Countee Cullen, African American Poet

Countee Cullen (May 30, 1903 – January 9, 1946) was an American poet who was a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance. (He pronounced his name "Coun-tay," not "Coun-tee.")

Countee Cullen was possibly born on May 30, although due to conflicting accounts of his early life, a general application of the year of his birth as 1903 is reasonable. He was either born in New York, Baltimore, Louisville, or Lexington, Kentucky, with his widow being convinced he was born in Lexington. Cullen was possibly abandoned by his mother, and reared by a woman named Mrs. Porter, who was probably his paternal grandmother. Mrs. Porter brought young Countee to Harlem when he was nine. She died in 1918. No known reliable information exists of his childhood until 1918 when he was taken in, or adopted, by Reverend and Mrs Frederick A. Cullen of Harlem, New York City. The Reverend was the local minister, and founder, of the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church.

Sometime before 1918, Cullen was adopted by the Reverend Frederick A. and Carolyn Belle (Mitchell) Cullen. It is impossible to state with certainty how old Cullen was when he was adopted or how long he knew the Cullens before he was adopted. Apparently he went by the name of Countee Porter until 1918. By 1921 he became Countee P. Cullen and eventually just Countee Cullen. According to Harold Jackman, Cullen's adoption was never “official.” That is to say it was never consummated through proper state-agency channels. Indeed, it is difficult to know if Cullen was ever legally an orphan at any stage in his childhood.
Frederick Cullen was a pioneer black activist minister. He established his Salem Methodist Episcopal Church in a storefront mission upon his arrival in New York City in 1902, and in 1924 moved the Church to the site of a former white church in Harlem where he could boast of a membership of more than twenty-five hundred. Countee Cullen himself stated in Caroling Dusk (1927) that he was “reared in the conservative atmosphere of a Methodist parsonage,” and it is clear that his foster father was a particularly strong influence. The two men were very close, often traveling abroad together. But as Cullen evidences a decided unease in his poetry over his strong and conservative Christian training and the attraction of his pagan inclinations, his feelings about his father may have been somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand, Frederick Cullen was a puritanical Christian patriarch, and Cullen was never remotely that in his life. On the other hand, it has been suggested that Frederick Cullen was also something of an effeminate man. (He was dressed in girl's clothing by his poverty-stricken mother well beyond the acceptable boyhood age for such transvestism.) That Cullen was homosexual or of a decidedly ambiguous sexual nature may also be attributable to his foster father's contrary influence as both fire-breathing Christian and latent homosexual.
At some point, Cullen entered the DeWitt Clinton High School in The Bronx. He excelled academically at the school while emphasizing his skills at poetry and in oratorical contest. While in high school Cullen won his first contest, a citywide competition, with the poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Life”, a nonracial poem inspired by Alan Seeger's “I Have a Rendezvous with Death”. At DeWitt, he was elected into the honor society, editor of the weekly newspaper, and elected vice-president of his graduating class. In January 1922, he graduated with honors in Latin, Greek, Mathematics, and French.

"Yet I do marvel"

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must someday die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

“

”

"Yet I do marvel" (1925)

After graduating high school, Cullen entered New York University (NYU). In 1923, he won second prize in the Witter Bynner undergraduate poetry contest, which was sponsored by the Poetry Society of America, with a poem entitled The Ballad of the Brown Girl. At about this time, some of his poetry was promulgated in the national periodicals Harper's, Crisis, Opportunity, The Bookman, and Poetry. The ensuing year he again placed second in the contest. He finally won it in 1925.

At New York University (1921–1925), Cullen wrote most of the poems for his first three volumes: Color (1925), Copper Sun (1927), and The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927).

Cullen competed in a poetry contest sponsored by Opportunity. and came in second with To One Who Say Me Nay, while losing to Langston Hughes's The Weary Blues. Sometime thereafter, Cullen graduated from NYU as one of eleven students selected to Phi Beta Kappa.

Cullen entered Harvard in 1925, to pursue a masters in English, about the same time his first collection of poems, Color, was published. Written in a careful, traditional style, the work celebrated black beauty and deplored the effects of racism. The book included "Heritage" and "Incident", probably his most famous poems. "Yet Do I Marvel", about racial identity and injustice, showed the influence of the literary expression of William Wordsworth and William Blake, but its subject was far from the world of their Romantic sonnets. The poet accepts that there is God, and "God is good, well-meaning, kind", but he finds a contradiction of his own plight in a racist society: he is black and a poet. Cullen's Color was a landmark of the Harlem Renaissance.

What is Africa to me:
Copper sun or scarlet sea,
Jungle star or jungle track,
Strong bronzed men, or regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his fathers loved,
Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,
What is Africa to me?

“

”

From "Heritage"

This 1920s artistic movement produced the first large body of work in the United States written by African Americans. However, Cullen considered poetry raceless. {Although his 1929 poem "The Black Christ" took a racial theme, the lynching of a black youth for a crime he did not commit.)

The Harlem Renaissance movement was centered in the cosmopolitan community of Harlem, in New York City. During the 1920s, a fresh generation of writers emerged, although a few were Harlem-born. Other leading figures included Alain Locke (The New Negro, 1925), James Weldon Johnson (Black Manhattan, 1930), Claude McKay (Home to Harlem, 1928), Hughes (The Weary Blues, 1926), Zora Neale Hurston (Jonah's Gourd Vine, 1934), Wallace Thurman (Harlem: A Melodrama of Negro Life, 1929), Jean Toomer (Cane, 1923) and Arna Bontemps (Black Thunder, 1935). The movement was accelerated by grants and scholarships and supported by such white writers as Carl Van Vechten.

If any event signaled the coming of the Harlem Renaissance, it was the precocious success of Countee Cullen. This rather shy black youth, more than any other black literary figure of his generation, was being touted and bred to become a major crossover literary figure. Here was a black man with considerable academic training who could, in effect, write “white” verse—ballads, sonnets, quatrains, and the like—much in the manner of Keats and the British Romantics (albeit, on more than one occasion, tinged with racial concerns) with genuine skill and compelling power. He was certainly not the first African American to attempt to write such verse but he was first to do so with such extensive education and with such a complete understanding of himself as a poet. Only two other black American poets before Cullen could be taken so seriously as self-consciously considered and proficient poets: Phillis Wheatley and Paul Laurence Dunbar. If the aim of the Harlem Renaissance was, in part, the reinvention of the native-born African American as a being who can be assimilated while decidedly retaining something called “a racial self-consciousness,” then Cullen fit the bill. If “I Have a Rendezvous with Life” was the opening salvo in the making of Cullen's literary reputation, then the 1924 publication of “Shroud of Color” in H. L. Mencken's American Mercury confirmed the advent of the black boy wonder as one of the most exciting American poets on the scene.

Cullen graduated from Harvard University with a masters degree in 1926. He then began work as assistant editor for Opportunity magazine, where his column, "The Dark Tower", increased his literary reputation. Indeed, between high school and his graduation from Harvard, Cullen was the most popular black poet and virtually the most popular black literary figure in America. One of Cullen's poems and his popular column in Opportunity inspired A'Leila Walker—heiress of Madame C. J. Walker's hair-care products fortune and owner of a salon where the black and white literati gathered in the late 1920s—to name her salon “The Dark Tower”.

Cullen won more major literary prizes than any other black writer of the 1920s: first prize in the Witter Bynner Poetry contest in 1925, Poetry magazine's John Reed Memorial Prize, the Amy Spingarn Award of the Crisis magazine, second prize in Opportunity magazine's first poetry contest, and second prize in the poetry contest of Palms. In addition, he was the second black to win a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Cullen's poetry collections The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927) and Copper Sun (1927) explored similar themes as Color, but they were not so well received. Cullen's Guggenheim Fellowship of 1928 enabled him to study and write abroad. He met Nina Yolande Du Bois, daughter of W. E. B. Du Bois, the leading black intellectual. At that time Yolande was involved romantically with a popular band leader. Between the years 1928 and 1934, Cullen traveled back and forth between France and the United States.

Countee Cullen was very secretive about his life. His real mother did not contact him until he became famous in the 1920s. Nevertheless, Cullen was placed at the center of one of the major social events of the Harlem Renaissance: On April 9, 1928, he married Yolande Du Bois, the only child of W. E. B. Du Bois, in one of the most lavish weddings in black New York history. This wedding was to symbolize the union of the grand black intellectual patriarch and the new breed of younger black intellectuals who were responsible for much of the excitement of the Renaissance. It was an apt meshing of personalities as Cullen and Du Bois were both conservative by nature and ardent traditionalists. That the marriage turned out so disastrously and ended so quickly (they divorced in 1930) probably adversely affected Cullen, who would not remarry until 1940.

It is rumored that Cullen was a homosexual, and his relationship with Harold Jackman ("the handsomest man in Harlem"), was a significant factor in the divorce. The young, dashing Jackman was a school teacher and, thanks to his noted beauty, a prominent figure among Harlem's gay elite. Van Vechten had used him as a character model in his novel Nigger Heaven (1926).

It is very possible that the conflicted Cullen was in love with the homosexual Jackman, but Thomas Wirth, author of Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance, Selections from the Work of Richard Bruce Nugent, says there is no concrete proof that they ever were lovers, despite newspaper stories and gossip suggesting the contrary.

Jackman's diaries, letters, and outstanding collections of memorabilia are held in various depositories across the country, such as the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University in New Orleans and Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University) in Atlanta, Georgia. At Cullen's death, Jackman requested that the name of the Georgia accumulation be changed from the Harold Jackman Collection to the Countee Cullen Memorial Collection in honor of his friend. When Jackman, himself, succumbed to cancer in 1961, the collection was renamed the Cullen-Jackman Collection to honor them both.

By 1929 Cullen had published four volumes of poetry. The title poem of The Black Christ and Other Poems (1929) was criticized for the use of Christian religious imagery - Cullen compared the lynching of a black man to the crucifixion of Jesus. Cullen published The Black Christ and Other Poems to less than his accustomed glowing reviews. He was bitterly disappointed that The Black Christ, his longest and in many respects most complicated poem, was considered by most critics and reviewers to be his weakest and least distinguished.

As well as writing books himself, Cullen promoted the work of other black writers. But by 1930 Cullen's reputation as a poet waned. In 1932, appeared his only novel, One Way to Heaven, a social comedy of lower-class blacks and the bourgeoisie in New York City. From 1934 until the end of his life, he taught English, French, and creative writing at Frederick Douglass Junior High School in New York City. (His most famous student at Frederick Douglass Junior High School was James Baldwin.) During this period, he also wrote two works for young readers: The Lost Zoo (1940), poems about the animals who perished in the Flood, and My Lives and How I Lost Them, an autobiography of his cat. In the last years of his life, Cullen wrote mostly for the theatre. He worked with Arna Bontemps to adapt his 1931 novel God Sends Sunday into St. Louis Woman (1946, published 1971) for the musical stage. Its score was composed by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, both white. The Broadway musical, set in a poor black neighborhood in St. Louis, was criticized by black intellectuals for creating a negative image of black Americans. Cullen also translated the Greek tragedy Medea by Euripides, which was published in 1935 as The Medea and Some Poems with a collection of sonnets and short lyrics.

In 1940, Cullen married Ida Mae Robertson, whom he had known for ten years.

Cullen died from high blood pressure and uremic poisoning on January 9, 1946.

The works of Countee Cullen include:

Poetry collections:

• Color Harper & brothers, 1925; [includes the poems "Incident," "Near White," "Heritage," and others], illustrations by Charles Cullen
• Tableau 1925
• Harlem Wine 1926
• Copper Sun, Harper & brothers, 1927
• The Ballad of the Brown Girl Harper & Brothers, 1927, illustrations by Charles Cullen
• The Black Christ and Other Poems, Harper & brothers, 1929, illustrations by Charles Cullen
• One way to heaven, Harper & brothers, 1932
• Any Human to Another (1934)
• The Medea and Some Other Poems (1935)
• On These I Stand: An Anthology of the Best Poems of Countee Cullen, Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1947
• Gerald Lyn Early (ed). My Soul's High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen Doubleday, 1991
• Countee Cullen: Collected Poems, Library of America, 2013

Prose:

• One Way to Heaven (1931)
• The Lost Zoo, Harper & Brothers, 1940; Modern Curriculum Press, 1991
• My Lives and How I Lost Them, Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1942

Drama:

• St. Louis Woman (1946)

*****

Wallace Thurman, African American Novelist

Wallace Henry Thurman (b. August 16, 1902, Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S. - d. December 22, 1934, New York, New York), was an American novelist active during the Harlem Renaissance. He also wrote essays, worked as an editor, and was a publisher of short-lived newspapers and literary journals. He is best known for his novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), which explores discrimination within the black community based on skin color, with lighter skin being more highly valued.

Thurman was born in Salt Lake City to Beulah and Oscar Thurman. When Thurman was less than a month old, his father abandoned his wife and son. It was not until Wallace was 30 years old that he met his father. Between his mother's many marriages, Wallace and his mother lived in Salt Lake City with Emma Jackson, his maternal grandmother. Jackson ran a saloon from her home, selling alcohol without a license.

Thurman's early life was marked by loneliness, family instability and illness. He began grade school at age six in Boise, Idaho, but his poor health eventually led to a two-year absence from school, during which he returned to his grandmother Emma in Salt Lake City. From 1910 to 1914, Thurman lived in Chicago. Moving with his mother, he finished grammar school in Omaha, Nebraska. During this time, he suffered from persistent heart attacks. While living in Pasadena, California, in the winter of 1918, Thurman caught influenza during the worldwide Influenza Pandemic. He recovered and returned to Salt Lake City, where he finished high school.

Thurman was a voracious reader. He enjoyed the works of Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Havelock Ellis, Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire and many others. He wrote his first novel at the age of 10. He attended the University of Utah from 1919 to 1920 as a pre-medical student. In 1922 he transferred to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, but left without earning a degree.

While in Los Angeles, he met and befriended the writer Arna Bontemps, and became a reporter and columnist for a black-owned newspaper. He started a magazine, Outlet, intended to be a West Coast equivalent to The Crisis, operated by the NAACP.

In 1925, Thurman moved to Harlem. During the next decade, he worked as a ghostwriter, a publisher, and editor, as well as writing novels, plays, and articles. In 1926, he became the editor of The Messenger, a socialist journal addressed to blacks. There he was the first to publish the adult-themed stories of Langston Hughes. Thurman left the journal in October 1926 to become the editor of World Tomorrow, which was owned by whites. The following month, he collaborated in founding the literary magazine Fire!! Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists. Among its contributors were Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Bruce Nugent, Aaron Douglas, and Gwendolyn B. Bennett.

He was able to publish only one issue of Fire!!. It challenged such figures as W. E. B. Du Bois and African Americans who had been working for social equality and racial integration. Thurman criticized them for believing that black art should serve as propaganda for those ends. He said that the New Negro movement spent too much energy trying to show white Americans that blacks were respectable and not inferior.

Thurman and others of the "Niggerati" (the deliberately ironic name he used for the young African American artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance) wanted to show the real lives of African Americans, both the good and the bad. Thurman believed that black artists should fully acknowledge and celebrate the arduous conditions of African American lives.

During this time, Thurman's flat in a rooming house, at 267 West 136th Street in Harlem, became the central meeting place of African-American literary avant-garde and visual artists. Thurman and Hurston mockingly called the room "Niggerati Manor." He had painted the walls red and black, which were the colors he used on the cover of Fire!! Nugent painted murals on the walls, some of which contained homoerotic content.

In 1928, Thurman was asked to edit a magazine called Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life; its contributors included Alain Locke, George Schuyler, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson. He put out only two issues. Afterward, Thurman became a reader for a major New York publishing company, the first African American to work in such a position.

Thurman married Louise Thompson on August 22, 1928. The marriage lasted only six months. Thompson said that Wallace was a homosexual and refused to admit it. They had one child together.

Thurman died in 1934 at the age of 32 from tuberculosis, which many suspect was exacerbated by his long fight with alcoholism.

Thurman's dark skin color attracted comment, including negative reactions from both black and white Americans. He used such colorism in his writings, attacking the black community's preference for its lighter-skinned members.

Thurman wrote a play, Harlem, which debuted on Broadway in 1929 to mixed reviews. The same year his first novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929) was published. The novel is now recognized as a groundbreaking work of fiction because of its focus on intra-racial prejudice and colorism within the black community, where lighter skin has historically been favored.

Three years later Thurman published Infants of the Spring (1932), a satire of the themes and the individuals of the Harlem Renaissance. He co-authored The Interne (1932), a final novel written with Abraham L. Furman, a white man.

***

The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929) is a novel by the American author Wallace Thurman, associated with the Harlem Renaissance. It was considered ground breaking for its exploration of colorism and racial discrimination within the black community, where lighter skin was often favored, especially for women.

The novel tells the story of Emma Lou Morgan, a young black woman with dark skin. It begins in Boise, Idaho and follows Morgan in her journey to college at UCLA, and a move to Harlem, New York City for work. Set during the Harlem Renaissance, the novel explores Morgan's experiences with colorism, discrimination by lighter-skinned African Americans due to her dark skin. She learns to come to terms with her skin color in order to find satisfaction in her life.

Part 1 Emma Lou

Born in Boise, Idaho, Emma Lou Morgan is an African-American girl with dark skin, and she suffers from it. Her mother and her family have lighter skin (it shows European ancestry in her family history). Emma Lou learned that her father, who left the mother and daughter soon after she was born, was a dark-skinned black man, and she appears to have taken after him. Her mother's family members comment on Emma Lou's color, thinking it will reduce her appeal for marriage. Her family help the girl try to lighten her skin with commercially available creams and bleaching, but are unsuccessful. Morgan wishes that she had been born a boy, as her mother said, "a black boy could get along, but that a black girl would never know anything but sorrow and disappointment."

The only "Negro pupil in the entire school," Emma feels conspicuous at graduation in their white robes. Her Uncle Joe encourages her to go to the University of Southern California (USC). He says she can find other black students for friends, and encourages her to study education and move to the South to teach. He believes that smaller towns like Boise "encouraged stupid color prejudice such as she encountered among the blue vein circle in her home town." Emma Lou’s maternal grandmother was closely associated with the "blue veins", those blacks who had skin light enough to show veins. Uncle Joe thought that Emma Lou could find a better life in Los Angeles, where people had more to think about.

At USC, Morgan intends to meet the "right" crowd among other Negro students. On registration day, she happens to meet Hazel Mason, another black girl, but decides when she speaks that she is lower class and the wrong sort. Other girls are pleasant enough, but never invited Emma Lou into their circle or sorority. Hazel drops out of school and Grace Giles becomes Emma Lou’s friend. One day Grace says the sorority only took light-skinned, wealthy girls.

By summer, Emma Lou felt more trapped by her skin. She began to notice that black leaders tended to have light skin or were married to women with light skin. At a picnic, she meets Weldon Taylor, a young black man. Although darker than her ideal, he attracts her. By the end of the night, she thought she was in love. Over the next two weeks, she is thrilled to be with Taylor, for "his presence and his love making."

However, Weldon traveled from town to town, finding work and a new girl each time. He was leaving Boise to become a Pullman porter but, Emma Lou took his departure as due to her color, and associated it with any setback. Two years later after graduation, she decides to move to New York City and Harlem.

Part 2 Harlem

Emma Lou goes to Harlem, where she soon meets John, a young man she decides is "too dark." She goes to an employment agency, seeking work as a stenographer. Lacking job experience, she encounters difficulties and pads her account of her skills. Sent to a real estate office for an interview, after she arrives, they tell her they have someone else in mind. After returning to the agency, Emma Lou was invited to lunch by its manager, Mrs. Blake. She was "warmed toward any suggestion of friendliness" and excited to have the chance "to make a welcome contact."

Mrs. Blake tells her about work prospects, saying that black business men had certain images for the women they hired; they wanted them pretty and light skinned. She suggests that Emma Lou go to Columbia Teacher's College to complete training for a job in the public school system. After lunch, Emma Lou began to walk along Seventh Avenue. While stopping to check her reflection, she noticed a few young black men walking by. One said to another, "There’s a girl for you ‘Fats.’" Fats replied, "Man, you know I don’t haul no coal."

Part 3 Alva

Determined to stay in New York, Emma Lou finds a job as a maid to Arline Strange, an actress "in an alleged melodrama about Negro life in Harlem." She thinks all the characters are caricatures. Arline and her brother from Chicago take Emma Lou to her first cabaret one night, where he makes her a drink from his hip flask. Emma Lou was entranced by the people dancing, and is invited by Alva, a man from another table. When the lights go up, he returns her to sit with Arline and her brother. The next morning, Alva and his roommate Braxton discuss the previous evening; agreeing that Alva did Emma Lou a favor in dancing with her.

Intrigued by the cabaret, Emma Lou talks to the stage director about being in the dance chorus. He tells her plainly the girls are chosen in part for appearance, and notes they all have lighter skin than hers. She decides to look for a new place to live, hoping to meet "the right sort of people."
One evening she goes to a casino, where she recognizes Alva. After a while she approaches him and asks if he remembers her. He politely acts as if he does, and talks and dances with her, even giving her his phone number. She calls him a couple of times before they make plans. Braxton is critical of Alva's seeing her, but he thinks, "She’s just as good as the rest, and you know what they say, ‘The Blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice.’"

Part 4 Rent Party

Alva generally did not take Emma Lou to parties or dances, as he didn't want his friends to meet her. He finally decides to take her to a "rent party." Usually he would take Geraldine, a woman with lighter skin, to more events where his friends were present. Used to manipulating young women for money, Alva liked Geraldine for herself. Emma Lou was very excited about the party, and worried that she would encounter more discrimination. Once there, they happened on to a conversation revolving around race: the differences between being a mulatto and a Negro, and individuals who are prejudiced or "color struck." Alva's group went on to rent party, where Emma Lou had more to drink than usual.

The next morning, her landlady told her she had to leave, as she wasn't meeting her boarding house's respectable standards. Emma Lou had consumed enough alcohol to warrant a visit from her land lady the next morning. Emma Lou thought more about Alva, who seemed kinder than others in her life, but she was aware of his manipulation.

Alva was having his own trouble with Braxton, who had no job and did not pay rent. He finally moved out, but Alva did not want Emma Lou to move in. One night the couple went to a theatre show, which included jokes about skin color. Emma Lou said to Alva, "You’re always taking me some place, or placing me in some position where I’ll be insulted."

One night, after an argument with Emma Lou, Alva returned to his room to find Geraldine sleeping in his bed. She told him she was pregnant with his child.

Part 5 Pyrrhic Victory

Two years later, Emma Lou works as a personal maid, more of a companion, to Clere Sloane, a retired actress. Clere is married to Campbell Kitchen, a white writer very interested in Harlem. He encouraged the young woman to seek more education in order to achieve economic independence. She often still feels out of place, with few friends. She decides to try to see Alva, although they had stopped seeing each other. As Geraldine answers the door, Emma Lou leaves without speaking to him.

Alva and Geraldine struggled with the problem of their boy, who was born disfigured. Sometimes they wished he was dead, as he seemed to have brought trouble. Alva had become alcoholic and wasted money. Geraldine worked and saved, planning to escape.

Having moved to the Y.W.C.A., Emma Lou had found some new friends. She also was studying teaching. Her friend Gwendolyn Johnson tried to make Emma Lou feel better about her appearance, but she still struggled with it. She continued to work.

Emma Lou started seeing Benson Brown, a light-skinned man described as a "yaller nigger." His appearance seemed reason enough to see him.

Emma Lou learned that Geraldine had abandoned Alva and their son. She went to him, and this time he welcomed her to his place, to care for Alva, Jr. After six months, Emma Lou begins teaching at a Harlem public school. She helped the boy to get along, but her relationship with Alva was uneasy. At the school, Emma Lou wore a lot of make-up to disguise her dark skin, but her colleagues teased her for it. Her economic independence did not totally free her.

Deciding to leave Alva and his son, Emma Lou returns to the YWCA, and calls Benson. He announces that he and Gwendolyn had been dating. They are marrying and invite her to the wedding.
Emma Lou realizes she has spent her life running. She ran away from Boise to get away from the color prejudice. Then she left Los Angeles for similar reasons. But she decide she is not running away again. She knows there are many people like her, and she has to accept herself.

Elmer Lokkins, Symbol of Same-Sex Marriage Cause

Elmer Lokkins, Symbol of Same-Sex Marriage Cause, Dies at 94

By WILLIAM YARDLEY

Published: November 15, 2013

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

Elmer Lokkins and Gustavo Archilla kept their relationship private for nearly 60 years. Some knew; some just wondered. Most did not discuss the situation. Uncle Gus and Uncle Elmer, their family called them.

Enlarge This Image

James Estrin/The New York Times

Elmer Lokkins, left, with Gustavo Archilla, whom he married in Canada in 2003. The two met in September 1945.

Connect With Us on Twitter

Follow @NYTNational for breaking news and headlines.

Twitter List: Reporters and Editors

Then, when they were both in their 80s, after a lifetime of refraining from even holding hands in public, they embraced in front of their family for the first time. It was November 2003, and they had just married in Canada, having traveled there from their home in Manhattan.

Soon they were being sought out for interviews and appearances. They participated in gay rights parades, including New York’s annual Wedding March. As same-sex marriage gained momentum in the United States, they became powerful symbols for supporters: faces of commitment, of enduring love.

But they were also still Uncle Gus and Uncle Elmer.

“When they got married and started talking about it, it was a little strange,” Christina Dean, Mr. Archilla’s niece, said this week. “Because you’re used to them being one way, and then they became famous.”

Mr. Lokkins died on Oct. 12 in Marco Island, Fla., less than a year after Mr. Archilla. Mr. Lokkins was 94, Mr. Archilla 96. They moved to Florida to be close to Ms. Dean and other family members.

When Mr. Archilla died, they had been married for nine years. But they had been together since that September day in 1945 when they met by chance in Columbus Circle.

“I had never seen anything so handsome,” Mr. Lokkins told The New York Times in 2003.

Mr. Lokkins eventually moved into the house in Washington Heights that Mr. Archilla shared with his nine siblings. Mr. Archilla’s parents had died, and he and a sister were helping raise their brothers and sisters. Mr. Lokkins had his own room.

Even after Mr. Lokkins and Mr. Archilla bought their own apartment in Morningside Gardens, the large cooperative in Morningside Heights, they were careful in public. Mr. Lokkins, who had graduated from City College, became the registrar of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Mr. Archilla was hired as his assistant and helped plan public events. Again, some people knew, but few talked about it.

“They always said they had no problems in New York,” Ms. Dean said.

They retired in the 1970s, traveling frequently and doting on their nieces and nephews. A few family members never accepted their relationship. But most adored them.

Elmer Theodore Lokkins was born on May 20, 1919, in Sunnyside, Wash., halfway between Seattle and Spokane. His father died when he was young, prompting his mother, Charlotte, to move with him and his three siblings to Chicago to be near her mother. When his mother remarried and moved to California, she left her children in the care of family members. The plan was for them to join her, but that never happened. Mr. Lokkins spent much of his childhood in an orphanage.

His survivors include a half-brother, Jerry Mullen, and dozens of nieces and nephews.

He served in the Army during World War II, saw combat in the South Pacific and was discharged in June 1945. Three months later he met his match, and they began their quiet life together.

“Living a lie,” he told The Times, “was the hardest part.”

Louisa Jo Killen, English Folk Singer

Louisa Jo Killen, English Folk Singer, Dies at 79

By PAUL VITELLO

Published: August 25, 2013

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

The English folk singer known for most of his life as Louis Killen was a bawdy, bearded pioneer of the 1950s British folk revival, a member of the Clancy Brothers and a soloist admired for giving voice to forgotten miners and sailors in traditional ballads.

Enlarge This Image

Brian Shuel/Redferns, via Getty Images.

As Louis,right, Ms. Killen had been among the most influential voices of England’s postwar folk music scene.

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 »

Enlarge This Image

Debra Cowan.

In 2010, when he was 76, Mr. Killen began living openly as a woman, adopting the name Louisa Jo Killen.

In 2010, when he was 76, Mr. Killen surprised his fans and many of his friends by resolving to give voice to another sort of lost life. He began living openly as a woman, performing in women’s clothing and a wig. In 2012, he underwent a sex-change operation.

Adopting the name Louisa Jo Killen, she continued to perform for almost two years, by most accounts winning over most of Louis Killen’s fans and all of his friends. She died at 79 on Aug. 9 at her home in Gateshead, England, from a recurrence of a cancer diagnosed six years ago, said the singer’s former wife, Margaret Osika.

As Louis, Ms. Killen had been among the most influential voices of England’s postwar folk music scene, as both a collector and performer of 19th-century ballads and folk songs chronicling the working lives of seamen, coal miners, mill workers and laborers. Folk archivists still consider the dozen recordings made by Louis Killen in the late 1950s and early ’60s for the British folk label Topic Records to be the definitive versions of traditional English songs like “The Shoals of Herring,” “Black Leg Miners,” “Pleasant and Delightful,” “The Flying Cloud” and “The Ship in Distress.”

Singing a cappella or accompanying himself sparsely on the concertina, Louis Killen was known for his lyrical tenor — a “terrifying decibel rate,” as one British critic described it — and a haunting ability to capture the aching loss at the heart of many traditional songs.

“A lot of his songs are not of the jolliest in content,” a reviewer for The Living Tradition, a traditional-music magazine published in Scotland, wrote in 2002. “But in his hands, you are impressed by the dignity, rather than the misery.”

Moving to the United States in 1966, Mr. Killen met and became friends with his fellow folk singer and archivist Pete Seeger, with whom he performed often over the years. In 1969 he was enlisted as a member of the maiden crew — along with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Len Chandler, Don McLean and a half-dozen other singers — on the first voyage of Mr. Seeger’s Hudson River Sloop Clearwater.

During the seven-week journey from South Bristol, Me., where the sloop was launched, to the South Street Seaport in Lower Manhattan, performances by Mr. Seeger and the crew basically paid off the mortgage on the boat, which has since become the floating soapbox and standard-bearer of Mr. Seeger’s campaign to clean up the Hudson River.

“Louis was my education about the music of the United Kingdom,” Mr. Seeger said in an interview on Wednesday. “He knew all the dialects, taught me many songs.” Mr. Seeger sang one over the phone. It was quite bawdy — another genre of traditional song in which Mr. Killen was expert.

In 1970, Mr. Killen joined the popular Irish folk singing group the Clancy Brothers. Fluent in the dialects and song catalogs of traditional Celtic, Scottish and English music, he was drafted to replace Tommy Makem, who had left for a solo career. He stayed for six years, making four albums with the group, including a two-disc “greatest hits” set “ in 1973.

In all, Mr. Killen contributed to more than 60 albums in his half-century career, including about a dozen in which he was the featured artist. Until returning to England about five years ago, he performed continuously at small clubs and was a mainstay at folk and maritime music festivals. He lectured widely on English traditional and folk music.

Louis Joseph Killen was born on Jan. 10, 1934, in Gateshead, one of four sons of Mary Margaret and Frank Killen. Both parents and all the brothers sang in the church choir and played stringed instruments or the concertina by ear.

Mr., Killen was studying carpentry at Catholic Workers’ College in Oxford when he attended his first folk concert. Enthralled by the music, he came under the influence of the traditional-music revivalists Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd, and by 1961 he had quit his job making cabinets and coffins to pursue music as a career.

He described his early attraction to folk music in a 1993 interview with The Los Angeles Times. “To me,” he said, “folk music springs from the unconscious reflection a community has of itself. It’s their music, their experience. My survival is based on how the audiences respond to my singing and stories. When we ‘connect,’ I can’t even describe the charge I get.”

His decision in 2010 to live as a woman followed almost 30 years of agonizing debate with himself. Ms. Osika, who was married to Mr. Killen from 1979 to 2000, knew about the conflict early, but fans and friends were surprised, she said in a telephone interview on Wednesday, “because Louie had been a very masculine man,” known for his pub exploits and racy stories.

She is one of three former wives; the others are Shelly Estrin and Sally Jennings. A brother, Martin, also survives.

Ms. Killen told friends in her last days that she had never regretted her life as a man — or her life, however brief, as a woman. Her only disappointment was in not having acquired a more feminine voice. The singer’s trademark strapping tenor remained a constant.

“That part of the change didn’t work, I guess you might say,” Ms. Osika said.

Emile Griffith, Champion Boxer

Emile Griffith, Boxer Who Unleashed a Fatal Barrage, Dies at 75

Associated Press

Emile Griffith pummeled Benny Paret in a fight at Madison Square Garden on March 24, 1962.

By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN

Published: July 23, 2013 112 Comments

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

It was the night of March 24, 1962, a nationally televised welterweight title fight at Madison Square Garden between Emile Griffith and Benny Paret, known as Kid. Griffith was seeking to recapture the crown he had once taken from Paret and then lost back to him.

Enlarge This Image

Larry Morris/The New York Times

Emile Griffith, shown in 1966, won numerous titles.

Enlarge This Image

John Lindsay/Associated Press

Paret, in white trunks, had referred to Griffith as gay at the weigh-in. Griffith wanted to fight him then.

Enlarge This Image

Robert Maxwell/USA Network

Later in life, Griffith, said he liked both men and women.

Readers’ Comments

Readers shared their thoughts on this article.

• Read All Comments (112) »

But this was more than a third encounter for a boxing title. A different kind of tension hung in the Garden air, fed by whispered rumors and an open taunt by Paret, a brash Cuban who at the weigh-in had referred to Griffith as gay, using the Spanish epithet “maricón.”

Fighters squaring off always challenge each other’s boxing prowess, but in the macho world of the ring, and in the taboo-laden world of 1962, Paret had made it personal, challenging Griffith’s manhood.

On a Saturday night about 7,500 fans — not a bad crowd for a televised bout in those years — had trooped to the Garden, then at Eighth Avenue and 49th Street, to watch the fight through a haze of cigarette and cigar smoke. By the 12th round of a scheduled 15, Griffith and Paret were still standing. But in the 12th, Griffith pinned Paret into a corner and let fly a whirlwind of blows to the head.

“The right hand whipping like a piston rod which has broken through the crankcase, or like a baseball bat demolishing a pumpkin,” Norman Mailer, a ringside witness, recalled in an essay.

Griffith delivered 17 punches in five seconds with no response from Paret, according to Griffith’s trainer, Gil Clancy, who counted them up from television replays. Griffith may have punched Paret at least two dozen times in that salvo.

At last the referee stepped in, and Paret collapsed with blood clots in his brain.

“I hope he isn’t hurt,” Griffith was quoted saying in his dressing room afterward. “I pray to God — I say from my heart — he’s all right.”

Paret died 10 days later at Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan.

Griffith, who had batted away rumors about his sexual orientation for years, survived a beating outside a gay bar in Times Square in 1992 and later acknowledged an attraction to men, died on Tuesday in Hempstead, N.Y., his boxing earnings and his memory long gone. He was 75.

The cause was kidney failure and complications of dementia, said Ron Ross, the author of “Nine ... Ten ... and Out! The Two Worlds of Emile Griffith,” published in 2008.

Griffith won the welterweight title three times and the middleweight title twice and briefly held the newly created junior middleweight title. He was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1990. But he was most remembered for the death of Paret. It followed him for the rest of his life.

Emile Alphonse Griffith was born on Feb. 3, 1938, one of eight children, on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. His father left the family when Griffith was a child, and his mother came to New York to work after sending the children to live with relatives.

When Griffith was a teenager, his mother sent for him, and he worked as a stock boy at a Manhattan factory that manufactured women’s hats. When the owner, Howard Albert, a former amateur boxer, noticed his physique — a slim waist with broad shoulders — he sent Griffith to Clancy, who developed him into a national Golden Gloves champion. Griffith turned pro in 1958, with Clancy remaining as his trainer.

Griffith won the welterweight title with a knockout of Paret in April 1961, but then lost the crown to Paret on a decision that September.

In boxing circles, Griffith had been rumored to be gay, and Paret seized on that to needle him at the weigh-in for their third fight.

“He called me maricón,” Griffith told Peter Heller in 1972 for “In This Corner: Great Boxing Trainers Talk About Their Art,” a book of interviews with boxing champions. “Maricón in English means faggot.”

Griffith wanted to attack Paret on the spot, but Clancy held him back and told him to save it for the ring. “Anytime you’re inside with this guy, you’ve got to punch until he either falls or grabs you or the referee stops you,” Clancy recalled telling him, as quoted in the book “In the Corner” by Dave Anderson, a former sports columnist for The New York Times.

But Clancy did not believe that Griffith had gone into the fight looking to make Paret pay for his slur. “I’ve always thought that what happened at the weigh-in had absolutely nothing to do with what happened in the Garden that night,” he said.

Paret’s death brought an inquiry by the New York State Athletic Commission, which absolved the referee, Ruby Goldstein, for his delay in stopping the fight.

Griffith lost his welterweight title to Luis Rodriguez in March 1963, then regained it in a rematch that year. He won the middleweight championship by a decision over Dick Tiger in April 1966, but that required him to give up his welterweight crown.

He lost the middleweight title to Nino Benvenuti of Italy in April 1967, won it back from him, then lost it again in their third bout. He briefly held the new junior middleweight title in the early 1960s.

After losing three consecutive fights, Griffith retired in 1977 with 85 victories, 24 losses and 2 draws. He later worked occasionally as a boxing trainer and lived in Hempstead, on Long Island.

In 1992, Griffith was severely beaten after leaving a gay bar in the Times Square area, his kidneys damaged so badly that he was near death. The assailants were never caught.

“That really started a sharp decline in his health,” Ross, his biographer, said on Tuesday.

Over the years, the questions concerning Griffith’s long-rumored homosexuality kept surfacing.

“I will dance with anybody,” Griffith told Sports Illustrated in 2005. “I’ve chased men and women. I like men and women both.”

He added: “I don’t know what I am. I love men and women the same, but if you ask me which is better ... I like women.”

That same year, he spoke to Bob Herbert, then a columnist for The Times.

“I asked Mr. Griffith if he was gay, and he told me no,” Mr. Herbert wrote. “But he looked as if he wanted to say more. He told me he had struggled his entire life with his sexuality, and agonized over what he could say about it. He said he knew it was impossible in the early 1960s for an athlete in an ultramacho sport like boxing to say, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m gay.’

“But after all these years, he wanted to tell the truth,” Mr. Herbert went on. “He’d had relations, he said, with men and women. He no longer wanted to hide.”

Griffith’s marriage to Mercedes Donastorg ended in divorce. Survivors include three brothers, Franklin, Tony and Guillermo; four sisters, Eleanor, Joyce, Karen and Gloria; and his longtime companion and caretaker, Luis Griffith, whom Ross described as Emile Griffith’s adopted son.

Griffith said he was tentative in the ring after the death of Paret.

“After Paret, I never wanted to hurt a guy again,” Sports Illustrated quoted him saying in 2005. “I was so scared to hit someone, I was always holding back.”

In “Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story,” a 2005 Dan Klores-Ron Berger documentary film about his life, Griffith embraces Paret’s son, Benny Jr.

“I didn’t want to kill no one,” Griffith told him. “But things happen.”

http://www.npr.org/2013/07/26/205866037/opponent-who-died-after-fight-weighed-on-boxer-emile-griffith-for-life

Laurie Frink, Trumpeter and Brass Instructor

Laurie Frink,Trumpeter and Brass Instructor to Many, Dies at 61

By NATE CHINEN

Published: July 17, 2013

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

Laurie Frink, an accomplished trumpeter who became a brass instructor of widespread influence and high regard, died on Saturday at her home in Manhattan. She was 61.

Enlarge This Image

Alan Nahigian

Laurie Frink in May.

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 »

The cause was cancer of the bile duct, said the classical violist Lois Martin, her partner of 25 years.

Ms. Frink built her trumpet career as a section player, starting when few women were accepted in those ranks. She worked extensively on Broadway and with the Benny Goodman Orchestra, the Mel Lewis Orchestra and Gerry Mulligan’s Concert Jazz Band, often playing lead.

“She was one of the most accurate trumpet players I’ve ever heard,” John McNeil, who recalled playing in trumpet sections alongside Ms. Frink some 40 years ago, said in an interview.

Ms. Frink and Mr. McNeil wrote a book together, “Flexus: Trumpet Calisthenics for the Modern Improvisor,” which has become an essential resource for many trumpeters since its publication a decade ago. The book’s exercises and études came from Ms. Frink’s reservoir of strategies for addressing physical issues on the horn, especially where a player’s embouchure, or formation of lips and facial muscles, was concerned.

“She would take each player and find out what was causing the problem — and then do it to herself, so she could figure out a solution,” said the celebrated trumpeter Dave Douglas, who sought out Ms. Frink when he ran into embouchure problems in the early 1990s. Meeting with her, Mr. Douglas recalled, “was like a combination of therapy, gym instruction and music lesson.”

A warm but private person with a sharp wit, Ms. Frink earned the protective loyalty of her students. Some of the brass players she counseled — trombonists and others as well as trumpeters — were, like Mr. Douglas and Mr. McNeil, working professionals seeking to discreetly avert career-ending difficulties.

But as a faculty member at several leading jazz conservatories, she also mentored many trumpeters at a more formative stage, including Ambrose Akinmusire and Nadje Noordhuis, who have since gained prominence in jazz circles. “I always encourage my students to be the square peg,” Ms. Frink said in 2011. “Sometimes it’s difficult for them, so I try to nurture that. They call me trumpet mother.”

Laurie Ann Frink was born on Aug. 8, 1951, in Pender, Neb., a small town now claimed by the Omaha Indian Reservation, to James and Carol Frink. Her father was a candy salesman. In addition to Ms. Martin, she is survived by her brother, James.

Ms. Frink studied with Dennis Schneider, the principal trumpeter with the Lincoln Symphony Orchestra, at the University of Nebraska. After moving to New York in her early 20s, she met Carmine Caruso, a brass guru who devised an adaptable set of calisthenic exercises for trumpet.

Ms. Frink became Mr. Caruso’s protégée, and for more than a dozen years his romantic partner. He died in 1987. Her own style of instruction was an extension of the Caruso method.

Ms. Frink never stopped playing at a high level. She appears on every album by the Maria Schneider Orchestra, including two that won Grammy Awards. “When I wrote these subtle inner parts, I would always give them to her,” Ms. Schneider said. “I knew she was the person who would really spin the heart into the line.”

Ms. Frink also worked in recent years with other critically acclaimed big bands, including the John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble, Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society and Ryan Truesdell’s Gil Evans Project. Her recorded work will endure, but for many of her former students her instruction is her chief legacy. “In a way it’s a very living art form,” Mr. Douglas said. “There are people all over town, and all over the world, doing what she told them to do.”

He said he practiced a routine of hers on Sunday morning after hearing the news of her death.

Emilio Colombo, Former Italian Premier

Emilio Colombo, Former Italian Premier, Dies at 93

George Tames/The New York Times

Prime Minister Emilio Colombo with President Richard Nixon during a visit to the White House in 1971.

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: July 1, 2013

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

Emilio Colombo, the prime minister of Italy at the start of the 1970s who curbed roaring inflation, battled political extremism and legalized divorce in his country while helping to build an integrated Europe, died on June 24 in Rome. He was 93.

Connect With Us on Twitter

Follow@nytimesworldfor international breaking news and headlines.

Twitter List: Reporters and Editors

Enlarge This Image

Alberto Lingria/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Mr. Colombo in March.

His office announced the death.

After World War II, Italian governments formed and fell with dizzying regularity, as did cabinet posts within the governments. Mr. Colombo emerged from Roman Catholic youth organizations to win a seat in Parliament at 26 and then held virtually every major cabinet position — agriculture, trade, finance, foreign affairs — before he became prime minister for 18 months between 1970 and 1972. The government he headed, centrist in its policies, was Italy’s 32nd since the war.

Mr. Colombo helped write some of Italy’s basic postwar reforms, including those that redistributed land to the poor, nationalized electricity production and spurred development in the nation’s impoverished South.

A self-described technocrat, Mr. Colombo wrote much of the Treaty of Rome, which in 1958 established the European Economic Community, a precursor to the European Community and the European Union. Martin Schulz, president of the European Parliament, said in a statement that Mr. Colombo was “a key figure in Italian history and European integration.”

As prime minister, Mr. Colombo, a member of the conservative Christian Democratic Party, juggled his and three other parties to form coalitions that would keep power from falling to the Communists, whose political strength in Italy exceeded that of any country in Western Europe. He also faced down the neo-Fascist right, survived waves of strikes and violence, and imposed new and higher taxes to successfully fight galloping inflation.

His foreign policy included establishing diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China and maintaining Italy’s strong support for the United States.

Communists said the Central Intelligence Agency had interfered in Italian politics on behalf of the Christian Democrats. Mr. Colombo denied the accusation. But in his 2007 book, “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA,” Tim Weiner, a former reporter for The New York Times, quoted former C.I.A. employees in Rome as saying that they had indeed distributed $25 million to anti-Communist parties in Italy beginning in 1970.

Mr. Colombo’s coalition collapsed in February 1972, partly over his signing, in 1970, of Italy’s first law legitimizing divorce. Like the Vatican, his own Christian Democrats opposed the legislation, while leftist members of the coalition demanded it.

In 1974, the law survived an attempt at a repeal, with 59.3 percent voting to support it.

Emilio Colombo was born on April 11, 1920, to a lower middle-class family in Potenza, 100 miles southeast of Naples. A bishop in his home region persuaded him to go into politics. Many called him “Cardinal Colombo” because of his strong faith.

Mr. Colombo earned a law degree from the University of Rome and joined Catholic Action Youth, a Vatican-backed political organization, rising to vice president and gaining enough prominence to win a seat in Parliament in 1946. That year he was elected to a convention charged with writing a new republican constitution to replace Italy’s monarchy. He was the last surviving member of that constitutional convention.

In 1948, after being re-elected to Parliament, Mr. Colombo was given his first leadership post, undersecretary of agriculture. He used the position to develop programs to help his native region in the South.

Mr. Colombo was twice foreign minister, in 1980-83 and 1992-93. In his first term, he was a strong backer of American plans to base medium-range ballistic missiles in Europe. A Soviet radio commentary said a long article he wrote on the subject sounded as if it had been written in Washington by the State Department.

Mr. Colombo was known for his total immersion in politics, which he considered “a priesthood,” a Milan newspaper wrote in 1970. He wore dull ties and well-pressed suits, and his crispness of bearing prompted a friend to suggest that he needed only an umbrella to be British.

In 2003, just after being appointed a senator for life, Mr. Colombo disclosed that he had used cocaine three or four times a week for more than a year. He said that he had used the drug for “therapeutic purposes,” and that he was making the admission to prevent his bodyguards from being prosecuted as his procurers. Consumption of cocaine in Italy is not a criminal offense, but trafficking is.

At the same time, Mr. Colombo also disclosed that he was homosexual. For years he had told interviewers that he was too busy to marry. Information on survivors was unavailable.

When Mr. Colombo visited the United States in 1971, an editorial in The Times praised his political agility, saying he had “surmounted more perils than Pauline.”

His sense of humor surely helped. When meeting with Mayor John V. Lindsay, who was grappling with huge fiscal challenges in New York City, Mr. Colombo invited him to Rome if he wanted to see real problems.

“I believe this would be a great source of comfort for you,” he said.