Monday, May. 11, 1998
Milestones
By Daniel Eisenberg, Anita Hamilton, Michael Krantz, Jodie Morse, Michele Orecklin, Alain L. Sanders, Joel Stein, David Van Biema, Susan Veitch
MARRIED. UMA THURMAN, 28, actress, and ETHAN HAWKE, 27, actor; in New York City. They are expecting their first child in July.
PLEADED GUILTY. JEAN KAMBANDA, 42, former Prime Minister of Rwanda, to genocide and crimes against humanity; before a U.N. tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania. Half a million people were slaughtered during his regime in 1994. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.
DIED. ELDRIDGE CLEAVER, 62, former Black Panther firebrand and prophet of black empowerment; of undisclosed causes; in Pomona, Calif. While serving a jail term for assault, Cleaver took up the idea of black power and penned Soul on Ice, his radical 1968 polemic on black rage. He joined the Black Panther Party on his release. Two years later, after a gunfight with police in Oakland, he fled to Algeria, Cuba and Paris, living in exile for eight years. Abroad, he embraced fervent anticommunism and evangelical Christianity. Addiction to crack and petty crimes followed his return to the U.S., as did an unsuccessful 1986 bid for a G.O.P. Senate nomination in California.
DIED. BISHOP JUAN GERARDI CONEDERA, 75, Guatemalan champion of human rights; from a bludgeoning he received two days after issuing a report that blamed the military for most of the deaths and disappearances that occurred during his country's 36-year civil war; in Guatemala City.
DIED. WRIGHT MORRIS, 88, writer-photographer of the middle-American gothic, who spun Fargo-like tales of small-town strangeness about his native Nebraska; in Mill Valley, Calif. His 33 books netted awards, but his plainspoken prose didn't sell well, dooming Morris to the dubious distinction of being one of America's most admired but least read men of letters.