AUTUMN LEGENDS

Bill Russell (1934-2022) Basketball star / USA

If there is one player who popularized the sport of basketball for Americans and set a career path for young black males, it is Bill Russell, who played center for the NBA’s Boston Celtics from 1956 to 1969. Born William Felton Russell in Monroe, Louisiana, he stood 6 feet 10 inches tall and had a 7-foot-4-inch arm span. These traits enabled him to stand out on the University of San Francisco Dons, which he led to two consecutive NCAA championships; captain the gold medal-winning U.S. national basketball team at the 1956 Summer Olympics; and power the Celtics to a record-setting 11 NBA championships. A five-time NBA Most Valuable Player (MVP) and a 12-time NBA All-Star, Russell (along with rival Wilt Chamberlain) is one of just two players to have grabbed more than 50 rebounds in a game. He was player-coach of the Celtics in his final three years, the first black coach in the NBA, and the first to win a championship. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, Russell’s highest honor was arguably having his #6 jersey retired upon his death in 2022, the only NBA player so honored.

Usain Bolt (b. 1986) Athlete extraordinaire / Jamaica

The eight-time Olympic gold medalist is widely considered to be the greatest sprinter of all time. He is a symbol of excellence for young people of all races. Bolt, who was born and raised in the West Indian island of Jamaica, holds the world record in the 100-meter, 200-meter and 4x100-meter relay. He is the only sprinter to win Olympic 100m and 200m titles at three consecutive Olympics (2008, 2012 and 2016), and he gained worldwide fame for his double sprint victory in world record times at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, making him the first person to hold both records since fully automatic time became necessary. He is the most successful male athlete of the World Championships, having won four titles in the 200m and three in the 100m. Nicknamed “Lighting Bolt” in the sports media, he is a worldclass celebrity and influencer and is the subject of a documentary, I Am Bolt. Since his retirement, Bolt has amassed millions from varied business interests.

Aunt Polly Jackson (? - ?)

Enslaved freedom fighter / USA

While Harriet Tubman has become the enduring symbol of the Underground Railroad System and the struggle of enslaved Africans for freedom, she was far from alone. Aunt Polly played just as vital a role in helping her people escape Southern slavery for freedom and opportunity in the North. Because she was born a slave, little is known of this courageous woman, as plantation owners did not always deem it necessary to keep records of birth and death of their human property. All that is known about her is that she became fed up with the extreme abuse in her middle age and made her escape to freedom through the Underground Railroad. She settled near Ripley, Ohio, in a place called Africa, an Underground Railroad stop for escaped slaves who were given the choice to settle there or proceed further north. Aunt Polly decided to stay and establish a small farm. She used her farm to battle anti-abolitionists who sought to recapture escaped slaves in what became known as a Reverse Underground Railroad. In addition to hiding escapees on her farm, she used clever subterfuge to fight off slave hunters, dressing as a meek old lady to fool the hunters and then attacking them with a kitchen knife and boiling water. She was so successful that she inspired similar attacks, some resulting in the deaths of those hunters, which helped crush the Reverse Underground Railroad.

Julius Waties Waring (1880-1968) Jurist / USA

Whites of good conscience helped speed along the African American quest for freedom and equality. One such person was Waring, a federal district judge in South Carolina. The native South Carolinian had been in private practice when President Franklin D. Roosevelt nominated him to the federal bench in 1941. Sworn in the following year after Senate confirmation, Waring had been a moderate on race issues but altered his stance to activism, in part influenced by his second marriage to a Northern socialite. As chief judge, Waring ended segregated seating in the courtroom and chose a black bailiff, John Fleming, who quickly became known as "John the Bailiff." Speaking at a Harlem church, he proclaimed, "The cancer of segregation will never be cured by the sedative of gradualism." Waring’s dissent in Briggs v. Elliott, a 1951 school desegregation test case, where he wrote the pivotal line, “Segregation is per se inequality," laid the foundation for Brown v. Board of Education (1954), outlawing segregated schools. Waring and his wife became so unpopular among Southern whites that they had to move permanently to New York City. The Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on his lawn in Charleston. Upon his death in 1968, approximately 200 African Americans but less than a dozen whites attended his burial in Magnolia Cemetery in Charleston. In 2015, as a small act of contrition, the Hollings Judicial Center in Charleston was renamed the J. Waties Waring Judicial Center.

Rev. Calvin O. Butts III (1949-2022) Church pastor and educator / USA

Bill

Pinkney

(b. 1935) Sailor and executive / USA

It was astounding when Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition first accomplished the feat of circling the globe by sea in 1522, and equally so when it was done by William Pinkney, the first black man to do so, when in 1992 he sailed the Seven Seas solo via the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn. The Chicago native and Navy veteran learned to sail in Puerto Rico, where he lived for a few years. Beginning in the 1960s, Pinkney worked in marketing for two cosmetics companies, Revlon and black-owned Johnson Products Company. He started planning to sail around the world in 1985, after being laid off from his job at the Department of Human Services, and fundraised throughout the late 1980s. The historic voyage began and ended in Boston and lasted 22 months, from August 1990 to June 1992, during which he traveled 27,000 miles in a Valiant 47, a 47-foot cutter he named The Commitment. The expedition cost $1 million. The documentary of his trip, The Incredible Voyage of Bill Pinkney, won a Peabody Award in 1992. Other honors included winning the Chicago Yacht Club’s Yachtsman of the Year Award in 1992 and induction into the National Sailing Hall of Fame. From 2000 to 2002, Pinkney served as the first captain of the replica of the Amistad. As captain, he took a group of teachers to Africa as part of a trip that traced the route of the Middle Passage crossing from Senegal to the Americas.

If you lived in the New York area in the racially turbulent 1980s and 1990s, you were familiar with Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, a regular fixture in television news as the go-to person for commentary on the local civil rights struggle among blacks. Reared in Queens, one of New York City’s outer boroughs, Butts was an alumnus of Morehouse College, a historically black college. He also studied at Union Theological Seminary and earned his doctorate of ministry at Drew University. Butts joined the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, traditionally New York City's largest and pre-eminent black church (where Adam Clayton Powell—both father and son—once served as senior pastor), in 1972 and rose to become senior pastor. He became well-known to New Yorkers by delivering a weekly sermon on local radio station 98.7 FM, aka KISS-FM. He came out early in support of AIDS patients and their families. As chair of the Abyssinian Development Corporation (ADC), which he also founded, Butts was credited with several community projects to better Harlem, including a new high school, businesses and an apartment complex. He was a key player in New York state politics and served from 1990 to 2020 as president of the State University of New York at Old Westbury.

Gladys West (b. 1930) Mathematician / USA

Born Gladys Brown in Virginia, this brilliant mathematician received her education at Virginia State University (at the time Virginia State College), a historically black university, before she began her teaching career In 1956, she was the second black woman recruited to the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Va , which employed only four blacks By the 1960s, West began to analyze data from satellites, especially satellite altimeters such as GEOS 3, putting together models of the Earth's shape. From the mid-1970s through the 1980s, West programmed an IBM 7030 Stretch computer to deliver increasingly precise calculations to model the shape of the Earth an ellipsoid with additional undulations, known as the geoid. Generating an extremely accurate geopotential model required her to employ complex algorithms to account for variations in gravitational, tidal and other forces that distort Earth's shape In her autobiography, West spoke of some of the complex problems she solved, which had proven too difficult for other members of the team. West's model ultimately became the basis for the Global Positioning System (GPS) West was inducted into the U S Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame in 2018 She was also awarded the Webby Lifetime Achievement Award at the 25th Annual Webby Awards for the development of satellite geodesy models.

Benjamin Lay (1682-1759)

Humanitarian and abolitionist / USA

Human and animal rights activists owe a debt to this Quaker farmer, author and vegetarian. Born in England into a farming family, he worked as a sailor and in 1718 moved to Barbados. Here he witnessed the poor treatment of enslaved Africans that instilled in him his lifelong abolitionist principles. Lay later settled in Philadelphia and became unpopular among his fellow Quakers due to his confrontational anti-slavery stance. He published over 200 pamphlets against such social ills as slavery, capital punishment, the prison system and the moneyed Quaker elite; one book—All Slave-Keepers That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates—was one of the earliest North American works against slavery. Lay, who stood about 4 feet 7 inches tall and had a hunchback, ate only fruits, vegetables and honey and drank only milk and water. He made his own clothes as he despised slave labor. He did not believe that humans were superior to non-human animals and lived much of his adult life in a cave in the Pennsylvania countryside.