James Spruill, celebrated actor and Boston University theater professor, died December 31, 2010 of pancreatic cancer at age 73.

At the time, his passing was noted locally only by a Boston University press release and a BU Today feature shortly thereafter:

University Mourns Legendary Theater Educator

To say that James Spruill, a retired College of Fine Arts associate professor of theater arts, was a renaissance man would be an understatement. Over the course of a five-decade career, Spruill, who died of pancreatic cancer on December 31 at age 73, made his mark as an actor, a director, and a leader in the African American theater community. But he is being remembered today first and foremost as an impassioned, dynamic educator—a man who taught and mentored generations of theater majors at BU.

Fast-forward to Friday’s Boston Globe, and there’s this:

James Spruill, 73; actor and founder of influential black theater company

A few months after launching the New African Company, a groundbreaking black theater troupe in Boston, James Spruill sat in the living room of Globe theater critic Kevin Kelly nursing a gin and tonic, amber-tinted glasses on his face, a cigarette in his hand.

“There must be a black theater for the black community, our own voices in our own playwrights, and the more black rage the better,’’ Mr. Spruill told Kelly in October 1968, speaking in a resonant, stage-trained voice which was as restrained as the words were fierce.

“Black people,’’ he added quietly, “refuse to go around not being recognized any more.’’

With New African Company, which performed everywhere from resplendent venues to abandoned buildings, he brought plays highlighting the black experience to white audiences and professional acting to black audiences who might never venture into Boston’s Theater District.

Mr. Spruill, an influential theater teacher at Boston University for 30 years and an actor who shared the stage with the likes of Morgan Freeman and Al Pacino, died Dec. 31 in his son’s Roxbury home of pancreatic cancer. He was 73 and in retirement resided in Winchester, N.H., fulfilling a longtime wish to live in a log cabin on 40 acres.

That’s swell but, really? A month and a half later?

Hey, Globe editors:

Anything you want to tell us?

Photo by Kalman Zabarsky