RIP AL FREEMAN Jr.

To some, he was Malcom X from Roots (and then Elijah Muhammad in Malcolm X, a pretty neat trick), to others he was My Sweet Charlie, while others perhaps only knew him as an instructor at Howard University.

To soaps fans, however, Al Freeman Jr. who died on August 9, 2012, he was One Life to Live's Captain Ed Hall.

Freeman won a Daytime Emmy for his role (watch him as part of the round up tribute in 1999, here), the first African-American actor to do so, at a time when representation was few and far between (you know, kind of like now).  In 1968, he was part of OLTL's ground-breaking story of a Black woman passing for white.

In 2010, as part of our roundtable discussion on Diversity on Daytime, actress Mariann Aalda (Didi; Edge of Night) talked about what that storyline meant to her as a viewer, and as a performer.  Read it, here.

RIP.