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We Remember: Former NFL Running Back Ron Springs Dies at 54. Former Dallas Cowboys running back Ron Springs, who spent the past four years in a coma after losing oxygen during a 2007 operation, has died without ever regaining consciousness. He was 54. Former Cowboys teammate Everson Walls, who donated a kidney to Springs for a transplant, says the Springs family informed him that his friend died about 4:30 p.m. Thursday at Medical City Dallas hospital, reports the AP. The hospital is where Springs first slipped into the coma in 2007 after undergoing surgery to remove a cyst from his forearm about seven months after receiving the kidney. In 2008, Springs’ wife, Adriane, filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against two doctors she says caused brain damage to her husband during the cyst surgery. Despite the lengthy coma, the death came as a surprise, Walls said. “We are people of faith, and we never gave up home that he would regain consciousness,” he said. “He seemed to be holding his own. They say he just took a breath and he flat-lined.” “He was such a worldly person who touched so many lives in every area code,” he said.
Man Dies On Street While New Yorkers Walk By. Either this is yet another case of our society’s numbness to tragedy or this is yet another day of New Yorkers passing by their homeless…or what they THOUGHT was a homeless man sleeping on the street. But it was really a man who had just helped a woman who was being mugged keep her purse. The mugger turned to him and stabbed him several times before running off. And even after the man was stabbed, he continued in his Superman role by pursuing the man in a high speed foot chase back down the street. Unfortunately, the unidentified superhero collapsed on the street in front of an apartment building where a surveillance camera picked up the entire incident. MSNBC show the chilling video along with other incidents throughout the country that have lead psychiatrists to come up with the term “Bystander Effect” to rationalize the stupidity and pure heartlessness of our society. The man layed on the sidewalk for over an hour with people walking by and offering no assistance. He later died. Unusual or Normal? What do you think? Are we becoming more and more heartless? I have to admit, I was watching a commercial where a girl showed up for BET’s American Idol for gospel, Sunday Best, and her voice started to quiver as she told the camera, “I came here in these house shoes because I lost my home. I’ve lost everything and this is all that I have” and I didn’t feel the sympathy that I thought her story should’ve summoned. My feeling immediately went to, not again! How about you? Are you getting numb as the Extreme Home Makeovers and American Idols pile up?
Civil Rights Veteran Dorothy Height Dies at 98. Dorothy Height, former president of the National Council of Negro Women and a leading activist in the 1960s civil rights movement, died Tuesday of natural causes, according to the Associated Press. She was 98. Height, who had marched against lynching as a teen in the 1920s and assisted the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other activists in galvanizing the civil rights movement, had been at Howard University Hospital since March 18. Born on March 24, 1912 in Richmond, Va., Dorothy Irene Height and her family moved to the Pittsburgh area when she was four. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from New York University and did postgraduate work at Columbia University and the New York School of Social Work. (She had been turned away by Barnard College because it already had its quota of two black women.) In 1937, while she was working at the Harlem YWCA, Height met famed educator Mary McLeod Bethune, the founder of the National Council of Negro Women, and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who had come to speak at a meeting of Bethune’s organization. Height eventually rose to leadership roles in both the council and the YWCA. She became president of the National Council of Negro Women in 1957 and held the post until 1997, when she was 85. She remained chairman of the group. “I hope not to work this hard all the rest of my life,” she said at the time. “But whether it is the council, whether it is somewhere else, for the rest of my life, I will be working for equality, for justice, to eliminate racism, to build a better life for our families and our children.” In 1963, Height was the only woman on the speaker’s platform when Dr. King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. But she wasn’t on the program for the March on Washington even though she was the nucleus of the meetings held by the mostly male civil rights leaders who planned it. Height told NPR in 2003 that the experience was uplifting despite the fact that a gospel singer was the only woman heard from the podium that day. “My being seated there had some very special meaning because women had been trying to get a woman to speak on the program,” Height said, “but we were always met by the planners with the idea that women were represented in all of the different groups, in the churches, in the synagogues, in the unions, organizations and the like. So the only voice we heard of a woman was that of Mahalia Jackson.” Height said women in the movement met the next day to discuss ways to deal with the issues of racism and sexism. “All of it was toward saying how can we bring all the people who need to understand the role that women have played, but also the predicament women face, and especially we who are women of color, where we’ve had both sex and racial discrimination as a characteristic of our lives,” she said.
Height received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994 from President Bill Clinton. Her passing marks the second death of a major civil rights figure in less than a week. Benjamin L. Hooks, the former longtime head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, died Thursday in Memphis at 85.