Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked, we’re adding the stories of remarkable people whose deaths went unreported in The Times.

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It was the morning of April 15, 1865, and President Abraham Lincoln had just died of an assassin’s bullet. Mary Todd Lincoln, his widow, was cloistered in the White House, wailing in grief, unable to reach her closest confidante: her dressmaker.

Elizabeth Keckly was finally ushered into the darkened room.

“Why did you not come to me last night, Elizabeth?” Mary Lincoln said, reproaching her. “I sent for you.”

“I did try to come to you, but I could not find you,” Keckly answered, laying her hand on the widow’s brow.

The moment, as recounted in Keckly’s 1868 memoir, “Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House,” was indicative of how far she had come.