Chicago Sun-Times

Henry English dies at 73, ran Black United Fund

- BY ANDY GRIMM Staff Reporter Email: agrimm@suntimes.com Twitter: @agrimm34

Even in his 70s, Henry English was perpetuall­y on his way to one event or another. A protest. An organizing meeting. A lobbying trip to Springfiel­d to speak on behalf of the needy.

Mr. English was a dervishlik­e presence in Chicago’s struggling neighborho­ods for more than 40 years, a Black Panther leader who in the 1960s recruited a young Bobby Rush, an organizer for Mayor Harold Washington and the founder of the charitable Black United Fund of Illinois.

On Saturday morning, Mr. English was driving on Lake Shore Drive to a get-out-thevote event for Hillary Clinton when his van was rear-ended near 63rd Street, his longtime friend Conrad Worrill said. Mr. English apparently suffered a heart attack and died at Northweste­rn Memorial Hospital. He was 73.

The other driver was unhurt, though his car was totaled.

“He was always running,” said Mr. English’s son, Nkrumah English. “When he was passing away, he was running somewhere. He had family life, work or a meeting every waking moment — the stamina he had to run all across the city, the state.”

Mr. English grew up on the city’s Near West Side, blocks from Farragut Career Academy. He was the second of four children raised by parents who came to Chicago from Mississipp­i.

After a post-high school stint in the Marine Corps, he returned to Chicago and became an activist while study- ing and serving in student government at what was then called Crane Junior College, where he rallied classmates to the cause of changing the school’s name to Malcolm X College, according to Worrill, who is director of the Jacob Carruthers Center for Inner City Studies at Northeaste­rn Illinois University.

Mr. English eventually became the treasurer of the Black Panther Party and, in a turbulent era, emerged as a calming presence with a “genius” for community organizing, Worrill said.

“He loved Malcolm, but he wasn’t stuck like that,” Worrill said. “He had a great appreciati­on for Dr. Martin Luther King.”

Mr. English moved his family to New York, where he studied at Cornell University and earned a master’s degree, then returned to Chicago and took a good-paying job as a health-care administra­tor. But he spent evenings organizing neighbors, his son said.

Mr. English had key, behind-the-scenes roles in efforts that included voterregis­tration initiative­s that helped propel Washington’s election as mayor in 1983. He also worked to preserve the buildings at the South Shore Country Club and transform them into the South Shore Cultural Center.

His career as a health executive turned out to be short-lived. In 1983, Mr. English founded the Black United Fund in Chicago, which raises charitable donations to provide grants and expertise to small not-for-profit groups and programs for job-training, his son said.

Though Mr. English counted figures such as Fred Hampton and Stokely Carmichael as friends and rubbed elbows with jazz greats Count Basie and Miles Davis while doing organizing, he was proudest of his work helping working-class families, according to his son.

“To him, the first step was economic developmen­t and getting folks back to work,” his son said. “He could have made money in the corporate world. He came back to be in the fight.”

Mr. English is also survived by his wife, Denise; another son, Jummane; and daughters Kenya and Kamillah. Funeral arrangemen­ts were pending.

 ?? | FACEBOOK PHOTO ?? Henry English (right) marches with the Rev. Michael Pfleger at a demonstrat­ion.
| FACEBOOK PHOTO Henry English (right) marches with the Rev. Michael Pfleger at a demonstrat­ion.
 ??  ?? Henry English
Henry English

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