Hugh Pearson

Hugh Pearson -BROOKLYN, NY - Funeral services for Mr. Hugh Pearson of Brooklyn, New York will be held on Saturday, August 27 at 11A.M. at Saint Paul A.M.E. Church, Dublin, with the Reverend Ralph Taylor officiating. Interment will be in Dudley Memorial Cemetery. -Hugh Pearson was born September 25, 1957 to Huey and Edith Pearson at St. Joseph's Hospital in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Their only son, he was named Huey Lawrence Pearson, Jr. During his boyhood, he was an avid reader. While in high school, he won the National Council of Teachers of English Achievement Award in Writing. He wrote later that as a teenager, the book The Best and The Brightest by David Halberstam, about the decisions leading the United States into the Vietnam War, convinced him of the need to study harder so that he could get an Ivy League education. After graduation from Wayne High School in Fort Wayne in 1975, he entered Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where he majored in biomedical ethics and wrote for the student newspaper. He graduated in 1979. He entered Meharry Medical College but after two years of study, decided against a medical career. His adventurous spirit led him to endeavors that included the study of urban planning at the New School of Social Research in New York and positions in urban development. However, he realized that his calling was writing. His first professional piece was published in New York Newsday. After a freelance career, he signed on with the Pacific News Service in San Francisco, California. In the summer of 1989, the shooting of Black Panther Huey Newton in Oakland, California rekindled a boyhood interest in Newton, leading to Hugh's first book, The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America. Published in 1994, the book was featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. Its success led to his appearance on the C-SPAN program Booknotes on August 21, 1994. -Hugh later took a position on the editorial staff of the Wall Street Journal. After leaving the Journal, he resumed freelance writing, most recently for Newsday. He authored two additional books: Under the Knife: How a Wealthy Negro Surgeon Wielded Power in the Jim Crow South, published in 2000, and When Harlem Nearly Killed King: The 1958 Stabbing of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., published in 2002. He owned the website NYAge.net. At the time of his death, he was working on a biography about James Weldon Johnson, who wrote the lyrics for the Negro National Anthem ("Lift Every Voice and Sing"). -In 1997, he became the father of twins, who were his joy and inspiration. -Hugh Pearson was preceded in death by his mother, Edith Richardson Pearson; his maternal grandparents, Crawford and Mary Richardson; and his paternal grandparents, Nathan and Bessie Pearson. -He leaves his children, Francesca and Nathaniel Pearson of New York, NY; father Huey Pearson, and stepmother Joyce Pearson of Fort Wayne, IN; sisters, Carol Pearson Stocchi of Cleveland, OH, Jennifer Pearson of Atlanta, GA, and Julie Pearson of Fort Wayne, IN; brother-in-law Luca Stocchi of Cleveland, OH; and two special friends in his life, Nancy Ross and Jordan Ross of New York, NY. -Hugh was blessed with a host of aunts, uncles and cousins. His passing is the first of the five grandchildren of the Crawford Richardson Family and the twenty-seven grandchildren of the Nathan Pearson Family. -Services by Dudley Funeral Home.