In writing about Guichard Parris, Class of 1927, and his 40+ year career with the National Urban League, my mind began to shift to thoughts of the current living Amherst College Black Alumni who, in my mind, is the greatest living Amherst College Black Alumni. My thoughts shifted to Hugh Bernard Price, Class of 1963, who served as the President of the National Urban League from 1994 to 2003.

If you look for an extensive Wikipedia article for Hugh Price you will be disappointed. Below is the Blackpast article which more fully describes his significance. But even it does not do Hugh justice, because while the article mentions that he retired in 2005, I know for a fact that he never did. I know this because a few years ago Hugh wrote a book entitled Strugglers to Strivers (see below) and graciously spent several days online with me discussing the interesting aspects of the thesis of his book.

I also know Hugh for his insightful comments as my keynote speaker at the 2021 Black Alumni Memorial Service. He did not have to do that, but he did. And I also know Hugh for his current efforts to build and preserve the Lewis Latimer House in Queens, New York (see the article set forth below). Latimer is one of the most important African American inventors and he happens to be one of Hugh's relatives.

In my book, it is Hugh Price's lifelong service which makes him the greatest living Amherst College Black Alumni. As for the Waters of Bellagio listed in the title of this piece, well one of Hugh's best creations is his daughter Traer Price, a designer of custom jewelry who also does water choreography. As she notes,

Water choreography is a niche I've occupied since 1990, with show highlights that include "Luck Be a Lady" and "Carol of the Bells" at the Fountains of Bellagio, Las Vegas; "I Will Always Love You" and "The Prayer" at the Dubai Fountain, Dubai, UAE; "New York, New York" and "My Heart Will Go On" at the Wynn Macau.

I invite you all to view the following videos and to read the following articles and I think you may begin to see why, for me, Hugh Price is our greatest living treasure.

Fountains of Bellagio - Carol of the Bells (2014) - YouTube

Fountains of Bellagio - Carol of the Bells (2014)

Wynn Palace Fountain - My heart will go on - YouTube

Wynn Palace Fountain - My heart will go on

Burj Khalifa THE PRAYER celine dion amazing water show.. - YouTube

Burj Khalifa THE PRAYER celine dion amazing water show..

Peace,

Everett "Skip" Jenkins

Class of 1975

Fairfield, California

September

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Hugh Price (1941 – )

Posted onMay 26, 2011by contributed by: Kelly Trsek

Hugh Price at March in Columbia, SC protesting Confederate Flag flying at State Capitol, 2000

Courtesy National Urban Leagues Archives, Fair use image

Hugh Bernard Price, civil rights activist and president of the National Urban League, was born on November 22, 1941 in Washington, DC. Raised in a middle-class home by his parents, Charlotte Schuster and Kline Price, Price became aware of racial struggles and the importance of activism as a child. He began his schooling in a segregated elementary school and graduated from an integrated high school. His parents were involved in the early litigation which would lead to Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.

Price graduated with a BA from Amherst College in 1963 and married Marilyn Lloyd that same year. He entered law school at Yale in New Haven, graduating in 1966. New Haven became Price’s home, as he became an attorney with the New Haven Legal Assistance Association in 1966, and then with Cogen, Holt and Associates in 1970. In both positions Price focused on supporting low-income clients. Although never directly involved with the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Price spent much of his life working to improve the lives of impoverished urban blacks.

In 1977, Price moved to New York City, where he was hired as an editorial writer for the New York Times. His editorials focused primarily on issues concerning race and poverty. In 1982, Price became the senior vice president and director of the production for WNET-TV in New York City. Six years later, in 1988, he became vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation, which funded projects to better communities and lives of disadvantaged people. Price worked heavily with the Special Initiatives and Explorations grant fund to improve the welfare of people of color through school reform and equal opportunity projects. His experience at the Rockefeller Foundation led the National Urban League to recruit him as president.

In 1994, when Price became president and CEO of the National Urban League, the 84-year-old organization was on the decline. Price played a crucial role in reviving the League, making it, once again, a leading organization in social justice activism. Up until Price’s presidency, the League had focused primarily on preparing rural African Americans for life in the cities. Recognizing that the great migration of southern blacks to northern cities was over, Price reoriented the goals of the organization. He focused on three principle initiatives: education and youth development programs, economic empowerment, and inclusionary programs. These initiatives, in turn, promoted the League’s new priority, addressing intergenerational urban poverty and the growing urban underclass. While at the League, Price also created related programs, most notably the Campaign for African American Achievement and the Institute of Opportunity and Equality. Hugh Price left the National Urban League in 2003 and retired in 2005. Price is a member of Sigma Pi Phi and Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternities.

----- Forwarded Message -----

From: skipjen2865@aol.com <skipjen2865@aol.com>

To: Everett Jenkins <skipjen2865@aol.com>

Sent: Tuesday, September 24, 2024 at 11:33:58 PM PDT

Subject: Hugh Price and the 'Waters of Bellagio

Strugglers Into Strivers: What the Military Can Teach Us about How Young People Learn and Grow Paperback – September 1, 2014

by Hugh B. Price (Author)

5.0 5.0 out of 5 stars 4 ratings

See all formats and editions

Research convincingly shows that students who struggle perpetually in school often lack the social and emotional skills needed to succeed academically. Their families, communities, and churches have fallen short. Their peer groups often pull them in the wrong direction. Drawing on research and real-world experience, Hugh Price proposes a new school paradigm that places equal emphasis on adolescents' academic and social development. By borrowing from the best of United States military education and training methods, Price argues, we can find out a lot about how young people learn and grow, particularly troubled teens and high school dropouts. Fostering responsible citizenship, community service, life-coping skills, health and hygiene, belonging, teamwork, interdependence, self-discipline, and accountability to oneself and others-this is what the U.S. military does well, even for young people who've been written off. Price urges the creation of a brand new type of public school, one devoted to the academic and social development of students who are laboring futilely in school and in life, schools whose mission it is to turn Strugglers Into Strivers.

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Long in the Shadows, the Latimer House Museum Gets a Glow-Up

The Queens home of the Black inventor who contributed to the invention of the lightbulb gets an overdue makeover.

Listen to this article · 9:21 min Learn more

A modest Queen Anne–style wood-frame house with a yellow facade stands inside a well-kept garden enclosed by a tall iron fence.

The Lewis Latimer House Museum at the corner of 137th and Leavitt Streets in Flushing, Queens, the home of the Black inventor whose innovation vastly improved the durability of Edison’s lightbulb.Credit...Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York Times

By Sam Roberts

Published June 13, 2024Updated June 24, 2024

Sign up for the Race/Related Newsletter Join a deep and provocative exploration of race, identity and society with New York Times journalists.

In an episode of HBO’s “The Gilded Age,” Peggy Scott, the budding journalist, and T. Thomas Fortune, her discerning editor, expectantly await the illumination of the New York Times building in Lower Manhattan.

“Tell me, what are your thoughts on electricity?” Fortune says.

“Are you talking about Mr. Edison’s lights?”

“Well, Mr. Edison is not solely responsible,” Fortune says, correcting her.

“Who else was involved?” Scott asks.

Lewis Latimer, Fortune responds, a Black inventor: “He created a better carbon filament. That’s the thing in the bulb that helps keep the lights on, so to speak.”

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“Well, I’m sure that Mr. Edison will give Mr. Latimer his due credit at the ceremony."

To which Fortune laughs and says, “I admire your wit, Miss Scott.”

Lewis H. Latimer did not get all the credit due him. His invention of a method to manufacture carbon filament to make lightbulbs mass-producible was patented in 1882, but he had been working at that time for Thomas Edison’s rival. (Latimer was generally recognized earlier, when the Equitable Building and the Union League Club in Manhattan were illuminated, but didn’t join Edison’s company until 1884.)

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Lewis H. Latimer (circa 1882), who vastly improved the practicality and durability of Edison’s incandescent lightbulb.Credit...Queens Library

When Latimer died in 1928, he was described in a two-paragraph obituary in The Times as “an electrical engineer widely known throughout the United States.” Today, though, he is perhaps best known as the namesake of a public housing development in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens and an elementary school in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.

Beyond those markers, Latimer, who never got beyond elementary school himself, has been largely forgotten. Historians and civic leaders hope to rectify that with the reopening of the Lewis Latimer House Museum in Queens.

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Latimer’s yellow-frame Queen Anne-style clapboard home with coral trim at the corner of 137th and Leavitt Streets near the Flushing High School athletic field has been restored and rejuvenated into a 21st-century kinetic tribute to the self-taught inventor, draftsman and patent expert.

Starting June 15, it will be open to the public Friday through Sunday, 11 a. m. to 5 p.m., and during the week to school groups.

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Photographs and displays at the museum include a portrait (center) of Lewis Latimer and his wife, Mary, on the porch of their home

Photographs and displays at the Latimer House Museum include a portrait (center) of Lewis Latimer and his wife, Mary, on the porch of their home.Credit...Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York Times

Latimer figured profoundly, if not prominently, in the introduction of transformational scientific ventures like Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, the commercialization of Edison’s lightbulb and social movements like abolitionism (his father, George, was an early hero of the movement). He was also an artist, poet and flutist who presaged the Harlem Renaissance.

“It’s certainly not ‘our grandfather’s historic-house museum,’” said Hugh B. Price, the former president of the National Urban League, who becomes the museum’s chairman next month.

Latimer was Price’s great-granduncle and Price recalls visiting his great-aunt, one of Latimer’s two daughters, at the house in Flushing as a college student.

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“Lewis Latimer was one of the very first African Americans to break the corporate glass ceiling and ascend the ladder of major American businesses,” said Price, a former member of the editorial board of The New York Times.

“He was an early trailblazer for the traditionally marginalized by demonstrating that qualified people who all too often are victims of discrimination and denied opportunity can compete and excel, produce and perform, create and contribute as capably as anyone else,” Price said.

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Hugh B. Price, wearing a teal T-shirt and khaki pants, poses on the museum’s porch.

Hugh B. Price, Latimer’s great-grandnephew on the porch of the Lewis Latimer House Museum. Price becomes the museum’s chairman next month.Credit...Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York Times

In what seems like a striking omission in retrospect, the Times obituary didn’t mention that Latimer was Black — a pioneer, like Benjamin Banneker in the 18th century and Thomas Jennings in the 19th, who overcame racial discrimination to advance science and social justice movements.

Latimer’s neighborhood of Flushing has a rich Native American heritage, and it is also famous for a foundational document of American freedom: the Flushing Remonstrance, in which neighbors petitioned Peter Stuyvesant in 1657 to stop discriminating against Quakers.

Latimer was an early disciple of two nascent causes that blossomed long after his death: the integral link between science and art (now known at STEAM, for curriculums that stress science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics) and the Black Is Beautiful assertion of self-respect.

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The house at 64 Holly Street (now 137-53 Holly Avenue) was scheduled to be razed in the 1980s to make way for new homes. But an article in The Times about the proposed demolition prompted the Queens Historical Society, the General Electric Foundation and Latimer’s granddaughter Winifred Latimer Norman to have it moved about a mile away to 137th Street.

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A black-and-white photograph of a study hangs against a mesh curtain that features part of a map of Flushing, Queens.

A print of the original photograph of Lewis Latimer’s study hangs against a mesh curtain that features part of a map that shows the original location of Latimer’s home in Holly Street in Flushing, Queens.Credit...Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York Times

Latimer lived and worked in the house from 1903 to 1928, and it was owned by the family until 1963. In 1995, it was designated a New York City landmark. Three years later, a modest museum opened, operated by the nonprofit Lewis H. Latimer Fund under an agreement with the city’s Parks and Recreation Department, which owns the building and land.

The museum struggled, though. It was underfunded; its exhibits were static. Its location, Flushing, had become heavily Chinese American, and the new leadership wants the museum to be more relevant to the neighborhood. One of those who had major say in the reimagining is Ran Yan, who came to the United States from China to pursue a master’s degree in historic preservation at Cornell University.

After graduation, Yan and Monica O. Montgomery received fellowships from the Historic House Trust of New York City to make Latimer House more contemporary, and Yan was ultimately appointed as the museum’s executive director.

With a $750,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation, the first floor has been restored to its early-20th-century appearance and divided into galleries that illustrate and celebrate Latimer’s life: his biography as a Civil War soldier and civil rights activist whose mother and father were enslaved, before escaping; his connections with fellow scientists and the family’s roots in the neighborhood; his inventions, including a more efficient toilet for railroad trains and the improved carbon filament for lightbulbs; and the endurance of his drafting and patents and his legacy.

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The galleries have video devices, touch screens, 3-D models and a machine that recites Latimer’s poems. His Civil War uniform is also on display, along with blueprints, drafting tools and other exhibits designed by Isometric Studio and memorabilia borrowed from the Queens Public Library.

“In the spirit of Lewis Latimer’s penchant for technology and thirst for discovery, it has been transformed into a highly interactive, tech-forward experience,” Price said.

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An interactive monitor in the museum shows a detail of a cooling apparatus, patented in January 1886.

An interactive monitor in the refurbished Latimer house museum shows a detail of a cooling apparatus, patented in January 1886.Credit...Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York Times

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A blue-colored panel that features the poem titled “The Ebon Venus.

An interactive sculpture in the museum shows panels featuring poems by Lewis Latimer including “The Ebon Venus,” an ode to his wife, Mary.Credit...Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York Times

This week, the Latimer House received a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to digitize its collection.

Latimer was born in 1848 in Chelsea, Mass. At 16, he lied about his age to join the Union Navy. He worked his way up from an office boy at a firm of patent lawyers in Boston and was awarded his first patent in 1874 — an improved toilet on railroad trains, designed with Charles W. Brown.

In 1876, Bell hired him to draft drawings that secured his patent for the telephone ahead of a rival and technical illustrations that helped bring the telephone into production.

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In 1881, Latimer was named superintendent of the incandescent lamp department of Hiram Maxim’s U.S. Electric Lighting Company. A year later he patented a transcendent process to make the carbon filament that gives off light in glass bulbs, and also found a better way to manufacture the bulbs.

In 1884, he began defending Thomas Edison’s patents as an expert witness and later wrote a seminal book, “Incandescent Electric Lighting: A Practical Description of the Edison System.”

From 1896 until 1911, he was the chief draftsman and a patent consultant for the Board of Patent Control, formed by General Electric and Westinghouse to coordinate patent licensing and litigation.

In 1918, he helped found the stellar alumni association of Edison Pioneers and was the only African American among its 37 members.

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An original copy of an 1881 patent application accompanied by drawings of an electric lamp and its parts.

An original copy of Lewis Latimer and J. V. Nichols’s successful patent application for the electric lamp in September 1881.Credit...Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York Times

Yan said she hopes visitors will leave the museum inspired by Latimer’s perseverance in overcoming the barriers a Black man faced in the 19th century, his self-education and his collaboration with fellow inventors, his spirit of community that led him to teach drawing to European immigrants at the Henry Street Settlement House and to found the interracial First Unitarian Church of Flushing. She noted, too, the sensitivity and grace that defined his poetry and celebration of Black culture as reflected in an ode to his wife, which ends:

O’er marble Venus let them rage
Who set the fashions of the Age,
Each to his taste; but as for me
My Venus shall be ebony.

Lewis Latimer House Museum

34-41 137th Street, Flushing, Queens; 718-961-8585, lewislatimerhouse.org.

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----- Forwarded Message -----

From: skipjen2865@aol.com <skipjen2865@aol.com>

To:

Sent: Friday, September 20, 2024 at 08:41:15 AM PDT

Subject: Guichard Parris (Amherst College Class of 1927), Amherst College Phi Beta Kappa National Urban League Public Relations Director and Whitney Young Medallion Recipient

The next name on my Memorial List is Guichard Parris, another Amherst College Phi Beta Kappa, who later became the long time (40+ year) Public Relations Director for the National Urban League. For his service to the National Urban League, Mr. Parris received the Whitney Young Medallion. His New York Times obituary follows.

Peace,

Everett "Skip" Jenkins

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Guichard Parris, 87, Urban League Officer

Nov. 16, 1990

Credit...The New York Times Archives

See the article in its original context from
November 16, 1990, Section B, Page 8Buy Reprints

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About the Archive

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.

Guichard Parris, a former officer of the National Urban League, died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 87 years old.

He died of a heart attack, a spokeswoman for the league said.

Mr. Parris, an adviser to two former league executive directors, Lester Granger and Whitney Young, joined the organization in 1944. In 1946, he started the league's public relations program. At his retirement in 1988, he had built it into a department employing 16 people who produced and distributed three million pieces of literature yearly, in addition to films for schools, television and civic organizations.

With Lester Brooks, he put together a book, "Blacks in the City," in 1950, commemorating the league's 40th anniversary.

He was born on the island of Guadeloupe in the French West Indies, and graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. He graduated from Amherst College, magna cum laude, and received an M.A. from Columbia University. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

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He is survived by his wife, the former Willie Ferron; two daughters, Mary Jacobs and Louise Manley, and a son Frederick, all of Manhattan; three grandchildren, and eight great-grandchildren.

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My Music

Sunday, October 20, 2024

A00089 - Joseph Clarence Chambers, Jr. (Amherst College Class of 1930), Composer of "All American Suite for Two Pianos"

Chambers All American (A Satirical Suite for Two Pianos), played by Jose and Amparo Iturbi (1950) (youtube.com)

and to reflect on a remarkable life that was ... and a wonderful legacy that is.

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Joseph Clarence Chambers, Jr.

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Deceased November 3, 2006

In Memory

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A00088 - The Wandering Day

not all those who wander are lost song from the rings of power - Search ...

Sunday, October 6, 2024

A00087 - Traer Price's "The Prayer" Water Choreography

Dubai dancing fountain - Celine Dion & Andrea Bocelli - The Prayer 🎶

A00086 - Hugh Price and the Waters of Bellagio

Fountains of Bellagio - Carol of the Bells (2014)

Wynn Palace Fountain - My heart will go on

Burj Khalifa THE PRAYER celine dion amazing water show..

Hugh Price (1941 – )

Strugglers Into Strivers: What the Military Can Teach Us about How Young People Learn and Grow Paperback – September 1, 2014

Long in the Shadows, the Latimer House Museum Gets a Glow-Up

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I Wanted to Crave Him, Not Have Him

How Optimus Prime and Megatron Learned to Transform in ‘Transformers One’

Widowed, 60, Seeking Affection

Guichard Parris, 87, Urban League Officer