Curtis Donnell "Big Mello" Davis (1968-2002)

Curtis Davis was born on August 7, 1968 in Houston, Texas to Liz and W.C. Davis, both natives of Louisiana. Davis attended the acclaimed Yates High School, and after graduation, enrolled in Texas Southern University, where he broadcast regularly on KTSU's Kidz Jamm. Both he and his show were well-liked, and he was naturally charismatic, so he decided to make music his life. He began his professional career at Rap-A-Lot Records, releasing his first singles, Playing the Game and Prime Time Live, which made a stir in the local hip-hop scene. His debut album, Bone Hard Zaggin was released on September 4, 1992 and reached #96 on Billboard's Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums, garnering him some national attention. Wegonefunkwichamind, his second album, lead by the singles, Funkwichamind and Wind Me Up was another success, placing him securely among Houston's rap elite. After several years on the Rap-A-Lot label, Mello signed with N-Terrogation Records. His third album, Southside Story, was his best work yet, making him a national figure. He toured with fellow hip-hop icons Scarface, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg and the Geto Boys, traveling as far as Alaska to do shows. In the Spring of 2002, he started working on his fourth album, Done Deal, with his friend and label mate Z-Ro. Unfortunately, the album would end up being released posthumously: while driving the night of June 15, his car swerved from the road and hit a support pillar at full speed. Mello died instantly. Source

COORDINATES

29° 33.836, -095° 20.920

Section 26
Houston Memorial Gardens
Pearland

Frederic Douglas "Curly" Neal (1942-2020)

Born in Greensboro, North Carolina, Fred Neal attended James B. Dudley High School and Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina from 1959 to 1963. At Smith, he averaged 23.1 points a game and was named All-Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association (CIAA) guard. Neal played for 22 seasons (from 1963 to 1985) with the Globetrotters, appearing in more than 6,000 games in 97 countries. His shaved head earned him his nickname, a reference to the Three Stooges' Curly Howard, and made him one of the most recognizable Globetrotters. 

In the 1970s, an animated version of Neal starred with various other Globetrotters in the Hanna-Barbera animated cartoon Harlem Globetrotters as well as its spinoff, The Super Globetrotters. The animated Globetrotters also made three appearances in The New Scooby-Doo Movies. Neal himself appeared with Meadowlark Lemon, Marques Haynes, and his other fellow Globetrotters in a live-action Saturday morning TV show, The Harlem Globetrotters Popcorn Machine, in 1974-75, which also featured Rodney Allen Rippy and Avery Schreiber. Neal also appeared in The White Shadow, The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island, and The Love Boat. 

On January 11, 2008, the Globetrotters announced that Neal's number 22 would be retired on February 15 in a special ceremony at Madison Square Garden as part of "Curly Neal Weekend." Neal was just the fifth Globetrotter in the team's 82-year history to have his number retired, joining Wilt Chamberlain (13), Meadowlark Lemon (36), Marques Haynes (20) and Goose Tatum (50). On January 31, 2008, it was announced that Neal would be inducted into the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame. He was also granted the Harlem Globetrotters' prestigious "Legends" ring, which is presented to those who make major humanitarian contributions and work for the Harlem Globetrotters organization. 

On March 26, 2020, Neal died at his home outside Houston at the age of 77. A mural commemorating Neal's achievements both as a Globetrotter and during his time at Dudley High School is painted in the basketball gym of the Hayes-Taylor Memorial YMCA at 1101 East Market Street in Greensboro, North Carolina. He had two daughters, Rocurl (Raquel) and Laverne Neal, and six grandchildren, David, Dante, Jayden, Brandon, Deja, and Hailey. Neal lived in Houston with his fiancée Linda Ware until his death.  

COORDINATES

29° 57.867, -095° 15.958

Mausoleum
Rosewood Funeral Home and Cemetery
Humble 

Ralph Webster Yarborough (1903-1996)

"Smilin' Ralph" Yarborough, United States senator and leader of the liberal wing of the Democratic party in Texas, was born at Chandler, Texas, on June 8, 1903, the seventh of nine children of Charles Richard and Nannie Jane (Spear) Yarborough. He attended local schools and developed a youthful fascination for military history. He was appointed to the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1919 but dropped out the following year. He taught school for a time while attending classes at Sam Houston State Teachers College, paid his way through the University of Texas by working at various jobs, and graduated from the law school in 1927. Yarborough married Opal Warren in 1928; they had one son. After several years with an El Paso law firm that included William Henry Burges and William Ward Turney among its partners, Yarborough was hired as an assistant attorney general in 1931 and was given special responsibility for the interests of the Permanent School Fund. Over the next four years he gained recognition by winning several cases against the Magnolia Petroleum Company and other major oil companies and successfully establishing the right of public schools and universities to oil-fund revenues. The million-dollar settlement he won in the Mid-Kansas case was the second-largest in Texas history at that time, and his work ultimately secured billions of dollars for public education. In 1936 Governor James Allred appointed Yarborough to a state district judgeship in Austin; Yarborough was elected to that office later the same year.

He made his first bid for statewide elective office in 1938, when he came in third in the race for attorney general. He served in the Texas National Guard in the 1930s and joined the United States Army in World War II; he served in Europe and the Pacific in the Ninety-seventh Division and ended the war as a lieutenant colonel with a Bronze Star and a Combat Medal. After the surrender he spent eight months with the military government of occupation in Japan. In 1946 he returned to Austin and resumed law practice. In the Democratic primary of 1952 Yarborough challenged incumbent governor R. Allan Shivers and lost. The campaign was the first of many in one-party Texas in which Yarborough was aligned with the progressive or liberal wing of the Democratic party against conservatives like Shivers. A second primary loss to Shivers in 1954 was characterized by harsh campaign attacks on both sides, as Yarborough accused Shivers of wrongdoing in the Veteran's Land Board Scandal and Shivers countered by claiming that Yarborough supported integration and was backed by Communist labor unions. He lost another bid for the governorship to senator Marion Price Daniel, Sr., in 1956 in a close run-off campaign. When Daniel vacated his senatorial seat in 1957, Yarborough joined the field for the office with twenty-one other candidates and squeaked through the primary with 38 percent of the vote to join Lyndon B. Johnson in the Senate. Yarborough received the support of organized labor, the newly organized Democrats of Texas, and the recently founded Texas Observer.

In the Senate, Yarborough established himself as a very different Democrat than the majority of his southern colleagues. After refusing to support a resolution opposing desegregation, he became one of only five southern senators to vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1957. He defeated wealthy conservative Democrat William A. "Dollar Bill" Blakley in the primary and Republican Ray Wittenburg in the election to win a full term in 1958. In 1960 Yarborough sponsored the Senate resolution leading to the Kennedy-Nixon television debate, a crucial event in the election and a model for subsequent presidential campaigns. In 1963 Yarborough was present at the Kennedy assassination; many believe his feud with conservative governor John B. Connally led to his sitting in the second car in the motorcade rather than with the president. Yarborough defeated George H. W. Bush, future president of the United States, in the senatorial race of 1964. In his years in the senate Yarborough supported many of the key bills of LBJ's Great Society and pressed for legislative action in the fields of civil rights, education, public health, and environmental protection. He voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and was one of only three southerners to support the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Yarborough served for years on the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee, of which he became chairman in 1969. He sponsored or cosponsored the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965), the Higher Education Act (1965) the Bilingual Education Act (1967), and the updated GI Bill of 1966. He was also an advocate for such public-health measures as the Occupational Health and Safety Act, the Community Mental Health Center Act, and the National Cancer Act of 1970. A strong supporter of preserving the environment, he co-wrote the Endangered Species Act of 1969 and sponsored the legislation establishing three national wildlife sanctuaries in Texas-Padre Island National Seashore (1962), Guadalupe Mountains National Park (1966), and Big Thicket National Preserve (1971). His interest in the preservation of Texas historical sites led him to sponsor bills to make Fort Davis, Jeff Davis County and the Alibates Flint Quarries national monuments.

Through his support of the social welfare legislation of the 1960s Yarborough further identified himself with the goals of the national Democratic party and further distanced himself from the moderate-conservative state Democratic party. In 1970 Lloyd Bentsen, Jr., upset him in the senatorial primary and went on to gain the Senate seat. Yarborough's last attempt at political office, a run at John G. Tower's Senate seat in 1972, did not make it past the primary, where he was defeated by Barefoot Sanders. Yarborough returned to the practice of law in Austin. As an avid bibliophile and collector of Western Americana and Texana, he amassed a substantial library and numbered J. Frank Dobie among his friends and supporters. Dobie called Yarborough "perhaps the best-read man that Texas has ever sent to Washington." Yarborough wrote an introduction to Three Men in Texas: Bedichek, Webb and Dobie (1967) and contributed to Lincoln for the Ages (1964). He died in Austin on January 27, 1996. and was buried in the State Cemetery. He is regarded by many as one of the great figures in the Texas progressive tradition, a gregarious politician who campaigned in the old energetic, back-slapping style and who cared deeply about the social welfare of the people and believed that it could be significantly improved through government action. Source

COORDINATES

30° 15.928, -097° 43.617

Republic Hill
Texas State Cemetery
Austin

Joseph Sovereign (1810-1877)

Joseph Sovereign was born in Portugal in 1790. Nothing else is known of him until the age of 45. In December 1835, he arrived in Texas for the first time before moving to New Orleans, where he joined Captain John M. Allen's volunteer company in late February, 1836. A few days later, upon arrival in Texas, the company was reorganized and Sovereign was assigned to Captain William S. Fisher's Company with the rank of private. He officially enlisted in the Texian Army on March 16. It was with Fisher's company that he fought at the Battle of San Jacinto. Evidently he was an excellent soldier, because on August 1st he was already commanding a company in Colonel C. L. Harrison's regiment. Sovereign remained in the Army until June 16, 1838. Over the next two decades, Sovereign moved between New Orleans and Texas. In April 1860, a San Antonio newspaper reported that a man known as "Portuguese Joe" (Sovereign) was shot twice with a revolver in the house of a Mexican by someone called Printer. Shortly after this nearly fatal incident, Sovereign may have gone to New Orleans for better medical treatment for his wounds. He was living in Galveston when he applied for his pension on August 13, 1870. After his arrest in New Orleans for violating a city ordinance against illegal gambling. He moved back to Texas for the final time and settled in Houston. On May 23, 1873, Sovereign attended the first annual reunion of the Texas Veterans Association, held in Houston. He died on January 16, 1877 of what was referred to as "exhaustion due to a lack of food or water" on his death certificate.

Note: Unmarked. Founders Memorial Park, originally founded in 1836 as Houston's first city cemetery, was rapidly filled due to a yellow fever epidemic and closed to further burials around 1840. The cemetery became neglected over a period of time, often vandalized and was heavily damaged by the 1900 hurricane. In 1936, despite a massive clean up effort, a century of neglect had taken its toll. The vast majority of grave markers were either destroyed or missing and poor record keeping prevented locating individual graves. Several cenotaphs were placed in random areas throughout the park in honor of the more high-profile citizens buried there, but a great number of graves go unmarked to this day. Joseph Sovereign's is one of them.

COORDINATES

N/A

Founders Memorial Park
Houston