Overlooked

Introduction

by Amisha Pandani


I didn't grow up wanting to be an obituaries editor. Who does? It would be an odd—some might even say creepy—ambition for a child. But as a journalist, I always enjoyed learning about life through the eyes of others, and I found myself turning to the obits page to learn about the remarkable people who shaped our world.

When I started working at The New York Times in 2011, I was curious to meet the team that put the section together. My chance came in 2016, when I joined the Obituaries team as an editor, and I soon learned just how challenging the job can be. Thousands of people die between one edition of the newspaper and the next. On the Obituaries desk, we hear about a scant few. Of those, we get to choose about three to spotlight. And so, each morning, my colleagues and I scan our list of names and ask, “Who is worthy?”

It’s a tough question to answer. In some cases, the decision is obvious; newsprint is always reserved for those who have achieved the highest levels of fame—heads of state, chart-topping musicians, and Oscar-winning actors, for instance. But more often, the names on our list are not widely known, so we look for interesting people who have left their mark: the inventor of the wetsuit, a beach bum who simply wanted to surf in the winter; the owner of the world’s only self-cleaning house; a professional prankster whose whimsical hoaxes fooled the world.

Still, as I sat in a room with my colleagues making these choices, I noticed a stark pattern: most of our obituaries were about men, mainly those of privilege. When I asked my team why this was, they said: “Obits are a rearview look at society. The people dying today are from a time when women and people of color weren’t invited to the table to make a difference.” While there was some truth to that answer, I still felt unsatisfied. As the daughter of Indian immigrants to the United States, I knew what it felt like to sometimes feel like an outsider—invisible even—and I longed to see myself, and a greater variety of people, reflected in our pages.

Where were the women, the people of color, and the LGBTQ and disabled communities who made history? What about the marginalized figures whose fierce advocacy changed the way society regarded them, whose curiosity and innovative spirit shaped the way we live, whose unique experiences left an indelible mark on the world? Soon, I found myself on a journey to find them, a journey that took me deep into The New York Times’s archives, from when the newspaper began publishing, on September 18, 1851.

I learned that the newspaper had failed to note the death of the pioneering athlete Major Taylor, who overcame racist brutal beatings and sabotage to become the first Black world champion in cycling. Nor had it mentioned Bette Nesmith Graham, a single mom whose invention of Liquid Paper saved the careers of secretaries and kept students’ notebooks tidy. I went as far back as 1858 to find that India’s queen warrior, the rani of Jhansi, who fought to protect her kingdom from the British, was also left out of our pages.

But that wasn’t all: the newspaper of record also did not write obituaries about Sylvia Plath, whose brilliant poetry and memorable prose gave voice to female anger and despair; Marsha P. Johnson, a central figure in a gay liberation movement energized by the 1969 police raid on the Stonewall Inn; or the trailblazing journalist Ida B. Wells, who started a campaign against lynching—even though all were notable in their lifetimes.

None of these people were “invited to the table” to make a difference, but they persevered and did it anyway. I went back to my team and asked, “What if we were to write their obituaries now?” My colleagues were excited by the idea.

And so, in 2018, I worked with dozens of talented editors and journalists to launch “Overlooked,” a history series that seeks to go beyond the figures taught to us in classrooms—or celebrated by society’s historically narrow lens—by telling the stories of extraordinary lives that have been hidden from view. This book expands upon the series to include a wide range of people who, across time and place and experience, staggered us with their bravery, expanded our understanding of the world by inventing and innovating, and broke constraints placed upon them in an unspoken mission to create a better future for others.

The strength these people exhibited in their lifetimes has propelled me to continue my research and has inspired my team to expand our criteria when we make decisions each day on the Obits desk. While we will never be able to publish obituaries about every single life, I hope this book expands our knowledge of whom we, as a society, value as worthy.