Other influential people in computer science and software engineering have recently passed away, without any black bar. I think even a Turing Award is not enough to qualify. Some of their fundamental contributions to CS and SE reach back to the 60s and even the 50s.
For people who weren't writing software in the 70s, 80s or 90s -- how would they have known Ed and his work?
(I'm not asking rhetorically, I'm genuinely curious. I read "Decline of the American Programmer" at the time it came out, thought it was total rubbish, and didn't bother to read anything else he wrote. Did I miss out?)
When I started studying software engineering in 1977 he was the most prominent figure in the books my city's college library had, I learned a lot back then from him and it's still generally relevant, although of course superseded as we figured out more things about the practice of software development ... or forgot rather a lot that had been learned back then.