Those We Lost — October 5

Honoring those we lost on October 5 — remembered for what they gave, and for what they left behind.

Oscar Charleston

Born October 14, 1896 — died October 5, 1954

Negro leagues baseball player and manager; Hall of Famer

Over a 43-year career Charleston played or managed with more than a dozen teams, including the Homestead Grays and Pittsburgh Crawfords, the Negro leagues’ leading teams of the 1930s, and played nine winter seasons in Cuba. By 1920 he was generally considered the greatest center fielder in Black baseball, and he shares with Josh Gibson the Negro leagues record of three batting titles. He was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1976.

Booker Little

Born April 2, 1938 — died October 5, 1961

Jazz trumpeter and composer

Little recorded as a leader and as a sideman with Max Roach, John Coltrane, and Eric Dolphy. He died at twenty-three.

Eddie Kendricks

Born December 17, 1939 — died October 5, 1992

Singer, songwriter, founding member of the Temptations, and solo artist

Kendricks’s distinctive falsetto led Temptations classics including The Way You Do the Things You Do, Get Ready, and Just My Imagination before he built a successful solo career. His voice helped define Motown’s sound, and his solo recordings contributed to the emerging dance and disco era of the 1970s.

Ruth Ellis

Born July 23, 1899 — died October 5, 2000

LGBT rights activist

Ellis was an African American LGBT rights activist and one of the oldest surviving openly lesbian women when she died at 101. Her life is the subject of Yvonne Welbon’s documentary Living With Pride: Ruth C. Ellis @ 100.

Fred Shuttlesworth

Born March 18, 1922 — died October 5, 2011

Minister, civil-rights organizer, and cofounder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

Shuttlesworth led direct-action campaigns against segregation in Birmingham, survived bombings and beatings, helped organize the Freedom Rides, and pressed national leaders toward decisive civil-rights action. His courage and strategic persistence made Birmingham a turning point in the freedom struggle and helped build momentum for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Derrick Bell

Born November 6, 1930 — died October 5, 2011

Civil-rights lawyer and legal scholar

Bell worked for the U.S. Justice Department and then the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where he supervised more than 300 school-desegregation cases in Mississippi. In 1971 he became Harvard Law School’s first tenured Black professor, and he was the first Black dean of the University of Oregon School of Law, from 1981 to 1985. His scholarship on race and American law made him a foundational figure in legal studies of race.

Geoffrey Holder

Born August 1, 1930 — died October 5, 2014

Dancer, choreographer, director, actor, and costume designer

Born in Trinidad, Holder was a principal dancer with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and built a career in American theater and film, including Baron Samedi in Live and Let Die (1973). He won two Tony Awards for the original Broadway production of The Wiz, Best Direction of a Musical and Best Costume Design in a Musical, the first Black man nominated in either category.