WASHINGTON (AP)—Now that the National Football League has a record number of head coaches who are Black and Hispanic, can Fortune 500 companies borrow from the league’s diversity playbook and see similar results among corporate executives?

Robert L. Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television, thinks so. He is urging corporate America to adopt a version of the NFL's Rooney Rule, which requires teams to interview at least one minority candidate when filling head coach and general manager positions.

BOB JOHNSON

by Jim Fitzgerald

NEW YORK (AP)—Derrick Bell, a civil rights scholar and writer who was the first tenured Black professor at Harvard Law School, has died. He was 80.

Bell, a native of Pittsburgh’s Hill District, died Oct. 5 of carcinoid cancer at a Manhattan hospital, his wife, Janet Dewart Bell, said Oct 7. He’d been diagnosed with the disease a decade ago, she said, but was still teaching at New York University Law School as recently as last week.

CIVIL RIGHTS SCHOLAR—Professor Derrick Bell testifies in Ward Churchill’s civil suit against the University of Colorado at the City and County Building in Denver, Colo., in this March 13, 2009 photo. (AP Photo/Mark Leffingwell, File)

The dean at NYU, Richard Revesz, said, “For more than 20 years, the law school community has been profoundly shaped by Derrick’s unwavering passion for civil rights and community justice, and his leadership as a scholar, teacher, and activist.”

by Justin Juozapavicius

TAHLEQUAH, Okla. (AP)—Charlene White didn’t learn the whole story about her grandfather’s secret number until she was 12.

Prior to that time, she knew only that he had scrawled the mysterious digits—3489—on a crumpled piece of paper and hidden it in a drawer

FIGHTING TO BE EMBRACED—Rena Logan, a member of a Cherokee Freedmen family, shows her identification card as a member of the Cherokee tribe at her home in Muskogee, Okla., Oct. 6. (AP Photo/Dave Crenshaw)

The number was assigned to him as a boy to indicate that members of his family had once been slaves to the Cherokee Nation. It seemed to be a piece of personal history best left in the past.

“I feel like he felt it was shameful being known as a slave, especially a slave of the Indians,” White said. “It was an embarrassment.”

Week of October 15-21

October 15

1859—White minister and mystic John Brown leads a violent uprising in Harper’s Ferry, Va., in a bid to spark a Black uprising against slavery. Dozens of Whites are killed but the revolt is eventually put down. President Abraham Lincoln once referred to him as a “misguided fanatic” but Brown actually had a fanatical hatred of slavery and wanted it ended at all costs.

1887—The U.S. Supreme Court declares Civil Rights Act of 1885 unconstitutional. Decision was spurred by the end of Reconstruction and helped to usher in the Jim Crow period in the South whereby Black rights won during Reconstruction were taken away.