From the Rolling Stone Magazine obituary by David Browne:

The oldest of nine children, Havens grew up in Brooklyn’s poor Bedford-Stuyvesant, the son of a factory worker who played piano; as a teenager, Havens formed a gospel group in high school. Although at one time he said he hoped to be a surgeon, he left home at 17 and landed in Greenwich Village. When he wasn’t painting portraits of tourists to make money, Havens was playing the folk clubs there. Among those who noticed him was Dylan: “One singer I crossed paths with a lot, Richie Havens, always had a nice-looking girl with him who passed the hat and I noticed that he always did well,” Dylan wrote in his memoir Chronicles: Volume One.

After recording two albums for a small label, Havens hooked up with Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman. With that, Havens’ visibility jumped up a new notches. In 1966, Havens was signed to Verve/Folkways, who released his classic Mixed Bag that year. Havens already had a growing audience thanks to albums like 1968’s ambitious blues-folk-psychedelic double LP Richard P. Havens, 1983, when he signed up for Woodstock. Recalling his trip into the grounds by helicopter, he later said, “It was awesome, like double Times Square on New Year’s Eve in perfect daylight with no walls or buildings to hold people in place.”

Havens wasn’t supposed to be the first act to open the festival; that slot originally was intended for the band Sweetwater, but that band wound up being stuck in traffic. Backstage, co-organizer Michael Lang approached Havens and practically begged him to go on instead. “It had to be Richie – I knew he could handle it,” Lang later wrote.

After performing a half-dozen songs, Havens ran out of material – until, he later said, he remembered “that word I kept hearing while I looked over the crowd in my first moments onstage. The word was: freedom.” Havens began chanting that word over and over, backed by his second guitarist and conga player, and eventually segued into the gospel song “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” which he had heard in church as a child. The combined, surging medley wasn’t just a crowd-pleaser; it later became a highlight of the Woodstock movie, which also immortalized Havens’ orange dashiki. (What many didn’t know at the time was that Havens wore dentures, which also gave his singing voice a unique tone.) “My fondest memory was realizing that I was seeing something I never thought I’d ever see in my lifetime – an assemblage of such numbers of people who had the same spirit and consciousness,” he later recalled of Woodstock to Rolling Stone.

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On September 14, 2013, 24 year-old Jonathan Ferrell, a former Florida A&M University football player, was shot and killed by a Charlotte, North Carolina police officer while seeking help for injuries sustained in a car accident.

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From “Jonathan Ferrell’s Autopsy Results Spark Suit” by Trymaine Lee:

The family of Jonathan Ferrell, an unarmed North Carolina man shot and killed by police shortly after he dragged himself from a violent car crash and sought help from neighbors, has filed a wrongful death lawsuit.

The lawsuit comes after autopsy results show that most of the bullets that hit Ferrell the night he was killed struck him with a downward trajectory, suggesting that he may have been on his knees or on the ground. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Officer Randall Kerrick fired a dozen shots at him, according to the family.

Ferrell was hit with 10 of those bullets and died on that early morning last September in Charlotte, not long after crashing his car along a dark, rural road.

“He was only seeking help,” Ferrell’s mother, Georgia, said during a press-conference on Tuesday morning, a day after the lawsuit was filed in North Carolina Superior Court. “I don’t know if it will bring peace,” she said of the lawsuit, “but I pray that they don’t kill no one else’s child.”

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From “Some Things You Didn’t Know About Albert Murray” by Paul Devlin (Salon.Com):

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Note: Willie Louis was born Willie Reed, in Greenwood, Mississippi.

From the New York Times obituary, by Margalit Fox:

The truck was going “real fast,” Willie Reed testified, as it came down the main road near Drew, Miss., on an August morning.

A green and white 1955 Chevrolet — that year’s model — it passed Mr. Reed as he was walking to the store, turned into a nearby plantation and parked in front of a barn.

In the cab, Mr. Reed said, were four white men. In the rear were three black men, plus a fourth — a black youth hunkered down in the very back of the truck.

Soon afterward, Mr. Reed said, he heard “somebody hollering” and “some licks like somebody was whipping somebody” coming from the barn.

The youth in the truck was named Emmett Till, and he would not be seen alive again.

The next month, the 18-year-old Mr. Reed, after braving intimidation from one of the suspects and walking through the thicket of Klansmen massed outside the courthouse, testified in open court to what he had seen and heard.

The son of a family of black sharecroppers, Mr. Reed was spirited out of Mississippi immediately after the trial. He changed his name to Willie Louis and lived discreetly in Chicago, where he worked as a hospital orderly.

Mr. Louis, one of the last living witnesses for the prosecution in the Till case, died on July 18 in Oak Lawn, Ill., a Chicago suburb. He was 76.

Till, had he lived, would have been 72 this Thursday.

The murder of Till, a 14-year-old Chicagoan visiting family in Mississippi, and the ensuing trial are watershed moments in the civil rights movement, galvanizing public attention on the deep perils of being black in the Jim Crow South.

Though the two white men tried for the murder were acquitted, the testimony of Mr. Reed was considered so powerful that it made him a hero of the movement — albeit a quiet, accidental and long unsung one, who spoke of the case only rarely and with obvious pain.

“Willie Reed stood up, and with incredible bravery pointed out the people who had taken and murdered Emmett Till,” the filmmaker Stanley Nelson, who interviewed Mr. Louis for his 2003 PBS documentary, “The Murder of Emmett Till,” said Wednesday. “He was from Mississippi, and somewhere in his heart of hearts he had to know that these people would not be convicted. But he did what he had to do.”

For decades, Mr. Louis told no one of his involvement in the case. Even his wife, Juliet, whom he married in 1976, did not learn of it until eight years later, when a relative told her.

He began speaking about it publicly only in recent years, with the release of Mr. Nelson’s film and another documentary, “The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till” (2005), directed by Keith Beauchamp.

“I couldn’t have walked away from that,” Mr. Louis told the CBS News program “60 Minutes” in 2004, speaking of his decision to testify. “Emmett was 14, probably had never been to Mississippi in his life, and he come to visit his grandfather and they killed him. I mean, that’s not right.”

Mr. Louis was born in Greenwood, Miss., in 1937 and as a youth lived with his grandfather in Drew. He worked in the fields picking cotton and received little formal education: though he was 18 at the time of the trial, he was only in the ninth grade.

On Aug. 21, 1955, Emmett Till arrived in Money, Miss., about 30 miles from Drew, to stay at the home of a great-uncle, Moses Wright. On Aug. 24, Till visited Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, a store in Money owned by a white couple, Roy and Carolyn Bryant.

Inside the store, Mrs. Bryant later testified, Till grabbed her hand and made a sexual suggestion. Leaving the store, according to some accounts, he let out a wolf whistle.

Early in the morning on Aug. 28, Mr. Bryant and his half-brother J. W. Milam abducted Till from his uncle’s home. His body, brutally beaten, shot in the head and weighed down with a cotton-gin fan laced round his neck with barbed wire, was found in the Tallahatchie River three days later.

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