Rights leader helped shape city

He grew up with segregation around him and couldn’t even play basketball on the official Liberty Memorial High School team.

Yet he lived in the city most of his life because he enjoyed the people and the culture. And Spearman worked with others to improve race and community relations during difficult periods in the 1960s and ’70s, his friends and colleagues said.

“He always believed that Lawrence was a place worth improving, even if he had to fight to do it,” John Spearman Jr., his son, said.

John Spearman Sr., 79, died on Wednesday – Independence Day – at Laurel Hospital in Laurel, Md., due to complications from acute renal failure, his children said. Funeral services will be 11 a.m. Wednesday at Warren-McElwain Mortuary.

Spearman and his wife, Vernell, a former Kansas University director of minority affairs, were civil rights movement leaders during tense and tumultuous times. He served on the Lawrence school board from 1969 to 1975, when race relations were marred by several events including large fights that erupted at Lawrence High School, said Max Rife, a longtime LHS assistant and associate principal.

“He was a very soft-spoken man, but he had, I think, a calming effect on incidents,” Rife said.

Spearman was fair and cooperated with the board to find solutions, said fellow board member Richard Holzmeister.

“He gave a lot of insight into what the thoughts of the black community were in a very professional way. It was not confrontational,” Holzmeister said.

An already rocky 1970 came to a head with the death of a 19-year-old black man, Rick Dowdell, killed by police as part of an altercation. It sparked firebombings and shootings across Lawrence and fueled a disturbance four days later that resulted in the random shooting death of Nick Rice, a white 18-year-old KU freshman.

“He was not a person that advocated white hate,” said Jesse Milan, another civil rights leader and the first black teacher at integrated Lawrence schools. “He was strictly in the ballpark of making sure our kids got a fair shake.”

Law enforcement officers looked to Spearman as a calming and cooperative player, said former Douglas County Sheriff Rex Johnson.

“He was just a good communicator and able to go among different groups of people here,” said his daughter Terry Spearman, who is a child life specialist at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

But he also stood firm on segregation issues – he led protests with his wife to urge the city to open an integrated swimming pool, said his son Michael Spearman, now a superior court judge in Seattle.

The senior Spearman, a World War II Army veteran who worked more than 30 years at Hallmark Cards, also was active in Concerned Black Parents and the NAACP, worked to improve housing opportunities and served on the Lawrence Human Relations Commission from 1966 to 1969.

“I don’t think he just sat back and said someone else could do it. He participated in making Lawrence what it is today,” said state Rep. Barbara Ballard, of Lawrence, a school board member from 1985 to 1993.

Spearman loved Lawrence so much that before he died, he had planned to return and live with his son Paul. His wife, Vernell, died in 1999, and a daughter, Melanie, also died earlier.

“He saw the changes. He was always looking for more change. But he saw the changes that took place, and there’s no question that living in Lawrence enriched his life,” said John Jr., who helps run a nonprofit trauma center at the University of Maryland Medical Center. “I think he believed, and we certainly believe, that him living in Lawrence enriched Lawrence.”