by Lucas Johnson II

NASHVILLE (AP)—Civil rights leader Benjamin L. Hooks, who shrugged off courtroom slurs as a young lawyer before earning a pioneering judgeship and later reviving a flagging NAACP, died April 15 in Memphis. He was 85.

HIGHEST CIVILIAN HONOR—President George W. Bush presents the Presidential Medal of Freedom to civil rights pioneer Benjamin Hooks, during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington Nov. 5, 2007.

Across the country, political leaders and Hooks’ peers in the Civil Rights Movement remembered his remarkably wide-ranging accomplishments and said he’d want the fight for social justice to continue. State Rep. Ulysses Jones, a member of the church where Hooks was pastor, said Hooks died at his home following a long illness.

“Our national life is richer for the time Dr. Hooks spent on this earth,” President Barack Obama said in a statement. “And our union is more perfect for the way he spent it: Giving a voice to the voiceless.”

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP)—At 3:02 p.m. April 5, computers on the surface detected a major seismic event deep inside the mine. It came from about a mile and a half inside the mountain, near an area known as the “Glory Hole.”

A half hour from the end of his nine-hour shift, coal car operator Melvin Lynch, 50, of Mount Hope, felt his ears pop. Suddenly, the mine went dark.

The power goes out occasionally when someone runs over a cable, so no one on the section panicked.

When the shift was over, Lynch and the other men on his crew made their way to the surface. It was only when another crew emerged and reported that they’d been showered with debris that Lynch knew that something was wrong.

PRAYER ENDS IN SORROW—In this April 7 photo, Melvin Lynch speaks to a reporter at his home in Mount Hope, W.Va. Lynch was working in the Upper Big Branch mine when a section of the mine exploded. Lynch’s brother Roosevelt was killed in the explosion.

Week of April 23-29

April 23
1856—One of the greatest inventors in American history, Granville T. Woods, is born in Columbus, Ohio. During his life he received 65 patents for electrical, mechanical and communication devices. Among his inventions was an advanced telephone transmitter. The transmitter was so advanced that the Alexander Graham Bell Co. purchased the rights to it from Woods both because it was superior to what Bell had invented and for fear that Woods might become a major rival to the Bell company. At his height, the Cincinnati, Ohio Catholic Tribune (Jan. 14, 1886) wrote of Woods: “...the greatest colored inventor in the history of the race and equal, if not superior, to any inventor in the country...”

GRANVILLE T. WOODS, ELLA FITZGERALD, MUHAMMAD ALI

by Verena Dobnik

NEW YORK (AP)—Reverend Al Sharpton is a “lightning rod” for President Barack Obama on inner city streets, Obama’s former Harvard mentor and friend said April 17 at a forum in Harlem.

But Sharpton, who led the event, told The Associated Press that America’s first Black president “has to work both for us and for others,” and that if Obama were to push a race-based agenda, “that would only organize the right against him.”