Dr. C. DeLores Tucker, longtime civil rights activist, a former Pennsylvania secretary of state and founder of a national Black women’s political organization, died Oct. 12. She was 78.

In 10 plays, nine set in Pittsburgh’s “Hill District,� August Wilson, “more than any writer of his generation, chronicled the lives of the ‘ordinary’ Black folks. He documented in a poet’s voice the history, culture, vision, pain, psychology, fighting spirit, struggles, aspirations and hopes of his people — Black people,� writes Haki Madhubuti in tribute. Wilson died of liver cancer. He was 60.

Inspiring a movement that would transform the United States, civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks died in October. She was 92. Mourners came out to pay their respects from Montgomery, Ala., to Detroit. Parks became the first woman in American history to lie in honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.

The Rev. Albert J. Sloan, president of Miles College and the man who brought the historically Black institution back from the brink of closing, died Nov. 25 at a Birmingham, Ala., hospital. He was 62.

Dr. Andrew A. Best, a physician credited with helping create the medical school at East Carolina University, died at the age of  89. Best, a native of Kinston, N.C., established his medical practice in Greenville in 1954 and retired in 2004. He served in the Army during World War II, earning a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. He went on to receive a medical degree in 1951 from Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tenn.