While poring over the Web site Legacy.com to prepare this issue, we noticed a trend. A search of the site’s database — which includes obituaries from more than 750 newspapers across the country — turned up hundreds of obits published in 2011 with one phrase in common.

 

A single thread appears and reappears, as a headline or an afterthought, in the final words written by the families of more than 300 people who departed this earth in the past year. In each of these obituaries was a phrase that read something like this: “The first black American to . . .” or “The first African-American .”

Eugene King was the first African-American milk-delivery man in the Gary, Ind., area. Eddie Koger was the first black bus driver in the state of South Carolina. Camillus Wilson was the first African-American meter reader for the Baltimore Gas and Electric Company. Nancy Hodge-Snyder was said to have “had the distinction of being the first black registered nurse in Kalamazoo.”

I scan the list, a spreadsheet of names and obituary excerpts, and cannot stop reading. How mundane the positions were, how modest the dreams had been. Added together, they somehow bear witness to how far the country has come and how it got to where it is. They speak to how many individual decisions had to be made, how many chances taken, the anxiety and second-guessing at the precise instant that each of these people was hired for whatever humble or lofty position they sought.

Walter Tharp Jr. was the first black window dresser at Wolf & Dessauer’s Department Store in Fort Wayne, Ind. Walter Lee was the first black postal clerk in Winter Park, Fla. Bernice Ellis Riley was the first black teller at First Federal Bank in Rocky Mount, N.C. Thomas Reid Sr. was the first African-American mold-maker at Wheaton Glass in Millville, N.J. 

There are influential people on the list. The pathologist James Bowman, the first black resident at St. Luke’s Hospital in Chicago and the father of the White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, was among those who died this year, as was Annette Samuels, the first black White House spokeswoman (under President Jimmy Carter); and Matthew Perry, the first black United States District Court judge in South Carolina.

But the lesser-known positions combine to make history with a lowercase h — at a post office in Saginaw or a police department in Poughkeepsie — when the country was opening up, one position at a time, to people who had been prohibited by law or custom from being what these people were trying to become.

John Howard was the first black car salesman in Cherry Hill, N.J. Adolph Hall was the first African-American garage-door tech in Houston. Bayleas Bingham was the first black female school-bus driver in Newport News, Va. Leon Gates was the first African-American business agent for Heavy Construction Laborers’ Union Local 663 in Kansas City, Mo.

The more ordinary the “first,” the more petty the years of exclusion now seem in a world filled with black tellers and postal clerks. Each position was in its own way both a happy triumph and a sad reminder of what it took to get there.

Marshall Arnell was the first black teacher to be hired at Dover High School in Dover, Del., in 1962. Eugene Smith was the first African-American licensed as a plumber and master electrician in Spartanburg, S.C. Travis Lucas was the first African-American paramedic for the Naval Station Great Lakes Fire Department in Lake County, Ill.

They ranged in age from 35 to 102, and most had gotten their jobs between World War II and the 1980s, although it wasn’t until 1998 that Ralph Tyson, for instance, became the first black federal-district judge for the Middle District of Louisiana.

Jimmie Nolcox was the first black reserve sheriff deputy hired in Gibson County, Ind. Donald Dickerson was the first African-American firefighter in Statesboro, Ga. Pressie Frentress was the first black mail carrier for the Grey Iron Foundry in Saginaw, Mich. Eva McElroy was the first African-American voter-precinct inspector in San Jose, Calif. Marjorie Grevious was the first African-American woman to be licensed as a funeral director and an embalmer in the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

When they were hired, most appeared to have known they were making history. The family of Alvin Taylor of Palmetto, Fla., described him simply as “the first African-American in every appointment he attained.” A woman named Dorothy Allen in Saginaw, Mich., never knew of a black probation officer in her county, but in 1974, she applied anyway because she had a sociology degree, heard of an opening and needed the job. “Everybody knew who had which jobs,” her husband, Dempsey, said. “There could have been some judge’s nephew that wanted that job. We were shut out time and time again. But she went in there and got it.” They celebrated in Detroit that weekend, and decades later, he would put the line in her obituary: “First black probation officer in Saginaw County, Mich.”

Summie Briscoe was the first black certified automobile mechanic in Cleveland County, N.C. Harriet Braxton was the first African-American female housing inspector in the city of Harrisburg, Pa. Wilbert Coleman was the first African-American narcotics detective in Hackensack, N.J.

Sometime in the future, the phrase will be invoked for the biggest first of all, the first African-American elected to the Oval Office, a designation that surely the first milk-delivery man and the first postal clerk and the first business agent for Heavy Construction Laborers’ Union Local 663 in Kansas City, Mo., had, upon consideration, more than a little something to do with.