Justin Dart Jr., 71, an activist who for more than five decades worked in his wheelchair to champion the cause of people with disabilities, died Saturday at his home in Washington.
Mr. Dart, whose family said he died in his sleep of natural causes, was regarded among the fathers of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the landmark 1990 civil rights law for the disabled. In 1998, he was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton.
Born in Chicago in 1930, Mr. Dart contracted polio in 1948 and used a wheelchair since then. He began working for the disabled from that time, when he was a student at the University of Houston, and went on to become chairman of the President's Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities in the Reagan administration.
Beverly Axelrod, 78, an activist and lawyer whose clients included members of the Black Panthers, American Indian activists and radicals of the 1960s and '70s, died of emphysema Wednesday at her home in Pacifica, Calif.
In 1952, she became president of the Modesto National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and, as an attorney for the Congress of Racial Equality, she participated in voter registration drives in the South. She represented Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, author of Soul on Ice, and also represented Jerry Rubin, co-founder of the Youth International Party, a radical street theater group, when he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1966.
Truck Parham, 91, a Chicago bassist who became known throughout the country playing with some of the biggest names in jazz during seven decades and crossing stylistic boundaries, died June 5 in Chicago, where he lived.
Although he came of age in the early days of jazz and was usually thought of as a traditionalist, Mr. Parham was at home in many different contexts. In the 1950s, he demonstrated his versatility by working with Dixieland cornetist Muggsy Spanier, swing drummer Louis Bellson and bebop saxophonist Gigi Gryce.
He became known across the country when Chicago pianist Earl Hines hired him in 1940. His records with the Hines band included "Jelly Jelly," featuring a vocal by Billy Eckstine, which became a sizable hit. After two years with Mr. Hines, Mr. Parham joined Jimmie Lunceford's big band, with which he toured and recorded extensively until Mr. Lunceford's death in 1947.
Frank O. Spinney, 93, who played a principal role in the formation of Old Sturbridge Village, the outdoor historical museum in Massachusetts, died June 4 in a Medford, N.J., retirement community. A leader in professionalizing the field of outdoor history-museum work in the United States, Mr. Spinney was a professor of museum studies at Oneonta College in Oneonta, N.Y., for some years.
From 1954 to 1962, Mr. Spinney was chief executive of Old Sturbridge Village, in southern Massachusetts. It was founded in 1946 to show visitors what life was like in a small, 19th-century New England town.
George Finn, 88, who with his late brother Charles were dubbed the Flying Finn Twins by the media during a battle with federal authorities over a surplus war plane in the 1950s, died Saturday in Carson City, Nev.
The Finns, identical twins, also were longtime foes of the California-Nevada Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, insisting its regulation of Lake Tahoe was unconstitutional. George continued that battle after Charles' death in 1986.
The Finns served as pilots in the Army Air Forces during World War II, and participated in the Berlin airlift. In the 1950s, the brothers, hoping to start a civilian air cargo service, drew national headlines for "liberating" a surplus military plane they bought from a Central California school district.
Marvin Paymer, 81, a pianist, composer, musicologist and author, died of cancer June 14 in San Diego.
In 1977, he co-founded and, until his retirement in 1993, served as associate director of the Pergolesi Research Center at City University of New York Graduate Center.
Mr. Paymer authenticated 13 Pergolesi compositions by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi among hundreds of fakes attributed to the posthumously famous 18th-century Italian composer, who died at 26.
Arthur K. Trask, 91, an attorney and patriarch of a politically active family in Hawaii, died June 3 on Kauai. Mr. Trask was the son of David Trask, an early member of the Democratic Party of Hawaii. His brothers included Bernard, also an attorney and father of Hawaiian activists Haunani-Kay and Mililani Trask, and David Jr., former head of the Hawaii Government Employees Association.
Arthur Trask was active in the Democratic Party and was the last surviving member of the Statehood Commission, on which he served from 1944 to 1957.