Life

U.S. Rep. John Lewis Receiving Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2011

Rep. John R. Lewis, the civil rights icon whose fight for racial justice began in the Jim Crow south and ended in the halls of Congress, died Friday night. John Lewis represented Georgia's 5th congressional district. He had been suffering from Stage IV pancreatic cancer since December. He was 80 old.

News from Bujumbura, Burundi, later confirmed in a statement from the Burundian Government, indicate that Pierre Nkurunziza, the President of Burundi, has died following a cardiac arrest on June 8, 2020 at the Karusi Fiftieth Anniversary Hospital. He was  55 years old.

Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson, NASA mathematician, physicist, and scientist. Credit NASA

Katherine Globe Johnson, known as the  "Black Woman Who Advanced Human Rights and Humanity With A Slide Rule and a Pencil" (see AfroAmerica Network),  died on Monday, February 24, 2020. She was 101.

She was depicted as one of the history-making and barrier-breaking NASA mathematicians  in "Hidden Figures,"  the  biographical drama film based on the non-fiction book of Margot Lee Shetterly.  She along with Octavia Spencer, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson were the black NASA employees who participated in calculating flight trajectories for Project Mercury in 1962.