1964

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Brenda Fassie (3 November 1964 – 9 May 2004) was an anti-apartheid South African Afropop singer. Her bold stage antics earned a reputation for "outrageousness". Affectionately called Mabrr by her fans, she was sometimes described as the "Queen of African Pop".

Fassie was born in Langa, Cape Town, as the youngest of nine children. She was named after the American singer Brenda Lee. Her father died when she was two, and with the help of her mother, a pianist, she started earning money by singing for tourists.

In 1981, at the age of 16, she left Cape Town for Soweto, Johannesburg, to seek her fortune as a singer. Fassie first joined the group Joy and later became the lead singer for a township music group called Brenda and the Big Dudes. She had a son, Bongani, in 1985 by a fellow Big Dudes musician. She married Nhlanhla Mbambo in 1989 but divorced in 1991. Around this time she became addicted to cocaine and her career suffered.

With very outspoken views and frequent visits to the poorer townships of Johannesburg, as well as songs about life in the townships, she enjoyed tremendous popularity. Known best for her songs "Weekend Special" and "Too Late for Mama", she was dubbed "The Madonna of the Townships" by Time in 2001.

In 1995, she was discovered in a hotel with the body of her lesbian lover, Poppie Sihlahla, who had died of an apparent overdose. Fassie underwent rehabilitation and got her career back on track. However, she still had drug problems and returned to drug rehabilitation clinics about 30 times in her life.

From 1996 she released several solo albums, including Now Is the Time, Memeza (1997), and Nomakanjani?. Most of her albums became multi-platinum sellers in South Africa; Memeza was the best-selling album in South Africa in 1998.

On the morning of April 26, 2004, Fassie collapsed at her home in Buccleuch, Gauteng, and was admitted into a hospital in Sunninghill. The press were told that she had suffered cardiac arrest, but later reported that she had slipped into a coma brought on by an asthma attack. The post-mortem report revealed that she had taken an overdose of cocaine on the night of her collapse, and this was the cause of her coma. She stopped breathing and suffered brain damage from lack of oxygen. Fassie was visited in the hospital by Nelson Mandela, Winnie Mandela, and Thabo Mbeki, and her condition was front-page news in South African papers. She died aged 39 on 9 May 9, 2004 in the hospital without returning to consciousness after her life support machines were turned off. According to the South African Sunday Times and the managers of her music company, the post-mortem report also showed that she was HIV-positive. Her manager, Peter Snyman, denied this aspect of the report.
Her family, including her long term partner, were at her side when she died in 2004.

Brenda Fassie was voted 17th in the Top 100 Great South Africans.
Her son Bongani 'Bongz' Fassie performed on the soundtrack to the 2005 Academy Award-winning movie Tsotsi. He dedicated his song "I'm So Sorry" to his mother.
In March 2006 a life-size bronze sculpture of Fassie by artist Angus Taylor was installed outside Bassline, a music venue in Johannesburg.

Most of Fassie's records were issued by the EMI-owned CCP Records.

• 1989: Brenda
• 1990: Black President
• 1994: Brenda Fassie
• 1995: Mama
• 1996: Now Is the Time
• 1997: Memeza
• 1997: Paparazzi
• 2000: Thola Amadlozi
• 2001: Brenda: The Greatest Hits
• 2003: Mali
• 2003: The Remix Collection
• 2004: Gimme Some Volume

Fassie also contributed to Mandoza's album Tornado (2002), Miriam Makeba's album Sangoma (1988), and Harry Belafonte's anti-apartheid album Paradise in Gazankulu (1988). She sang for the soundtrack for Yizo, Yizo (2004).

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Sam Cooke, byname of Samuel Cook   (b. January 22, 1931, Clarksdale, Mississippi.—d. December 11, 1964, Los Angeles, California), American singer, songwriter, producer, and entrepreneur. Cooke was a major figure in the history of popular music and, along with Ray Charles, one of the most influential African American vocalists of the post-World War II period. If Charles represented raw soul, Cooke symbolized sweet soul. To his many celebrated disciples — Smokey Robinson, James Taylor, and Michael Jackson among them—he was an icon of unrivaled stature.

Cooke’s career came in two phases. As a member of the groundbreaking Soul Stirrers, a premier gospel group of the 1950s, he electrified the African American church community nationwide with a light, lilting vocal style that soared rather than thundered. “Nearer to Thee” (1955), “Touch the Hem of His Garment” (1956), and “Jesus, Wash Away My Troubles” (1956) were major gospel hits and, in the words of Aretha Franklin, “perfectly chiseled jewels.”

Cooke’s decision to turn his attention to pop music in 1957 had tremendous implications in the African American musical community. There long had been a taboo against such a move, but Cooke broke the mold. He reinvented himself as a romantic crooner in the manner of Nat King Cole. His strength was in his smoothness. He wrote many of his best songs himself, including his first hit, the ethereal "You Send Me," which shot to number one on all charts in 1957 and established Cooke as a superstar.

While other rhythm-and-blues artists stressed visceral sexuality, Cooke was essentially a spiritualist, even in the domain of romantic love. When he did sing dance songs—“Twistin’ the Night Away” (1962), “Shake” (1965)—he did so with a delicacy theretofore unknown in rock music. Cooke also distinguished himself as an independent businessman, heading his own publishing, recording, and management firms. He broke new ground by playing nightclubs, such as the Copacabana in New York City, previously off-limits to rhythm-and-blues acts.

The tragedy of his demise in 1964—he was shot to death at age 33 by a motel manager—is shrouded in mystery. But the mystery has done nothing to damage the strength of his legacy. “A Change Is Gonna Come” (1965) remains his signature song, an anthem of hope and boundless optimism that expresses the genius of his poetry and sweetness of his soul. Cooke was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986.

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Don (Donald Matthew) Redman (1900-1964), a jazz saxophonist, bandleader, and arranger, was the first African American orchestra leader to have a sponsored radio series.  He was a pioneer jazz arranger-composer and contributed significantly to the development of the big-band sound of the 1920s and 1930s.  A child prodigy, Redman was born in Piedmont, West Virginia, and studied at music conservatories in Boston and Detroit.

1963

W. E. B. Du Bois, in full William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (b. February 23, 1868, Great Barrington, Massachusetts — d. August 27, 1963, Accra, Ghana), American sociologist, was the most important African American leader in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. He shared in the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and edited The Crisis, its magazine, from 1910 to 1934. Late in life he became identified with communist causes.

Du Bois graduated from Fisk University, an African American institution at Nashville, Tennessee, in 1888. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1895. His doctoral dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870, was published in 1896. Although Du Bois took an advanced degree in history, he was broadly trained in the social sciences; and, at a time when sociologists were theorizing about race relations, he was conducting empirical inquiries into the condition of African Americans. For more than a decade he devoted himself to sociological investigations of African Americans, producing 16 research monographs published between 1897 and 1914  at Atlanta (Georgia) University, where he was a professor, as well as The Philadelphia Negro; A Social Study (1899), the first case study of an African American community in the United States.

Although Du Bois had originally believed that social science could provide the knowledge to solve the race problem, he gradually came to the conclusion that in a climate of virulent racism, expressed in such evils as lynching, peonage, disfranchisement, Jim Crow segregation laws, and race riots, social change could be accomplished only through agitation and protest. In this view, he clashed with the most influential African American leader of the period, Booker T. Washington, who, preaching a philosophy of accommodation, urged African Americans to accept discrimination for the time being and elevate themselves through hard work and economic gain, thus winning the respect of the European Americans. In 1903, in his famous book The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois charged that Washington’s strategy, rather than freeing the African American from oppression, would serve only to perpetuate it. This attack crystallized the opposition to Booker T. Washington among many African American intellectuals, polarizing the leaders of the African American community into two wings—the “conservative” supporters of Washington and his “radical” critics.

Two years later, in 1905, Du Bois took the lead in founding the Niagara Movement, which was dedicated chiefly to attacking the platform of Booker T. Washington. The small organization, which met annually until 1909, was seriously weakened by internal squabbles and Washington’s opposition. But it was significant as an ideological forerunner and direct inspiration for the interracial NAACP, founded in 1909. Du Bois played a prominent part in the creation of the NAACP and became the association’s director of research and editor of its magazine, The Crisis. In this role he wielded an unequaled influence among middle-class blacks and progressive whites as the propagandist for the black protest from 1910 until 1934.

Both in the Niagara Movement and in the NAACP, Du Bois acted mainly as an integrationist, but his thinking always exhibited, to varying degrees, separatist-nationalist tendencies. In The Souls of Black Folk he had expressed the characteristic dualism of African Americans:

One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.…He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

Du Bois’s black nationalism took several forms—the most influential being his pioneering advocacy of Pan-Africanism. the belief that all people of African descent had common interests and should work together in the struggle for their freedom. Du Bois was a leader of the first Pan-African Conference in London in 1900 and the architect of four Pan-African Congresses held between 1919 and 1927. Second, he articulated a cultural nationalism.  As the editor of The Crisis, he encouraged the development of African American literature and art and urged his readers to see “Beauty in Black.” Third, Du Bois’s black nationalism is seen in his belief that African Americans should develop a separate “group economy” of producers’ and consumers’ cooperatives as a weapon for fighting economic discrimination and African American poverty. This doctrine became especially important during the economic catastrophe of the 1930s and precipitated an ideological struggle within the NAACP.

He resigned from the editorship of The Crisis and the NAACP in 1934, yielding his influence as a race leader and charging that the organization was dedicated to the interests of the black bourgeoisie and ignored the problems of the masses. Du Bois' interest in cooperatives was a part of his nationalism that developed out of his Marxist leanings. At the turn of the century, he had been an advocate of African American capitalism and African American support of African American business, but by about 1905 he had been drawn toward socialist doctrines. Although he joined the Socialist Party only briefly in 1912, he remained sympathetic with Marxist ideas throughout the rest of his life.

Upon leaving the NAACP, he returned to Atlanta University, where he devoted the next 10 years to teaching and scholarship. In 1940 he founded the magazine Phylon, Atlanta University’s “Review of Race and Culture.” In 1945 he published the “Preparatory Volume” of a projected encyclopaedia of people of African descent, for which he had been appointed editor in chief. He also produced two major books during this period. Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (1935) was an important Marxist interpretation of the Reconstruction era (the period following the American Civil War during which the seceded Southern states were reorganized according to the wishes of Congress), and, more significantly, it provided the first synthesis of existing knowledge of the role of African Americans in that critical period of American history. In 1940 appeared Dusk of Dawn, subtitled An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. In this book, Du Bois explained his role in both the African and the African American struggles for freedom, viewing his career as an ideological case study illuminating the complexity of the black-white conflict.

Following this fruitful decade at Atlanta University, he returned once more to a research position at the NAACP (1944–48). This brief connection ended in a second bitter quarrel, and thereafter Du Bois moved steadily leftward politically. Identified with pro-Russian causes, he was indicted in 1951 as an unregistered agent for a foreign power. Although a federal judge directed his acquittal, Du Bois had become completely disillusioned with the United States. In 1961 he joined the Communist Party and, moving to Ghana, renounced his American citizenship more than a year later. The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois was published in 1968.

1962

Jerome Kersey (June 26, 1962 – February 18, 2015) was an American professional basketball player in the National Basketball Association (NBA). He played for the Portland Trail Blazers (1984–1995), Golden State Warriors (1995–96), Los Angeles Lakers (1996–97), Seattle SuperSonics (1997–98), San Antonio Spurs (1998–2000), and Milwaukee Bucks (2000–01).

The Trail Blazers selected Kersey in the second round of the 1984 NBA draft from Longwood University (then Longwood College) in Farmville, Virginia. He was a member of the champion Spurs during their 1999 NBA Finals victory over the New York Knicks. Following his playing career, Kersey worked with his former Portland teammate and then-head coach of the Milwaukee Bucks Terry Porter as an assistant in 2005. Kersey died from a pulmonary embolism caused by a blood clot at his home in Tualatin, Oregon, on February 18, 2015.

1961

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Jamaican-born Ferdinand Christopher Smith (1894-1961) became a prominent twentieth century international labor activist and leader.  At an early age, Smith left Jamaica’s poor economic conditions in search of work as a migrant laborer.  He spent five years in Panama, where he worked as a hotel steward and a salesman.  After World War I he moved to Cuba and by 1920 was working as a ship’s steward.

In the 1920s, impressed by their commitment to racial issues, Smith joined the Communist-led Marine Workers Industrial Union.  Although maritime workers faced oppressive working conditions including high rates of disease, low wages, poor rations, and unventilated quarters, they had virtually no union representation aboard ships.  This began to change as part of the New Deal’s support of labor unions. In 1936, Smith supported the strike against West Coast shippers.  When maritime strikes spread to the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, Smith became one of the nine members of the national strike Strategy Committee.

Smith was a founding member of the communist-backed National Maritime Union (NMU) and was elected to the position of Secretary Treasurer at its first convention held in 1937.  This was the second highest position in the union and the highest union office held by any African American labor leader at the time.  The NMU grew quickly in the late 1930s, and by 1944 represented approximately 90,000 maritime workers.

The NMU was a Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) union, and like many leaders involved in the CIO, Smith wanted a union that welcomed all maritime workers regardless of race, class, craft, or ethnicity.  As NMU’s Secretary Treasurer, he promoted labor rights and civil rights.  Smith guided the passage of a non-discrimination plank in the union’s constitution.  The NMU’s 1944 contract, accepted by over 100 ship companies, contained a pledge of non-discrimination.  He furthered the cause of civil rights by participating in the National Negro Congress and the Negro Labor Victory Committee.

The Red Scare that swept the country after 1945 soon led to Smith’s expulsion from the NMU.  After World War II, Smith critiqued the United States government’s crackdown on labor unions.  Since Smith had never become a citizen he was easily labeled an “Alien Red.”   Joseph Curran, president of the NMU, under pressure from the federal government, expelled a number of communists from the NMU, including Smith in 1948.  Smith’s expulsion is a stark example of the decline of union power in the face of anti-communism. Smith, who had been under government surveillance for years, was detained by the federal government beginning in February 1948 and was deported in 1951.

Thereafter, Smith briefly worked for the World Federation of Trade Unions in Vienna before returning to Jamaica in 1952. In Jamaica, Smith organized sugar workers and led a union federation.  These efforts failed to bear fruit when the government refused to recognize the union.

Ferdinand Christopher Smith died in August 1961 in Jamaica.

1960

1959

Jonathan "Johnny" Kemp (August 2, 1959 – April 16, 2015) was a Bahamian singer. 

Kemp began singing in nightclubs in the Bahamas at 13. He moved to New York in 1979 with the band Kinky Fox. His self-titled debut album came out in 1986, and he scored a minor hit with Just Another Lover. True success came the following year, however, with the release of his Secrets of Flying album, which contained a pair of Top 40 hits on the US Billboard R&B chart, "Dancin' with Myself" and "Just Got Paid", the latter hitting #1.

"Just Got Paid" hit the Top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1988, and sold over a million singles in the United States. It went to top the Hot Dance Music/Club Play, and provided his only UK Singles Chart entry, peaking at #68 in August 1988. His only other Hot 100 entry was "Birthday Suit", a tune from the soundtrack to the movie, Sing which climbed to #36 in 1989.

Kemp appeared on the 2007 DVD release by Keith Sweat entitled Sweat Hotel Live. The DVD featured live performances by Sweat in a sort of reunion with other R&B/new jack swing era pioneers of the late 1980s, including Teddy Riley. Kemp appeared on the final track, an "all-star finale" rendition of "Just Got Paid", originally recorded at a February 2006 concert in Atlanta, Georgia.  Incidentally, Sweat had initially passed on the instrumental track that would eventually become "Just Got Paid", when it was first offered to him in the mid-1980s. Kemp listened to it, added his own lyrics to the melody, and "Just Got Paid" was born.

Kemp was the featured performer (singing "Just Got Paid") at the NJS4E event in New York on September 8, 2007. As the name implied, the show celebrated and commemorated 20 years of new jack swing, and took place at Ashford & Simpson's Sugar Bar.

Kemp was married and the father of two sons.

According to news reports, Johnny Kemp died during the week of April 16, 2015. On Thursday morning, April 16, 2015, his body was found floating in the water of Montego Bay, Jamaica, according to Jamaica police. The cause or exact date of death has not yet been determined. He was 55 years old.

While he was scheduled to be on the Tom Joyner Foundation-hosted annual Fantastic Voyage cruise as a performer when his body was found, reports state he did not board the ship.

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Unity Dow (b. April 23, 1959, Botswana) was a Motswana judge, human rights activist and writer currently serving as Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.  She came from a rural background that tended toward traditional values. She successfully challenged the law that argued that citizenship was inherited by children from the fathers and not from their mothers. She also went to court to argue that a gay rights group was legal and not unconstitutional in the law of Botswana.

Dow studied law at the University of Botswana and Swaziland (LLB 1983), which included two years spent studying at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.  Her Western education caused a mixture of respect and suspicion.

In 1991, Unity Dow co-founded the private Baobab Primary School in Gaborone and she co-founded the first AIDS-specific NGO in the country, "AIDS ACTION TRUST."

Dow earned her acclaim as a lawyer particularly through her stances on women's rights. She was the plaintiff in a case that allowed the children of women with Botswana citizenship by foreign national fathers to be considered citizens of Botswana (Attorney General of Botswana v. Unity Dow (1992).  Before this case, according to tradition and prior precedent, nationality only descended from the father. She later became Botswana's first female High Court judge. She was also co-founder of the first all-female law practice Dow, Malakaila, and was one of the founding members of the women's organization Emang Basadi.

As a novelist, Dow published five books. These books often deal with issues concerning the struggle between Western and traditional values and also involve her interest in gender issues and her nation's poverty.  Dow contributed to the book Schicksal Afrika (Destiny Africa) by the former German President Horst Koehler in 2009. In May 2010, she published her book, Saturday is for Funerals, which describes the AIDS problem in Africa.  

In 2005, Unity Dow became a member of a United Nations mission to Sierra Leone to review the domestic application of international women's human rights. On December 13, 2006, she was one of three judges who ruled on the acclaimed Kgalagadi (San, Bushmen or Basarwa) court decision, concerning the rights of the San to return to their ancestral lands.

In 2007, Unity Dow became a Member of a special mission at the invitation of the Rwandan Government and United Nations special court for Rwanda. The purpose of this mission was to review the Rwandan Judiciaries preparedness to take over the hearing of the 1994 genocide cases.

Dow was a visiting professor of Law at the Columbia University School of Law in New York, during the fall semester 2009, and at Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia, 2009, and University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2009.

After retiring from the High Court Botswana in 2009, after 11 years of service, she opened the legal firm "Dow & Associates" in Botswana in February 2010. Dow was also sworn in as Justice of the IICDRC (Interim Independent Constitutional Dispute Resolution Court) of Kenya by the Kenyan President to help implement the new constitution of Kenya.

On July 14, 2010, Dow was awarded the Medal of the Legion d'honneur de France by representatives of the French President Nicolas Sarkozy for her human rights activities.

At the Women of the World Summit in March 2011 and 2012 in New York, Unity Dow was mentioned as one of 150 women who shake the world.

Unity Dow also served as Commissioner of the International Commission of Jurists. She was first elected in 2004 and re-elected in 2009. In 2006 she was also elected to the Executive Committee and subsequently re-elected in 2008. In March 2011 she was elected the Chairperson of the Executive Committee, succeeding Dr. Rajeev Dhayan, of India, effective from June 2011 to June 2012.

Unity Dow is the only motswana listed under the world recognized feminists for her advocacy for women rights from the period of 1940 to present.

On 6 July 2012 Dow was appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council as one of three independent experts to conduct a fact-finding mission on how Israel's West Bank settlements affect Palestinians. A preliminary version of the report was published on January 31, 2013.

In 2013, Dow decided to enter politics. On October 28, 2014. Dow was nominated by former President Ian Khama of Botswana as "special elected member of parliament" and confirmed by the new 11th Parliament of Botswana. Dow was also appointed Assistant Minister of Education in the Government of Botswana, responsible for Higher / Tertiary Education and Skills Development.

On November 14, 2014, Dow was successful in representing LEGABIBO, the Lesbians, Gays, and Bisexuals of Botswana in a trial versus the State of Botswana to register LEGABIBO as an organization in Botswana. Previously the State had refused the registration on arguments it would be unconstitutional. On March 1, 2015, Dow was appointed Minister of Education and Skills Development in the Government of Botswana.

After the inauguration of the fifth President of Botswana Mokgweetsi E. Masisi on April 1, 2018, Unity Dow took over as Minister of Infrastructure and Housing Development in the Government of Botswana. On June 20, 2018, in a cabinet reshuffle, she was named Minister of International Affairs and Cooperation. After re-election of Dr. Mokgweetsi E. Masisi on November 1, 2019 as President of Botswana, Unity Dow was reconfirmed as Minister of International Affairs and Cooperation by the 12th parliament of Botswana.

1958

Izola Curry (née Ware; June 14, 1916 – March 7, 2015) was a woman who attempted to assassinate civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. She stabbed King with a letter opener at a Harlem book signing on September 20, 1958, during the Harlem civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s. King was eventually assassinated April 4, 1968, in an unrelated incident. Curry was born near Adrian, Georgia. At age 20, she moved to New York City, where she found work as a housekeeper. Shortly after moving, she developed delusions about the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). 

Curry was one of eight children born to sharecroppers in 1916 near Adrian, Georgia, a city about 100 miles northwest of Savannah. 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, 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.

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 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.

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.  On October 17, after hearing King's testimony, a grand jury indicted Curry for attempted murder. 

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.  

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 York nursing home. where she resided until her death. Curry died on March 7, 2015 of natural causes.

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Dori J. Maynard (May 4, 1958 – February 24, 2015) was the president of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education in Oakland, California, the oldest organization dedicated to helping the nation's news media accurately and fairly portray all segments of our society. The Institute has trained thousands of journalists of color.  She was the co-author of "Letters to My Children," a compilation of nationally syndicated columns by her late father Robert C. Maynard,  with introductory essays by Dori. She served on the board of the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation, as well as the Board of Visitors for the John S. Knight Fellowships.

As a reporter, she worked for the Bakersfield Californian, and The Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Massachusetts, and the Detroit Free Press.  In 1993 she and her father became the first father-daughter duo ever to be appointed Nieman scholars at Harvard University; Bob Maynard won this fellowship in 1966.

She received the "Fellow of Society" award from the Society of Professional Journalists at the national convention in Seattle, Washington on October 6, 2001 and was voted one of the "10 Most Influential African Americans in the Bay Area" in 2004. In 2008 she received the Asian American Journalists Association’s Leadership in Diversity Award.

Maynard graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont with a bachelor of arts in American History.