Intern Spotlight: Uncovering African American Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Manuscript Division

This is a guest post by Onur Ayaz, formerly a Junior Fellow in the Manuscript Division.

When does entrepreneurship become innovative, and when does innovation become invention? Are activists, educators, scientists, and laborers also innovators? Are they entrepreneurs?

In 1918 Carter G. Woodson, an African American historian who also collected manuscripts, ephemera, and other materials relating to the history of African American life, caught wind of a “gas blast” candy stove invented by a Black man. Woodson knew just what to do. He wrote Henry E. Baker, an assistant examiner at the U.S. Patent Office, asking him to “kindly trace this invention.” Baker had been on a decades-long quest to recover the names of Black inventors, sending thousands of letters to patent lawyers, manufacturing firms, and newspapers around the country. He found inventions “in nearly every branch of the industrial arts – in domestic devices, in mechanical appliances, in electricity through all its wide range of uses, in engineering skill and in chemical compounds.” He also found inventors who had abandoned their patent applications for lack of funds, records that were frustratingly incomplete, and clients who “preferred not to have their racial identity disclosed” lest it harm the “commercial value of their patents.” Baker’s search for Black inventors inspires me. As a Junior Fellow in the Library of Congress, I was responsible for producing a Library Research Guide on “African American Innovation, Invention, and Entrepreneurship in the Manuscript Division.” Like Baker’s search a century ago, this project started with the fact that many African Americans in the history of science, technology, and business have been overlooked. I began by asking, where in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division are the African American innovators, inventors, and entrepreneurs?

I started with this question, expecting to find easy answers. Surely Black innovators, inventors, and entrepreneurs are in the collections somewhere, right? The Library, for example, now holds the papers of understudied, underrecognized women mathematicians, like Gladys B. West and Gloria Ford Gilmer. West, I learned through my research, made pioneering contributions to the Global Positioning System (GPS). Working at the intersection of computer coding and mathematical modeling, she created precise measurements of the shape of the earth. Gilmer was a pioneer of the ethnomathematics movement, a classroom teacher turned curriculum designer whose innovative research explored the relationship between mathematics and culture.

In my first week of research, I found many stories like this, of people whose work I had never seen or heard of before. Excited, I expected to find similar stories as I went further back in time. Like any researcher headed into the archives can tell you, it’s never quite that easy.

An early challenge in the search was rethinking my understanding of what innovation, invention, and entrepreneurship mean and the ways we use these terms. Gilmer was not only a teacher and a scholar, but also an entrepreneur who founded her own educational consulting business. But what about Mordecai Johnson, the president of Howard University from 1926 until 1960? By 1930, Johnson had raised over a million dollars for the school. Was that an entrepreneurial act? Paul Cuffee, an African American and Wampanoag shipping magnate and merchant, is often noted for being one of the wealthiest people of color in the United States during his lifetime. Manuscript Division collections even show him, in 1813, petitioning President James Madison for support in resettling formerly enslaved people to Sierra Leone. Cuffee was an entrepreneur, but what about the less wealthy African American sailors he must have encountered? These moments and stories only began to appear as I shifted my thinking about innovation and entrepreneurship away from its contemporary understanding of commercially motivated business activity to something broader and more inclusive.

As a researcher faced with an ocean of material, I had to get creative in my search for African American innovators, inventors, and entrepreneurs. First, I began with figures whose collections the Library holds like mathematician Gloria Ford Gilmer, chemist Henry Aaron Hill, and social scientist Kenneth Bancroft Clark. Next, I began recreating their networks by tracking down recurring names of friends, family, colleagues. I looked through everyone’s correspondence, letters of recommendations, and coauthors. Though Gilmer, Hill, and Clark did not share a network, through this research I discovered other prominent figures, including author W. E. B. Du Bois, university administrator Mordecai Johnson, and social worker James Dumpson.

With a newfound openness structuring my search, I began to look at the history of the civil rights movement and the work of individual activists, social scientists, and organizations which are well represented in the Manuscript Division. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Records (NAACP) contain over three million items documenting the struggle for freedom, equality, and betterment of minority groups in America. Within this collection I discovered understudied figures like activist Kathryn Magnolia Johnson and author Jessie Fauset, a perfect fit for the project thanks to their overlooked entrepreneurial activities. Johnson, for example, was a paid, full-time field agent of the NAACP, and a successful promoter. Other times, I found examples that did not quite fit the project but which, nevertheless, I found important. One such story revolves around the NAACP and the automobile.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, new transportation technologies like railroads, streetcars, and public buses became literal vehicles of discrimination and oppression against African American riders. Though Black drivers still faced potential harassment from police or discrimination at businesses like gas stations and restaurants, many Black drivers nonetheless welcomed the freedom the automobile promised. Automobiles came to symbolize autonomy on the road but, more crucially, offered liberation from discriminatory and possibly violent travel by train or bus. I discovered that in 1934 the NAACP decided to purchase a Ford automobile for the safety of its field agent, William Pickens. NAACP officials largely framed the purchase as a way to save money – and raised funds from individuals like Governor Herbert H. Lehman of New York and Harlem Renaissance photographer Carl Van Vechten. But for me, the purchase also evoked complex historical relationships between technology and society, relationships that I found reflected throughout my exploration of the Library’s manuscript collections.

When I began this project, I never would have imagined learning about the history of education, law, and activism. I’ve come to appreciate the larger, wide-reaching dimensions of social discrimination and racism; but I’ve also come to appreciate how intertwined the histories of science, technology, and business are with social issues, activism, civil rights, and education.

Much work remains to be done to draw attention to understudied and unrecognized histories of individual African Americans, and to find more of their stories in the Manuscript Division’s collections. In creating a Library Guide I’ve learned to draw attention to the way African Americans in science and business were often involved with causes that seem far removed from their scientific or entrepreneurial work, from education and religion to law, poetry, and art. I hope future researchers will continue to discover these stories.

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“Kindly trace this invention…” Carter G. Woodson to Henry E. Baker, April 27, 1918, box I:11, Carter Godwin Woodson Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

“Commercial value of their patents…” Henry E. Baker, “The Negro in the Field of Invention,” The Journal of Negro History 2, no. 1 (January 1917), 27-28.

“Raised over a million dollars for the school…” Howard D. Gregg, nomination of Mordecai Wyatt Johnson for the William E. Harmon Awards for Distinguished Achievement Among Negroes, August 30, 1930, box 41, Harmon Foundation, Inc., Records, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

“Decided to purchase a Ford automobile…” Automobile Fund, 1934, box I:C155, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Records, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.