With the city's kids scoring dead last on national tests, isn't that a problem?

According to his memoir, The Teacher Who Couldn't Read, John Corcoran graduated from college in 1961 and taught high school for 17 years, all without being able to read, write or spell. Finally, at age 48, he sought help and now serves as a public speaker and fierce advocate for literacy. The John Corcoran Foundation claims to have trained 300 tutors and tutored more than 2,000 students.

Perhaps Otis Mathis should look into that—or some other organization that’s devoted to adult literacy. Because as president of the Detroit Public Schools board, Mathis clearly needs help. A recent article in the Detroit News revealed his struggle to compose coherent English sentences that aren't rife with egregious errors of usage, punctuation and grammar. Under the headline, "Does DPS leader's writing send wrong message?" the article included portions of a recent e-mail Mathis sent to friends and supporters:

If you saw Sunday's Free Press that shown Robert Bobb the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, move Mark Twain to Boynton which have three times the number seats then students and was one of the reason's he gave for closing school to many empty seats.

And there’s this, from another mass e-mail:

Do DPS control the Foundation or outside group? If an outside group control the foundation, then what is DPS Board row with selection of is director? Our we mixing DPS and None DPS row's, and who is the watch dog?

According to his memoir, The Teacher Who Couldn't Read, John Corcoran graduated from college in 1961 and taught high school for 17 years, all without being able to read, write or spell. Finally, at age 48, he sought help and now serves as a public speaker and fierce advocate for literacy. The John Corcoran Foundation claims to have trained 300 tutors and tutored more than 2,000 students.

Perhaps Otis Mathis should look into that—or some other organization that’s devoted to adult literacy. Because as president of the Detroit Public Schools board, Mathis clearly needs help. A recent article in the Detroit News revealed his struggle to compose coherent English sentences that aren't rife with egregious errors of usage, punctuation and grammar. Under the headline, "Does DPS leader's writing send wrong message?" the article included portions of a recent e-mail Mathis sent to friends and supporters:

If you saw Sunday's Free Press that shown Robert Bobb the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, move Mark Twain to Boynton which have three times the number seats then students and was one of the reason's he gave for closing school to many empty seats.

And there’s this, from another mass e-mail:

Do DPS control the Foundation or outside group? If an outside group control the foundation, then what is DPS Board row with selection of is director? Our we mixing DPS and None DPS row's, and who is the watch dog?

According to his memoir, The Teacher Who Couldn't Read, John Corcoran graduated from college in 1961 and taught high school for 17 years, all without being able to read, write or spell. Finally, at age 48, he sought help and now serves as a public speaker and fierce advocate for literacy. The John Corcoran Foundation claims to have trained 300 tutors and tutored more than 2,000 students.

Perhaps Otis Mathis should look into that—or some other organization that’s devoted to adult literacy. Because as president of the Detroit Public Schools board, Mathis clearly needs help. A recent article in the Detroit News revealed his struggle to compose coherent English sentences that aren't rife with egregious errors of usage, punctuation and grammar. Under the headline, "Does DPS leader's writing send wrong message?" the article included portions of a recent e-mail Mathis sent to friends and supporters:

If you saw Sunday's Free Press that shown Robert Bobb the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, move Mark Twain to Boynton which have three times the number seats then students and was one of the reason's he gave for closing school to many empty seats.

And there’s this, from another mass e-mail:

Do DPS control the Foundation or outside group? If an outside group control the foundation, then what is DPS Board row with selection of is director? Our we mixing DPS and None DPS row's, and who is the watch dog?

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Long before the State Dinner party crashers and the tension with her White House colleagues and the strain in her relationship with the first lady, Desirée Rogers began to understand she was in trouble when David Axelrod summoned her to his office last spring to scold her.

Ms. Rogers had appeared in another glossy magazine, posing in a White House garden in a borrowed $3,495 silk pleated dress and $110,000 diamond earrings. But if the image was jarring in a time of recession, Mr. Axelrod was as bothered by the words and her discussion of “the Obama brand” and her role in promoting it, according to people informed about the conversation.

“The president is a person, not a product,” he was said to tell her. “We shouldn’t be referring to him as a brand.”

The confrontation that day between Ms. Rogers, the White House social secretary, and Mr. Axelrod, the senior adviser to President Obama, put at odds two longtime Chicago friends of the first family. And it foreshadowed a deeper, wrenching conflict that would eventually cost Ms. Rogers her job and tear at the fabric of the close-knit inner circle around Mr. Obama.

The rise and fall of Desirée Rogers, the glamorous Harvard educated corporate executive who brought sizzle to the State Dining Room but became a victim of a publicity stunt by a pair of aspiring reality show stars, is a tale familiar to almost any White House. A new president comes to town and installs friends he trusts, but inevitably some of them wind up burned by the klieg lights and corrosive politics of Washington.

While it has happened to past presidents, though, this was the first time it has happened to Mr. Obama, who prided himself on running a campaign free of the typical petty rivalries and personal subplots that distract other politicians. And it happened with a friend who at first was celebrated for personifying the fresh, new-generation approach that the Obamas promised to bring to Washington.

For Ms. Rogers, associates said the episode proved a searing experience that has soured her on Washington. She believes she was left largely undefended by the White House, by her colleagues, including Mr. Axelrod, Robert Gibbs and even her close friend, Valerie Jarrett .And while she is unwilling to discuss her story publicly, several associates shared her account in the belief that her side has been lost in the swirl of hearings, backbiting and paparazzilike coverage.

“As she put it, ‘They never lifted a finger to help me set the record straight,’ ” said one of the associates, who insisted on not being identified to avoid alienating the White House. “She didn’t get any help from Gibbs, no help from Axelrod, no help from Valerie Jarrett. Nobody came to her defense.”

White House officials who asked not to be named rejected that, pointing to instances where Mr. Gibbs and the others publicly defended her, even if it was not as vigorously as she may have wanted.

Asked for comment, Katie McCormick Lelyveld, Michelle's press secretary, praised Ms. Rogers’s “track record of success as an incredibly successful leader of a team here that turned out 330 events over 13 months.”

The tension with her colleagues was building long before November when Michaele and Tareq Salahi, socialites from Virginia, managed to slip uninvited into the State Dinner for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India. Ms. Rogers’s hip style, expensive clothing and presence at fashion shows at first were seen as symbolizing a new Camelot but ultimately struck many as tone deaf in a time of economic hardship and 10 percent unemployment.

The White House eventually clamped down on her public profile. She was ordered to stop attending splashy events and showing up in fancy clothes on magazine covers. When Michelle Obama learned one day that Ms. Rogers was on a train heading to New York to attend an MTV dinner, the first lady told her longtime friend to cancel, associates said.

After the Salahi incident, these associates said Ms. Rogers was barred by the White House from testifying before Congress or giving interviews or even answering written questions. She was told she could not attend the Kennedy Center Honors, a major annual Washington event. And even her decision to finally resign leaked before she could secure a new job.

So Ms. Rogers is leaving the White House and Washington never having been allowed to describe publicly what happened that night four months ago. But in conversations with associates, she has defended herself by noting that she had positioned a staff member to greet guests at the East Portico landing just as the Social Office had sometimes done in the past. And she has expressed disappointment that her work at creating a “people’s house” for the first couple has been overshadowed by one lapse.

“It’s been very difficult for her,” said Amy Zantzinger, who was President George W. Bush’s last social secretary and has become a friend of Ms. Rogers’s. “And I think what can’t be lost is there are all these unbelievable events they did at the White House when she was there, particularly bringing in all the artists and musicians. I don’t think that’s ever been done before to this magnitude.”

Representative Peter T. King of New York, the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, faulted Ms. Rogers for not having a staff member at the outer checkpoint on the street and complained that the White House “just totally stiff-armed us” in terms of getting answers to what happened.

But Mr. King suggested Ms. Rogers was left hanging in the wind by the White House. “She was in a tough spot,” he said. “All of us in public life dread the screw-up which is going to come back to haunt you.”

Public life has singed presidential friends over the years with striking regularity, people like Bert Lance during Jimmy Carter’s administration, Vincent W. Foster Jr. and Webster L. Hubbell during Bill Clinton’s, and Harriet E. Miers and Alberto R. Gonzales during George W. Bush’s. Washington can be seductive and then destructive.

In some cases, they were ill equipped for the jobs they were given, unable to transform success in private life or smaller-scale politics to the White House. In other instances, the cutthroat politics proved too caustic to stomach. In the most extreme example, Mr. Foster, a law partner of Hillary Rodham Clinton before he became deputy White House counsel, committed suicide in 1993 leaving behind a note saying that “here ruining people is considered sport.”

Off to Washington

A native of New Orleans, Ms. Rogers graduated from Wellesley College and earned an M.B.A. from Harvard University. She got to know the Obamas some 20 years ago through her husband at the time, who went to Princeton University with Michelle Obama’s brother, Craig Robinson.

Ms. Rogers’s glamorous looks, fashion taste and on-the-town profile in Chicago obscured a fast rise through the management world, as she served as head of the Illinois lottery, then president of Peoples Gas and North Shore Gas, and finally as a senior executive at Allstate Financial. During the 2008 campaign, she helped bring in roughly $600,000, according to a person familiar with campaign finances.

Tall and striking, Ms. Rogers can easily pass for younger than her 50 years. She seemed to the Obamas to be a natural for White House social secretary. The first African-American to hold the job, she swept into Washington brimming with ideas for executing the Obamas’ vision of opening the White House to a wider circle of people, and became an instant magnet for attention.

After taking an apartment in the same exclusive Georgetown building as her friend, Ms. Jarrett, Ms. Rogers quickly became a hot Washington draw. She posed for a spread for Vogue and later accompanied its editor, Anna Wintour, to Fashion Week in New York. Within months, other magazines came calling, including Town & Country, Vanity Fair, Michigan Avenue and Capitol File.

But it was a spread in The Wall Street Journal’s magazine, WSJ, with the expensive clothes and jewelry provided by the magazine, that got her in trouble in the White House.

Mr. Axelrod called her in for a long conversation about her interviews and photo shoots, warning her explicitly that she was flying into dangerous territory and that Washington loves to watch people become too big and ultimately crash and burn, according to people familiar with the conversation. Ms. Rogers noted that everything she had done had been approved by the White House. She viewed her trips to fashion shows and other events as a way to make connections in the creative community and find talent to perform at the White House.

But her profile was deliberately lowered. Mr. Gibbs, the White House press secretary, had already canceled a proposed photo shoot of Ms. Rogers wearing an Oscar de la Renta ball gown in the first lady’s garden, officials said. Michelle Obama’s new chief of staff, Susan Sher, more closely scrutinized Ms. Rogers’s public activities, to her aggravation.

Praise and Criticism

Amid all this, Ms. Rogers earned widespread praise for the events she organized at the White House, including a summer luau for members of Congress, a poetry jam and a Halloween party for 2,000 trick-or-treaters. She managed to put on 309 events in 2009, compared with 231 produced in the last year of the Bush White House.

“If you look at the totality of her time here,” said Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, “she did a good job of projecting a White House that was open, family friendly and classy.”

Shawnelle Richie, a Rogers friend from Chicago, said, “She is a multitasker of the first order.” Ms. Richie added: “She did a good job. If the impression is she didn’t, I think people are wrong. They’re misinformed.”

For all the attention to Ms. Rogers’s photo spreads, Ms. Richie said, Ms. Rogers kept focused on the job at hand. “Glamour wasn’t a distraction,” she said. “If everybody were to look at her complete work and her history and her background, as opposed to an isolated event, they would see she was the right person for the job at the right time.”

The isolated event, of course, was the State Dinner in November, which in fact received near universal acclaim as an elegant, memorable evening until the next morning when the first reports of the party crashers emerged.

As she put together plans for the dinner, Ms. Rogers and her staff consulted records of two State Dinners held by Mr. Bush before leaving office. The records indicated that the social office in both cases sent a person to the East Portico of the White House, where the metal detectors are stationed for State Dinners, in case any guests are not on the Secret Service list. Her office copied that arrangement.

In the Spotlight

At State Dinners in the past, though, the social office stationed a person, or even more than one, at the outer checkpoint. Critics like Mr. King faulted Ms. Rogers for not doing that. Still, the Secret Service acknowledged it was not supposed to allow the Salahis in without checking. And the officers on duty that rainy night as the long line of wet celebrities and power players waited impatiently did not check with anyone from the social office when the Salahis showed up.

The White House afterward issued a memorandum announcing the policy would be changed. In interviews afterward, both the president and first lady praised the State Dinner, with Mrs. Obama calling it “an outstanding success” and dismissing the gate crashers as “a footnote.” But she and Mr. Obama bypassed opportunities to defend Ms. Rogers. “I was unhappy with everybody who was involved in the process,” the president said. “It was a screw-up.”

Lisa Caputo, who worked in the East Wing under Mrs. Clinton when she was first lady, said Ms. Rogers had weathered the hothouse glare of Washington with grace. “She’s done a fantastic job of opening the White House,” Ms. Caputo said.

“She was put in a position where the spotlight was put on her in a different way,” Ms. Caputo added, “coming in as someone who was not a Washingtonian, coming into a high-profile senior role and being the first African-American in that role. The combination of all three makes it not easy. I would venture to say she’s had a larger mountain to climb.”

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There is one public, all-male, all–African American high school in the city of Chicago called "The Urban Prep Academy for Young Men," located in Englewood. The school recently got the attention of Mayor Richard Daley and Chicago Public Schools Chief Ron Huberman, when they were able to get all of their 107 seniors accepted in to 72 different colleges across the country.

Huberman had this to say:

"All of you in the senior class have shown that what matters is perseverance, what matters is focus, what matters is having a dream and following that dream."

I spoke with Evan Lewis, the school's Vice President for Institutional Advancement. He argues that getting the students in to college is not the only goal, but that getting them through college is what matters.

"We are not just committed to getting our students through high school, we are committed to getting them through college. We are going to be a constant presence in their lives and give them the support that a lot of folks don't have when they go to college."

The school has a very strict dress code, consisting of black blazers, khaki pants and a red tie. The red tie is swapped out for a gold one once the student is accepted in to college. When one student, Rayvaughn Hines, was asked which college he was accepted to, he said, "Do you want me to name them all?"

Hines, a student who once thought college wasn't made for him, has chosen to become a Morehouse man. He cherished the moment when he switched out his red tie for a gold one.

"I wanted to take my time, because I was just so proud of myself," he said. "I wanted everyone to see me put it on."

Urban Prep has a unique set of hurdles. It is in a troubled part of the city, and only 4 percent of the incoming freshmen could read at grade level. With hard work and persistence, the students who could not read at grade level four years ago are now on their way to college.

"I never had a doubt that we would achieve this goal," said Tim King, the school's founder and CEO. "Every single person we hired knew from the day one that this is what we do: We get our kids in to college."

From the day the students enter high school, they are prepared for the next step. They have a college counselor from day one, and their first field trip is a visit to Northwestern University. Their school day is longer than that of students who attend other schools. The school's voice mail has a student saying, "I am college bound," before the caller is able to dial an extension.

"These are the same guys who would have gone to traditional high schools and not enrolled in college had they not gone to Urban prep," said Vice President Lewis. "It's not rocket science. We work really hard and work really long hours. When you do that, you start to see results. We've instilled in them a belief in themselves and their ability and the willingness to do what it takes in order to be successful."

It was hard to write about Urban Prep without my eyes filling with tears. When I think back to my days as a high school student, when I truly believed that I wasn't smart enough to go to college, I become petrified. The memories frighten me, because I almost missed out on the chance to become Dr. Boyce Watkins. When someone kills your spirit and willingness to try, they have given a death sentence to your destiny.

What is also interesting is that Urban Prep is proving a critical truth that I've been screaming to my students for the past 17 years: When black males put the same intensity into academic achievement that we put into dribbling basketballs and throwing footballs, we are truly phenomenal. The young men at Urban Prep will have longer, more financially-rewarding careers than they would have had by pursuing their hoop dreams at the expense of everything else. They will also be well-positioned to be effective and relevant leaders in the 21st century. Being a great athlete can make you powerful, but being a great thinker makes you EMPOWERED. Power without empowerment is a recipe for social impotence (when's the last time you saw an athlete stand up for any kind of progressive social cause?)

Urban Prep certainly scores one point for charter schools. At the same time, President Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to learn lessons from Urban Prep and apply those lessons to every single school in the country. Urban Prep Academy should be given a massive budget to replicate its activities, since it has clearly shown a recipe for success. Additionally, the model of Urban Prep should be applied across the nation, because they are reminding us that when adults create an environment conducive for success, the children in that environment will always rise to the occasion.

You can watch the Urban Prep's 2009 Convocation below and get a whiff of the spirit and dedication they are bestowing on their students. I'm sure it will touch you and remind you that we are all capable of greatness. Show this to your children, show this to your neighborhood kids. Urban Prep Academy is breaking mental barriers and prescribed capabilities with each graduate they usher in to this big, bold world.

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Is online dating capable of doing great things for the Black community?

Consider: Gallup reports that half of all Black Americans believe it's "very important" for couples to marry when they have a child -- yet according to research from Packaged Facts, more than six out of ten Black Americans are unmarried, thereby making that group the most unattached in America.

The solution may well lie in online dating, where African-Americans now constitute one of the fastest-growing segments of that market.

A passionate exponent of the belief that meaningful, lasting relationships are essential for building strong African-American families, Ron Worthy, Executive Director of BlackPeopleMeet.com -- the nation's leading online dating site for Black singles --- sees a tight connection between online dating and the integrity of the family.

A pioneer in Internet dating sites that serve the Black community, Worthy is available immediately to offer guidance and perspective to the emergence of online dating for targeted communities, citing the experiences of thousands of African-Americans who have found kinship at the site in their search for companionship, love and marriage.

BlackPeopleMeet.com is operated by People Media (www.PeopleMedia.com), the No. 1 provider of targeted online dating communities. Launched in 2002, BlackPeopleMeet has helped introduce tens of thousands of couples, with a majority of members ages 35-45. Every month, the site reaches 4 percent of the total Black population in the United States.

"In an ever more wired society, online dating has become recognized as one of the most effective ways for people to meet, and Black singles are one of the fastest growing populations within this trend," said Worthy. "As this population migrates from urban centers to suburban settings, an online community acts as a common meeting ground, a place to gather and find each other. Compared to traditional methods of meeting other singles, online dating offers the greatest pool of potential relationship partners, and it's certainly the most affordable option in today's difficult economy."

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Tennessee Titans  linebacker Keith Bulluck surprised nine high school students Monday night by presenting them with $1,000 in scholarship money in the name of his late teammate Steve McNair.

The scholarships were presented at the 44th annual National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame awards dinner. Bulluck chose nine winners (the same as McNair's jersey number) from among 54 recipients of a separate scholar-athlete award for Middle Tennessee high schoolers. The nine players didn't know about Bulluck's gesture beforehand.

"This was a nice surprise because I don't think any of us knew about it," scholarship winner Juwan Turner told The Tennessean. "[Bulluck] is a role model."

He also took the job of finding scholarship winners quite seriously. The Tennessean reports:

"They all filled out applications and it really was a lot of work picking nine,'' Bulluck said. "I read through all of them, looked at their GPAs, looked at their extracurricular activities, looked at their coaches' comments, saw how much they were involved in things and how many years they lettered on teams."

It's a great gesture from Bulluck, but even more so considering that he isn't expected to be in Tennessee much longer. He's an unrestricted free agent coming off an ACL injury and insiders expect Tennessee to part ways with the 10-year veteran.

It brings to mind Scott Fujita donating money to New Orleans on his way out of town. There are plenty of good guys out there in the NFL. It's nice to hear about them every once in a while.

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Minorities make up nearly half the children born in the U.S., part of a historic trend in which minorities are expected to become the U.S. majority over the next 40 years.

In fact, demographers say this year could be the "tipping point" when the number of babies born to minorities outnumbers that of babies born to whites.

The numbers are growing because immigration to the U.S. has boosted the number of Hispanic women in their prime childbearing years. Minorities made up 48 percent of U.S. children born in 2008, the latest census estimates available, compared to 37 percent in 1990.

"Census projections suggest America may become a minority-majority country by the middle of the century. For America's children, the future is now," said Kenneth Johnson, a sociology professor at the University of New Hampshire who researched many of the racial trends in a paper being released Wednesday.

Johnson explained there are now more Hispanic women of prime childbearing age who tend to have more children than women of other races. More white women are waiting until they are older to have children, but it is not yet known whether that will have a noticeable effect on the current trend of increasing minority newborns.

Broken down by race, about 52 percent of babies born in 2008 were white. That's compared to about 25 percent who were Hispanic, 15 percent black and 4 percent Asian. Another 4 percent were identified by their parents as multiracial.

The numbers highlight the nation's growing racial and age divide, seen in pockets of communities across the U.S., which could heighten tensions in current policy debates from immigration reform and education to health care and Social Security.

There are also strong implications for the 2010 population count, which begins in earnest next week, when more than 120 million U.S. households receive their census forms in the mail. The Census Bureau is running public service announcements this week to improve its tally of young children, particularly minorities, who are most often missed in the once-a-decade head count. The campaign features Nickelodeon's Dora the Explorer, the English- and Spanish-speaking cartoon character who helps "mommy fill out our census form."

The population figures are used to distribute federal aid and redraw legislative boundaries with racial and ethnic balance, as required by federal law.

"The adults among themselves sometimes forget the census is about everyone, and kids should be counted," said Census Bureau director Robert Groves. "If we fail to count a newborn that is born this month, that newborn misses all the benefits of the census for 10 years."

Whites currently make up two-thirds of the total U.S. population, and recent census estimates suggest the number of minorities may not overtake the number of whites until 2050.

Right now, roughly 1 in 10 of the nation's 3,142 counties already have minority populations greater than 50 percent. But 1 in 4 communities have more minority children than white children or are nearing that point, according to the study, which Johnson co-published.

That is because Hispanic women on average have three children, while other women on average have two. The numbers are 2.99 children for Hispanics, 1.87 for whites, 2.13 for blacks and 2.04 for Asians in the U.S. And the number of white women of prime childbearing age is on the decline, dropping 19 percent from 1990.

For example:

_In Gwinnett County, Ga., an Atlanta suburb, the population has shifted from 16 percent minority in 1990 to 58 percent minority in 2008. The number of blacks and Hispanics nearly doubled, while the number of white young people stayed roughly the same.

_The population of Dakota County, Neb., increased from 15 percent minority in 1990 to 54 percent in 2008, due largely to an influx of Hispanics who came looking for work in meatpacking and other labor.

_In Lake County, Ind., a suburb of Chicago, the minority population grew from 43 percent in 1990 to 53 percent in 2008 as the number of white children declined, the number of blacks stayed stable and the number of Hispanics increased.

The 2008 census estimates used local records of births and deaths, tax records of people moving within the U.S., and census statistics on immigrants. The figures for "white" refer to those whites who are not of Hispanic ethnicity.

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Juanita Goggins is seen in a 1974 file photo in Rock Hill, S.C. Goggins was the first black woman elected to the the South Carolina Legislature in 1974, and was hailed as a trailblazer at the time. Three decades later, Goggins died alone and freezing in the home she rented for 16 years, just four miles from the gleaming Statehouse dome

Horace W. Goggins II poses in his family home Wednesday March 10, 2010, in Rock Hill, S.C. His mother, Juanita Goggins was the first black woman elected to the South Carolina General Assembly from Rock Hill. She served from 1974-1980.

When Juanita Goggins became the first black woman elected to the South Carolina Legislature in 1974, she was hailed as a trailblazer and twice visited the president at the White House.

Three decades later, she froze to death at age 75, a solitary figure living in a rented house four miles from the gleaming Statehouse dome.

Goggins, whose achievements included key legislation on school funding, kindergarten and class size, had become increasingly reclusive. She spent her final years turning down help from neighbors who knew little of her history-making past. Her body was not discovered for more than a week.

Those neighbors, as well as former colleagues and relatives, are now left wondering whether they could have done more to help.

"I'm very saddened. People like her you want to see live forever. She had quite a gift for helping others," said state Sen. John Land, a fellow Democrat who was first elected to the House the same year as Goggins.

Goggins, the youngest of 10 children, grew up the daughter of a sharecropper in rural Anderson County, about 130 miles northwest of the capital. She was the only sibling to earn a four-year college degree. Her bachelor's in home economics from then-all-black South Carolina State College was followed by a master's degree.

She taught in the state's segregated schools, married a dentist and got into politics. In 1972, she became the first black woman to represent South Carolina as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. Two years later, she became the first black woman appointed to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

"I am going to Columbia to be a legislator, not just a black spot in the House chambers," she told The Associated Press in 1974 following her victory over an incumbent white man from a district just south of Charlotte, N.C.

Voters "were weary of poor representation. They were ready to accept a person who was sincere and concerned about things. Those feelings go beyond color," Goggins said.

She sat on the powerful House budget-writing committee and was responsible for funding sickle-cell anemia testing in county health departments.

The former teacher also helped pass the 1977 law that is still the basis for education funding in the state. Her proposals to expand kindergarten and to reduce student-teacher ratios in the primary grades were adopted after she left politics in 1980, citing health issues.

"She was not bashful or anything. She liked to talk. I used to say she could sell an Eskimo ice," recalled Ilese Dixon, 88, of Pendleton, Goggins' last surviving sibling. "She was just lively and smart. She thought she could fix the world."

Her colleagues say they never learned the specifics of her illness and, since she didn't talk about it, they didn't press.

Several years after leaving the Legislature, Goggins divorced and then moved to Columbia in the early 1990s, renting the brick ranch house in a quiet neighborhood off North Main Street where she lived for 16 years.

Her son said she worked several years as a case manager for the state Department of Health and Environmental Control, although a spokesman said the agency had no records of her employment. At one point, she also started a nonprofit tutoring service called the Juanita W. Goggins School of Excellence.

Neighbors said she was always a private person. One neighbor said she would return her waves, but refused to let visitors in the door.

Last year, about the same time the Legislature voted to name part of a state highway after her, Goggins was mugged near her home. She changed the locks on her door and stopped taking walks, according her neighbors and landlord.

Police found Goggins' body March 3 — two weeks after she was last seen. Her landlord contacted police after a next-door neighbor realized he had not seen her lights on in some time.

Coroner Gary Watts said she died of hypothermia, probably about Feb. 20, and said he found indications of dementia. When she died, during a cold snap, Goggins was wearing several layers of clothing, yet her heat was working at the time.

She had money to pay her bills, but the utility company said it shut off the electricity for nonpayment Feb. 23. Watts said it appeared Goggins was using Sterno to cook, but her stove was still functioning when police climbed through a window and found her.

"I miss her," said Erskine Hunter, an 83-year-old neighbor who ensured Goggins' lawn was mowed and hedges were trimmed. "I don't know why I didn't go over there and hammer on the door."

Hunter said Goggins occasionally came to his home and visited with his granddaughter. She refused to let anyone drive her anywhere, and refused rides to and from the bus stop, so he often went to the grocery store for her. But he had not done that in several months.

State Sen. John Scott, whose realty company owns Goggins' home, said he and his sister tried to take care of Goggins as best as they could without prying.

"We lost a great trailblazer," said Scott, a Democrat from Columbia. "Our family's very saddened this happened to a person who's given so much."

His sister who manages the property, Linda Marshall, said Goggins declined help from the county.

"She needed someone to assist her, but anyone who tried to get close, she'd block them off," she said. "She was very fragile. This was something I always dreaded."

Why she withdrew remains a mystery even to her son. He attributes it to her illness, which was never fully diagnosed.

"That's something I've been trying to get my head around for the last 15 years," said Horace Goggins Jr., 42, of Powder Springs, Ga.

He last saw her about six months ago. She would not let him help her either, he said.

He wants to focus on her accomplishments and the good times at his mother's funeral Friday in Rock Hill.

"I would like for her to be remembered as a woman who cared about her community," he said. "I want her to be remembered as a positive role model, not only for African-American girls, but also any young girl who has a want and a desire to make a change and do something positive."

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