Black History
1836-1913
Born a slave, Fannie Jackson Coppin was virtually self-educated. Prominent white families who noticed her exceptional intellect welcomed her into their homes, providing her with room and board and the opportunity to study. She eventually attended Oberlin College, mastered Latin, Greek, and mathematics, and graduated in 1865.
Coppin was committed to educating the masses of newly freed black peopleand to dispelling the myth that blacks could not learn because of intellectual inferiority. Later, she became a teacher at the Quakers’ Institute for Colored Youth. During one of her classes, she invited an Englishman to take over the class and observe her students.
He commented afterward: “They are more capable of examining me. Their proficiency is wonderful.” Coppin State College in Baltimore, Maryland, is named after Fannie Jackson Coppin.
Politics
Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in 1817, in Tuckahoe, Maryland. Because his slave mother, Harriet Bailey, used to call him her “little valentine,” he adopted February 14th as his birthday, not knowing the exact date of his birth. He knew very little about his mother since she was employed as a field hand on a plantation some twelve miles away, and she died when he was eight or nine years old. Douglass knew even less about his father, but it was rumored that he was the son of his White slave master, Aaron Anthony.
Young Frederick was grossly mistreated. To keep from starving, on many occasions, he competed with his master’s dogs for table scraps and bones. In 1825, he was sent to serve as a houseboy in the home of Hugh and Sophia Auld in Baltimore. Mrs Auld grew fond of him and sought to teach him to read and write. By the time her irate husband discovered the deed and put a stop to it, Douglass had acquired enough of the rudiments to carry on by himself.
His life in Baltimore was interrupted in 1832, when he was passed along to another master and sent back to Tuckahoe’s brutal, plantation environment. Four years later, Frederick, along with several other slaves, attempted to escape. However, their effort proved unsuccessful when one of the slaves revealed their plan. Viewed as a “bad slave,” Frederick was then sent to a slave breaker who worked and whipped him mercilessly. He endured the mistreatment until one day he could stand it no longer and fought back. Soon thereafter, Fred was again sent to Baltimore, where he met Anna Murray. His love for and encouragement from Anna, a free Black woman, heightened his quest to be a free man. On September 3, 1838, Douglas, dressed in a sailor’s uniform and carrying identification papers provided by a free Black seaman, managed to reach New York City. There he met David Ruggles, an Abolitionist, who sheltered Douglass and assisted him with his wedding plans. Frederick changed his surname from Bailey to Douglass, married Anna Murray, and the couple moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts.
Douglass began reading the Liberator and frequenting Anti-Slavery meetings, and on one occasion was unexpectedly called upon to speak. In the presence of some of the most prominent Abolitionists, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and William Collins, Douglass told his story, and he was immediately urged to become an Anti-Slavery lecturer.
His towering, erect posture depicted dignity and strength, and when he spoke, his voice was a rich, powerful baritone. These attributes, when taken together, gave Douglass quite a commanding presence. Yet he provided more than a mere presence. His enunciation and command of the English language armed him with a profound argument, which he reinforced by employing a quick wit and vivid imagery to describe the horror of slavery. So eloquent were his speeches that after a while the public began to wonder if this well-versed man was ever a slave. At the risk of capture, Douglass chose to remove this doubt by publishing an account of his slave experiences, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in 1845. His freedom jeopardized by the detailed documentation presented in his book, Douglass fled to England and remained overseas for two years.
With the financial aid of his European friends, Douglass returned to America, legally secured his freedom, and launched his newspaper, the North Star. Douglass wrote scathing editorials on a variety of topics; slavery was just one of his targets. About the need to remain adamantly concerned about the plight of slaves, he wrote: “Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.” In an effort to attack job discrimination against Blacks, he wrote, “we need mechanics as well as ministers; we must build as well as live in houses; we must construct bridges as well as pass over them.” He responded to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, by writing that the “true remedy” to the legislation was a “good revolver, a steady hand and a determination to shoot down any man attempting to kidnap” a fugitive slave. During this period, Douglass also found time to publish his autobiography, My bondage and My Freedom, in 1855.
Douglass was a man of action, as well. His previous belief in “moral suasion” was becoming dissatisfactory to him, and he began implementing more active ways to show his convictions. He focused attention on Jim Crow laws in the North, by entering public places in which he knew these laws were enforced, sometimes risking physical ejection. He also gave his money to aid fugitive slaves, and used his printing shop in Rochester, New York as an Underground Railroad station. In addition, he became impressed with the radical Abolitionist, John Brown, whose advocacy of revolutionary means to end slavery, intrigued Douglass. However, he decided against joining Brown in his plan to overthrow the government. Still, his involvement with Brown was visible enough that a warrant for Douglass’ arrest was issued after the Harper’s Ferry raid, and Douglass had to again flee; this time, he went to Canada for several months.
Science
Frederick M. Jones held more than 60 patents in a variety of fields, but refngeration was his specialization. In 1935, he invented the first automatic refrigeration system for long-haul trucks.
Later. the system was adapted to a variety of other carriers, including ships and railway cars. His first practical refrigeration unit helped to completely change the food transport industry. Consequently, it eliminated the problem of food spoilage and changed America’s eating habits in addition, Jones developed an air conditioning unit for military field hospitals (which was needed to keep blood serum for transfusions and medicines at exact temperatures), a portable x-ray machine, and a refrigerator for military field kitchens.
Born in Ohio, Jones served in France during World War I. After the war, he worked as a garage mechanic and. from the knowledge gained in this early experience, developed a self-starting gasoline motor. In the late 1920 s, Jones designed a series of devices for the growing movie industry, adapting silent movie projectors to accommodate talking films, and developing the box-office equipment that delivers tickets and spills out change.
In 1949, the U.S. Thermo Control Company, founded jointly by Jones and his former boss, J.A. Numero, had boomed to a $3,000,000 a year business. They manufactured automatic air coolers for trains, ships and airplanes so that foodstuffs could be kept fresh for long periods of time. And Jones was behind it all.
At fifty years of age, Frederick Jones was one of the outstanding authorities in the field of refrigeration in the United States. In 1944, he was elected to membership in the American Society of Refrigeration Engineers. During the l950’s, he was called to Washington to give advice on problems having to do with refrigeration. He was a consultant to both the Defense Department and the United States Bureau of Standards.
As an inventor, he was never satisfied with the improvements he had made in his cooling units. He developed ways that kept the air around the food at a constant temperature. He created other devices that produced special atmospheric conditions to keep strawberries and other fruits from drying out or becoming too ripe before reaching the supermarkets. Still other methods controlled the moisture in the air and air circulation. Jones’ inventions made it possible for the first time to transport meat, fruit, vegetables, eggs, butter, and other produce that needed refrigeration over long distances during any season of the year.
When Frederick McKinley Jones passed away in Minneapolis in 1961, his inventions were serving people throughout the world. He was a behind-the-scenes contributor to many of the luxuries of modern living.
Pioneers
George Bonga one of the most successful and famous of the black voyageurs. He was the son of Pierre Bonga who joined the North West Company in 1803. George was educated in Montreal where he learned English. He spoke French and several Native languages. Like his father he married a Chippewa lady. As a voyageur, he was known for his massive size and incredible strength. He was said to carry a load of 750 pounds for a quarter of a mile. By contrast the average load carried by a voyageur was 250 pounds. He was an acknowledged expert in the songs of the French Canadian voyageurs, and a master of the art of negotiation.
Science
Born 1/4/1890, black educator and agricultural researcher. George Washington Carver was one of the best-known African Americans of his era. He was born in the Missouri town of Diamond. His mother and older brother were the only slaves of Moses and Susan Carver, successful, small-scale farmers. His mother disappeared, presumed kidnapped by slave raiders, while George was an infant. He became both free and orphaned at about the same time.
The childless Carvers raised him and his brother as their own children. Being a sickly child, George was not required to do hard labor but helped around the house. Very early his intellect and knowledge of nature awed those around him, but he was not allowed to attend the neighborhood school because of his color. Thus, at a young age, he began a series of moves through the Midwest, seeking further education. He supported himself cooking, doing laundry, and homesteading before finally enrolling at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, in 1890.
At Simpson Carver majored in art, but a teacher convinced him to transfer to Iowa State College to study agriculture. By the time he completed a master’s degree in agriculture in 1896, Carver had impressed the faculty as an extremely talented student in horticulture and mycology as well as a gifted teacher of freshman biology. Had he been white, he probably would have stayed at Iowa and concentrated on research in one of those fields. Instead he accepted an offer from Booker T. Washington to head the agricultural department at the all-black-staffed Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.
For nearly 20 years (1896-1915) Carver labored in the shadow of Washington. He taught classes and operated the only all-black agricultural experiment station, but he proved inept at administration, provoking frequent clashes with the principal. He was engaged, however, in some of his most significant work–seeking solutions to the burden of debt and poverty that enmeshed landless black farmers. Carver’s research and innovative educational extension programs were aimed at inducing farmers to utilize available resources to replace expensive commodities. He published bulletins and gave demonstrations on such topics as using native clays for paints, increasing soil fertility without commercial fertilizers, and growing alternative crops along with the ubiquitous cotton. To enhance the attractiveness of such crops as cow peas, sweet potatoes, and peanuts, Carver developed a variety of uses for each. Peanuts especially appealed to him as an inexpensive source of protein that did not deplete the soil as much as cotton did.
Carver’s work with peanuts drew the attention of the National Association of Peanut Growers, which invited him to testify at congressional tariff hearings in 1921. That testimony as well as several honors brought national publicity to the “Peanut Man.” A wide variety of groups adopted the professor as a symbol of their causes, including religious groups, New South boosters, segregationists, and those working to improve race relations. Some white publicists exploited Carver’s humble demeanor and apolitical posture to provide a “safe” symbol of black advancement; many, however, seem to have been genuinely captivated by his compelling personality. Carver’s fame increased and led to numerous speaking engagements, taking him away from campus frequently.
By the late 1920s much of Carver’s time was devoted to lecture tours of white college campuses, sponsored by the Commission on Interracial Cooperation and the YMCA. With his warm personality, he cultivated close personal relationships with dozens of young whites, opening their eyes to racial injustice, and continued to serve as a mentor and father figure to black students.
Carver developed numerous products from the peanut and sweet potato, including plastics, lubricants, facial cream, and tapioca. His ideas of sustainable agriculture based on renewable resources were out of step with his times, but perhaps not with the future. His early work enriched the lives of countless sharecroppers, and later in life he was a potent source of inspiration as a symbol of African-American achievement.
Carver died on his birthday, January 5, 1943.
