North Carolina A&T photographer Charles Watkins remembered for stories told with his camera and his courage in facing adversity

Longtime A&T photographer Charles Watkins remembered for stories told with his camera and his courage in facing adversity
By Nancy McLaughlin -News/Record-December 14, 2019

Photograph: In this 2018 portrait, former NC A & T photographer, Charles Watkins, poses with some of his paintings. He continued to work on his art through a series of life threatening illnesses during his life.-Credit: H. Scott Hoffman-News/Record Greensboro, NC

GREENSBORO, NC— Charles Watkins never gave up on the idea of getting dual kidney and heart transplants even as his own body weakened and doctors told him he stood the risk of dying on the operating table.
The former longtime campus photographer known for documenting milestone moments involving A&T sought out research hospitals on his own and had thick stacks of medical bills.
His work across A&T’s campus includes a mural in Corbett Gym.

"I’m not afraid of death, but I’m not going to just give up and call it quits," Watkins said in 2018.
The Alabama native and father of two died Friday at the age of 57 without ever getting the transplants that doctors at one time thought would save his life.

Funeral arrangements are incomplete.
"What a kind, courageous, talented, and wise man he was," Raycia Evans-Crawford wrote on Facebook.
His life served as an example of what many Americans go through when an organ begins to fail and there’s no immediate donor. It is where the wait and life intersect.

Also an associate minister at Raleigh’s Crossroads United Methodist Church, he often talked about the need for organ donation, even when it became apparent that it was too late for him.
"People hold this gift in their hands that could do so much good," he said.
Watkins, who was suffering from pneumonia, stopped by the church during services on Sunday, said Phyllis Jeffers, a member of the church.
"Rev. Charles was an inspiration," she said.
He suffered with unrelated ailments since childhood.

Watkins, who collected 10-cent Marvel comic books and sketched from them as a boy, was born with a rare kidney disorder that made it hard passing liquids and often leads to kidney failure. Doctors didn’t expect him to live past the age of 12.

"In the 1960s there was no dialysis — it was either you die or you get over it," he told the News & Record in 2010.
A doctor told his mother to eliminate meat and excess salt from his diet. Irene Watkins fed him oatmeal, grits and rice. Eventually, the problem resolved itself, and his kidneys began functioning normally.

While working at UPS in his 30s, Watkins ruptured a hernia. Midoperation, doctors discovered cancer on his urinary tract.
The mass was removed and after chemotherapy, things seemed to improve for Watkins, who also worked for a stint in law enforcement.

A barrage of health problems would follow in the next few years, including hypertension, a mild heart attack and the return of the kidney disorder.
Watkins didn’t smoke or drink.
"It’s not that someone is picking on you — that’s the way it goes," Watkins said he has always reasoned.
It would only get worse. By 2001, with his kidneys failing, Watkins was put on dialysis.

On Nov. 21, 2007, a kidney became available.
The organ was a perfect match. But by then, Watkins’ immune system was so severely compromised that a week later he would suffer another mild heart attack, even momentarily flatlining. He blames his body’s eventual rejection of the kidney on the high toxicity of the 52 drugs he was taking — and the discovery of acute lymphoma, which doctors were able to clear up with a blood transfusion.

As far back as 2010, doctors were telling Watkins that in order to get another kidney, he’d need a heart transplant at the same time. His heart was only functioning at 10% and he might not last through surgery.
As he waited, Watkins was using a mobile dialysis machine at night that in 8 1/2 hours filtered his blood through his abdominal cavity.

He used much of the time to paint, including portraits for a campus art show.
When the divorced Watkins awakened his daughter Imari, then in high school, at 6:30 a.m. for classes, he was on his way to work. Watkins' 18-year-old son, Xavier, was killed in a motorcycle accident in 2013.

After an infection, Watkins would end up at a center undergoing dialysis most days a week.
He was in the middle of shooting a women’s basketball game at N.C. A&T in 2012 — and healthy enough for surgery — when he got the call from the Duke University transplant team.
Both a kidney and heart compatible to his blood type were available and waiting for him.
The odds against something like that happening at the same time were enormous. It helped that he had previously signed off on accepting the first available organs, whatever the medical history of the donor. The organs, they told him, were healthy, but they were coming from someone who carried HIV before dying.

Watkins was willing to take the chance as he raced to the car, the heavy camera equipment still slung around his neck.
He had just started the car and buckled up when a second call came. The organs, the team had just learned in the passing seconds, were cancerous — unusable.
So Watkins unbuckled his seat belt, got out of his car and walked back into the gym to finish shooting the action.

"I’m still a very functional person and they can’t understand why," he would say of his ability to keep working years ago. He shot Carolina Panthers football games and former President Barack Obama's first trip to Greensboro as a candidate. He even took pictures — while carrying three cameras the whole 4 miles — of N.C. A&T Chancellor Harold Martin leading the March of Dimes walk-a-thon.

More recently, he was using a cane.
"He fought a good fight," said his former colleague and friend, Nettie Rowland.
After leaving A&T on disability, he spent more of his time in front of his canvases.
"He was so creative," said his brother, Ira Watkins of Fayetteville. "He was good at so many things."

He took delight in a mixed-art collage of former A&T chancellors in front of the old campus administration building constructed in 1891, and the newer one with the statue of the four A&T freshmen who sat down at the downtown segregated Woolworth lunch counter and started a sit-in movement that spread across the South.
He also surprised people, including District Court Judge Lora Cubbage and people in the pews and his church, with portraits.

"I find serenity," he said at the time, "in just praying and painting."

Source: https://www.greensboro.com/.../article_c3912104-a92b-5c33...