Earl Williams, 1971 National League Rookie of the Year

Earl Williams, Baseball Slugger, Dies at 64

By BRUCE WEBER

Published: February 1, 2013

• FACEBOOK
• TWITTER
• GOOGLE+
• SAVE
• E-MAIL
• SHARE
• PRINT
• REPRINTS
• 

Earl Williams, a slugging if ambivalent catcher and infielder — “My favorite position is batter,” he once said — who won the National League rookie of the year award in 1971 but whose promise went unfulfilled amid a welter of minor controversies, died early Tuesday at his home in Somerset, N.J. He was 64.

Enlarge This Image

Associated Press

Earl Williams in 1975.

Keep up with the latest news on The Times's baseball blog.

Go to the Bats Blog

Major League Baseball

• Live Scoreboard
• Standings | Wild Card
• Stats | Injuries

Yankees

• Schedule/Results
• Roster | Stats

Mets

• Schedule/Results
• Roster | Stats

Enlarge This Image

An ad placed by Williams in The New York Times in 1978.

The cause was acute myeloid leukemia, a cancer of the blood, his wife, Linda, said.

Playing for the Atlanta Braves in his first two full seasons, Williams hit 61 home runs — including 33 in 1971, his rookie year — and drove in 174 runs, impressive numbers for a player still in his early 20s. He was only the second catcher, after Johnny Bench in 1968, to win the top rookie honor in the National League. (Four others have won the award since, most recently the Giants’ Buster Posey in 2010.)

But Williams was traded to the Baltimore Orioles of the American League before the 1973 season, and his career spiraled down so quickly that he was out of the big leagues for good by the time he was 29, an age when many players are entering their prime. Never a hitter for high average, he nonetheless reached double figures in home runs every year of his career on four different teams, averaging nearly 20 a year and hitting 13 in 100 games for the Oakland A’s in 1977.

But during spring training in 1978, he was waived by the A’s and not claimed by any other team — a surprising turn, especially to Williams. That June he took the remarkable step of placing a job-seeking advertisement in The New York Times.

“Employment wanted by baseball player,” the ad said, adding: “Excellent Health — No Police Record. HAVE BAT — WILL TRAVEL — WILL HUSTLE.”

“I don’t understand how I got in this position,” Williams said at the time. “How can I sit on the shelf? How did this happen to me? If you look at my statistics, you’d see I’m a proven hitter.”

The ad didn’t work. He never played in the big leagues again.

Earl Craig Williams Jr. was born on July 14, 1948, in Newark, and grew up in East Orange and Montclair in New Jersey. His father was a factory worker. His mother, Dolores Reilly, known as Bobbi, served for a time on the Montclair City Council. Earl was a star athlete in high school and spent three years at Ithaca College studying journalism, leaving just short of graduation to play ball. He was drafted by the Milwaukee Braves in 1965. (The franchise moved to Atlanta the next season.)

Williams began his minor league career as a pitcher but played mostly at first base and third base. The Braves saw him as a future catcher, and their trouble filling the position led them to rush Williams into action at the major league level. Williams said he never felt comfortable there — in 1972 he had 28 passed balls (though 21 of them came while catching the knuckleballs of Phil Niekro) — and he was not shy about expressing his discontent.

The Braves traded Williams to Baltimore, where he butted heads with the Orioles’ equally temperamental manager, Earl Weaver, who died last month. They clashed over Williams’s arriving late for games, resisting catching instruction, yelling at umpires and heckling fans. Still, Williams led the Orioles in home runs in 1973 with 22, but his production fell in 1974, and in 1975 he was shipped back to Atlanta, then sent to the Montreal Expos in 1976. In his last year, on a last-place Oakland team, Williams irritated management by criticizing the coaching staff.

Before the trade to the Orioles, Weaver had once said that if he had Earl Williams, the Orioles would win the pennant. Williams later acknowledged that the pressure on him to perform in Baltimore was enormous, and that he felt it especially because he was black. The fans he argued with, he said, were calling him offensive names. Asked by The New York Times in 1981 if race had been a factor in his becoming something of a pariah, he said, “Being a black person has to have an effect on everyone’s career.”

In addition to his mother and his wife, the former Linda Montgomery, Williams is survived by a sister, Pamela Reilly; a stepdaughter, Raquel M. West; and a step-granddaughter, Ruqayyah M. Williams.

Williams finished his career with a .247 batting average, 138 home runs and 457 runs batted in. He played two years in Mexico before leaving professional baseball for good, after which he worked for more than 20 years as a warehouse supervisor for a cosmetics and pharmaceutical company.

After the 1980 season, Williams wrote to 10 major league teams in a failed effort to find a spot on a roster.

“Time and experience have certainly taught me that baseball is more than a game of numbers,” he wrote. “But statistics do make an unbiased statement. Why, then, am I out of baseball? I think you know. In a word: controversy.”

Controversy “pinned the label ‘undesirable’ on Earl Williams,” he continued.

“That label, as baseball labels do,” he wrote, “haunted me to the end of my major league career.”

Donald Byrd, "Walking in Rhythm" Jazz Trumpeter

Donald Byrd, Renegade Jazz Trumpeter, Dies at 80

By WILLIAM YARDLEY

Published: February 11, 2013

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google+
• Save
• E-mail
• Share
• Print
• Reprints
• 

Donald Byrd, one of the leading jazz trumpeters of the 1950s and early 1960s, who became both successful and controversial in the 1970s by blending jazz, funk and rhythm and blues into a pop hybrid that defied categorization, died on Feb. 4 in Dover, Del. He was 80.

Enlarge This Image

Marty Lederhandler/Associated Press

Donald Byrd in 1990.

Connect With Us on Twitter

Follow @nytimesarts for arts and entertainment news.

Arts Twitter List: Critics, Reporters and Editors

A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics.

• Go to Event Listings »

His death was confirmed by Haley Funeral Directors of Southfield, Mich. Word of Mr. Byrd’s death had circulated online for several days, but was not announced by his family.

Almost from the day he arrived in New York City in 1955 from his native Detroit, Mr. Byrd was at the center of the movement known as hard bop, a variation on bebop that put greater emphasis on jazz’s blues and gospel roots. Known for his pure tone and impeccable technique, he performed or recorded with some of the most prominent jazz musicians of that era, including John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins and the drummer Art Blakey, considered one of jazz’s great talent scouts.

As a bandleader, Mr. Byrd was something of a talent scout himself: he was one of the first to hire a promising young pianist named Herbie Hancock — who, like Mr. Byrd, would later become known for a renegade approach that won a wide audience but displeased many critics.

Mr. Byrd, a strong advocate of music education, spent much of the 1960s teaching. Then, in 1973, he made a surprising transition to pop stardom with the release of the album “Black Byrd,” produced by the brothers Larry and Fonce Mizell, who had been his students at Howard University in Washington. With Mr. Byrd’s restrained trumpet licks layered over an irresistible funk groove seasoned with wah-wah guitar and simple, repeated lyrics (“Get in the groove, just can’t lose”), “Black Byrd” reached the Billboard Top 100, where it peaked at No. 88.

Mr. Byrd was hardly the first jazz musician to try such a crossover: Miles Davis had achieved a similar musical synthesis with “Bitches Brew” three years earlier. But “Black Byrd” was more overtly pop-oriented, and its success was extremely rare for a jazz musician. It became, and for a long time remained, the best-selling album in the history of Blue Note Records, the venerable jazz label for which Mr. Byrd had been recording since the 1950s.

“Then the jazz people starting eating on me,” Mr. Byrd recalled in a 1982 radio interview. “They had a feast on me for 10 years: ‘He’s sold out.’ Everything that’s bad was attributed to Donald Byrd. I weathered it, and then it became commonplace. Then they found a name for it. They started calling it ‘jazz fusion,’ ‘jazz rock.’ ”

The criticism did not stop him from making more pop records. In addition to recording as a leader, he organized some of his Howard students into a group called the Blackbyrds and produced their records. The band had a string of hit singles in the 1970s, including “Walking in Rhythm,” which reached the Top 10 on the pop charts, and “Rock Creek Park,” which evoked late-night romance in a wooded park in Washington, D.C.

“Rock Creek Park” became something of a local anthem and one of many recordings by Mr. Byrd to be sampled by rap and hip-hop artists, including Public Enemy, Nas and Ludacris. His music and the Blackbyrds’ has been sampled more than 200 times, with the 1975 album “Places and Spaces” among his most frequently repurposed recordings, according to the Web site whosampled.com.

“They use all of the music that I did in the ’50s, ’60s and the ’70s behind people like Tupac and LL Cool J,” Mr. Byrd told students in a lecture at Cornell in 1998. “I’m into all that stuff.”

Donaldson Toussaint L’Ouverture Byrd II was born in Detroit on Dec. 9, 1932. His father, E. T. Byrd, was a Methodist minister. His music studies there at Wayne State University were interrupted by two years in the Air Force. After receiving a bachelor’s degree from Wayne State, Mr. Byrd moved to New York, where he began his jazz career in earnest and received a master’s in music education from the Manhattan School of Music.

His musical pursuits were paralleled by a lifelong interest in education. He taught jazz at Howard, North Carolina Central University, Rutgers, Cornell, the University of Delaware and Delaware State University, and also studied law. In 1982 he received a doctorate in education from Teachers College at Columbia University. He spent many years, at various institutions, teaching a curriculum that integrated math and music education.

In 2000 Mr. Byrd was given a Jazz Masters award by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Mr. Byrd had homes in Dover, Del., and Teaneck, N.J. Information on his survivors was not available.

In his 1998 Cornell lecture Mr. Byrd said he had been inspired by musicians who changed music, notably John Coltrane.

“I met him in the 11th grade in Detroit,” he told the students. “I skipped school one day to see Dizzy Gillespie, and that’s where I met Coltrane. Coltrane and Jimmy Heath just joined the band, and I brought my trumpet, and he was sitting at the piano downstairs waiting to join Dizzy’s band. He had his saxophone across his lap, and he looked at me and he said, ‘You want to play?’

“So he played piano, and I soloed. I never thought that six years later we would be recording together, and that we would be doing all of this stuff. The point is that you never know what happens in life.”

James DePreist, Pioneering Conductor

James DePreist, a Pioneering Conductor, Dies at 76

Michael Nagle for The New York Times

James DePreist at the Juilliard Symphony in 2008.

By ALLAN KOZINN

Published: February 9, 2013

• FACEBOOK
• TWITTER
• GOOGLE+
• SAVE
• E-MAIL
• SHARE
• PRINT
• SINGLE PAGE
• REPRINTS
• 

Even in the motorized wheelchair he rode to the podium, or seated on the low swivel chair from which he conducted, James DePreistcut an imposing figure, one that usually got the best from the orchestras he led — whether major ensembles like the New York Philharmonic and the Oregon Symphony, or student groups at the Juilliard School, where he was director of conducting and orchestral studies for seven years.

Connect With Us on Twitter

Follow@nytimesartsfor arts and entertainment news.

Arts Twitter List: Critics, Reporters and Editors

A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics.

• Go to Event Listings »

Enlarge This Image

RICHARD TERMINE for The New York Times

Mr. DePreist, in 2004.

Tall and heavyset, with a shaved head, a trim mustache and a beard that grayed in recent years, Mr. DePreist, who died on Friday at 76, was one of the few black conductors to achieve international renown. And he refused to let disability derail his career; he went on conducting after polio, contracted in 1962, left both legs paralyzed and forced him to use the wheelchair.

Two years later, he won the gold medal in the Dmitri Mitropoulos International Conducting Competition, and in 1965 he became an assistant conductor to Leonard Bernstein at the New York Philharmonic.

Though he was reluctant to be seen as a role model on the basis of his race, rather than purely for his musical accomplishments, he still understood, he said, that young black musicians regarded him as a role model, much as they had revered his aunt, the great contraltoMarian Anderson, who was the first black singer to perform at the Metropolitan Opera. It was a responsibility he took seriously, he said. In 1997, he appeared in “My Country,” an hourlong documentary on PBS in which he drew comparisons between racial barriers and the challenges faced by people with disabilities.

Mr. DePreist objected, however, to outreach programs that seemed to patronize black audiences. When he was engaged by the New York Philharmonic in 1988 to lead a performance at the Apollo Theater in Harlem with the Boys Choir of Harlem and the Modern Jazz Quartet, he made a point of saying that he would not have agreed to participate had he not already been contracted for two weeks of subscription programs with the orchestra at Lincoln Center, in Avery Fisher Hall.

“I think if I’m seen as a role model, I would like it to be for conducting the subscription weeks, and not just the concert at the Apollo,” he said at the time. “I do not believe in engaging black artists and doing black music in black areas, because I feel that it is misleading, the worst kind of tokenism, especially if it’s the only time you see black artists or hear works by black composers.”

Mr. DePreist died at his home in Scottsdale, Ariz., his manager, Jason Bagdale, said. His wife, Ginette DePreist, told the newspaper The Oregonian that he had been in and out of the hospital since having a heart attack last March followed by open-heart surgery. He had also undergone a kidney transplant in 2001.

James Anderson DePreist was born on Nov. 21, 1936, in Philadelphia, completed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Pennsylvania and studied composition with Vincent Persichetti at the Philadelphia Conservatory as well as conducting. It was on a State Department-sponsored Asian tour in 1962 that Mr. DePreist, in his mid-20s at the time, contracted polio while conducting an orchestra in Bangkok. While being treated he spent several months studying scores in preparation for the 1963 Dmitri Mitropoulos International Conducting Competition.

During the competition, “the other candidates looked at me in braces and on crutches and thought, ‘Well, we can write him off,’ ” Mr. DePreist recalled in an interview with The New York Times in 1987. But he recovered enough to reach the semifinals. The next year, he won.

His victory brought him to the attention of Leonard Bernstein, who took him on as an assistant at the New York Philharmonic for the 1965-66 season. Two seasons conducting a youth orchestra in Westchester County, N.Y., followed.

Mr. DePreist moved to the Netherlands in 1967 and, two years later, made a triumphant European conducting debut with the Rotterdam Philharmonic. It opened doors, and in 1971 the conductor Antal Dorati appointed him associate conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, a position Mr. DePreist held until 1974.

He soon began a guest-conducting career that took him to the Cleveland Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony. For the 1975-76 season he returned to the National Symphony as principal guest conductor.

He conducted orchestras in a host of European cities, including Amsterdam, Berlin, Budapest, Copenhagen, Prague, Rome, Stockholm and Vienna. He also led performances in Seoul, Sydney and Tel Aviv.

Connect With Us on Twitter

Follow@nytimesartsfor arts and entertainment news.

Arts Twitter List: Critics, Reporters and Editors

A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics.

• Go to Event Listings »

After he left the National Symphony, Mr. DePreist became music director of the Quebec Symphony Orchestra, a position he held from 1976 to 1983. But he became best known for his work with the Oregon Symphony, which he directed from 1980.

During his nearly quarter-century tenure in Portland, he transformed the orchestra from a good regional group to an esteemed one that won a following through more than a dozen recordings on the Delos label that Mr. DePreist made at its helm; among them were Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” and “Firebird” Suite and Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2.

Mr. DePreist made recordings with many other orchestras, including the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic, the Malmo Symphony Orchestra in Sweden, of which he was principal conductor from 1991 to 1994, and the Monte Carlo Philharmonic, which he directed from 1994 to 1998.

After leaving the Oregon Symphony in 2003, he became its laureate music director and moved to New York to join Juilliard. His concerts with its ensembles at Carnegie Hall and elsewhere were highlights of the school’s performance season. He left the conducting and orchestral studies directorship in 2011, turning it over to Alan Gilbert, the music director of the New York Philharmonic, but retained his association as director emeritus.

From 2005 to 2008 Mr. DePreist was the permanent conductor of the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra. A character in “Nodame Cantabile,” a popular Japanese cartoon series, was based on Mr. DePreist (and bore his name). The character directed a fictional orchestra in Paris. Mr. DePreist conducted the soundtrack recordings for the live-action and animé adaptations of the story in 2009.

He also published two books of poetry and received numerous honors, including the National Medal of Arts, bestowed by President George W. Bush in 2005.

Besides his wife, he is survived by two daughters, Tracy and Jennifer, from his first marriage, to Betty Childress, and two grandchildren.

Mr. DePreist saw music as presenting “a mirror of our better selves,” he told the broadcaster Bruce Duffie in an interview in 1988 — “as something to which we can relate on a very personal and emotional level.”

“We can admire it architecturally,” he added. “We can admire it in terms of its harmonic structure. But fundamentally there is a visceral reaction, and that visceral reaction is sheer magic. There’s no two ways about it.”

Cardiss Collins, Fighter in Congress for Equality and the Poor

Cardiss Collins, Fighter in Congress for Equality and the Poor, Dies at 81

By WILLIAM YARDLEY

Published: February 7, 2013

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google+
• Save
• E-mail
• Share
• Print
• Reprints
• 

Cardiss Collins, who reluctantly ran for a Chicago Congressional seat left vacant when her husband died in a plane crash and went on to become Illinois’s first black congresswoman, serving for nearly 25 years as a voice for racial and gender equality and expanded health care for the poor, died on Sunday in Arlington, Va. She was 81.

Enlarge This Image

Associated Press

Cardiss Collins in 1973.

Her death was confirmed by Representative Danny K. Davis, who succeeded her in 1997 after she retired from Congress.

Mrs. Collins’s husband, George W. Collins, had served two years when he was among 45 people killed in the crash of United Airlines Flight 553 near Midway Airport in Chicago on Dec. 8, 1972. Local Democrats, led by Mayor Richard J. Daley, quickly endorsed Mrs. Collins to succeed him. Mrs. Collins, then 41 and an auditor for the Illinois Revenue Department who was worried about the couple’s 13-year-old son, Kevin, was wary of running but eventually agreed to do so.

She campaigned little but easily won the primary in April and cruised through the general election in June with 92 percent of the vote. Six years later, and after some early struggles in office — she had never considered a political career before she was thrust into one — she became chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus. For much of the 1980s, she was the only black woman in Congress.

“In the last six years, my biggest roadblock has been shyness,” Mrs. Collins told The Washington Post in 1979. “I was basically an introvert, but once people learned I had something to say, I gained confidence.”

Mrs. Collins was openly critical of President Jimmy Carter, questioning his commitment to social programs and minorities. She did not invite him to speak at the caucus’s annual fund-raising dinner in 1979, although he had spoken there in previous years, and she expressed support for Senator Edward M. Kennedy when he signaled that he would run against Mr. Carter for the Democratic nomination in 1980.

When Ronald Reagan was elected that fall, she was no easier on him when he proposed cutting social programs.

“Mr. President, if you promise me you won’t hurt the poor I’ll sit down right now,” she said at a meeting in March 1981 after challenging Mr. Reagan’s description of welfare cheating.

Mrs. Collins, who rose to leading roles on a range of Congressional committees, was also a steady supporter of equity in college athletics, pressing the N.C.A.A. to honor the requirements of Title IX and requiring colleges to disclose more details about how they spent federal money.

She was particularly assertive on affirmative action and minority employment issues, criticizing various agencies and industries for what she called their poor records of hiring minorities. The Smithsonian Institution and the airline industry were among her targets.

She pushed through legislation in 1990 expanding Medicare coverage for mammography screening for older and disabled women and introduced resolutions designating October National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. She wrote laws increasing safety labeling on toys, setting safety standards for bicycle helmets and expanding child care services for federal workers nationwide. She also sponsored several measures to make air travel safer.

Cardiss Hortense Robertson was born on Sept. 24, 1931, in St. Louis. Her family moved to Detroit when she was 10, and she graduated from high school there before attending Northwestern University in Chicago. After college, she initially worked as a stenographer at the Illinois Department of Labor. She married Mr. Collins in 1958.

Her survivors include her son and a granddaughter.

Essie Mae Washington-Williams, Interracial Child of Segregationist Strom Thurmond

Essie Mae Washington-Williams, Child of Famous but Secret Father, Dies at 87

By WILLIAM YARDLEY

Published: February 5, 2013

• FACEBOOK
• TWITTER
• GOOGLE+
• SAVE
• E-MAIL
• SHARE
• PRINT
• REPRINTS
• 

Essie Mae Washington-Williams, who lived for decades with a stunning secret — that she was the interracial daughter of SenatorStrom Thurmond of South Carolina, a former segregationist who never acknowledged her publicly as his child — died Monday in a nursing home near Columbia, S.C. She was 87.

Enlarge This Image

Tami Chappell/Reuters

Essie Mae Washington-Williams with her daughter Wanda in 2003.

Related

• Times Topic: Essie Mae Washington-Williams

Connect With Us on Twitter

Follow@NYTNationalfor breaking news and headlines.

Twitter List: Reporters and Editors

Enlarge This Image

Lou Krasky/Associated Press

Strom Thurmond never publicly acknowledged that he was Ms. Washington-Williams's father.

Her death was confirmed by her lawyer, Frank K. Wheaton.

Six months after her father died at age 100 as the longest-serving senator in history, Ms. Washington-Williams broke her silence.

“My father’s name was James Strom Thurmond,” she said at a news conference in a hotel ballroom in Columbia on Dec. 17, 2003.

She said she had remained silent out of respect for Mr. Thurmond, his career and the rest of his family. His death, and encouragement from her children, motivated her to speak out. She noted that there were similarities between her story and that of Sally Hemings, a slave with whom Thomas Jefferson bore children.

“My children deserve the right to know from whom, where and what they have come,” Ms. Washington-Williams said. “I am committed in teaching them and helping them to learn about their past. It is their right to know and understand the rich history of their ancestry, black and white.”

Measuring her emotions, Ms. Washington-Williams explained that her mother was Carrie Butler, a teenage maid in the Thurmond household in Aiken, S.C., in the 1920s, when Mr. Thurmond, the son of a wealthy lawyer, was in his early 20s. She would go on to say in interviews that not until she was 13 and being raised by an aunt did she learn that Ms. Butler was her mother. Several years later, after her mother took her to meet him for the first time, she learned that her father was white.

“You,” he said to Ms. Butler, “have a lovely young daughter.”

After that meeting, Mr. Thurmond, who did not yet hold elected office, delivered $200 to his daughter, using go-betweens.

In 1948, the year Ms. Butler died at age 38, Mr. Thurmond, then the governor of South Carolina, ran for president on a segregationist platform.

“All the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes,” he said at the time.

While Ms. Washington-Williams’s 2003 announcement was a revelation for many people, many others had long understood Mr. Thurmond to have had an interracial child.

He met with her many times while she was a student at South Carolina State University, a historically black college, and after she moved to Los Angeles, where she and her husband, a lawyer, raised her four children. He provided some financial support to her children, and wrote a letter of recommendation for her son to attend medical school. Ms. Washington-Williams said that she had visited his office in Washington many times and felt no bitterness toward him.

“All of those on his staff knew exactly who I was,” she said in making her announcement.

Ms. Washington-Williams sought no financial compensation. After her announcement, the Thurmond family quickly acknowledged the family link, and she met personally with at least two of her half-siblings, J. Strom Thurmond Jr., a former United States attorney in South Carolina, and Paul Thurmond, a Republican state senator.

Essie Mae Washington was born on Oct. 12, 1925, in Aiken, S.C. She moved to Coatesville, Pa., as a young child and was raised by her aunt and uncle, whose name she took. She met her husband, Julius T. Williams, while both attended South Carolina State. In Los Angeles, she spent more than 30 years as a teacher and school administrator while her husband worked as a lawyer.

Her survivors include two daughters, Monica Williams-Hudgens and Wanda Williams-Bailey; a son, Ronald; more than a dozen grandchildren; and several great-grandchildren; as well as her two half-brothers and a half-sister, Mr. Thurmond’s daughter, Juliana Whitmer. A son, Julius, and her husband both died before her.

In 2004, a monument at the South Carolina State House was altered to add the name Essie Mae as one of Mr. Thurmond’s children. In 2005, she published a best-selling memoir, “Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond.”

In that book, she recalled that Mr. Thurmond had required her to travel from California to Atlanta in later years to receive money. She also recalled his response when she sent him a Father’s Day card:

“Dear Essie Mae, Thank you for your kind remembrance on Father’s Day. Affectionately, Strom Thurmond.”

Arlene C. Ackerman, Effective but Controversial School Superintendent

Arlene C. Ackerman, Superintendent, Dies at 66

Clem Murray/The Philadelphia Inquirer, via Associated Press

Arlene C. Ackerman got a standing ovation after addressing principals in Philadelphia in 2011.

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: February 4, 2013

• FACEBOOK
• TWITTER
• GOOGLE+
• SAVE
• E-MAIL
• SHARE
• PRINT
• REPRINTS
• 

Arlene C. Ackerman, who won national accolades for improving student performance as a schools superintendent in all three cities that hired her — Washington, San Francisco and Philadelphia — even as her bulldozer management style rankled union leaders and politicians, died on Saturday in Albuquerque. She was 66. The cause was pancreatic cancer, said the Rev. Kevin Johnson, a friend. She lived in Albuquerque.

Dr. Ackerman called herself “a warrior for children.” She fought to improve the performance of disadvantaged students by allocating more resources and attention to lower-performing schools, and by replacing the worst with new ones, often charter schools. In 2010 she won the Richard R. Green Award, given by the Council of Great City Schools to the nation’s top urban school leader.

Arne Duncan, the federal education secretary, said in a statement after her death that he had learned from Dr. Ackerman during his years as superintendent of the Chicago schools.

Dr. Ackerman improved students’ test scores, including those in the most severely underperforming schools, in each of the three cities in which she presided. But in each city disagreements with elected school overseers prompted her to leave before her contract expired. Many attributed this to arrogance and an autocratic style; some called her Queen Arlene.

In San Francisco, “she was unwilling to listen to different points of view and not able to work with the entire Board of Education,” Mark Sanchez, its president, said in an interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2008.

Dr. Ackerman countered that she was unwilling to play politics. “Is it a crime to stand up for children instead of stooping down into the political sandbox and selling our children for a politician’s campaign victory?” she said to The Inquirer.

When she became superintendent in Washington in 1998, Dr. Ackerman dismissed 30 principals and 600 administrative staff members in her first three months. When she took over in San Francisco in 2000, she said, she was appalled by financial shenanigans in the district’s facilities division and called in the police and the F.B.I. She recovered $50 million in settlements from companies defrauding the schools.

Her first step in Philadelphia was to create a five-year blueprint that called for allocating more resources to needier schools and expansion of school choice. Three years of gains in test scores ensued.

Arlene Cassandra Randle was born in St. Louis on Jan. 10, 1947, the first of five children of a Protestant minister and a teacher. For Arlene, who was black, race was a constant consideration: after attending an all-black elementary school, she was one of only 50 black students in a 3,000-student high school. Dr. Ackerman recalled an episode in which a white girl lied in accusing her of threatening her with a knife. An assistant principal threatened to expel her, but her father, outraged, straightened things out.

When she was chosen for the National Honor Society, the white student who was to escort her into the induction ceremony refused. She entered alone.

Dr. Ackerman earned an undergraduate degree in elementary education from what is now Harris-Stowe State University, a historically black college in St. Louis. She earned master’s degrees from Washington University and Harvard and a doctorate from Harvard, all in education. She taught elementary and middle school in a St. Louis suburb, rising to middle school principal and school district administrator.

In 1992, she was recruited to be an administrator in the Seattle school system. She went to Washington in 1997 as an assistant to the chief schools executive for the District of Columbia and became superintendent the next year. She was praised for working with parents and criticized for clashing with politicians.

In 2000, Dr. Ackerman was the first woman to be appointed superintendent of the San Francisco schools. In 2004 and 2005 San Francisco had the highest achievement of any urban school system in California. In 2005 the city was a finalist for the Broad Prize for Urban Education, given annually to the best urban school district in the country.

From 2006 to 2008, Dr. Ackerman taught at Teachers College, Columbia University. She was superintendent in Philadelphia from 2008 to 2011. When she left, some criticized her severance package of $905,000 at a time when the schools were struggling. The criticism grew after she applied for unemployment.

Dr. Ackerman’s two marriages ended in divorce. She is survived by her sons, Anthony and Matthew Antognoli; four granddaughters; and several brothers and sisters.

For all her political battles, Dr. Ackerman remained at heart a teacher. Once a week, she escaped her superintendent duties to read to kindergartners.