![]() There’s a lot of work to be done,” he said. Lorn Snow told a reporter as the service was ending. It was important to speak about Juneteenth during Sunday Mass, the Rev. Standing before paintings of a Black Jesus and Mary, Thorne said Juneteenth is a day of celebration, but it also “has to be much more.” And in order to have peace we must work for justice,” John Thorne, executive director of the Detroit Catholic Pastoral Alliance, said to the congregation at Gesu Catholic Church in Detroit. “In order to have justice we must work for peace. On Juneteenth weekend, a Roman Catholic church in Detroit devoted its service to urging parishioners to take a deeper look at the lessons from the holiday. Today’s federal holiday commemorates the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned they had been freed - two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued during the bloody Civil War. “Is #Juneteenth the only federal holiday that some states have banned the teaching of its history and significance?” Author Michelle Duster asked on Twitter this weekend, referring to measures in Florida, Oklahoma and Alabama prohibiting an Advancement Placement African American studies course or the teaching of certain concepts of race and racism. And still others have remarked at the strangeness of celebrating a federal holiday marking the end of slavery in the nation while many Americans are trying to stop parts of that history from being taught in public schools. While many have treated the long holiday weekend as a reason for a party, others urged quiet reflection on America’s often violent and oppressive treatment of its Black citizens. Monday at the First United Methodist Church, 200 FM 517, Dickinson.DETROIT > Americans across the country this weekend celebrated Juneteenth, marking the relatively new national holiday with cookouts, parades and other gatherings as they commemorated the end of slavery after the Civil War. Williams is survived by his wife, Brenda, and two adult children, his daughter Brooke Utter-Williams and his son Brody Williams, all of League City and his parents, Charles and Donna Williams of Dickinson.Ī memorial is scheduled for 2 p.m. "For us in the organization, it was Scott the person that we are missing," he said. He also brought a droll humor that helped ease tension in the newsroom, Smith said. Williams' law experience and his decade covering crime and the courts made him an invaluable newsroom resource, Smith said. The departure of two senior editors at the newspaper left an opening, and Smith convinced Williams to return in January. Williams indicated in a chance phone conversation with Smith last year that he might consider returning to the Daily News under the right circumstances. He left the newspaper to pursue a career in law, working as a prosecutor for the Brazoria County district attorney before going into private practice. "It wasn't that you couldn't get him to work, it was that you couldn't get him to stop." "One of Scott's faults was that he worked all the time," Smith said. Williams infused the newsroom with energy, he said. "He had the cell phone numbers for everybody you can imagine," Smith said. Over the next decade, Williams covered law enforcement and courts for the Daily News, building strong sources within the legal and law enforcement communities. He was the guy you wanted if you needed something fast and you needed to get it right without libeling anybody." "Hiring Scott was one of the first smart things I did," Smith said. Smith, the editor of the Galveston County Daily News, recalled that he had recently been appointed city editor when he hired Williams as an intern and then as a full-time staff reporter in 1998. He wrote for the Cy-Fair High School newspaper and in college became editor of the Daily Cougar at the University of Houston. He was not deterred, and his work at the junior high newspaper convinced him that he wanted to make his living as a writer. Some parents were outraged when he reviewed the movie "An Officer and a Gentleman" because of its "R" rating. He became a movie reviewer in the seventh grade for the newspaper at Arnold Junior High School in Cypress, where he wrote his first controversial story. His parents gave him a typewriter when he was in sixth grade, and he typed on it nearly every day, his mother recalled. He became captivated with the written word as a child, reading voraciously at the age of 4. Williams, an only child, was born in El Paso, but grew up in Cypress. "These last months have been the best of his life," Donna Williams said. Williams was admitted to the State Bar of Texas in 2011, but missed journalism, said his mother, Donna Williams. ![]()
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