Al Freeman Jr., Actor Prominent in Civil Rights Era, Dies at 78 - NYTimes.com: Al Freeman Jr., a star among a generation of black actors that emerged during the civil rights era, who made his mark in both drama and race relations with his portraits of some of the movement’s most forbidding personalities — angry young men in the 1960s plays of James Baldwin and LeRoi Jones, Malcolm X in a television drama, and the black separatist Elijah Muhammad in Spike Lee’s 1992 movie “Malcolm X” — died on Thursday in Washington. He was 78.
His death was announced by Howard University, where he had been chairman of the theater arts department since 2005. No cause was disclosed.
Mr. Freeman’s lucid fury and psychological insight made him a favorite of literary black playwrights in the 1960s. He made his Broadway debut in 1960in “The Long Dream,” a stage adaptation of a novel by Richard Wright, playing a black undertaker’s son who discovers his father’s complicity in the racial oppression at the heart of small-town life.
