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

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When William Byron Rumford Sr. arrived at his hotel in Sacramento the night before starting his first term in the California Legislature , a clerk told him there were no rooms available. But he had made a reservation, he explained.

Rumford went outside to a telephone booth and with a call confirmed that the hotel had a room for him. Then he went back to the front desk, where the clerk rejected him once more.

“This time I told him sternly that I was a newly elected assemblyman and would take up the matter of racial discrimination in the Legislature the next day,” Rumford said, as quoted in “William Byron Rumford: The Life and Public Services of a California Legislator,” by Lawrence P. Crouchett. “This made him pause, and he pretended he hadn’t heard me before. Changing his whole approach, he responded politely, ‘Sir, just a second, we do have a room!’ ”

Rumford, a pharmacist who in 1948 became the first black person elected to the Legislature from the Bay Area, was at the forefront of the struggle to desegregate the promise and opportunity of the West Coast. His bills expanded African-Americans’ access to jobs, schools and housing, and while he was often described as moderate — a change-from-the-inside politician who owned a business, eschewed loud protests and fought for expanded access to capitalism instead of rejecting it as later generations of Bay Area activists did — he left a bold and successful record that easily made him one of the most important lawmakers in the nation’s largest state.