Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

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Rose Morgan and her friend Oletha White were driving from Chicago to New York in White’s brand-new 1938 Ford when they began crossing the George Washington Bridge. Morgan looked up and saw the skyline full of tall buildings and asked: “Is that New York? People live in those buildings?”

White answered yes to both questions and Morgan was intrigued. Sure, Chicago had tall buildings, but they were mostly in the Loop. New York looked like it had tall buildings everywhere.

White was a dancer, and she and Morgan, a gifted hairdresser, were going to the city to see the actress Ethel Waters, who wanted Morgan to style her hair. Waters had been very impressed with the job Morgan had done once before, during an engagement in Chicago, and had invited the young hairdresser to New York to work her magic again. Morgan was charmed by the city and decided she had to move there.

“I had never seen people dressed up like these people were dressed up,” she said in a 1988 video interview for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. “Their hair was beautiful. Everybody was just gorgeous. I said, ‘Oh this is the place for me.’ ”