The Memorial Wall

With Philip J. Hirschkop, he brought Loving v. Virginia to the Supreme Court, which struck down laws against interracial marriages.

“Dear Sir,” began the letter from Washington that found its way to Bernard S. Cohen at the American Civil Liberties Union in June 1963. “I am writing to you concerning a problem we have. Five years ago my husband and I were married here in the District. We then returned to Virginia to live. My husband is white, and I am part Negro and part Indian.”

The letter, from Mildred Loving, went on to explain that when she and her husband, Richard, returned to Caroline County, Va., to live, they were charged with violating Virginia’s law against mixed-race marriages and exiled from the state.

“It was that simple letter that got us into this not-so-simple case,” Mr. Cohen said later. The not-so-simple case was Loving v. Virginia, which Mr. Cohen and his co-counsel, Philip J. Hirschkop, eventually took to the Supreme Court. In a landmark unanimous ruling in 1967, the court said that laws banning interracial marriage, which were in effect in a number of states, mostly in the South, were unconstitutional.

Mr. Cohen died on Monday at an assisted-living center in Fredericksburg, Va. He was 86.

His son, Bennett, said the cause was Parkinson’s disease.

The Lovings had married in 1958. Five weeks later they were in their home in Caroline County when the county sheriff and two deputies burst in and arrested them. They pleaded guilty to violating the state’s Racial Integrity Act and were sentenced to a year in jail; a judge, Leon M. Bazile, suspended the sentence on the condition that they leave the state and not return together for 25 years.

By 1963 that restriction had begun to chafe, since they had relatives in Virginia and Ms. Loving missed “walking on grass instead of concrete,” as she put it. A relative noticed her distress.

“I was crying the blues all the time, so she said, ‘Why don’t you write Robert Kennedy?’” she recalled in a 1992 interview with The New York Times. “She said that’s what he’s there for.”

Mr. Kennedy was the attorney general at the time, and Ms. Loving did indeed write to him, asking if the national civil rights legislation then being formulated would provide any relief. Mr. Kennedy in turn suggested she write to the A.C.L.U., where Mr. Cohen was a longtime volunteer.

Mr. Cohen acknowledged that he was not particularly well versed in the relevant areas of law. He faced other obstacles as well, not the least of which was Judge Bazile, whose rulings in the case included this oft-cited declaration: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and He placed them on separate continents, and but for the interference with His arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages.”

He began by filing a motion to set aside the sentence, but Judge Bazile took no action on it for months; the Lovings became concerned that they’d been forgotten. But in 1964 a law professor introduced Mr. Cohen to Mr. Hirschkop, who had only recently graduated from law school but knew civil rights litigation. He helped steer the case onto a path that eventually brought it to the Supreme Court, where, Mr. Hirschkop said in a phone interview, he argued that the Virginia law was a violation of the equal protection clause of the Constitution and Mr. Cohen argued that it was also a due process violation.

“Under our Constitution,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in finding in their favor, “the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State.”

Bernard Sol Cohen was born on Jan. 17, 1934, in Brooklyn. His father, Benjamin, was a furrier, and his mother, Fannie (Davidson) Cohen, was a homemaker.

He grew up in Brooklyn and graduated from the City College of New York in 1956 with a degree in economics. He graduated from Georgetown Law School in 1960.

Bennett Cohen said that, after the Loving case, his father did a lot of work in environmental law. In one case, he said, “the Jewish boy from Brooklyn represented some Christmas tree farmers whose whole crop of Christmas trees was destroyed by acid rain.” That lawsuit, he said, forced nearby power plants to reduce their pollution.

From 1980 to 1996, Mr. Cohen served in the Virginia House of Delegates, where among his accomplishments were measures that restricted smoking — a hard sell in a tobacco state like Virginia. Over the years, the story of the Loving case was told in a 1996 Showtime movie; the 2011 HBO documentary “The Loving Story,” directed by Nancy Buirski; and the 2016 feature film “Loving,” based in part on that documentary.

Richard Loving was killed in a car accident in 1975. Mildred Loving died in 2008.

In addition to his son, Mr. Cohen is survived by his wife of 61 years, Rae (Rose) Cohen; a daughter, Karen Cohen; and three grandchildren.

In 1994, when Mr. Cohen received a distinguished service award from the Virginia Trial Lawyers Association, he gave an acceptance speech in which he lamented that public opinion of lawyers had turned negative, focusing on a few big-dollar civil verdicts and stereotyping anyone seeking redress in the courts as being part of an overly litigious society.

“There seems to be months of trial time available for Pennzoil to sue Texaco and for Polaroid to sue Kodak,” he said, “but cluttering the court with everyday people has become bad form, bad habit, bad business.”

He worried, he said, about the chilling effect.

“In a society of laws, driven by centers of economic and financial power,” he said, “if the courts are not available for the average person to seek justice, then the average person will not receive justice.”

French paleontologist Yves Coppins, famous for discovering in Ethiopia in 1974 the skeleton of Lucy, the ancestors of humans dating back about 3.2 million years, the most famous Australopithecus afarensis, died today at the age of 87 after a long illness. Coppins is considered the “father of prehistory”, who revolutionized thanks to dozens of discoveries in paleobiology over the course of more than half a century. In October 2021, he organized a workshop on symbolism and the religious sense in man from the beginning at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, of which he has been a member since 2014.

He was Professor Emeritus of Ancient and Prehistoric Anthropology at the College de France, Director Emeritus of the Musée du Manne in Paris, and a member of scientific institutions around the world, including the Royal Academy of Sciences, the European Academy, the Royal Belgian Academy, the National Academy of Sciences in Rome and the Institut Royal Anthropology.

Born in Vans on August 9, 1934, Coppins began his research first in Brittany while in high school and then at the Sorbonne in Rennes in Paris, where he studied geology, zoology, botany, and palaeontology. In 1956 he joined the French National Center for Scientific Research and dealt with distant periods and distant countries, particularly the borders of the Third and Quaternary eras in the tropics of the Old World. Beginning in 1960, he organized important expeditions first on his own in Chad, then in international cooperation, in Ethiopia (Omo Valley and Afar Basin) as well as numerous expeditions in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Mauritania, South Africa, Indonesia, the Philippines, China and Siberia. His research focused on the paleontology of vertebrates (proboscis, hippos), their formation and importance to paleoenvironments, climate, biology, as well as paleoanthropology. The fruit of those expeditions is remarkable: tens of tons of fossils including more than a thousand human remains which could have been studied with amazing results, shedding light on the history of the past ten million years. He is known for his hypotheses that highlight the interrelationships between human evolution and the evolution of the environment.

In 1969 Cobbins was called to the deputy director of the Museum of Man, who became its director in 1980 at the same time
To dedicate the Anthropology Chair to the National Museum of Natural History. Meanwhile, travel to the Omo River valley in Ethiopia, an important site for the discovery of ancient humans. At the request of Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, the British paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey organized an international expedition in which Yves Coppins participated, discovering the remains of Australopithecus Aethiopicos (2.5 million years ago).

Then the French scientist headed to Afar in eastern Ethiopia: in 1974 Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) was discovered with Maurice Tayeb and Don Johansson (USA). Lucy’s 52 bones (a human skeleton has 206) made it possible to reconstruct her weight, age, and movement and to discover that pre-humans walked and climbed trees. Lucy’s name comes from the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” whose tunes rang out in the field.

Over the years, Coppins has formulated hypotheses proposing an ecological explanation for the separation of Hominidae Panidae 8 million years ago (1983), another hypothesis that identified the first appearance of Australopithecines 4 million years ago (1999), and another hypothesis about the emergence of the genus Homo 3 million years ago (1975) . These three stages postulated by Coppins are connected vertically or transversely within real trees, and each creates the conditions for the next stage, while developing its own stock in an original and independent manner.

Drawing on the different speeds of development of biology and technology, Yves Coppins also explained how the acquired gradually prevailed over the innate, giving man freedom and responsibility, and why human evolution slowed and then stopped.

Robert Lewis Smith died peacefully in Murfreesboro, TN on September 23, 2020. His wife of 60 years, Mary "Sue" Crisp Smith, also died peacefully in Murfreesboro, TN on November 19, 2020.

Robert was born on June 22nd, 1938 in Ranger, TX. He grew up in nearby Abilene as the 4th child of the late Lewis Smith and Eunice Turner Smith. He was preceded in death by his brother Ned Smith of Houston, TX and his sister Marilyn Owens of Abilene, TX. His sister Bonnie Baker of Dallas, TX passed away on May 3, 2021.

Sue was born in Victoria, TX on December 11, 1938, the firstborn to her parents, the late Noah and Elizabeth Crisp. She is survived by her brothers Don Crisp and Jerry Crisp, both of Dallas, TX.

Robert and Sue are survived by their children Sara Smith of Shreveport, LA, Timothy Smith and his wife Jocelyn of Olympia, WA, Marcie Smith Castleberry and her husband John of Murfreesboro, TN, and Andrew Smith and his wife Erin of Seattle, WA. They have five grandchildren: Will Smith, Nathan Smith, Erin Smith, Elliot Smith, and Ben Smith.

Robert and Sue both graduated from Abilene Christian College in 1961. Robert received a doctoral degree from The University of Tennessee, Memphis. They moved to Shreveport in 1968 where Robert joined the faculty of LSU Health Sciences Center. He was a researcher and professor of Biochemistry there until he retired in 2006.

Sue worked as an advocate for people with disabilities. She was president of the PTO at Sara's school, and she worked for many years with the Caddo-Bossier Association for Retarded Citizens, including serving as its president. In 1979 Sue created ACCESS, a state-funded agency designed to help disabled people access resources to enable them to overcome limitations.

Sue and Robert were both longtime members of Southern Hills Church of Christ and then Clearview Church of Shreveport. Robert served first as deacon then as elder at Southern Hills. Sue was a gifted teacher and leader. She taught Bible classes and led home Bible studies. Robert and Sue opened their home to many "small groups," furloughed missionaries, and other friends over the years. In 2010 they helped establish Clearview Church of Shreveport with the goal of reaching more young people with Christ's message of hope.

Robert was deeply interested in the interface between science and faith. Well after retirement he continued to read scientific books and journals, compelled by his love for nature and respect for the scientific process. This wonder also compelled him to hike, fish, and garden for as long as his Parkinson's Disease would allow.

Sue had a quick and inquisitive mind. She loved to learn and was interested in new ideas. When home computers came on the scene, Sue was an early adopter and she loved helping others with her skills. Even in old age, she could help her middle-aged children with their software woes.

Both Robert and Sue especially loved visits from their children and grandchildren. During those times, their home was full of the family cooking and eating together, playing games and working puzzles, laughing, talking, and watching football, with grandkids running joyfully through the house. Their family will always cherish memories of those times together.

Our dear friend, Joyce, went home on June 1, 2010.

Born in Canada on the 156th anniversary of Beethoven's birthday, she had a passion for music. With a contralto voice, her singing choices embraced spirituals, oratorio, operatic arias, and show tunes. She directed choirs, particularly children's choirs. She sang in a wide variety of venues. She joked that she had sung in so many different churches that she was ecumenical. Joyce had a non-stop zest for life, even as Parkinson's disease slowed her mobility.

Her lifelong mantra was "Don't take life too seriously; you'll never get out of it anyhow."

For nearly 53 years, Joyce and her cousin and best friend, Grace, laughed, traveled, attended all manner of events, made friends and volunteered, as they together enjoyed life to the full. Yes, they did work once in a while as well. Joyce's favorite spiritual was Anton Dovrak's "Goin' Home" "Mother's there 'specting me, Father's waiting, too. Lots of folks gathered there, All the friends I knew…. Through an open door…. Goin' home."

Joyce leaves behind a lot of friends who have yet to walk the final mile, but she looks forward to seeing them again, too. 

"Thanks for the Memories!!!" - Grace

Really sad news, Vern. One of the men who brought Ernest P. Worrell to life has died. Filmmaker John Cherry died Sunday after a long battle with Parkinson's disease at the age of 73. 

"Buster, as his friends lovingly knew him by, was probably the most brilliant man I've ever met," reads a post from Melissa Laster on a Facebook page dedicated to the iconic character portrayed by Jim Varney. "Even as Parkinson's began to rob him of some things, that creative mind of his was always going full-force to the best of its ability.

"He was kind, amazingly funny, generous and had a heart of gold. In addition to being a brilliant writer, he was also an amazing artist, a skilled fisherman and an all-around amazing human being."

Cherry, a longtime resident of Williamson County, helped create the lovable good ol' boy Ernest character for his ad agency Carden and Cherry, alongside then-rising stand-up comic Varney in the role that would wind up defining both of their careers. The character was created to help advertise a then-rundown Beech Bend Raceway Park in Bowling Green, Ky.

In a 1990 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Cherry described the appeal that Ernest had during the advertising days. 

"Every time we do a study on who Ernest appeals to, it’s the under-13 and over-35 age groups,” Cherry said at the time. “If you’re under 13, it’s OK, and when you’re over 35, you know it doesn’t count anymore — you don’t have to be cool.”

The Ernest character first was used in regional advertisements (including an eight-year run with Nashville's Purity Dairies) and in short comedy skits before he hosted a direct-to-video special, Knowhutimean? Hey Vern, It's My Family Album, in 1983. He made his theatrical debut in 1985's subversive cult film Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam, which saw Varney play seven roles, including Ernest, the titular Dr. Otto and his recurring character Auntie Nelda. That film started Cherry's longtime practice of mainly shooting the Ernest films in and around Nashville. 

Cherry is survived by his children Josh, Emilie and Chapman. His son Josh appeared in Ernest in “the Army” as Corporal Davis.