2014 Remembrances: Honoring Some Exceptional Lives

As we begin the new year, Code Switch takes a moment to look back at some of the extraordinary, influential and interesting people whom we lost in 2014.

Sam Greenlee during the 2004 Los Angeles Film Festival. John Heller/WireImage via Getty hide caption

Sam Greenlee during the 2004 Los Angeles Film Festival.

Sam Greenlee

A native Chicagoan, Greenlee drew on his own experiences as one of the first black Foreign Service officers to write The Spook Who Sat by the Door. Published in 1969, the novel centers on a government conspiracy to eradicate black America and the well-trained Army that the country's first black CIA agent or "spook," in agency lingo assembles to foil the plan.

The idea was intriguing enough that the novel was made into a 1973 movie that has gained a cult following. (The fact that the movie opened and then disappearedall the copies of the film had been hijackedinspired a documentary, Infiltrating Hollywood: The Rise and Fall of the Spook Who Sat By The Door.

Greenlee lived quietly for several decades, but he was a constant presence in Chicago's black communities, writing and supporting his hometown's cultural life. A few years before he died, he told a Chicago radio journalist he couldn't have written the novel today. "The idea that street gangs that are now dope-dealing thugs would start a revolution is a historical absurdity," he snorted. "Now, when I wrote [The Spook Who Sat by the Door], the gangs had political consciousness." Greenlee kept his till the end. He died in Chicago on May 19.

Fred Ho

Ho was an avant garde jazz musician who didn't like to describe his work that way. He believed the term "jazz" was initially used to denigrate black musicians. Ho liked to refer to his genre as "Afro-Asian Futurism."

You couldn't miss him in a crowd: Ho always dressed colorfully, in brightly-patterned clothes he often designed himself. The colors were often riotous, but the form Mandarin-collared jackets that closed with silk frogs were a direct reference to his Chinese heritage.

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2014 Remembrances: Honoring Some Exceptional Lives