We originally featured Overlooked in the 3-16-2018 Scout Report, and since then this fascinating project has continued to add obituaries honoring remarkable people whose contributions were not recognized at the time of their death.
When Amisha Padnani became an obituary writer for The New York Times in 2017, she noticed that a number of important women throughout history had not received obituaries in the paper. Padnani decided to team up with Jessica Bennett, a gender editor at the Times to launch Overlooked: an initiative to provide obituaries for some of the women that Padnani couldn't locate in the paper's archives. On International Women's Day (March 8, 2018), the Times published this collection of fifteen obituaries of artists, activists, writers, athletes, and other important women that the Times overlooked in their obituary section throughout the years. In one obituary, Sewell Chan writes about the life of Marsha P. Johnson, a transgender activist who played a key role in the 1969 Stonewall uprising and, posthumously, was the subject of David France's 2017 film The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson. In another obituary, Aisha Khan writes about Bollywood star Madhubala, who appeared in dozens of films from the 1940s and 1950s before her premature death in 1969. Other women featured in this series include Ida B. Wells, Ada Lovelace, and Henrietta Lacks. The Times plans to add additional overdue obituaries each week, and readers are invited to nominate historical women to be featured in the series.
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