Tara Folashade Ogunde

With deepest sorrow and regret, we announce the passing of our beloved Tara Folashade Ogunde, age 31, of Landenberg, Pennsylvania, on Friday, June 7th, 2019 after a spirited battle against triple negative breast cancer.

Tara, the daughter of Kunle and Angela Marie Ogunde of Landenberg, was born in Wilmington, Delaware on January 25, 1988. Consistently one of the brightest students in her classes through her academic life, she graduated from Kennett High School, where she played basketball and was very active in school activities, in 2006. At graduation, her classmates voted her Most Opinionated Student because of her passion for promoting the course of fairness and justice. She continued her winning ways at the University of Pittsburgh where she graduated, Magna Cum Laude, with a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration in 2010. Tara was a meticulous, long range planner who envisioned for herself a prominent role in the world-wide women’s struggle against suffocating Taliban-esque policies and politics that are becoming pervasive not only in forgotten, inconsequential third world countries, but in America itself.

In college, Tara worked several summers in her favorite place in the entire world, Disney World in Orlando, Florida. Post-college, she served in the Americorps program. After brief employment stints at Honda of America, Bank of America and JP Morgan in Delaware, Tara enrolled at the University of Michigan Law School where she was in her final year. She was an Associate Editor of the Michigan Law Review. During her first two summers at Michigan, she interned at the Morris Nichols law firm in Wilmington, Delaware, and was in an externship program with the Delaware Attorney General’s office in Spring 2019. Tara’s dream, on her way to becoming the champion of the down-trodden and disaffected, was to work in New York City for the Davis Polk law firm. She achieved her objective of getting a seat at the table at Davis Polk and would have been at work when the advancing disease took her young life. Those of us who knew Tara can attest to the true gaping hole her passing leaves in the fight for justice for the seemingly invisible many, for whom the American dream has become a nightmare in the recent past. Her passing irreplaceably silences the voice of a potential warrior for social justice.

Tara was an aspiring world traveler. She studied abroad in Barcelona, Spain in her junior year at Pittsburgh. She has also visited Nigeria, France, The Netherlands, Thailand and Hong Kong and was just getting into her traveling stride when cancer struck. To Tara, the only way to travel the world was business class on Emirate Airways.

Left to mourn and miss her perpetually sunny smile are her parents, sisters - Leslie Marie Daniels (Arron Gregory), Chelsea Ogunde, nephew Joshua Daniels, nieces - Maleah Daniels-Gregory and Victoria Daniels-Gregory, a host of aunts and uncles in the United States and Nigeria, many cousins in the US, United Kingdom and Nigeria, and many friends whose lives were brightened by their contact with Tara.

In lieu of flowers, our family recommends donations to the American Cancer Society specifically for research into triple negative breast cancer which continues to decimate the lives of promising young, black women.