In memoriam through June 15: Civil rights activist Dorothy Cotton, Neal Boyd of ‘AGT’

Dorothy Cotton, who worked closely with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., taught nonviolence to demonstrators before marches and calmed tensions by singing church hymns, died June 10 at a retirement community in New York. She was 88.

Cotton was among a small number of women in high positions at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference during the civil rights era, and she led the Atlanta-based civil rights group’s Citizenship Education Program.

“She had a beautiful voice, and when things got tense, Dorothy was the one who would start up a song to relieve the tension,” said Xernona Clayton, who was King’s office manager in Atlanta.

Cotton became one of King’s closest colleagues and worked at the SCLC for more than a decade.

Cotton also commanded respect from her male counterparts within the group, said Bernard Lafayette Jr., a longtime civil rights leader who is now chairman of the SCLC’s national board.

When King and others ventured to parts of the Deep South that had a reputation for violence against blacks, Cotton was fearless, Lafayette recalled in an interview.

“She was very courageous,” Lafayette said. “She never hesitated.”

A key focus of Cotton’s work was voter education and teaching people how to read ballots, how to vote and the importance of voting, said Edwina Moss of Cleveland, Ohio, who was civil rights leader Andrew Young’s administrative assistant.

“She worked a lot in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia — just all over — everywhere where there was a need,” Moss said. “It was extremely important work. It was probably the core foundation of the organization.”

Cotton remained active in civil rights and education after King’s death, later serving as an administrator at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Gena Turgel, who was half of a love story born in the Holocaust and whose barracks mates at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp included Anne Frank, died on June 7. She was 95. The Holocaust Educational Trust was among those announcing her death. The location was not given.

Turgel was imprisoned in several concentration camps after the Nazis invaded Poland and rousted her family from a comfortable home in Krakow. Most of her family members died, but she and her mother survived to see the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, in northern Germany.

One of the liberating British soldiers, Sgt. Norman Turgel, saw her and was lovestruck — so much so that soon after meeting her he managed to arrange a dinner for her at the officers’ mess at his British camp. The lavish setting she encountered when she entered perplexed her.

“I turned ‘round to this Sergeant Norman,” Turgel recalled in an oral history for Shalom TV, a Jewish cable channel. “I said, ‘Do we expect any special visitors? What am I doing here?’ So he says, ‘You are the special visitor. This is our engagement party.’”

They married six months later. Turgel was “the Bride of Belsen.”

She related her story in interviews and in a book, “I Light a Candle” (1987), and worked with educational groups over the years. In 2005, at 81, she escorted Queen Elizabeth II to her seat for a Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration in London, held on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, one of the camps in which she was held.

Eunice Gayson, a British stage and film actress who earned a place in cinema history as the first Bond girl, died June 8. She was 90. Her death was announced on her Twitter account. No other details were provided.

Gayson appeared in the first James Bond film, “Dr. No,” from 1962, as the sultry Sylvia Trench. She meets the British spy Bond (Sean Connery) at the elegant club Le Cercle over a game of cards. It was the first time he introduced himself as “Bond. James Bond.”

Gayson repeated the role in 1963’s “From Russia With Love” but the character was cut from subsequent movies after filmmakers decided to introduce a new “Bond girl” in every film.

Gayson trained as an opera singer and came to “Dr. No” after performing the role of Baroness Elsa Schraeder in the 1961 London production of “The Sound of Music.”

After the Bond films Gayson acted in television shows, among them two 1960s spy series, “The Saint” and “The Avengers.” She remained a fixture in London theater.

Danny Kirwan, a guitarist, singer and songwriter for Fleetwood Mac whose work fueled the band’s rise during its early years, died June 8 in London. He was 68. Fleetwood Mac announced the death in a Facebook post without specifying a cause.

“Danny’s true legacy, in my mind, will forever live on in the music he wrote and played so beautifully as a part of the foundation of Fleetwood Mac, that has now endured for over fifty years,” said a statement attributed to the band and its co-founder Mick Fleetwood.

Kirwan was a teenager when he joined the British-American rock band in 1968, but his talent was apparent to the band’s guitarists Peter Green and Jeremy Spencer, bassist John McVie and drummer Fleetwood.

His work was featured on five albums beginning with “Then Play On,” a bluesy 1969 record on which he shared writing and lead guitarist duties with Green. He wrote half of the tracks on the band’s 1972 album, “Bare Trees.”

During four years with the band, Kirwan composed thoughtful instrumentals and performed inventive harmonies. Onstage, he was known for his vibrato.

“Many guitarists make the vibrato sound like a dying cow or a mosquito in heat,” Fleetwood said in an interview last year. “Danny had an unbelievable touch.”

In 1972 Kirwan was fired from the band, reportedly after a tantrum on tour during which he smashed his Gibson Les Paul guitar.

His departure came as Fleetwood Mac was transitioning from its foundation in bluesy rock to the more melodic, California pop-rock the band came to epitomize in the 1970s. Kirwan played a role in that transition but had left the band before Stevie Nicks joined it and before the release of hit albums like the chart-topping “Rumours” and the experimental “Tusk.”

Kirwan released a few solo albums and then faded from public view. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1998 along with seven other past and present members of Fleetwood Mac. He did not attend the ceremony.

Neal Boyd, an opera singer who won NBC’s “America’s Got Talent” and dabbled in Missouri politics, died June 10 at his mother’s house in Sikeston. He was 42. Boyd had a number of medical problems, including heart failure, kidney failure and liver problems. He was seriously injured in a car crash in 2017.

Boyd won the network TV show and its $1 million prize in 2008. He released the album “My American Dream” in 2009 and performed at the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida.

Boyd also ran unsuccessfully as a Republican for a southeast Missouri House of Representatives seat, losing in the general election in 2012 and in the primary in 2014.

Samuel Tom Holiday, one of the last surviving Navajo Code Talkers from World War II, died June 11 in southern Utah Monday surrounded by family members. He was 94.

Holiday was among hundreds of Navajos who used a code based on their native language to transmit wartime messages. The Japanese never broke it.

He was 19 when he joined the Marine Corps and became a part of operations in several locations across the Pacific during the war, according to The Spectrum. A mortar explosion left him with hearing loss, but he would later tell family that he always felt safe during battle because of a pouch around his neck holding sacred stones and yellow corn pollen.

Holiday received a Congressional Silver Medal, a Purple Heart and other recognition for his action during the conflict.

After the war he returned to the Navajo reservation and worked as a police officer, a ranger and later started his own equipment company. In 2013, Holiday co-wrote a book about his experience as a Code Talker called “Under the Eagle.”

Fewer than 10 Code Talkers are believed to be alive today. The exact number is unknown because the program remained classified for several years following the war.

D.J. Fontana, whose simple but forceful drumming behind Elvis Presley helped to shape the early sound of rock ‘n' roll, died June 13 at a hospital in Nashville. He was 87. His son, David, said Fontana had been in poor health since breaking his hip in a fall last year.

Fontana was the first drummer in Presley’s band and played with him for 14 years, from Presley’s earliest days in the national spotlight through the 1968 television special that was widely hailed as Presley’s return to form. He backed Presley on more than 450 recordings, including hits like “Hound Dog,” “All Shook Up,” “Blue Suede Shoes” and “It’s Now or Never,” and was seen playing with him in the movies “Loving You,” “Jailhouse Rock” and “G.I. Blues.”

He was later an in-demand studio musician in Nashville.

Fontana’s entree into rock history came by way of his job as a member of the band on “Louisiana Hayride,” a popular country-music radio show broadcast from Shreveport, Louisiana. Presley, at the beginning of his career, appeared on the show in October 1954 with his backing band, which at the time consisted of just two musicians: Scotty Moore on guitar and Bill Black on double bass. Fontana played with the band on that broadcast, and the next year he became a permanent member.

Presley’s blend of country, blues and other elements was already distinctive. The addition of Fontana’s powerful drumming raised it to a new level.

“Elvis and Scotty and Bill were making good music,” drummer and singer Levon Helm said in an interview with The Associated Press in 2004, “but it wasn’t rock ‘n’ roll until D.J. put the backbeat into it.”

Fontana worked with Presley through his comeback TV special in December 1968. The show presented Presley informally in a jam-session setting, with Moore once again on guitar and Fontana beating out the rhythm with his drumsticks on a closed guitar case.

But with Presley using increasingly bigger ensembles for his records and his appearances in Las Vegas, Fontana no longer felt he belonged and the two parted ways. They never worked together again.

This story was originally published June 15, 2018 at 9:23 PM with the headline "In memoriam through June 15: Civil rights activist Dorothy Cotton, Neal Boyd of ‘AGT’."