A pioneer hiker, Emma Gatewood, was the first woman to walk the Appalachian Trail solo in one season. At the age of 67, after raising 11 children, Gatewood started hiking, inspired by an article in National Geographic, and set her mind to tackle the 2,168-mile trail. She completed the hike three times, the last at age 75, making her the first person to do so. She also walked 2,000 miles of the Oregon Trail, averaging 22 miles a day. In total she walked alone through 14 states. The impetus behind her marathon hikes is rooted in her experience as a survivor of domestic violence. The last straw was an incident when her husband Percy beat her so badly he broke her teeth, jaw and cracked her ribs, nearly killing her. A sheriff’s deputy arrived at the house, and arrested Emma, not Percy. She spent a night in jail until the mayor of the small West Virginia town where they lived intervened when he saw her blackened eyes and bloodied face. He granted Emma a divorce — unheard of in those days — and she raised her last three children alone. Her youngest daughter Lucy who witnessed the brutal violence showed her mom the National Geographic article and urged her mom to set out on an adventure. Hiking for Emma, was an act of self-care, healing, resistance, independence and a way to regain her inner and outer strength and find her way back to herself. When asked why she hiked, she said simply “Because I wanted to.”
These remarkable black men and women never received obituaries in The New York Times — until now. We’re adding their stories to our project about prominent people whose deaths were not reported by the newspaper.
Since 1851, The New York Times has published thousands of obituaries, capturing the lives and legacies of people who have influenced the world in which we live.
But many important figures were left out.
Overlooked reveals the stories of some of those remarkable people.
We started the series last year by focusing on women like Sylvia Plath, the postwar poet; Emma Gatewood, the hiking grandmother who captivated a nation; and Ana Mendieta, the Cuban artist whose work was bold, raw and sometimes violent. We added to that collection each week.
Now, this special edition of Overlooked highlights a prominent group of black men and women whose lives we did not examine at the time of their deaths.
Many of them were a generation removed from slavery. They often attempted to break the same barriers again and again. Sometimes they made myth out of a painful history, misrepresenting their past to gain a better footing in their future. Some managed to achieve success in their lifetimes, only to die penniless, buried in unmarked graves. But all were pioneers, shaping our world and making paths for future generations.
We hope you’ll spread the word about Overlooked — and tell us who else we missed.
Read about the project’s first year, and use this form to nominate a candidate for future Overlooked obits.
1907-1960
Gladys Bentley
A gender-bending blues performer
who became 1920s Harlem royalty.
BY GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO
When it comes to loosening social mores, progress that isn’t made in private has often taken place onstage.
That was certainly the case at the Clam House, a Prohibition-era speakeasy in Harlem, where Gladys Bentley, one of the boldest performers of her era, held court.
READ MORE
1867-1917
Scott Joplin
A pianist and ragtime master who wrote “The
Entertainer” and the groundbreaking opera “Treemonisha.”
BY WIL HAYGOOD
When Scott Joplin’s father left the North Carolina plantation where he had been born a slave, there was one thing he wanted to hold on to: the echoes of the Negro spirituals he had heard in the fields. In those songs he found a sense of uplift, hope and possibility.
In the post-Civil War era, the cruel breath of slavery and the aborted plan of Reconstruction still hung over the American South. But in the Joplin home, banjo and fiddle music filled the family’s evenings, giving the children — Scott in particular — a sense of music’s power to move.
READ MORE
1834-1858
Margaret Garner
In one soul-chilling moment, she killed her own
daughter rather than return her to the horrors of slavery.
BY REBECCA CARROLL
Margaret garner, who was born as an enslaved girl, almost certainly did not plan to kill her child when she grew up and became an enslaved mother.
But she also couldn’t yet know that the physical, emotional and psychological violence of slavery, relentless and horrific, would one day conspire to force her maternal judgment in a moment already fraught with grave imperative.
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1878-1932
Major Taylor
A world champion bicycle racer whose
fame was undermined by prejudice.
BY RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
More than 100 years ago, one of the most popular spectator sports in the world was bicycle racing, and one of the most popular racers was a squat, strapping man with bulging thighs named Major Taylor.
He set records in his teens and was a world champion at 20. He traveled the globe, racing as far away as Australia, and amassed wealth among the greatest of any athlete of his time. Thousands of people flocked to see him; newspapers fawned over him.
READ MORE
1905-2001
Zelda Wynn Valdes
A fashion designer who outfitted
the glittery stars of screen and stage.
BY TANISHA C. FORD
More than a half century before a “curvy” model made the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and before hashtags like #allbodiesaregoodbodies, there was a designer who knew that it was the job of clothes to fit the woman, not vice versa.
Zelda Wynn Valdes was a designer to the stars who could fit a dress to a body of any size — even if she had to do so just by looking at the client. “I only fit her once in 12 years,” Valdes told The New York Times in 1994 of her long-time client Ella Fitzgerald, “I had to do everything by imagination for her.” Valdes would simply look at Fitzgerald in the latest paper, noting any changes in her full-figured body, and would design the elaborate gowns — with beads and appliques — that she knew Fitzgerald loved.
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1941-1970
Alfred Hair
A charismatic businessman who created
a movement for Florida’s black artists.
BY GORDON K. HURD
“Well-Known Artist Alfred Hair Slain,” read the headline in The Fort Pierce News Tribune newspaper in Florida.
But before he was killed in a barroom brawl on Aug. 9, 1970, at just 29, Hair had become more than just an artist. With his drive, charisma and business acumen, he helped start a collective of Floridian artists, all African-American, who painted vibrant landscapes of their home state. They would later come to be known as The Florida Highwaymen, or more simply The Highwaymen.
READ MORE
1912-1967
Nina Mae McKinney
An actress who defied the barrier
of race to find stardom in Europe.
BY ANITA GATES
About 20 minutes into “Hallelujah,” Hollywood’s first all-sound feature with an all-black cast, Nina Mae McKinney appeared on screen as Chick, a singer and dancer, in a sexy flapper dress.
She had flashing eyes, an armful of jangly bracelets, and no qualms about cheating a handsome young cotton farmer out of the money he had just gotten for his family’s crop.
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1856-1910
Granville T. Woods
An inventor known as the ‘Black Edison.’ He
found that recognition came at a hefty price.
BY AMISHA PADNANI
He carefully sealed the drawings in a mailing tube and quietly placed them out of sight from his business partner, then went to a meeting.
But when he returned, Granville T. Woods found that his drawings — a design for a novel invention that held the potential to revolutionize transportation around the world — were gone.
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1884-1951
Oscar Micheaux
A pioneering filmmaker prefiguring independent
directors like Spike Lee and Tyler Perry.
BY MONICA DRAKE
Almost as soon as you settle in to watch the 1939 melodrama “Lying Lips,” you can figure out who is the victim, who is the villain and who is the hero. And even if you know how it all will end, you want to watch anyway.
That was the beauty of the filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. He made you want to soak up the exuberance he clearly felt in delivering a whole new way of telling stories.
READ MORE
1814-1907
Mary Ellen Pleasant
Born into slavery, she became a Gold Rush-era
millionaire and a powerful abolitionist.
BY VERONICA CHAMBERS
When the abolitionist John Brown was hanged on Dec. 2, 1859, for murder and treason, a note found in his pocket read, “The ax is laid at the foot of the tree. When the first blow is struck, there will be more money to help.” Officials most likely believed it was written by a wealthy Northerner who had helped fund Brown’s attempt to incite, and arm, an enormous slave uprising by taking over an arsenal at Harpers Ferry in Virginia. No one suspected that the note was written by a black woman named Mary Ellen Pleasant.
In 1901, an elderly Pleasant dictated her autobiography to the journalist Sam Davis. As Lynn Hudson writes in the book “The Making of ‘Mammy Pleasant’: A Black Entrepreneur in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco,” Pleasant told Davis, “Before I pass away, I wish to clear the identity of the party who furnished John Brown with most of his money to start the fight at Harpers Ferry and who signed the letter found on him when he was arrested.” The sum she donated was $30,000 — almost $900,000 in today’s dollars.
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1827-1901
Elizabeth Jennings
Life experiences primed her to fight for racial equality.
Her moment came on a streetcar ride to church.
BY SAM ROBERTS
Because she was running behind one Sunday morning, Elizabeth Jennings turned out to be a century ahead of her time.
She was a teacher in her 20s, on her way to the First Colored American Congregational Church in Lower Manhattan, where she was the regular organist, when a conductor ordered her off a horse-drawn Third Avenue trolley and told her to wait for a car reserved for black passengers.
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1876-1917
Philip A. Payton Jr.
A real estate magnate who turned Harlem into a black mecca.
BY ADEEL HASSAN
“Human hives, honeycombed with little rooms thick with human beings,” is how a white journalist and co-founder of the N.A.A.C.P., Mary White Ovington, described the filthy tenements that black New Yorkers were relegated to at the turn of the 20th century.
As more rural Southerners arrived in the city, the teeming Manhattan slums in which African-Americans were living had become the most densely populated streets in the city, nearly 5,000 people per block, according to one count, as landlords rented almost exclusively to white tenants.
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1857-1924
Moses Fleetwood Walker
The first black baseball player in the big
leagues, even before Jackie Robinson.
BY RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
When Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, becoming the first African-American player in modern major league baseball, he was not only a trailblazer in the sports world, but an inspiring figure in the modern civil rights movement.
But Robinson was not the first ballplayer in the long history of big league baseball known to be an African-American. That distinction belongs to Moses Fleetwood Walker.
Emma Gatewoodová si v květnu 1955 sbalila pytel s věcmi, zabouchla dveře domu a svým jedenácti dětem a třiadvaceti vnoučatům zanechala vzkaz: „Šla jsem na túru do lesa.“ Jen se nezmínila, že se vrátí až v září. Po 146 dnech.
Emma "Grandma" Gatewood was the first woman to solo thru-hike the Appalachian Trail. She is a pioneer in long-distance hiking and a portrait
Image: 1957 photo of Emma Gatewood on Appalachian Trail near sign for Lonesome Lake, text overlay "The First Woman to Solo Hike the Entire Appalachian Trail"
The story of Emma "Grandma" Gatewood who hiked the Appalachian Trail (all 2000+ miles of it) at age 67. In Keds. Without camping gear. She told her kids she was going for a walk in the woods.
Emma Gatewood was the first woman to hike all 2,168 miles of the Appalachian Trail, and she was 67 when she did it. As if this wasn’t awesome enough, she knew her family would get on her case if she told them about her plans to hike the trail, so she peaced out without any warning.
