The Lives Who Were Overlooked

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Deep in Sheldon, S.C., in the village of Oyotunji, people wear colorful African robes and walk among life-size carvings and shrines. They pray each day and gather for community meals of jollof rice and pounded yams, which they harvest themselves. Only the Yoruba language is spoken.

“Welcome to Our Land!” a sign reads.

This one-of-a-kind village for practitioners of the religion of the Yoruba, one of the largest ethnic groups in Africa, was created in 1970 by Adefunmi I, who was also its oba, or spiritual leader, and was the culmination of a quest that went back to his childhood.

As a teenager, he asked his mother why their family didn’t celebrate cultural holidays like his Jewish and Polish classmates. The answer was unsatisfying. “Blacks didn’t really have any knowledge of their history and culture before slavery,” she told him.

So Adefunmi set out to learn all he could about his African heritage and ultimately read about the Yoruba religion, which at the time did not have much of a footing in the United States.

He dedicated himself to educating Americans about the religion, opening temples, organizing festivals and parades, selling African wares and establishing Oyotunji, named for the African Yoruba kingdom of Oyo and meaning “Oyo rises again.”

Adefunmi’s life was recently recounted in Overlooked, a New York Times series of obituaries about remarkable women, people of color and others in history whose deaths The Times did not cover when they occurred. His obituary is also part of the first Overlooked book compilation, which will be available in bookstores on Nov. 14.

The book includes 66 Overlooked obituaries, including those of Alice Anderson, who ran the first all-women garage in Australia; Ida B. Wells, the pioneering investigative journalist who started a campaign against lynching; Terri Rogers, a brilliant transgender ventriloquist; and Esquerita, a rock ’n’ roll pioneer who inspired Little Richard. About two dozen of them are new, having never run in The Times before.

I started the series in 2018, shortly after joining the Obituaries desk as an editor.

Each morning, my colleagues and I would look over a list of names of people who had died and decide whom to write about. Most of the people on the list were men — mainly white ones.

As a woman of color, I yearned to see more people in our report who looked like me. This propelled me on a quest of my own: How could we balance our report to include more women and people of color?

An answer began forming one day when I was researching a woman in the tennis world and stumbled on a website about the history of the sport that mentioned Mary Ewing Outerbridge, who was credited with introducing tennis to America in 1874. On a hunch, I checked our archives to see if she had been the subject of an obituary when she died in 1886. She hadn’t.

Soon I was on a journey to see whom else we had missed: the Rani of Jhansi, who trained an army in India to fight colonization by the British; Margaret Chung, the first woman of Chinese descent to become a doctor in the United States; and Jobriath, an openly gay glam rocker. To date, the series has recounted the lives of around 250 people.

Creating Overlooked has been one of the most meaningful parts of my journalism career. It has brought attention to people who have otherwise not been widely celebrated for their ambition, resourcefulness and creativity in changing the world. It’s also an opportunity to acknowledge those who fought back against society’s constraints because of their gender, race, sexual orientation or disability. It has played a part in shifting the cultural conversation so that we are seeing more types of people reflected on television, in movies, in art exhibits and in books. It has made us think differently about the people we choose to write about in our section.

Friends and colleagues often ask me if I’m proud of the work that I have done with Overlooked, a question that puts me out of my comfort zone. As the daughter of Indian immigrants, I was taught to work hard while keeping my head down and assimilating to American culture; touting success was not part of that formula.

It is also a tough question to answer while so many people in our society continue to be marginalized.

But the people in this series have taught me that putting your head down and staying quiet will get you nowhere. So, yes, I am proud, but I also plan to continue doing this important work to make sure that no one else is overlooked.

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