Phyllis R. Klotman, Archivist of African-American Cinema, Dies at 90
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Phyllis Klotman, right, with Frances Stubbs and Gloria Gibson at the Black Film Center/Archive in 1986.CreditIndiana University Black Film Center/Archive
Phyllis R. Klotman, a film scholar who helped unearth lost treasures of African-American cinema and established a major archive devoted to their preservation and study, died on March 30 at her home in Manhattan. She was 90.
Her daughter, Janet K. Cutler, confirmed the death.
At her death, Professor Klotman was an emeritus professor in the department of African- American and African diaspora studies atIndiana University in Bloomington. There, in 1981, she created the Black Film Center/Archive, the first significant repository of its kind in the United States.
Professor Klotman, who wrote and lectured widely about black cinema, founded what became the journal Black Camera. She convened symposiums and screenings, and championed the work of contemporary black filmmakers.
“She was one of the first to preserve black independent films, and in doing that, she encouraged us,” Charles Burnett, one of the most acclaimed black independent filmmakers of the postwar period, said in a telephone interview. “One of the first forums that we had was at her school. And for many of us, it was the first time that we had some exposure on this level, in a university setting.”
One of her department’s few white members, Professor Klotman became interested in black film history in the 1960s, while writing her doctoral dissertation on African-American literature at what is now Case Western Reserve University.
Seeking visual representations of black people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, she learned of the existence of a body of work — long scattered, little known and unpreserved — by early black filmmakers.
She traveled the country, scouring attics and cellars and museum vaults, assembling a collection of films by and about African-Americans. Many had survived only in fragments.
“They were technically very poor: poorly lighted, bad sound quality, made in people’s houses to save money,” Professor Klotman told The Associated Press in 1981. “But they were a picture of the black experience.”
Among the films she amassed over the years were several made in response to “The Birth of a Nation,” D. W. Griffith’s unrepentantly racist Civil War film of 1915. These included “The Birth of a Race” (1918), directed by John W. Noble, which sought to overturn the stereotypes of African-Americans that Griffith promulgated.
There were also films by Oscar Micheaux (1884-1951), the country’s most famous early black auteur, whose work includes “The Symbol of the Unconquered” (1920) and “Murder in Harlem” (1935).
“The movies were called ‘race films’ the way jazz records with black artists were called ‘race records,’ ” Professor Klotman explained in the same interview. “It was a kind of buzzword.”
Today, the archive she founded comprises more than 3,000 films, spanning the silent era to the present day, along with photographs, posters and oral histories.
Phyllis Helen Rauch was born on Sept. 9, 1924, in Galveston, Tex. Her father was a door-to-door salesman and quite possibly a numbers runner, Professor Klotman’s daughter said. She married Robert Klotman, a violinist and music educator, in 1943. They later divorced but afterward remarried, and remained married until his death in 2012.
Combining a university education with motherhood, Phyllis Klotman earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English from Western Reserve University, as it was then known, in the early 1960s, followed by a doctorate there. She joined the Indiana faculty in 1970 and later served as the university’s dean for women’s affairs.
After retiring in 1999, she moved with her husband to the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Besides her daughter, a professor of film studies at Montclair State University, Professor Klotman is survived by a son, Paul; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Another son, Eric, died at 2 of Tay-Sachs disease, a recessive genetic disorder prevalent among Ashkenazi Jews. After his death, Professor Klotman became an outspoken advocate of genetic screening to identify carriers of the disease.
Professor Klotman’s books include “Another Man Gone: The Black Runner in Contemporary Afro-American Literature” (1977); “Frame by Frame: A Black Filmography” (1979); and “Struggles for Representation: African American Documentary Film and Video” (1999), an anthology she edited with her daughter.
As recently as the 1980s, Mr. Burnett said, many African-American filmmakers felt they had to expatriate themselves to find an audience for their work.
“We felt that we were back in the days when people would go to Paris, like Josephine Baker, and get recognized over there,” he said. “In Europe, there was advertising in the papers about what we did. At that point, here, there was nothing — except for that little island at Indiana.”
Rev. Willie T. Barrow, a Fighter for Civil Rights, Dies at 90
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The Rev. Willie T. Barrow, with the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr. in 1986, was a past chairwoman of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition.CreditSun-Times Media, via Associated Press
The Rev. Willie T. Barrow, who championed civil rights for minorities, women, gay people and consumers; opposed the war in Vietnam and apartheid; and mentored generations of community organizers, including a young Chicagoan named Barack Obama, died on Thursday at her home in Chicago. She was 90.
Her death was confirmed by the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the alliance of two groups founded by the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr., of which she was chairwoman for a decade.
Ms. Barrow organized her first civil rights demonstration when she was 12, protesting the fact that she and her fellow black students had to walk to school in her hometown in Texas while whites could ride the school bus. She went on to conduct sit-ins and boycotts with luminaries of the movement, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, and joined in the 1963 March on Washington and the protests two years later in Selma, Ala. More recently she voiced concern over gun violence and dilution of the Voting Rights Act.
Willie Beatrice Taplin was born in Burton, Tex., on Dec. 7, 1924, to Nelson and Octava Taplin. Her father was a farmer and a Church of God minister. When she was 16 she moved to Oregon, where she studied theology, organized a Church of God group and worked as a welder in a shipyard, where she met Clyde Barrow, a fellow shipyard worker. They married and moved to Chicago in 1945.
In the early 1970s, she helped Mr. Jackson found Operation PUSH (the letters originally stood for People United to Save Humanity, later changed to Serve Humanity) and succeeded him as executive director when he sought the Democratic presidential nomination in the 1980s. She later served as chairwoman.
She was a fiery advocate and fierce adversary, as the organization pursued its civil rights goals. It encouraged young people to study and stay in school. And, with mixed success, it pressed major corporations to hire more black workers and executives under threat of boycotts. Mr. Jackson merged PUSH with his National Rainbow Coalition in 1996.
Ms. Barrow was a mentor and self-described godmother to young activists, including the future President Obama. The president said in a statement, “I was proud to count myself among the more than 100 men and women she called her ‘godchildren,’ and worked hard to live up to her example.”
The Rev. Calvin S. Morris, the retired executive director of the Community Renewal Society in Chicago and her friend for 48 years, described her as “an old-fashioned schoolmarm of the civil rights movement.”
After her son, Keith, announced that he was gay, she publicly embraced gay rights. He died of AIDS in 1983. Her husband died in 1998. No immediate family members survive.
Married for 56 years, she was inspired to write a book, “How to Get Married ... and Stay Married.” Among her sage prescriptions: “Don’t try and make your mate over. It cannot be done.”
While Ms. Barrow mentored men and women alike, she was an unabashed feminist.
She learned by opening her home “to all of the powerful women in the movement — Coretta Scott King, Dorothy Height, Addie Wyatt,” she told The Chicago Sun-Times in 2012. “We have to teach this generation, train more Corettas, more Addies, more Dorothys.
“If these youth don’t know whose shoulders they stand on, they’ll take us back to slavery. And I believe that’s why the Lord is still keeping me here.”
Willie Beatrice Barrow (née Taplin; December 7, 1924 – March 12, 2015) was an Americancivil rights activist and minister. She was the co-founder of Operation PUSH, which was named Operation Breadbasket at the time of it's creation alongside Rev. Jesse Jackson. In 1984, she became the first woman executive director of a civil rights organization, serving as Push's CEO. Barrow was the godmother of President Barack Obama.[4]
Born Willie Beatrice Taplin in Burton, Texas, to Nelson, a minister, and Octavia Taplin, one of seven children. When she was 12, she organized a demonstration with fellow students to protest that white students were allowed to ride the bus, but black students had to walk to school. Barrow confronted the bus driver and demanded that he let her fellow students ride.[5] When the bus driver confronted her about it she said "Y'all can kill me if you want to. But I'm tired."[6] When Barrow turned 16, she moved to Portland, Oregon, to study at the Warner Pacific Theological Seminary (now Warner Pacific College). While still a student, Barrow and a group of black residents helped build one of the first black Churches of God in the city; she was ordained as a minister after graduation.[7] She started working as a welder during World War II at theKaiser Shipyards in Swan Island, Washington, where she met Clyde Barrow, whom she married in 1945 in Washington state. [8]
The couple moved to Chicago in the early 1940s, and Barrow attended the Moody Bible Institute to further her call to service. They lived on the South Side, and Barrow ran the youth choir at Langley Avenue Church of God. According to Barrow, she was approached by the minister to do some additional organizing for civil rights movement actions.[9] Barrow campaigned for Harold Washington who became the first Black Mayor of Chicago in 1983. In 1984 and 1988 she worked for Jesse Jackson's Presidential campaign. [10]
Barrow additionally was an activist for the LGBT community, which included fighting for HIV/AIDS victims. She also advocated for fair labor practices, took an anti-Vietnam war stance, and was vocal about women's rights. In a 1987 interview on Chicago Tonight she said, "You see ministers, they would rather have a minister who could not articulate and perhaps may not have even been called ... than to have an articulate woman that knows something about the rebirth of Christ and knows about the natural birth and the new birth. They would rather try to have a man articulate than a woman. ... As Jesse [Jackson] grew, his vision grew. Anytime that there was a committee was formed, it would be all men. I'd say 'Jesse, you haven an unbalanced committee. You've got to have some women.' ... He kept putting women on committees, kept making them managers ... then it became a habit, a part of his vision."
She spoke on January 6, 1994 at a Violence Against Women forum. Her stance was that it starts within the family and crosses racial boundaries and financial boundaries.[26]
Each Saturday she would participate in demonstrations and she participated weekly in Rainbow/PUSH's events. She helped many people by writing checks to cover college tuition for them. She mentored over a hundred people in PUSH, helping them to move on to the next stage of the movement. Barrow was co-pastor of the Vernon Park Church of God in Chicago. She helped raise money for assisted living development in the south and to fund after school programs. [7] She had focused on gun violence in Chicago and changes to the Voting Rights Act that were taking away rights that the Selma marches helped create.[27] Barrow died of respiratory failure on March 12, 2015 at age 90 in Chicago. Following her passing, A tribute to her life was held at Operation PUSH headquarters ; Her funeral at her church Vernon Park Church of God.
Willie T. Barrow (Willie Beatrice Taplin) (b. December 7, 1924, Burton, Texas - d. March 12, 2015, Chicago, Illinois) was a civil rights activist who devoted her life to championing the rights of African Americans and working to improve their circumstances, both on the front lines of public demonstrations and as a mentor to generations of young activists. Barrow engaged in her first act of protest as a child, when she sought to change the rule that required African American children to walk to school while European American children rode on school buses. When she was 16 years old, she moved to Portland, Oregon, where she worked as a shipyard welder and attended Pacific Bible College (since 1959 Warner Pacific College). She also organized and led an African American Church of God congregation. Barrow relocated (in 1945) to Chicago and attended Moody Bible Institute. By the 1950s, she had become a civil rights filed organizer for such groups as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She participated in such campaigns as the March on Washington (1963) and the Selma March (1965). In the mid-1960s, she helped found the Chicago chapter of Operation Breadbasket, which focused on increasing the hiring and promotion of African Americans. Barrow worked with civil rights leader Jesse Jackson when he founded Operation PUSH (which also had the goal of economic empowerment in black communities), and she later served as the organization's executive director. After the 1996 merger that created the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, she headed that group's governing board for 10 years. In addition, Barrow was a vocal feminist and a supporter of gay rights.
Willie T. Barrow(Willie Beatrice Taplin), (born Dec. 7, 1924, Burton, Texas—died March 12, 2015, Chicago, Ill.), American civil rights activist who devoted her life to championing the rights of African Americans and working to improve their circumstances, both on the front lines of public demonstrations and as a mentor to generations of young activists. Barrow engaged in her first act of protest as a child, when she sought to change the rule that required black children to walk to school while white children rode on school buses. When she was 16 years old, she moved to Portland, Ore., where she worked as a shipyard welder and attended Pacific Bible College (since 1959 Warner Pacific College); she also organized and led an African American Church of God congregation. Barrow relocated (1945) to Chicago and attended Moody Bible Institute. By the 1950s she had become a civil rights field organizer for such groups as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She participated in such campaigns as the March on Washington (1963) and the Selma March (1965). In the mid-1960s she helped found the Chicago chapter of Operation Breadbasket, which focused on increasing the hiring and promotion of African Americans. Barrow worked with civil rights leader Jesse Jackson when he founded Operation PUSH (which also had the goal of economic empowerment in black communities), and she later served as the organization’s executive director. After the 1996 merger that created the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, she headed that group’s governing board for 10 years. In addition, Barrow was a vocal feminist and a supporter of gay rights.
Izola Ware Curry, the mentally ill woman who in 1958 stabbed the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at a Harlem book signing — an episode that a decade later would become a rhetorical touchstone in the last oration of his life — died on March 7 in Queens. She was 98.
Ms. Curry died in a nursing home, the last stop in the series of institutions that had been her home for more than half a century. Her death, confirmed by the office of the chief medical examiner of New York City, was first reported by The Smoking Gun, the investigative website.
What surprised many observers at the time of the crime was that Ms. Curry herself was black, the daughter of sharecroppers from the rural South. Questions persisted about what could have moved her to attack Dr. King, then a 29-year-old Alabama preacher who had assumed the national stage amid the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56.
The stabbing nearly cost Dr. King his life, requiring hours of delicate surgery to remove Ms. Curry’s blade, a seven-inch ivory-handled steel letter opener, which had lodged near his heart. If he had so much as sneezed, his doctors later told him, he would not have survived.
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The letter opener Izola Ware Curry used to stab the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. protruded from his chest after the attack.CreditVernoll Coleman/New York Daily News
Dr. King, who said afterward that he bore no animus toward Ms. Curry and did not want charges pressed, memorialized the attack in “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.” That speech, delivered in Memphis on April 3, 1968, the day before he was assassinated, endures as one of his most famous.
“The X-rays revealed that the tip of the blade was on the edge of my aorta, the main artery,” Dr. King said in the speech. “And once that’s punctured, you’re drowned in your own blood — that’s the end of you.”
Of all the letters of consolation that poured in to the hospital, he continued, there was one that “I will never forget.”
“Dear Dr. King,” it read. “I am a ninth-grade student at the White Plains High School. While it should not matter, I would like to mention that I’m a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune, and of your suffering. And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I’m simply writing you to say that I’m so happy that you didn’t sneeze.”
To impassioned applause, Dr. King went on: “And I want to say tonight — I want to say tonight that I, too, am happy that I didn’t sneeze. Because if I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been around here in 1960, when students all over the South started sitting in at lunch counters.”
If he had sneezed, he continued, he would not have seen the Freedom Rides of the early ’60s, nor given his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, nor seen the passage of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, nor been involved in the Selma-to-Montgomery marches of 1965.
And so, Dr. King concluded, “I’m so happy that I didn’t sneeze.”
He was shot to death by James Earl Ray in Memphis the next day.
Apart from Dr. King’s speech, Ms. Curry vanished from history. Deemed unfit to stand trial, she was committed to a mental hospital; as the years elapsed and no more was heard of her, she was widely presumed dead. Even a 2002 book about the stabbing, “When Harlem Nearly Killed King,” by Hugh Pearson, does not chart her life’s later course.
Then, in a profile published last August, The Smoking Gun wrote of having found Ms. Curry, physically and mentally feeble, at the nursing home, Hillside Manor, in the Jamaica section of Queens.
“While Curry described her daily routine — up at 5:30 a.m., bed around 10 p.m., and not much going on in between,” the profile said, “she met questions about King and the stabbing with a furrowed brow and a blank stare.”
Izola Ware was born on June 14, 1916, near Adrian, a village in east-central Georgia. She appears to have had little education beyond grade school.
After a brief early marriage to James Ware dissolved, Ms. Curry moved to New York, where she found work as a domestic. There, she began to experience the paranoid delusions that would overtake her completely before she was 40.
Her mental state made it increasingly hard for her to hold a job. As Mr. Pearson’s book reported, she bounced among New York; Cleveland; St. Louis; Charleston, W.Va.; Savannah, Ga.; Miami, West Palm Beach and Daytona Beach, Fla.; Lexington, Ky.; and Columbia, S.C. By 1958 she was back in New York, living in a rented room in Harlem, at 121 West 122nd Street.
“To her neighbors she was a very antisocial woman,” Mr. Pearson wrote. “Curry spoke with a distinct Southern accent, but her words were often unintelligible.”
A half-dozen years earlier, she had begun having delusions about theNational Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which she believed was a Communist front. In her mind, the group was persecuting her — following her and making it impossible for her to find steady work. She wrote letters to that effect to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Over time, as Dr. King rose to prominence, her delusions centered increasingly on him.
On the afternoon of Sept. 20, 1958, Dr. King was autographing copies of his first book, “Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story,” in Blumstein’s department store, at 230 West 125th Street.
Ms. Curry, elegantly attired in a stylish suit, jewelry and sequined cat’s-eye glasses, entered the store armed with a loaded .25-caliber automatic pistol and the letter opener. The pistol was secreted in her bra, the letter opener in her handbag. She pushed her way through the crowd to the table where Dr. King sat.
“Are you Martin Luther King?” she asked.
“Yes,” he replied, not looking up from the book he was signing.
She reached into her handbag.
“The next minute,” Dr. King later wrote, “I felt something beating on my chest.” He was taken to Harlem Hospital, where surgeons opened his chest and ever so gently withdrew the blade.
Ms. Curry was apprehended in the store. “I’ve been after him for six years,” she cried. “I’m glad I done it.”
At her arraignment the next day, The New York Times reported, she was scarcely her own best advocate.
“I understand this is the woman who is accused of stabbing the Reverend Dr. King with a knife,” the judge said.
“No,” Ms. Curry shouted. “It was a letter opener.”
On Oct. 17, 1958, a grand jury indicted her on a charge of attempted first-degree murder. If convicted, she could have gone to prison for 25 years.
She remained there for some 14 years. She was later institutionalized for about a year at the Manhattan Psychiatric Center on Wards Island, in the East River. She lived in a series of residential-care homes before entering the nursing home.
Ms. Curry apparently left no living immediate family. If her body is not claimed in the coming weeks, it will be taken to New York’s potter’s field on Hart Island, in Long Island Sound off the Bronx, her final institutional resting place.
Curry was one of eight children born to sharecroppers in 1916[1][2] near Adrian, Georgia, a city about 100 miles northwest of Savannah, and, as of 2014, has no surviving family members. She left school in the seventh grade and later married a man named James Curry when she was 21. The couple separated about six months after their 1937 nuptials, and Izola moved to New York City, the beginning of an itinerant existence that would see her bounce from Georgia, Florida, St. Louis, and New York while in search of steady work as a housekeeper, short-order cook, or factory worker. According to court records, as well as law enforcement and psychiatric reports,[3] Curry began suffering from delusions, paranoia, and illogical thinking for several years before she sought to kill King. This erratic state appears to have contributed to her difficulties in securing and maintaining employment.[citation needed]
King went on a tour to promote Strive Toward Freedom after it was published. During a book signing at a department store in Harlem, a well-dressed woman approached and asked him if he was Martin Luther King, Jr. When King replied in the affirmative, she said, "I've been looking for you for five years," then stabbed him in the chest with a steel letter opener.
New York City Police Department officers Al Howard and Phil Romano were in a radio car near the end of their tour at 3:30 pm when they received a report of a disturbance in Blumstein’s Department store. They arrived to see King sitting in a chair with an ivory handled letter opener protruding from his chest. Howard was heard telling King, "Don’t sneeze, don’t even speak." Howard and Romano took King still in the chair down to an ambulance that took King to Harlem Hospital, which was already notifying chief of thoracic and vascular surgery John W. V. Cordice, Jr., who was in his office in Brooklyn, and trauma surgeon Emil Naclerio, who had been attending a wedding and arrived still in a tuxedo. They made incisions and inserted a rib spreader, making King’s aorta visible. Chief of Surgery Aubre de Lambert Maynard then entered and attempted to pull out the letter opener, but cut his glove on the blade; a surgical clamp was finally used to pull out the blade.[4]
"Days later", King wrote in his posthumously published autobiography, "when I was well enough to talk with Dr. Aubrey Maynard, the chief of the surgeons who performed the delicate, dangerous operation, I learned the reason for the long delay that preceded surgery. He told me that the razor tip of the instrument had been touching my aorta and that my whole chest had to be opened to extract it. 'If you had sneezed during all those hours of waiting,' Dr. Maynard said, 'your aorta would have been punctured and you would have drowned in your own blood.'"[5]
While still in the hospital, King said in a September 30 press release in which he reaffirmed his belief in "the redemptive power of nonviolence" and issued a hopeful statement about his attacker, "I felt no ill will toward Mrs. Izola Currey [sic] and know that thoughtful people will do all in their power to see that she gets the help she apparently needs if she is to become a free and constructive member of society."[6] On October 17, after hearing King's testimony, a grand jury indicted Curry for attempted murder.[7]Reportage recalling the event on the occasion of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 2014, noted:
As it happened, one of the cops was black, the other white and the same was the case with the two surgeons. Each pair worked as true partners, proving that the color of their skin meant nothing and translating the content of their character into life-saving action.[4]
Curry was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic by two psychiatrists who reported that she had an IQ of 70, “low average intelligence,” and was in a severe “state of insanity.” A Manhattan judge would later concur with the psychiatrists’ conclusion that Curry—who had been indicted for attempted murder—should be committed to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.[citation needed]
Curry spent nearly 14 years at Matteawan before being transferred in March 1972 to the Manhattan Psychiatric Center on Ward’s Island in upper Manhattan. She spent about a year there before officials placed her in the Rosedale, Queens home of a woman certified through the state’s “Family Care” program to provide residential care for those diagnosed with mental illnesses. After a fall resulting in a leg injury, Curry was placed in the Jamaica, Queens, New Yorknursing home, where she resided until her death.[3] Curry died on March 7, 2015 of natural causes.[8][9]
