Franklin Smith, 34, of Catonsville, received a nine-year sentence, while Davon Dorsey, 30, of Gwynn Oak, was sentenced to 15 years.

The defendants were charged with 12 counts in April 2022, including kidnapping, according to court documents. In July, Smith pleaded guilty to carjacking and using a gun in a violent crime. In March, Dorsey pleaded guilty to carjacking.

In May 2021, Smith, Dorsey and two others posed as police officers with lights on their car, vests and badges and pulled over an employee of Check Cash Depot in Northwest Baltimore on her way home from work, according to court documents. Smith set up a detour to direct the woman down a side street where two other defendants brandishing guns removed her from her car, handcuffed and blindfolded her while demanding access to the cash checking business, according to court documents. The defendants then left the woman in the trunk of her own car and covered it with a tarp. She was able to make her way out and call for help, according to a news release from the district attorney’s office.

Later in May 2021, the defendants again used police lights to pull over a man around midnight in Edgewood, according to court documents. The defendants told the victim he had a warrant and was under arrest before handcuffing, blindfolding and bounding him while demanding $10,000, according to court documents. The defendants eventually released the victim in Baltimore City after 5 a.m.

In August 2021 the defendants carjacked a woman outside an Ace Cash Express in Cockeysville by posing as police officers and blindfolding her in the back of a car, according to the indictment. The defendants demanded access to the check cashing business and safe codes, detaining the victim for nearly six hours before releasing her near Edmonson Village, according to court documents.

In all three cases, the defendants threatened the victims with guns and assaulted them with blow torches while demanding money and keys to the businesses, according to court documents. Court documents do not say that the defendants were ever successful in accessing or robbing one of the check cashing businesses.

The two other defendants in the case did not take plea deals, according to court documents. Dennis Hairston, 34, of Windsor Mill, and Donte Stanley, 33, of Rosedale, were convicted by a jury in June of kidnapping, gun and carjacking charges. They both have sentencing hearings scheduled for November.

The Mets said the cause was cardiac arrest.

He is the fourth member of the Mets’ 1969 World Series championship team — the “Miracle Mets,” as they were called — to die this year, following Jerry Grote, Bud Harrelson and Jim McAndrew.

The Mets were nearly halfway to a 40-120 record in 1962, their first season as a National League franchise, when they signed Kranepool for a bonus of $80,000. A tall, left-handed batter, he had just broken Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg’s single-season home run record at James Monroe High School in the Bronx. Ed was 17 and living at home.

Kranepool brought a jolt of youthful promise to a team managed by Casey Stengel, the wizened former New York Yankees skipper, and stocked with mediocrities, castoffs, players past their primes and the inaccurately nicknamed Marvelous Marv Throneberry.

When Stengel assessed Kranepool’s talent, he told The New York Times: “He don’t strike out too much and he don’t let himself get suckered into goin’ for bad pitches. I wouldn’t be afraid to play him. He don’t embarrass you.”

After playing briefly for the Mets at the end of the 1962 season, Kranepool struggled against major league pitching during the next two seasons. When he faltered in 1963, one fan raised a banner that asked, “Is Ed Kranepool Over the Hill?”

He was 18.

He was soon sent to the Mets’ top minor league team in Buffalo, New York, for parts of the 1963 and 1964 seasons.

And in 1970, when a batting average of .118 led to another demotion, Times columnist Robert Lipsyte wrote, “Kranepool was the last player linked to the bad old days, and it might have been more than symbolic that the Mets rose into first place the day after he was cut loose, like a balloon freed of ballast.”

He was promoted about six weeks later, played sparingly and wound up hitting .170. And the Mets faded to third place.

But the next season was one of Kranepool’s best — he hit 14 home runs, drove in a career-high 58 runs and batted .280.

Nicknamed “Steady Eddie, ” Kranepool inspired fans to chant “Ed-die! Ed-die!” He was selected to the 1965 National League All-Star team, though he didn’t play. In the 1969 World Series, he hit a home run as the Mets rolled to the championship in five games over the favored Baltimore Orioles.

After the ’69 Series, Kranepool and several teammates, including Tom Seaver and Cleon Jones, put together a musical act that performed in Las Vegas, singing, among other songs, “The Impossible Dream.” After the group’s debut on the Circus Maximus stage at Caesars Palace, Kranepool conceded that the singing Mets were nervous.

“It’s not like Shea Stadium, where we know what we’re doing,” he told the Times. “But we had enough Scotch.”

Edward Emil Kranepool III was born in New York City’s Bronx borough on Nov. 8, 1944, less than four months after his father, Edward Jr., an Army sergeant, was killed in battle in Saint-Lô, France, during World War II. His mother, Ethel (Hasselbach) Kranepool, raised her son and her daughter, Marilyn, on a military pension and earnings from various jobs.

Ethel Kranepool told The Daily News in 1963 that it had been difficult to be a single parent. “With Edward it was always a case of slapping him on the backside with one hand and handing him an ice cream cone with the other,” she said.

Ed Kranepool swung a toy bat at age 3, then played baseball in local playgrounds and sandlots. By high school, he stood 6-foot-3 and was launching long drives at James Monroe’s home field toward a large oak in right center field that came to be known as “Eddie’s Tree.”

He played for the Monroe team that lost, 6-5, to Curtis High School of Staten Island in the Public Schools Athletic League title game in 1962. Around graduation time, he tried out for the Mets at the Polo Grounds, the former home of the New York Giants and the Mets’ temporary home before Shea Stadium opened in 1964. He impressed the team by hitting nine balls into the stands.

That flash of teenage muscle helped give rise to the improbable notion that the Mets might have signed another great left-handed-hitting first baseman, like Mel Ott of the Giants or Lou Gehrig of the Yankees.

But Kranepool never became a superstar. Rather, he was a line-drive hitter with modest power — he never had more than 16 home runs in a season — who turned into an elite pinch-hitter as his time as a first baseman and outfielder diminished.

When the Mets returned to the World Series in 1973, facing the Oakland A’s, Kranepool went hitless in three plate appearances. The Mets lost in seven games.

From 1974 to 1978, he came off the bench to hit .396 as a pinch-hitter. In 1978, he had 15 hits in 50 at bats in that reserve role, including three home runs.

When he retired after the 1979 season, Kranepool held several Mets career records, all but two of which have been surpassed: the most pinch hits, 90, and most games played, 1,853

Kranepool admitted to regrets that he had spent too little time being nurtured in the minor leagues and that he had played for a team so desperate for fresh talent. “If I could have seen ahead in 1962, I would have signed with another club,” he told the Times as the Mets were heading to the World Series in 1969. “It was a lot of fun playing in the majors, but a lot of frustrations, too.”

He is survived by his wife, Monica (Bronner) Kranepool; his daughter, Jamie Pastrano; his sons, Keith Kranepool and Darren Todfield; seven grandchildren; and a sister, Marilyn Ternay.

During his playing career, Kranepool was a stockbroker and, with his teammate the outfielder Ron Swoboda, an owner of The Dugout, a restaurant in Amityville, New York, on Long Island. When he heard in 1979, during his final season, that the Mets might be for sale, he said, he assembled a group to purchase the franchise. But it was acquired by a group led by Fred Wilpon and Doubleday & Co., the publishing house. The Wilpon family later became the team’s majority owner and ultimately sold the Mets to the current owners, Steve and Alex Cohen, in 2020.

In about 2011, with Wilpon and his family facing financial pressure following losses from their involvement with fraudster Bernard L. Madoff, they sought investors to buy minority stakes in the club. At a team dinner, a Mets spokesperson recalled, Kranepool talked to Jeff Wilpon, the club’s chief operating officer and one of Wilpon’s sons, about the sales of the shares.

“I don’t want shares,” the spokesperson quoted Kranepool as saying. “I want to buy the whole team so I can run it better than you and your father.”

The encounter caused a rift that ended seven years later with a call from Jeff Wilpon that led to Kranepool’s throwing out the first pitch before a game in 2018.

“I was on the outside looking in,” Kranepool told the Times, “and I’m glad I’m not anymore.”

In 2017, after announcing that both his kidneys were failing, Kranepool auctioned his 1969 Mets world championship ring for $62,475 to defray medical expenses. After undergoing transplant surgery nearly two years later, he learned who his donor was: a Mets fan.

A few months after the surgery, he helped the Mets celebrate the 50th anniversary of their World Series victory. Speaking at Citi Field during the ceremony, he encouraged the team, then near the bottom of the National League East, to turn their season around.

“They can do it, like we did — you got to believe in yourself,” he said. “Good luck. You have half a season. I wish you the best so that we can celebrate in October.”

The team did rally, finishing third in the division, but there was no 50th-anniversary miracle. The Mets didn’t make the playoffs.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

His office told NBC News and Reuters that Bush also won’t reveal how he or wife Laura will vote this November.

“President Bush retired from presidential politics years ago,” his office told NBC News.

A couple of days ago, Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, announced he would cross party lines and support Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. Cheney called the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, a “threat to our republic.”

“In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said in a statement. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again.”

Cheney, who joined his daughter, former Rep. Liz Cheney, in advocating for Harris over Trump, said he was putting “country above partisanship.”

As for Bush, People magazine reported in 2021 that he didn’t vote for either Trump or President Joe Biden in the last election. Bush wrote in former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s name instead, according to the interview with People.

Bush won’t be endorsing Harris, but some of his former staffers have done just that.

Over 200 Republicans who worked for the last two Republican presidents, before Trump, and the last two Republican presidential nominees signed onto an open letter endorsing Harris to be president.

The Republicans signing onto a letter lending their support to Harris included people who worked for Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush as well as those who worked for the late Sen. John McCain and Sen. Mitt Romney, the GOP nominees in 2008 and 2012.

The Republicans in the letter noted that many of them also spoke out in 2020 against reelecting Trump.

“We made those announcements months before lies about a stolen election became everyday talking points and six months before Trump incited an insurrection, cheering on a mob of sore losers and sycophants as they tried to use force to overturn the will of the American public. We reunite today, joined by new George H.W. Bush alumni, to reinforce our 2020 statements and, for the first time, jointly declare that we’re voting for Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz this November,” part of the letter reads. “Of course, we have plenty of honest, ideological disagreements with Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz. That’s to be expected. The alternative, however, is simply untenable.”

And multiple Republicans joined Democrats on stage at their convention in August to endorse Harris.

One of them, former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, told the DNC crowd that she was throwing her support behind Harris “because I love my country more than my party.”

Meanwhile, former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and former Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have endorsed Trump.

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In a filing in the foreclosure case of Spacey’s harborfront home in Baltimore’s Federal Hill, the actor asked the court to revoke the sale to a Potomac real estate investor. Trustees mishandled the auction, leading to an inadequate price of $3.24 million, and the buyer should be disqualified because of harassment, the document says.

A representative of buyer Sam Asgari called the claims “frivolous” and without merit.

“This is still the house of cards,” said Sam Sheibani, a Compass real estate agent who is representing Asgari, on Monday, referring to the popular Netflix TV series filmed in Baltimore in which Spacey starred.

Asgari is preparing a response to the latest filings in Baltimore City Circuit Court and plans to pursue eviction, Sheibani said.

Attorneys for Spacey, listed as Kevin Spacey Fowler, principal of home owner Clear Toaster LLC, accused Asgari of acting in bad faith.

“Mr. Asgari has continuously harassed Clear Toaster’s principal, Kevin Spacey Fowler, and has published false and defamatory statements and accusations against Clear Toaster’s principal, Kevin Spacey Fowler, who occupies the property as his home,” said Spacey’s attorney, Edward U. Lee III, in a motion Friday.

Spacey purchased the two-unit condo in the gated The Pier Homes at Harborview for $5.7 million in 2017. His friend and manager Evan Lowenstein owned the home, but the former “House of Cards” star recently laid claim to it, Lowenstein previously told The Sun.

The Oscar-winning Spacey, who has said he was left with millions of dollars of debt from fighting several lawsuits in the U.S. and Britain alleging sexual misconduct, owed back payments for the home.

Last summer, a city Circuit Court judge approved a foreclosure sale.

Spacey’s attorneys are arguing the court should revoke the July sale, which took place outside Baltimore Circuit Court and require trustees to resell the property.

They say trustees failed in their obligations to maximize the home’s price. They advertised it as a dwelling, the filing said, but left out details such as its size, 9,000 square feet on five levels, and amenities, such as seven full baths, a sauna, elevator, home theaters, a rooftop terrace and four-car garage.

The price at auction fell well below both the property’s assessed value of more than $5.4 million in July, and the outstanding principal balance of more than $3.8 million, the court document said.

It says Asgari should be disqualified, in part because he threatened eviction before the auction sale had been ratified and before he had possession of the home, placing a “notice about eviction” on the home Spacey has occupied as his primary residence. The sale is not final, the filing says, until an exception period expires and the court ratifies the sale.

Yet, Spacey’s filing says, the notice placed on the property on the day of the auction gave anyone residing in the home 15 days to notify Asgari, or the property would be considered abandoned and the locks changed, without a court order.

Asgari knew the home was not abandoned and intended only to “harass and coerce [Spacey] to leave his home when he was in no way obligated to do so,” the filing said. “In Mr. Asgari’s wrongful demand to have [Spacey] vacate the property, he threatened to pursue eviction as a result of the property being ‘abandoned.'”

Lee said Asgari contacted him in mid-August, “threatening to proceed with interviews with Inside Edition and CBS News that same day unless an immediate response was provided regarding the vacancy date and further threatening to start eviction proceedings the following Monday.”

Asgari views the chain of events differently, Sheibani said. Spacey simply won’t return something that no longer belongs to him, he said.

He is taking advantage of “my client’s generosity, requesting a large sum of money and a long time to vacate the property,” Sheibani said. “We simply want the property that rightly belongs to my client to be vacated and handed over.”

Lee, Spacey’s attorney, countered in the filing that Spacey has never “refused or threatened to refuse” to leave the home.

The document said Lee spoke with Asgari’s attorney Aug. 6 and proposed that Spacey be allowed to stay until about Feb. 1 in exchange for giving Asgari early entry to the home to begin planning to sell to an investor and agreeing not to file an objection to ratification of the sale.

But then a week later, Asgari offered $50,000 if Spacey would leave by Sept. 15, the filing says.

The 33-year-old African penguin, who made a “tremendous contribution” to the survival of his endangered species by fathering 230 chicks, was euthanized for age-related declining health, the Maryland Zoo said. He is survived by his lifelong mate Mrs. Greedy.

“This one bird was incredibly important to the continued existence of African penguins throughout the world,” Maryland Zoo bird curator Jen Kottyan said in a Sept. 5 news release. “It’s tough to lose an animal who has been such a welcome presence at our Zoo for three decades, but all of us are proud that he is survived by five generations of offspring.”

Kottyan added the median life expectancy of African penguins is 18 years, and Mr. Greedy was the oldest penguin in the zoo’s colony. Both Mr. and Mrs. Greedy hatched in 1991 and arrived in Baltimore in 1992.

“They had been paired up from the time they hit reproductive age in 1994,” Kottyan said.

Zookeepers are monitoring Mrs. Greedy, and if she shows interest, will pair her with a single male in the colony as a companion, according to the release.

The couple’s oldest offspring is 28 years old, and several of the pair’s chicks still live at the Maryland Zoo, including a fifth-generation descendant named Olive, according to the release.

Based in Baltimore, Maryland Zoo is home to the largest colony of African penguins (Spheniscus demersus) in North America, according to the release, and has bred more than 1,000 chicks.

The zoo’s Penguin Coast exhibit is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year and offers private visits with a zookeeper and photo opportunities.

In a Sept. 4 letter to Gov. Wes Moore, Muñoz said she will resign Jan. 1, 2025, to “spend more time with my young family.”

“I pray that you and the legislature pass laws to keep Marylanders safe and prosperous in the coming years,” she wrote in the letter.

Muñoz, 37, has been a delegate since November 2021. Former Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, appointed her to fill the remaining term of former Del. Michael E. Malone, who resigned his District 33 seat in August 2021 to become an Anne Arundel County Circuit Court judge.

In 2022, Muñoz ran for election to one of three District 31 seats in the House of Delegates and won.

In a text message to Fox45 News, Muñoz, a cancer survivor who is now pregnant, said her decision to resign stemmed in part from health concerns: “We’re expected a health[y] baby boy in November, and I have confidence that my replacement in the legislature will do their best to represent District 31,” she said.

Muñoz was raised in Severna Park and graduated from Severna Park High School. She received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Maryland in 2009 and a law degree from the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. She has five children, according to her state biography.

Since 2021, Muñoz has been on the House Judiciary Committee. In 2023, she began sitting on the Joint Committee on the Chesapeake and Atlantic Coastal Bays Critical Area.

State law requires the Anne Arundel County Republican Central Committee to nominate someone to fill the vacancy and submit their name to the governor for appointment to serve out the remainder of Muñoz’s term, which ends in January 2027.

A representative on the committee did not respond to a request for comment.

The high court ruled in 2023 that colleges and universities could no longer take race into account when conducting admissions. That practice, known as affirmative action, had previously been enforced to ensure a diverse student body.

Brown on Friday released the racial diversity profile of its incoming freshman class. The data revealed Asian students make up 33% of the student body, compared to 29% the year prior.

Students who identify as white, Black and Hispanic each saw a decrease in their share of the incoming class.

The class is also the school’s most globally diverse group, with 14% being international students, according to the data. Brown noted, however, that the makeup of the class saw a decline from 27% to 18% in “groups historically underrepresented in higher education.”

Associate Provost for Enrollment and Dean of Undergraduate Admission Logan Powell attributed these shifts to the SCOTUS decision.

“Even with a significant number of measures in place to ensure a diverse, talented applicant pool and enrolled class, we recognized the likelihood that declines in the number of students of color at Brown and other selective universities were widely anticipated across the country,” Powell said. “We’re pleased to welcome an academically excellent class of students and one that remains diverse, although to a lesser degree than previously.”

He also noted the school’s “commitment to a diverse campus community in every sense remains unchanged.” Powell said Brown would continue to encourage “talented students of every background [to] apply.”

The findings follow a similar shift at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where enrollment of Asian students rose 6% this fall. The number of African American students enrolled saw a sharp decline, however, falling from 13% to just 5%, according to MIT data. Hispanic and Latino enrollment also fell from 15% to just 5%.

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Jerome Isaac Hurley, 44, was charged in April with one count of theft of more than $100,000, a felony in Maryland law punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Hurley appeared Friday in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court in Annapolis. His next hearing is scheduled for Dec. 4 with trial set to begin Dec. 10, according to the Maryland Judiciary.

Mark Lechowicz, Hurley’s defense attorney, declined to comment Monday.

On Sept. 5, 2023, Anne Arundel County Police went to the Miracle Temple along Southern Maryland Boulevard after being alerted to a theft, according to charging documents.

Police said church officials had recently discovered $347,000 of a $350,000 insurance check had been transferred from their Bank of America checking account into Hurley’s personal account.

According to charging documents, Hurley filed a successful insurance claim in March 2020 after a residence on the church’s property caught fire. Church officials told investigators that throughout Hurley’s seven years at Miracle Temple, from 2015 to 2022, he handled bank statements and finances.

A year after the fire, when the claim was vetted and a check was issued, Hurley took the vast majority of the insurance money from the temple’s account, police said. Charging documents reference bank account numbers and the dates of several bank transfers, including when the insurance money cleared the church’s account and when it was allegedly transferred to Hurley nine days later.

The church’s attempts to contact Hurley about the money were unsuccessful, police said. In February 2023, the Miracle Temple’s board sent Hurley a certified letter saying they had entrusted him “to act in good faith” when handling the church’s finances and that they had never been notified of the insurance claim or the $350,000 check, according to charging documents.

Police did not indicate what Hurley may have spent the money on once it was in his account.

A representative for Miracle Temple declined to comment Monday on Hurley’s case or time with the church.

A spokesperson with the Anne Arundel County Fire Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the 2020 fire at Miracle Temple.

Since last year, Hurley’s case is at least the second criminal accusation levied against a church official in Anne Arundel County involving church money.

In March 2023, Marie Simeone was charged with embezzlement and two felony theft counts after she was accused of taking nearly $65,000 from the Our Lady of Sorrows Roman Catholic Church in West River.

Simeone, who was the church’s director of operations until about three months before she was charged, allegedly made personal purchases at several businesses, subscribed to magazines and streaming services, went to restaurants and paid her utility bills using church funds, prosecutors said.

In November 2023, Simeone pleaded guilty to a felony theft scheme charge and was granted probation before judgment.

NEW YORK (AP) — James Earl Jones, who overcame racial prejudice and a severe stutter to become a celebrated icon of stage and screen — eventually lending his deep, commanding voice to CNN, “The Lion King” and Darth Vader — has died. He was 93.

His agent, Barry McPherson, confirmed Jones died Monday morning at home in New York’s Hudson Valley region. The cause was not immediately clear.

The pioneering Jones, who in 1965 became one of the first African American actors in a continuing role on a daytime drama (“As the World Turns”) and worked deep into his 80s, won two Emmys, a Golden Globe, two Tony Awards, a Grammy, the National Medal of Arts and the Kennedy Center Honors. He was also given an honorary Oscar and a special Tony for lifetime achievement. In 2022, a Broadway theater was renamed in his honor.

He cut an elegant figure late in life, with a wry sense of humor and a ferocious work habit. In 2015, he arrived at rehearsals for a Broadway run of “The Gin Game” having already memorized the play and with notebooks filled with comments from the creative team. He said he was always in service of the work.

“The need to storytell has always been with us,” he told The Associated Press then. “I think it first happened around campfires when the man came home and told his family he got the bear, the bear didn’t get him.”

Jones created such memorable film roles as the reclusive writer coaxed back into the spotlight in “Field of Dreams,” the boxer Jack Johnson in the stage and screen hit “The Great White Hope,” the writer Alex Haley in “Roots: The Next Generation” and a South African minister in “Cry, the Beloved Country.”

He was also a sought-after voice actor, expressing the villainy of Darth Vader (“No, I am your father,” commonly misremembered as “Luke, I am your father”), as well as the benign dignity of King Mufasa in both the 1994 and 2019 versions of Disney’s “The Lion King” and announcing “This is CNN” during station breaks. He won a 1977 Grammy for his performance on the “Great American Documents” audiobook.

“If you were an actor or aspired to be an actor, if you pounded the pavement in these streets looking for jobs, one of the standards we always had was to be a James Earl Jones,” Samuel L. Jackson once said.

Some of his other films include “Dr. Strangelove,” “The Greatest” (with Muhammad Ali), “Conan the Barbarian,” “Three Fugitives” and playing an admiral in three blockbuster Tom Clancy adaptations — “The Hunt for Red October,” “Patriot Games” and “Clear and Present Danger.” In a rare romantic comedy, “Claudine,” Jones had an onscreen love affair with Diahann Carroll.

LeVar Burton, who starred alongside Jones in the TV movie “Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones,” paid tribute on X, writing, “There will never be another of his particular combination of graces.”

Jones made his Broadway debut in 1958’s “Sunrise At Campobello” and would win his two Tony Awards for “The Great White Hope” (1969) and “Fences” (1987). He also was nominated for “On Golden Pond” (2005) and “Gore Vidal’s The Best Man” (2012). He was celebrated for his command of Shakespeare and Athol Fugard alike. More recent Broadway appearances include “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” “Driving Miss Daisy,” “The Iceman Cometh,” and “You Can’t Take It With You.”

As a rising stage and television actor, he performed with the New York Shakespeare Festival Theater in “Othello,” “Macbeth” and “King Lear” and in off-Broadway plays.

Jones was born by the light of an oil lamp in a shack in Arkabutla, Mississippi, on Jan. 17, 1931. His father, Robert Earl Jones, had deserted his wife before the baby’s arrival to pursue life as a boxer and, later, an actor.

When Jones was 6, his mother took him to her parents’ farm near Manistee, Michigan. His grandparents adopted the boy and raised him.

“A world ended for me, the safe world of childhood,” Jones wrote in his autobiography, “Voices and Silences.” “The move from Mississippi to Michigan was supposed to be a glorious event. For me it was a heartbreak, and not long after, I began to stutter.”

Too embarrassed to speak, he remained virtually mute for years, communicating with teachers and fellow students with handwritten notes. A sympathetic high school teacher, Donald Crouch, learned that the boy wrote poetry, and demanded that Jones read one of his poems aloud in class. He did so faultlessly.

Teacher and student worked together to restore the boy’s normal speech. “I could not get enough of speaking, debating, orating — acting,” he recalled in his book.

At the University of Michigan, he failed a pre-med exam and switched to drama, also playing four seasons of basketball. He served in the Army from 1953 to 1955.

In New York, he moved in with his father and enrolled with the American Theater Wing program for young actors. Father and son waxed floors to support themselves while looking for acting jobs.

True stardom came suddenly in 1970 with “The Great White Hope.” Howard Sackler’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway play depicted the struggles of Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight boxing champion, amid the racism of early 20th-century America. In 1972, Jones repeated his role in the movie version and was nominated for an Academy Award as best actor.

Jones’ two wives were also actors. He married Julienne Marie Hendricks in 1967. After their divorce, he married Cecilia Hart, best known for her role as Stacey Erickson in the CBS police drama “Paris,” in 1982. (She died in 2016.) They had a son, Flynn Earl, born in 1983.

In 2022, the Cort Theatre on Broadway was renamed after Jones, with a ceremony that included Norm Lewis singing “Go the Distance,” Brian Stokes Mitchell singing “Make Them Hear You” and words from Mayor Eric Adams, Samuel L. Jackson and LaTanya Richardson Jackson.

“You can’t think of an artist that has served America more,” director Kenny Leon told the AP. “It’s like it seems like a small act, but it’s a huge action. It’s something we can look up and see that’s tangible.”

Citing his stutter as one of the reasons he wasn’t a political activist, Jones nonetheless hoped his art could change minds.

“I realized early on, from people like Athol Fugard, that you cannot change anybody’s mind, no matter what you do,” he told the AP. “As a preacher, as a scholar, you cannot change their mind. But you can change the way they feel.”

___

Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits

Connerton has worked for Anne Arundel County Public Schools for 15 years and now is the school system’s wellness coordinator.

Connerton, who went to the White House after being named teacher of the year, is one of 48 recipients nationwide. Given by the National Education Association Foundation, the award recognizes exceptional K-12 public school educators for excellence in the classroom, dedication to family and community engagement, a commitment to equity and diversity and advocacy for the teaching profession.

“I am honored and humbled to be one of the 48 educators in the nation to receive the 2025 Travelers Award for Teaching Excellence through the NEA Foundation,” Connerton said in a news release Monday. “I am in awe that this work that I hold so dear to my heart is getting such notice because what drives me every day is simply doing everything I can to create a better world for our youth.”

Previously, Connerton was the wellness coordinator at Annapolis High School, where she created and led the school’s Trauma-Informed Leadership Team. She led monthly counseling groups, such as yoga sessions for specific student needs, and put together professional development for teachers with a focus on the health and wellness of students.