B6 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 5 , 2019
have a great education. She’s dys-
lexic, but she’s certainly intelli-
gent and became a private ac-
countant. She was driven to get us
both to university, which she did,
but most of all, she poured all the
love she had into us.” (Dr. Grubis-
ic was also diagnosed as dyslexic
only a few years ago.)
He was deeply influenced by
his maternal grandfather, To m
Richardson, a daredevil who en-
joyed skydiving and attending air
shows. “I’m certain this is where
Angelo inherited his fearless
streak,” Karina Grubisic said.
“Our granddad made his last sky-
dive on his 80th birthday.”
In addition to his sister, Dr.
Grubisic’s survivors include his
parents, a half brother and a half
sister.
Angelo Grubisic studied aero-
space technology at Coventry
University, obtaining a bachelor’s
of engineering degree in 2003. At
the International Space Univer-
sity in France, dedicated to the
development of space explora-
tion for peaceful purposes, he
received a master’s degree in
space studies in 2005. He com-
pleted a doctorate in advanced
propulsion at Southampton in
2009.
He attended a joint post-doc-
torate fellowship program with
Southampton and the Jet Propul-
sion Laboratory. Using his experi-
ence gained at N ASA, D r. G rubisic
worked with the Paris-based ESA.
He was instrumental in develop-
ing the Solar Electric Propulsion
System for the BepiColombo mis-
sion.
On July 4, Dr. Grubisic, jump-
ing from a helicopter, was
crowned British national wing-
suit champion in the advanced
category at Dunkeswell Aero-
drome in southwest England.
“My brother grew up on classic
war films like ‘Platoon’ and ‘Full
Metal Jacket,’ ” Karina Grubisic
said. “A t first he wanted to be an
Apache helicopter pilot in the
Royal Marines but then realized
he would make more of a contri-
bution to mankind if he helped
push it forward instead of de-
stroying it.”
[email protected]Grubisic told The Washington
Post. “My mom would put us
before everything else. She didn’tpoor in monetary terms, both
Angelo and I always considered
ourselves rich in love,” Karinabrought up by their mother.
“Being a one-parent family was
tough financially and althoughmiles was set by American Kyle
Lobpries, also over Davis, in 2016.
The goal of Dr. Grubisic’s Icar-
us Project was to jump from
45,000 feet and fly as far as
possible for around 15 minutes,
reaching 280 mph.
Wingsuit-flying and BASE
jumping — the acronym refers to
free-falling from bridges, anten-
nae, spans or Earth features —
were Dr. Grubisic’s hobbies, but
he was far more than a hobbyist.
He was also described in Britain
as “Rocket Man” or “Jet Man” f or
his stunts in which he took off
and flew James Bond-style in a
suit powered by jet engines on his
arms and back.
He and the jet suit’s inventor,
Richard “Iron Man” Browning,
stunned tourists last year at the
Bournemouth Air Festival in
southern England when they
took off from a pier and buzzed
over sea bathers at low level
before one of Dr. Grubisic’s arm
engines exploded. He cart-
wheeled and crashed in shallow
surf.
Unlike some extreme athletes,
Dr. Grubisic was after more than
an adrenaline rush. At the Uni-
versity of Southampton, he spe-
cialized in the development and
testing of advanced propulsion
systems for spacecraft in support
of the European Space Agency
(ESA) and NASA. He was a con-
sulting engineer for the ESA dur-
ing its BepiColombo mission to
Mercury last year, a joint project
with the Japan Aerospace Explo-
ration Agency using two satellites
that are due to reach Mercury’s
orbit in 2025.
Dr. Grubisic was also a consul-
tant to NASA’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in La Cañada
Flintridge, Calif., which is in-
volved in exploration research on
Mars, including probing the pos-
sibility of life on the Red Planet.
Angelo Niko Grubisic was born
in Walsall, north of Birmingham,
on June 24, 1981, and grew up in
nearby Willenhall. His father, a
Serb immigrant, worked in a ball-
bearing factory and married an
English barmaid.
Angelo was 3 when his parents
divorced, and he and a sister wereBY PHIL DAVISONAs a n extreme sportsman, Eng-
lishman Angelo Grubisic’s goal
was to break the world records for
flying as far, as fast, for as long
and from as high an altitude as
possible — not in a plane, but in a
wingsuit, an aerodynamic overall
with fabric wings at the arms. He
leaped from mountains or air-
craft to glide toward the ground
before deploying his parachute.
While training for those world
records, he leaped from a helicop-
ter over the Asir mountains of
southwestern Saudi Arabia on
Aug. 21 and, according to three
fellow fliers, performed a 360-de-
gree barrel-roll. He was known as
a “proximity flier” — one who
stays close to the landscape — and
hit a ridge at 108 mph, dying
instantly, according to the fliers.
Dr. Grubisic called his
world-record preparations “the
Icarus Project,” after the Greek
mythological figure who carried
himself aloft on homemade
wings of feathers and wax but
died after flying too close to the
sun.
The University of Southamp-
ton, in southern England, where
Dr. Grubisic was a lecturer in
aeronautics and advanced pro-
pulsion and had enlisted 10 stu-
dents to help design the ideal
wingsuit, confirmed his death at
age 38.
The current world record for
wingsuit flight duration was set
by Colombian skydiver Jhona-
than Florez in 2012 with a time of
nine minutes and six seconds.
(Florez was killed during a wing-
suit flight when he crashed into a
mountainside in Switzerland in
2015.)
The highest-altitude wingsuit
jump — from a plane at 37,426
feet — was achieved on Veterans
Day 2015 by retired U.S. Air Force
Pararescueman Jimmy Petrolia
over Davis, Calif., to raise funds
for Special Operations forces
killed in the line of duty.
The highest speed so far was
reached by Japanese wingsuit pi-
lot Shinichi Ito in 2011, when he
hit 226 mph. The “greatest abso-
lute distance” record of 19.94
obituaries
ANGELO GRUBISIC, 38
Daredevil rocket scientist worked with NASA and European counterpart
CATALIN ONOFREI
Angelo Grubisic, a British space scientist and champion wingsuit flier, also performed stunts in
which he took off and flew powered by jet engines on his arms and back.BY BART BARNESDouglas E. Moore, a Methodist
minister who in 1957 led one of
the first sit-ins to protest racial
segregation in the South and later
served a tumultuous stint on the
D.C. Council in the 1970s, died
Aug. 22 at a hospital in Clinton,
Md. He was 91.
The cause was Alzheimer’s dis-
ease and pneumonia, said his
wife, Doris Hughes-Moore.
Rev. Moore settled in Washing-
ton in 1966 and gained promi-
nence in the city as an acolyte and
self-described “personal pastor”
of black-power leader Stokely
Carmichael. In 1 974, he won a D.C.
Council seat, but his reputation as
a volatile provocateur, along with
an incident in which he bit a
tow-truck driver, led to his loss of
a committee chairmanship and a
stay in jail. He never again held
elective office, although he con-
tinued seeking it, most recently
with a mayoral run in 2002.
He first drew attention as a
28-year-old clergyman in Dur-
ham, N.C., where he brought a
confrontational approach to the
nascent civil rights struggle. He
drank from “whites-only” public
water fountains, then would ex-
claim, “Good white water!”
He said activists such as the
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who
had been a classmate at the Bos-
ton University School of Theol-
ogy, r elied too much at t he time on
the power of oratory, instead of
action, to achieve racial equality.
“I was more educated than
most of the whites that segregat-
ed against us,” Rev. Moore once
told the Washington Informer, a
local publication that covers the
African American community. “I
was just tired of riding on the
back of transportations, walking
through ‘colored’ entrances, sip-
ping out of different water foun-
tains and [being] made to feel by
other black folk that it was okay.”
On Sunday, J une 23, 1957, h e led
a group of activists into the racial-
ly segregated Royal Ice Cream
parlor — a white-owned business
in the heart of Durham’s black
community. It was around
6:30 p.m. when he and his contin-
gent entered through a whites-
only door before taking whites-
only seats.
Over the next 15 minutes, their
food orders were refused, and a
manager asked them to leave. One
protester exited when eight police
officers arrived — one for each
activist — and the remaining
“Royal Seven,” as they became
known, were escorted to jail.
All seven were convicted by an
all-white jury and fined $10, plus
court costs, for trespassing. The
U.S. Supreme Court declined to
hear their appeal.
Sit-in protests were not yet a
mainstream part of the civil
rights struggle, and the Royal Sev-
en garnered little attention be-
yond the local and black press. An
alliance of black clergymen in
Durham criticized Rev. Moore,
calling his sit-in “radical.”
“We selected Royal Ice Cream
because it was surrounded by
black people,” he told the Durham
Herald-Sun decades later. “We
thought we’d g et s upport. No w ay.
We g ot the wrath of the communi-
ty.”
But the events in Durham
proved a harbinger of higher-
profile sit-ins, most notably the
one that began Feb. 1, 1960, at a
segregated Woolworth lunch
counter in Greensboro, N.C.
Rev. M oore came from Durham
for the demonstration and invited
King, who exhorted the young
protesters to “fill up the jails of the
South” i f necessary.
After months of protests
throughout North Carolina
chronicled in the national news,
Woolworth opened its lunch
counter to all customers — and
made the sit-in a primary tactic of
the civil rights movement.
Unlike Rev. Moore’s activists in
Durham, the demonstrators in
Greensboro benefited from local
support, William H. Chafe, a Duke
University history professor and
author of “Civilities and Civil
Rights,” about the Greensboro
protests, wrote in an email.
In G reensboro, the NAACP and
the faculty at North Carolina Ag-
ricultural and Te chnical College
“rallied immediately,” he said.
“That did not happen in Durham.”
Douglas Elane Moore was born
in Hickory, N.C., on July 23, 1928.
His mother was a schoolteacher,
his father a high school principal.
Several forefathers had been
Methodist clergymen.
His first taste of activism, he
once recalled to The WashingtonPost, was at h is high school gradu-
ation. He threw away his princi-
pal-approved salutatorian ad-
dress about the greatness of
America and instead gave a rous-
ing speech about the 14 th and
15th amendments, to the cheers
of black students but not the ad-
ministrators.
He graduated in 1949 from
what is now North Carolina Cen-
tral University, a historically
black college, and received a sec-
ond bachelor’s degree, in theol-
ogy, from Boston University in- He began a church ministry
in Durham while continuing his
studies at B U, w here he received a
master’s degree in 1958. (A year
before, he was also present at the
founding of King’s Southern
Christian Leadership Conference
in Atlanta.)
From 1962 to 1965, Rev. Moore
was a Methodist missionary in
Congo, then helped lead an urban
renewal project in Washington’sShaw neighborhood. He officiat-
ed at the 1968 wedding between
Carmichael and singer Miriam
Makeba, served as chairman of
the militant Black United Front
and espoused incendiary rhetoricas he entered politics (“When we
get the power, we are going to
squeeze the white people.”)
He lost campaigns for school
board in 1968 and D.C. delegate in
1971 before winning an at-large
seat on the D.C. Council in 1974.
“Then began a string of inci-
dents,” The Post’s Juan Williams
later wrote, “the stuff of front-
page comic opera.”
Rev. Moore threw tantrums
from the council dais. He was
accused of ramming the car of a
woman with whom he had a per-
sonal disagreement and throwing
a rock through a window at her
home. The case was settled out of
court.
In 1975, during an argument
with a 19-year-old tow-truck driv-
er whom he accused of blocking
his car in a D.C. Council lot, Rev.
Moore bit the driver’s back. Rev.
Moore claimed he thought the
driver, who was white, was trying
to assassinate him and invoked
the memory of his erstwhile
friend King.
Rev. Moore, who was stripped
of his budget committee chair-
manship in 1977, repeatedly re-
fused court-ordered psychiatric
examinations. In 1981, a judge
sentenced him to six months in
jail for ignoring the terms of his
probation. He made five more
bids for the elective office: for D.C.
Council chairman in 1978 and
1986; for council seats in 1979 and
1982; and for mayor in 2002,
when he received less than 6 per-
cent of the vote in the Democratic
primary.
In 1981, Rev. Moore founded
Moore Energy Resources, a fuel
and energy brokerage that he op-
erated for 20 years and won lucra-
tive contracts with the region’s
power and gas companies. He a lso
was pastor of Elijah United Meth-
odist Church in Poolesville, Md.
His first marriage, to Daisy
Haynes, ended in divorce. In
2000, he married Doris Hughes.
In addition to his wife, of Wash-
ington, survivors include four
children from his first marriage,
Douglas Moore Jr., Daisy Moore,
Peter Moore and Debessa Moore;
five stepchildren, Richard
Hughes Jr., Melany Hughes, Can-
dyce Coulibaly, Wilson Hughes
and Lewis Hughes; a brother; a
sister; and 14 grandchildren.
[email protected]DOUGLAS E. MOORE, 91
Provocative presence in civil rights and politics led one of South’s first sit-ins
DURHAM COUNTY LIBRARYBILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POSTABOVE: Douglas E. Moore,
left, and the Royal Ice Cream
strikers pray in 19 57. He later
was part of the 196 0 sit-in that
led Woolworth to open its lunch
counters to all customers.
RIGHT: Rev. Moore in 2002,
while running for D.C. mayor.