Joe Smitherman; 75; Mayor of Selma, Ala.,...

Joe Smitherman; 75; Mayor of Selma, Ala., During ‘Bloody Sunday’

Joe Smitherman, 75, who was a young, newly elected mayor of Selma, Ala., during the 1965 “Bloody Sunday” confrontation between law enforcement officers and protesters, died Sunday in a Montgomery, Ala., hospital. He had undergone surgery after breaking a hip in a fall at his home Thursday.

Smitherman was elected to the Selma City Council in 1960 when he was 30 and served as mayor from 1964 until he was defeated in 2000 by James Perkins Jr., Selma’s first black mayor. “I got into politics to try to get industry, pave the streets, install streetlights,” Smitherman said in the 1990 history “Voices of Freedom,” compiled by Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer. “Segregation was not an issue, because everybody was a segregationist.”

Selma, which had only 150 registered black voters, was targeted in early 1965 by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. for voting rights demonstrations. On March 3, 1965, demonstrators were beaten by police on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, in what came to be called “Bloody Sunday.”

The violence in Selma helped bring about passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and Smitherman, a flexible politician, adapted quickly. By appointing blacks to key supervisory positions in city government, he attracted black voter support to become Selma’s longest-serving politician.

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Bill Charmatz, 80; Illustrator for Magazines, Newspapers

Bill Charmatz, 80, a witty illustrator for Sports Illustrated and other publications, died Sunday at his New York City home of unspecified causes.

Born Adolph Charmatz in Brooklyn to Russian immigrant parents, Charmatz attended the High School of Industrial Arts in New York. Hating his given name, he added William and became known as Bill. He served in the Navy during World War II, working in a graphics unit making charts. Later he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and at the Grande Chaumiere, both in Paris.

His impressionistic illustrations bore the imprint of European cartoon artists and his own lighthearted perspective. He drew a regular feature for Sports Illustrated, showing baseball and football teams in training and European skiing.

Early in his career, he produced drawings and watercolors of everyday life in France, which earned him commissions from Esquire, TV Guide, Time, Life and the New York Times. From 1996 to 2004 he illustrated the Crime column for the newspaper’s Book Review section.

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Murphy Matthews, 71; Promoted Zydeco, Cajun Music in L.A.

Murphy Matthews, 71, who promoted zydeco and Cajun music and dancing in Los Angeles, died Saturday of an apparent heart attack while dancing at a Redondo Beach fundraiser for victims of Hurricane Katrina.

An aerospace worker by profession, Matthews moved to Los Angeles in 1973 from his native Louisiana. He quickly sought out members of Southern California’s Creole and Cajun communities and began organizing musical get-togethers and dances.

Matthews regularly attended the annual Long Beach Bayou Festival in Queen Mary Events Park. There and at many other gatherings, he taught zydeco jitterbug and helped others with the Cajun waltz, Cajun two-step and Cajun hustle.

Born near Jeanerette, La., Matthews told The Times in 1992 that some of his happiest memories were of singing and dancing to Cajun and zydeco music in his youth. He described the Cajun form as a combination of the fiddle, accordion, triangle and spoons, integrating country western, African American, swing and bluegrass styles. Zydeco, he said, added a percussion washboard and incorporated rhythm and blues, jazz and urban soul influences.

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Murray Emeneau, 101; Founded UC Berkeley Linguistics Department

Murray Barnson Emeneau, 101, an expert in Sanskrit and Dravidian languages who founded the UC Berkeley Linguistics Department, died Aug. 29 in his sleep of natural causes at his Berkeley home.

Born Feb. 28, 1904, in Lunenberg, Nova Scotia, Canada, Emeneau studied French, German and Latin in high school and Greek and Latin at Canada’s Dalhousie University.

He was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University in England and earned his doctorate in Sanskrit and classical languages at Yale.

After teaching Sanskrit at Yale, he traveled to India in 1936 to study Dravidian languages, including Toda, Badaga, Kolami and Kota.

His 21 books include grammar texts and other works on those languages.

He joined the Berkeley faculty in 1940, teaching Sanskrit and general linguistics until his retirement in 1971.

In 1953, Emeneau persuaded UC Berkeley to establish a Department of Linguistics and became its first chairman.

He also set up what became the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, which continues to document indigenous languages of California and the continental United States.

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Laura Esguerra Adams, 36

Laura Esguerra Adams, 36, who designed U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer’s website and maintained her own blog in recent months recounting her treatment for cancer, died of the disease Sept. 3 at her home in downtown Los Angeles, her sister, Celia, announced.

Adams’ website, www.kevinsdeadcat.blogspot.com, detailed her illness and also her marriage last May to James Adams and other events of her life.

Born in Manila, the Philippines, Adams moved to Los Angeles in 1976 and earned a bachelor’s degree from Cal State Los Angeles.