Showing posts with label Grey Villet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Grey Villet. Show all posts

Saturday, February 11, 2017

NEW BOOK DOCUMENTS THE LOVE STORY OF MILDRED AND RICHARD LOVING




The Lovings
An Intimate Portrait
Grey Villet, Barbara Villet, Stephen Crowley
Princeton Architectural Press
10 × 8 inches, Hardcover, 128 pages, 82 duotones
Now available from the Gallery $24.95

The Lovings: An Intimate Portrait documents the extraordinary love story of Mildred and Richard Loving. The Lovings presents Grey Villet's stunning photo-essay in its entirety for the first time and reveals with striking intensity and clarity the powerful bond of a couple that helped change history. Mildred, a woman of African American and Native American descent and Richard, a white man, were arrested in July 1958 for the crime of interracial marriage, prohibited under Virginia state law. Exiled to Washington, DC, they fought to bring their case to the US Supreme Court. Knowledge of their struggle spread across the nation, and in the spring of 1965, the Life magazine photojournalist Villet spent a few weeks documenting the Lovings and their family and friends as they went about their lives in the midst of their trial. Loving v. Virginia was the landmark US civil rights case that, in a unanimous decision, ultimately ended the prohibition of interracial marriage in 1967.

Grey Villet (1927--2000) was an award winning photographer and photojournalist who worked at Life magazine for more than thirty years.

Barbara Villet is an author and journalist who was a photo editor at Life and collaborated on many of Mr. Villet's projects.

One of photojournalism's most distinguished practitioners, Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Crowley of the New York Times credits the influence of a Grey Villet Life essay with his decision, at age nine, to become a photographer.



Monroe Gallery will exhibit rare vintage prints from GreyVillet's Loving's photo essay on our booth #53 4during the AIPAD Photography Show in New York March 30 - April 2. A special book signing of The Lovings with Barbara Villet will take place in our booth # 534 on Saturday, April 1, from 3 - 4 PM.



Thursday, October 20, 2016

Monroe Gallery Announces Three Exhibitions For November



Monroe Gallery of Photography announces three timely exhibits for November, two of which coincide with major film releases.
Beginning November 1, LIFE magazine photographer Grey Villet's intimate images of Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple who married and then spent the next nine years fighting for the right to live as a family in their hometown, will be on exhibit.
Their civil rights case, Loving v. Virginia, went all the way to the Supreme Court, which in 1967 reaffirmed the very foundation of the right to marry. On November 4, the feature film “Loving” opens, from acclaimed writer/director Jeff Nichols and starring Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga in the roles of Richard and Mildred Loving. Grey Villet’s photographs are on exhibit November 1 – December 31, 2016, and will then be exhibited at Photo LA, January 12 – 17, 2017.

Monroe Gallery of Photography will present a pop-up gallery exhibition in collaboration with veteran curator and art critic Peter Frank: “Tony Vaccaro: War, Peace, Beauty”, November 11 to 21, 2016, at 508 West 26th Street, 5th floor, in the West Chelsea Arts Building in New York City. The exhibit opens with a reception for Tony Vaccaro, Friday, November 11, 6 – 8 pm. Sidney and Michelle Monroe will be in attendance. Tony Vaccaro’s photographs will be on exhibit concurrently at Monroe Gallery in Santa Fe, NM, through December 31, 2016.

The Vaccaro exhibits coincide with the HBO premiere on Monday, November 14, of the documentary film “Under Fire: The Untold Story of Private First Class Tony Vaccaro”. The film tells the story of how Tony survived the war, fighting the enemy while also documenting his experience at great risk, developing his photos in combat helmets at night and hanging the negatives from tree branches. The film also encompasses a wide range of contemporary issues regarding combat photography such as the ethical challenges of witnessing and recording conflict, the ways in which combat photography helps to define how wars are perceived by the public, and the sheer difficulty of staying alive while taking photos in a war zone.

Finally, on November 25 Monroe Gallery presents a major exhibition of photographs from one of America’s most accomplished photographers, Art Shay. The exhibit of 50 photographs opens Friday, November 25 with a reception for the 94-year old photographer from 5 – 7 PM, and continues through January 22, 2017.

Gallery hours are 10 to 5 Daily, admission is free. For further information, please contact the Gallery.

Thursday, July 28, 2016

Winning The White House: From Press Prints To Selfies



WINNING THE WHITE HOUSE FROM PRESS PRINTS TO SELFIES

Via ICP

NEW YORK, NY AND SOUTHAMPTON, NY – From official portraits and campaign ads to selfies and televised debates, images play an essential role in every presidential campaign. Now, Winning the White House: From Press Prints to Selfies—a new thought-provoking special exhibition presented by International Center of Photography opening at the Southampton Arts Center on August 6th—explores the complex relationship between candidates’ representations in visual media and their carefully created and tightly controlled campaign images.

Organized by ICP’s Assistant Curators Susan Carlson and Claartje van Dijk, Winning the White House: From Press Prints to Selfies features works by Cornell Capa, Grey Villet, Elliott Erwitt, Bill Eppridge, Chris Buck, Stephen Crowley, Ken Light, Mark Peterson, Antoni Muntadas and Marshall Reese, and others as well as campaign ephemera, posters, and video materials created for candidates from John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

“Since the time of Abraham Lincoln through the present day, presidential candidates have used photographic imagery in their campaigns to impact public opinion,” says Claartje van Dijk, Assistant Curator of ICP. “While staged and curated press prints have historically been the tools of choice for candidates to reach and perform for their electorate, the delivery method has shifted from print publications to broadcast to computer and mobile phone screens—and the imagery has become more personal, more immediate and seemingly more off-the-cuff. With Winning the White House we examine that evolution and put it side to side with the screened selection of campaign images.”

“While professional press photographers continue to cover every campaign stop for major media outlets like their predecessors, they are now joined by thousands of amateur photographers,” adds Susan Carlson, Assistant Curator of ICP and van Dijk’s co-curator for Winning the White House. “With the rise of smart-phone technology and the rapid rate at which images are released on social media, the 2016 campaigns are seeing an even greater demand for visual content. This provides us with a timely opportunity to explore photography’s significant role in elections.”

The Southampton Arts Center is located at 25 Jobs Lane, with gallery hours Thursday-Sunday from 12-6pm. Admission is free and open to the public. For programming and other information, please visit us at http://www.icp.org or http://southamptonartscenter.org.  The exhibition was made possible by ICP Trustee Renee Harbers-Liddell and Chris Liddell.

Southampton Arts Center
25 Jobs Lane
Southampton, NY 11968 United States
+ Google Map

Friday, November 20, 2015

Grey Villet: last overland cattle drive from Cedar Butte, South Dakota, to northern Nebraska


Via Colorado Central Magazine

A Docent Out of Retirement

Photographer Grey Villet had a saying: “Every story should be as real as real could get.”

Grey was an award-winning lensman for Life magazine back in the 1960s, and he never had any idea that someday I’d be representing his photos at the annual Art for the Sangres here in Westcliffe.

Each year the San Isabel Land Protection Trust organizes Art for the Sangres as its major fundraiser for the year. The annual art sale brings together artists of many mediums from all over the country, as well as locally, to raise funds for land and water conservation in Southern Colorado. Celebrating its 20th year in 2015, San Isabel has administered 128 conservation easements protecting 40,000 acres of land, 174 water rights and 61 miles of stream frontage.

In recent years I had served as a docent at the art sale. The first year I had represented the paintings of my friend and neighbor Lorie Merfeld-Batson. The next year I was the docent for JG Moore, a bronze sculptor from Colorado’s eastern plains.

But last year I’d begged off the volunteer role as it took up a lot of time during what is typically one of the nicest-weather weekends of the year. And this year I’d pretty much decided to do the same. But I sure did miss the party, easily one of the biggest social events of the year in Custer County.
Then my friend Peter Hedberg contacted me regarding the art sale. Peter is a benefactor of the land trust and had convinced organizers to include a collection of photography called “The Last Cattle Drive” taken in 1960 by Villet, who passed in 2000. Villet’s wife Barbara represents his work. The couple met when she was also working at Life as a writer.

“Roundup” by Grey Villet. Photo courtesy Barbara Villet.
“Roundup” by Grey Villet. Photo courtesy Barbara Villet
 
 

Peter wanted to know if I’d be interested in representing this photo display, along with Barbara; meanwhile I’d been notified by the land trust that a docent had canceled if I wanted to fill in. Peter invited me to his office to view the photos.

This photo essay documented what would prove to be the last overland cattle drive of more than 1,000 animals from Cedar Butte, South Dakota, to northern Nebraska. Over the course of that week, Grey captured the beauty of the rolling grasslands of the Great Plains, as well as the grit and determination of the men who were desperately holding tight to their waning lifestyle of self-reliance. The stunning and historic collection is currently on display at the Monroe Gallery in Santa Fe.

“What attracted me to this was it’s not just the land but images of man interacting with the land, and that is what San Isabel is trying to preserve,” Peter said. “It’s a great narrative, and it’s different from anything the art show has ever done.”

I was immediately taken by the scope and range of the photos. What’s more, I recognized the black-and-white techniques from my early days in photography – I immediately knew Grey had used Kodak Tri-X film, for example, and could tell how the images had been burned and dodged under the enlarger. I was fascinated with the pictures and the sense of photojournalism.

It turns out Grey also never took a posed photo, used only natural light and – get this – never even cropped a single image. Each print was made to the same exact dimension as a 35mm negative.
Grey, born in South Africa in 1927, also had a way of capturing more than just cowboys. The celebrated photojournalist and recipient of many major photography awards also took historically significant photographs of people like John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Richard Nixon. He photographed Fidel Castro’s triumphant ride into Havana, and Jackie Robinson stealing home in the 1955 World Series. His masterpiece Life photo essay “The Loving Story” documented the story of Mildred and Richard Loving, whose case became a landmark civil rights decision by the United States Supreme Court, striking down laws prohibiting interracial marriage.

I was out of retirement as a docent very quickly.

Which is how I came to find myself spending a lovely evening with Barbara – who makes her home in Cambridge, New York – at A Painted View Ranch, where Art for the Sangres is hosted. For this show the barn is converted to a showcase, with the horse stalls serving as mini-galleries for the 24 artists. Ironically, Barbara and I were sharing a stall with Lorie, who was this year’s featured artist, and with whom my docent career began.

Two of these amazing Grey Villet photos went home from the show with Wet Mountain Valley residents. And hundreds more people had the chance to view these images and hear Grey’s story, as told by me, as they circulated around the artists and their work while sipping wine and enjoying the fine food.

In the end more than $147,000 in art was sold during the event, with 40 percent of the proceeds supporting San Isabel’s conservation efforts. As a docent out of retirement, spending this evening immersed in the historic world of photojournalism was about as real as it could get.


Hal Walter is a 30-year resident of Custer County and the author of Full Tilt Boogie – A journey into autism, fatherhood, and an epic test of man and beast.

Friday, December 7, 2012

NYC: The Loving Story Film Opens December 10


 Grey Villet: Mildred and Richard Loving, King and Queen County,
Virginia in April 1965


Welcome to villagevoice.com


The Loving Story
By Michelle Orange Wednesday, Dec 5 2012

Well-timed and well crafted in equal measures, The Loving Story is a thoughtful, terrifically intimate account of the case that dismantled this country's anti-miscegenation laws 100 years after the abolition of slavery. The story of Virginia couple Mildred and Richard Loving's efforts to live and love each other freely captures a critical moment in a civil rights movement whose most recent strides—for same-sex marriage—are just a few weeks old. First-time director Nancy Buirski's focus on the constitutional tangles that brought Loving v. Virginia before the Supreme Court in 1967 also complement Lincoln's warm, wonky embrace of the democratic procedural. A wealth of archival footage gives The Loving Story an oddly modern quality. We watch the supremely humble couple (Richard was white; Mildred part black and part Native American) interacting at home, tolerating journalists, conferring with attorneys, and recounting their path to the courtroom: Having been arrested in their home state, the Lovings moved to Washington, D.C. Mildred's distressed letter to Bobby Kennedy set things rolling. Equally compelling is footage of the dauntless young lawyers, Bernard Cohen and Philip Hirschkop, who saw much to be gained in one couple's belief in their rights and even more to be cut away.


Details
The Loving Story
Directed by Nancy Buirski
Icarus Films
Opens December 10, Maysles Cinema


Related: Director's Interview: The Loving Story

              Grey Villet:  A Storyteller Is Seen With New Eyes          

              On Exhibit: Grey Villet's Photographs of The Lovings 

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

A Storyteller Is Seen With New Eyes


Grey Villet:"Slo-Pokes", Drag Racing In Moline, Illinois, 1957



Via The Wall Street Journal


"(Grey)  "Villet really fits into that ICP/Cornell Capa tradition—not only with photojournalism but this real interest in ordinary people and their lives."
 --Erin Barnett, International Center of Photography


"My sense of his power as a photographer was very great, and I was beginning to lose all hope that I was going to get this beautiful work out there."
--Barbara Villet, Grey's widow

"Villet shot for LIFE in both its weekly and reinvented monthly iterations between 1955 and 1985, producing some 40 full-length features of remarkable emotional and intellectual range—from a 1962 visit inside Synanon House, a controversial drug-treatment facility in California, to "The Lash of Success," an allegorical look at a Chicago furniture-chain owner whose abuse of power ultimately destroyed what he'd built. His mid-'70s essay about a hospital nurse, "More Than Compassion," like W. Eugene Smith's "Country Doctor," is a striking examination of life and death. Yet Smith's 1948 essay is legendary, and Villet's is hardly known."

"Grey was able to tell a story about something people necessarily hadn't gotten their minds around," said David Friend, who worked with Villet at LIFE as a reporter and picture editor. "It's not necessarily about [Henri] Cartier-Bresson's 'decisive moment'; it's about the collision or dovetailing of images that add up to a greater whole."

Among his own kind," Mr. Friend said of his former colleague, "he was revered."

"His work is every bit as important as those who were so well known," said Sidney Monroe, whose Santa Fe-based gallery represents Villet's estate."

Full article here.
(Subscription required)



Wall Street Journal slide show
(No subscription required to view)

Wall Street Journal Interactive: Watching and Listening: The Work of Photojournalist Grey Villet
View Grey Villet's photographs during the AIPAD Photography Show March 28 - April 1 at Monroe Gallery of Photography Booth #419.

Monday, February 6, 2012

On Exhibit: Grey Villet's Photographs of The Lovings

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Mildred and Richard Loving, King and Queen County, Virginia in April 1965

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 Grey Villet
 Mildred and Richard Loving, King and Queen County, Virginia in April 1965



Concurrent with the opening of Vivian Maier: Discovered, we are pleased to exhibit selected photographs Grey Villet shot of the Richard and Mildred Loving for Life magazine in 1965. "Grey Villet: The Lovings" will continue through March 18, 2012.

Grey Villet took over 2,400 frames of the Lovings for Life in 1965 but the magazine did not run the story until March 18, 1966, when the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals upheld the lower court ruling and the Lovings’ case headed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The tone of the piece, as well as the selected images, was cool and neutral; the three published images that include both Mildred and Richard are extremely chaste and do not capture the emotional bond between them as so many of Villet’s other images do. Life, like many other media outlets, did not want to address the topic of interracial sex directly for fear of offending popular opinion.

The Loving Story, a documentary film, tells the story of Richard and Mildred Loving to examine the drama, the history, and the current state of interracial marriage and tolerance in the United States. It's World Premiere was at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in April 2011, and the On-air premiere of The Loving Story will be on HBO, February 14, Valentine’s Day, 2012.

A selection of Grey Villet's photographs, including several of The Lovings, will also be on exhibit during the AIPAD Photography Show in New York March 28 - April 1, at Monroe Gallery Booth #419.

Related:

NPR: The Loving War: How Black History Is Both Black And White

Richmond Times Dispatch: HBO documentary examines Lovings' struggle

Life of Marital Bliss (Segregation Laws Aside)

Grey Villet: The Lovings



Friday, January 27, 2012

Life of Marital Bliss (Segregation Laws Aside)





Mildred and Richard Loving, King and Queen County, Virginia in April 1965
Grey Villet: Mildred and Richard Loving, King and Queen County,
Virginia in April 1965



We have been covering the forthcoming documentary film about Mildren and Richard Loving, an inter-racial couple who made civil-rights history. "The Loving Story" film will premiere on HBO on Valentine's day, February 14. An exhibition of Grey Villet's vintage photographs is currently on exhibition at the International Center of Photography.

Today's New York Times has a review of the exhibit:

"Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple from Virginia whose marriage prompted a benchmark 1967 Supreme Court ruling overturning state miscegenation laws, are portrayed in “The Loving Story: Photographs by Grey Villet” as heroes who fell into history by accident.

 Grey Villet,  a South African photographer who worked for Life magazine, entered the story in 1965 when he traveled to Virginia to photograph the family, by then living together under an unofficial amnesty with their three children. Mr. Villet shot 73 rolls of film, but Life published only 9 images. The photographer then sent 70 prints to the Lovings. The vintage prints in this show are from that collection, as well as from Mr. Villet’s estate.

The images represent the heyday of social documentary, but also the photo-essay format established by magazines like Life and Look. There is the whiff of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and other 1930s documentarians, but also of W. Eugene Smith, a revered midcentury photo essayist, and David Goldblatt, a South African chronicler of apartheid"  Full post and photographs here.

Concurrently, Monroe Gallery of Photography is opening the exhibition "Grey Villet: The Lovings" on February 3, concurrent with the exhibition "Vivian Maier: Discovered". The exhibition continues through March 18, and Grey Villet's photographs of the Lovings will be on exhibit during the AIPAD Photography Show March 29 - April 1 at Monroe Gallery, Booth #419. Monroe Gallery of Photography is honored to represent the Estate of Grey Villet.


Friday, January 20, 2012

WEEK IN REVIEW: Selected Photography Stories



Med_indian_canyons_8367-jpg
Supermarket Pickets, New Jersey, 1963 © Steve Schapiro,
Monroe Gallery of Photography, Santa Fe

La Lettre de la Photographie has a wrap-up of the 2012 edition of Photo LA, reported by Jeff Dunus with a slide show of highlights here.


September 28, 1959, 108th St. East, New York
Vivian Maier: September 28, 1959, 108th St. East, New York
©Maloof Collection, Ltd.


 
Art Critic Roberta Smith of The New York Times writes a review of 2 concurrent Vivian Maier exhibitions in New York. The exhibition "Vivian Maier: Discovered" opens at Monroe Gallery of Photography on February 3, and continues through April 22.



Grey Villet: Mildred and Richard Loving

The International Center of Photography opened the exhibition "The Lovings Story: Photographs by Grey Villet".  The Amsterman News has the most recent article about this remarkable collection of photographs, taken by Life magazine photographer Grey Villet:

"Brown v. Board of Education. Plessy v. Ferguson. The list of notable court cases that blazed the trail for civil rights in our nation is long, but there is one case that many have forgotten but is no less important: Loving v. Virginia."

More about the Lovings photographs here.


Raw File Blog covers Tim Mantoani's  new book Behind Photographs: Archiving Photographic Legends. "The Tank Man of Tienanmen Square. Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston in victory. The portrait of the Afghan Girl on the cover of National Geographic. Many of us can automatically recall these photos in our heads, but far fewer can name the photographers who took them. Even fewer know what those photographers look like." We are very proud that several of Monroe gallery's photographers are featured.

Sunday, January 8, 2012

Based on an anonymous tip that the Lovings were illegally living as a married couple in Caroline County, sheriff Garnett Brooks and two deputies burst into the Lovings’ bedroom on July 11, 1958 at 2 a.m. When Richard explained that the woman in bed with him was his wife, Brooks replied, “Not here she’s not.”



The Loving Story Film Poster


HBO and the Museum of Tolerance invite you and a guest to a special screening of

THE LOVING STORY

An exclusive screening for Museum of Tolerance members only
 Tuesday, January 10, 2012 at 7:00pm

A racially-charged criminal trial and a heart-rending love story converge in this documentary about Mildred and Richard Loving, a part-black, part-Indian woman married to a white man in Jim Crow era Virginia. Thrown into rat-infested jails and exiled from their hometown for 25 years, the Lovings fought back and changed history. They were paired with two young and ambitious lawyers who were driven to pave the way for social justice and equal rights through a historic Supreme Court case, Loving v. Virginia. THE LOVING STORY takes us on a journey into the heart of race relations in America. But, in the end, it is a poignant love story of two people who simply wanted to live in the place they called home.

This film, with its contemporary parallels, will live on as record of monumental change, not just in civil rights then, but in the human right to pursue happiness regardless of color, gender or creed.
Q & A with Director Nancy Buirski and Producer Elisabeth Haviland James.
Dessert reception to follow.

There is no charge for the screening but pre-registration is required.
THIS EVENT IS SOLD OUT

Download a flyer here

More about The Loving Story movie here

View Grey Villet's photographs of the Lovings in Los Angeles during photo la, January 12 - 16, at Monroe Gallery of Photography Booth B-500.

Related: New York Times feature: Grey Villet's photographs of the Lovings; International Center of Photography exhibit

John Edwin Mason: Grey Villet, Interracial Love, and Drag Racing, 1965

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

PHOTO DISTRICT NEWS PHOTO OF THE DAY: GREY VILLET - LITTLE ROCK NINE


© Grey Villet. Above: The Little Rock Nine enter a classroom to register after escort from Army’s 101st Airborne Division, September 25, 1957.





March 15, 2011
A daily selection by the editors of Photo District News
Posted on Tuesday, March 15th, 2011 at 11:00 am ET by Amber Terranova

Grey Villet was a master of the classic “fly on the wall” style of photojournalism and he was the absolute master of the 180mm f/2.8 Sonnar. In addition to covering the news in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 — when a group of high school students attempted to enroll in Little Rock Central High School and were initially prevented by Governor Orval Faubus who called on the National Guard to stop the school’s integration, his assignments included the 1958 arrest of Martin Luther King Jr, Fidel Castro’s triumphant drive into Havana, Jackie Robinson’s daring steal of home base in the 1955 World Series, and the now classic LIFE photo essay “Going Under” about farm foreclosures in the 1980s. Villet’s work will be on display with the Monroe Gallery at the AIPAD Photography Show New York, March 17-20, 2011, at the Park Avenue Armory.- AIPAD. To see more of Villet’s work click here.

Previous post: E-Photo Newsletter Names its List of The Most Influential Photography Sources In 2010-2011

Monroe Gallery of Photography is located at Booth #417 during the AIPAD Photography Show

Monday, September 6, 2010

Little Rock 9 member Jefferson Thomas dies in Ohio

Grey Villet: The Little Rock Nine enter classroom after escort from Army's 101st Airborne Division.




The Associated Press
September 6, 2010

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Jefferson Thomas, who as a teenager was among nine black students to integrate a Little Rock high school in the nation's first major battle over school segregation, has died. He was 68.


Thomas died Sunday in Ohio of pancreatic cancer, according to a statement from Carlotta Walls LaNier, who also enrolled at Central High School in 1957 and is president of the Little Rock Nine Foundation.

The integration fight was a first real test of the federal government's resolve to enforce a 1954 Supreme Court order outlawing racial segregation in the nation's public schools. After Gov. Orval Faubus sent National Guard troops to block Thomas and eight other students from entering Central High, President Eisenhower ordered in the Army's 101st Airborne Division.

Soldiers stood in the school hallways and escorted each of the nine students as they went from classroom to classroom.

Each of the Little Rock Nine received Congressional Gold Medals shortly after the 40th anniversary of their enrollment. President Clinton presented the medals in 1999 to Thomas, LaNier, Melba Patillo Beals, Minnijean Trickey Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Terrence Roberts and Thelma Mothershed Wair.

In 2008, then President-elect Obama sent Thomas and other members of the Little Rock Nine special invitations to his inauguration as the nation's first black president. During his campaign, he had said the Little Rock Nine's courage in desegregating Central High helped make the opportunities in his life possible.

Thomas played a number of sports and was on the track team at Dunbar Junior High, but others had little to do with him once he entered Central, the state's largest high school.

I had played with some of the white kids from the neighborhood," Thomas said. "I went up to Central High School after school and we played basketball and touch football together. I knew some of the kids.


"Eventually, I ran into them ... and they were not at all happy to see me," Thomas added. "One of them said, 'Well I don't mind playing basketball or football with you or anything. You guys are good at sports. Everybody knows that, but you're just not smart enough to sit next to me in the classroom.'"

Beals said Monday that Thomas was nicknamed "Roadrunner, because he was so fast. You could sometimes avoid danger by running fast."

She said by phone from her home in California that Thomas always seemed to bring a light moment to the crisis.

"He was funny, he had a most extraordinary sense of humor. He did sustain an enormous amount of damage and pain during the Little Rock crisis, but no matter what, he always had something refreshing and funny to say," she said. "It could be the most horrible day and he would say 'Yes, but how are you dressed and are you smiling?'"

Thomas also brought a bit of levity to the 2007 commemoration marking the 50th anniversary of the integration fight — letting the audience know how angry LaNier was with him when he stood up and cheered at a Central High Tigers pep rally.

Thomas thought the white students were carrying the school flag and yelling the school cheer. He said LaNier glared at him and later set him straight: It was the Confederate flag and the students were singing "Dixie."

After graduation, Thomas served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam and later became an accounting clerk with the
Department of Defense.


Following the 2008 election, Thomas said in an interview that he supported Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Ohio primary and he also liked former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who made a bid for the Republican nomination.

"It would have been a hard decision for me to make if Huckabee was running against Obama," Thomas added.

Still, he said, he was overjoyed with Obama's victory.

"This was really the nonviolent revolution," Thomas said. "We went and cast our ballots and the ballots were counted this time. I'm thinking now we've got to do something. I don't know what. But there are a lot of things Obama ran on, what he's saying he wants to do."



Copyright 2010 The Associated Press.