List of Famous people who died in 1955

Charles Archibald Hahn was an American track athlete and is widely regarded to be one of the best sprinters in the early 20th century. He is the first athlete to win both the 100m and 200m race at the same Olympic Games.

Alfréd Hajós was a Hungarian swimmer, football player and manager, and architect. He was the first modern Olympic swimming champion and the first Olympic champion of Hungary. No other swimmer ever won such a high fraction of all Olympic events at a single Games.

Oswald Theodore Avery Jr. was a Canadian-American physician and medical researcher. The major part of his career was spent at the Rockefeller Hospital in New York City. Avery was one of the first molecular biologists and a pioneer in immunochemistry, but he is best known for the experiment that isolated DNA as the material of which genes and chromosomes are made.

Manuel Ávila Camacho was a Mexican politician and military leader who served as the President of Mexico from 1940 to 1946. Despite participating in the Mexican Revolution and achieving a high rank, he came to the presidency of Mexico because of his direct connection to General Lázaro Cárdenas and served him as a right-hand man as his Chief of his General Staff during the Mexican Revolution and afterwards. He was called affectionately by Mexicans "The Gentleman President". As president, he pursued "national policies of unity, adjustment, and moderation." His administration completed the transition from military to civilian leadership, ended confrontational anticlericalism, reversed the push for socialist education, and restored a working relationship with the US during World War II.

James Millican was an American actor with over 200 film appearances mostly in western movies.

Jeanne Primitive Mette, better known under her married name, Jane Catulle-Mendès, and as a French poet who also wrote plays and other prose works, and contributed to Pierre Lafitte's Femina.

Dorothy Bernard was an American actress of the silent era. She appeared in 87 films between 1908 and 1956.

Dovid Knut or Knout, real name Duvid Meerovich Fiksman, was a Russian Jewish poet and member of the French Resistance.

Mary Jane McLeod Bethune was an American educator, stateswoman, philanthropist, humanitarian, womanist, and civil rights activist. Bethune founded the National Council for Negro Women in 1935, established the organization's flagship journal Aframerican Women's Journal, and resided as president or leader for myriad African American women's organizations including the National Association for Colored Women and the National Youth Administration's Negro Division. She also was appointed as a national adviser to president Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom she worked with to create the Federal Council on Negro Affairs, also known as the Black Cabinet. She is well known for starting a private school for African-American students in Daytona Beach, Florida; it later continued to develop as Bethune-Cookman University. Bethune was the sole African American woman officially a part of the US delegation that created the United Nations charter, and she held a leadership position for the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps. For her lifetime of activism, she was deemed "acknowledged First Lady of Negro America" by Ebony magazine in July 1949 and was known by the Black Press as the "Female Booker T. Washington". She was known as "The First Lady of The Struggle" because of her commitment to gain better lives for African Americans.