature obituary on William Safire, wondering how in the world the nation’s newspaper of record could get things so wrong in the end.
The power vacuum created at the Times when Howell Raines resigned really has left the former U.S. newspaper of record with a talent void — in spite of the TV commercials to the contrary.
I mean look at this lede. Do you see anything wrong?
William Safire, a speechwriter for President Richard M. Nixon and a Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist for The New York Times who also wrote novels, books on politics and a Malaprop’s treasury of articles on language, died at a hospice in Rockville, Md., on Sunday. He was 79. The cause was pancreatic cancer…
Do you know what a malaprop is? According to Wikipedia, which of course is banned in links from the NYTimes online, a malaprop is the substitution of an incorrect word for a word with a similar sound, in which the resulting phrase makes no sense but often creates a comic effect.
What Safire wrote was a dictionary for terms used in politics not otherwise found in a regular dictionary, terms such as “trial balloon” and the like. I’ve had a copy since the early 1980s, when I first studied political science and journalism at the University of Alabama and became a fan of Safire’s columns in the paper and the Sunday magazine.
Maybe in the end the Times‘ new management got mad at Safire for something, or maybe they just hired the wrong guy to write his obit. It doesn’t do him justice.
James “Milford” Perkins, the patriarch of the musical Perkins family of East Birmingham, Alabama, died Sept. 8 after a long bout with Alzheimer’s disease. He was 83.
Earline and Milford Perkins
Perkins was a veteran of the second World War and retired from Hayes Aircraft as a painter.
He was born on March 23, 1926, to James and Eliza Perkins in a house or a barn near Little Rock, Arkansas, where his family had moved from Alabama in a horse-drawn wagon to raise cotton. But when the Great Depression hit in 1929, there were more opportunities in making moonshine than farming. So the family moved back to Alabama, ending up in the unincorporated suburb of Birmingham known as Center Point, the half-way point between the steel city and the country in Blount and St. Clair Counties.
Raised by three sisters, Milford was somewhat shy, but he loved music and he loved to sing. He also became known for his singing voice while in the Army and at Hayes, where he was tagged with the nickname “Peon.” Some of his favorite songs were Hank Williams hits such as “I Saw the Light.”
Because of his shyness, Perkins may have missed an opportunity to sing on the Grand Ole Opry. An Army buddy was so impressed with his singing that he tried to persuade him to come to a local radio station in the days when they were sort of a farm system for auditions to play and sing on the Opry. Milford couldn’t get up the nerve to play on live radio.
He was also known for playing and singing on the front porch of the Perkins shotgun house on Twenty Fifth Avenue, which became a gathering spot for musicians and their friends in the 1960s and ’70s, especially after the oldest son Wayne Perkins came back from an audition to play guitar with the Rolling Stones in 1974.
That’s about the time I met Milford and Wayne Perkins.
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
