Banneker was easily one of the smartest people in the eighteenth century, replicating the blueprints for Washington, DC, from memory after the man hired for the job, Pierre Charles L’Enfant, left his position as engineer in a huff and took the plans with him. He also built the first clock in America, which worked perfectly for forty years. Another of his accomplishments includes his annual farmer’s almanac, which he created after becoming interested in astronomy (and successfully predicting an eclipse from his own calculations). The almanac contains information all drawn from Banneker’s mathematic and scientific know-how and became a top-selling book in several states including those in the original thirteen colonies as well as those closer to the South like Kentucky, a tremendous feat for the first book of science, and one of the first published works, written by an African American author.
Banneker’s almanac was useful for farmers of all stripes, but one of the most important uses he had for it was as a weapon against racism and war. One of his tactics included sending a copy to Thomas Jefferson, who had hired him to replicate plans for the capital. Although Jefferson’s most famous line from the Declaration of Independence was, “all men are created equal,” he wasn’t a practitioner of what he preached; he owned hundreds of slaves on his property, Monticello, and kept Sally Hemmings as what many would have called back then a “mistress,” although in reality she was a victim of his sexual abuse, since slaves didn’t have the right to consent. How can you change the mindset of a man whose own behavior is wildly hypocritical? It’s not known if Banneker thought his plan of sending his almanac was a long shot, but he sent it anyway, with the goal to impress upon Jefferson that his own words of men being created equal should stand for Black men, too. However, despite Jefferson’s words of praise, he failed to implement any action against slavery, which is why Jefferson consistently gets an L in history for being one of the country’s biggest hypocrites, a man full of flowery words but no backbone to implement them in reality.
Regardless of being unable to change Jefferson, Banneker charged forward when it came to speaking out against injustice, whether that was through his inventions or his almanac, his work as a farmer, surveyor, engineer and city planner, or through his writings as an author or his research as a mathematician and astronomer. Banneker and others like him provided inspiration for those looking to make a better life for themselves, even with slavery and discrimination staring them in the face. That drive kept up even after the Civil War, when many Black Americans were excited to start life as free Americans.
After the Civil War, America was ready for Reconstruction, which took place from 1865 to 1877. This period was supposed to establish Black Americans as independent, self-sufficient citizens. Instead, Reconstruction was a volatile time in which freed Blacks faced violent racism, often resulting in lynchings, burnings, and other fearmongering tactics. It can be argued that Reconstruction was doomed from the beginning, since President Abraham Lincoln, the architect of Reconstruction, was assassinated one week after the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. Even though Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s Vice President, assumed Lincoln’s Reconstruction policies after he took over the presidential office, states as far up across the Mason-Dixon line as the Midwest began installing rules to limit Black economic and social progression.
It can also be argued that Reconstruction didn’t last long enough to establish any kind of nationwide social sea change. Once the initiative became dismantled via Lincoln’s assassination and Southern and Midwestern states undermining the government, the idealistic notion of Reconstruction became something like a pipe dream. However, Black Americans had survived slavery through sheer will and ingenuity—they didn’t have the support of the government when they needed it during slavery, and they weren’t going to limit themselves after slavery just because of this lack of support.
Despite states trying to limit progress, even with violent measures, Black Americans persisted throughout the trauma and established themselves as prominent business leaders, inventors and economic innovators.
Inventors and businesspeople like Banneker and others from the eighteenth century showcased the intelligence of the Black mind, one that was able to reach for the stars despite Black Americans being shackled on the ground, whether by actual shackles or the societal shackles placed on free Black people. That uplifting outlook on life can be found in the life of Clara Brown, who was a slave in Virginia before becoming a community leader and philanthropist. As a philanthropist, she helped former slaves acclimate to free life in Denver, Colorado, during the state’s Gold Rush. Brown became the first Black woman to reside in Denver after arriving in 1859, and she’s believed to be the first Black woman to take part in the Colorado Gold Rush. Brown was also a business owner, opening a laundry shop wherever she went, including in Denver.
That entrepreneurial spirit can also be found in the area of Tulsa, Oklahoma, once known as Black Wall Street. Black Wall Street was the nickname for Greenwood Avenue in the suburb of Greenwood. Greenwood Avenue was a breath of fresh air in America since it was home to hundreds of prosperous Black-owned businesses. It became a hot zone for commerce because of Tulsa’s oil boom in the early 1900s, which attracted many Black Americans from the South. It’s ironic that Oklahoma’s Jim Crow laws, which in the Southern and some Midwestern states prohibited Blacks from working, socializing, and living in general alongside Whites, helped Black Wall Street grow. Because Blacks couldn’t do business in the same areas as White Oklahomans, the isolation forced Black businesses to innovate, starting with O.W. Gurley, the entrepreneur who established Black Wall Street in 1906.
Gurley was a wealthy Black landowner who had a presidential appointment from President Grover Cleveland before he moved from Arkansas to Oklahoma to take part in 1889’s Oklahoma Land Run. When he came to Tulsa in 1906, he bought forty acres of land, which became Greenwood Avenue, named in honor of a city in Mississippi. Gurley also established Vernon AME Church, which was destroyed during the Tulsa race riots and rebuilt in 1928. More on that tragedy later.
All of the businesses were owned by Black businesspeople and catered exclusively to Black clientele. Despite Oklahoma’s systematic racism, however, both White and Black Tulsans patronized the shops and businesses in Black Wall Street.
Black Wall Street exhibited the business power of Black Americans when given the chance. The area became home to many Black multimillionaires, and, if this area was a White-owned neighborhood, Tulsa wouldn’t have had a problem. But because it was run exclusively by wealthy Black Tulsans, the White community felt threatened by their success. So, the Tulsa riots arose after a nineteen-year-old shoe shiner named Dick Rowland allegedly assaulted seventeen-year-old Sarah Page, a White elevator operator in a White-owned building. Rowland only used the elevator to get to the building’s bathroom, and Page herself never pressed charges. But with an opportunity present, armed White men rampaged Tulsa, with armed Black men rising up to protect Rowland. Today, the burning of Black Wall Street is known as domestic terrorism, but, at the time, it was seen as keeping Blacks in their place, based on the imaginary fear created by stereotypes and assumptions.
After Black Wall Street
We can be thankful that Black Wall Street wasn’t the only place where Black business excellence thrived. Throughout the country, Black inventors, businesspeople, and innovators charged forward and created unimaginable lives for themselves. One of those businesspeople include Garrett Morgan, who started out life as the son of former slaves in Kentucky but became one of America’s wealthiest men in the 1920s. As a young man, Morgan quickly used his business talents to better himself. Once he moved to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1895, he spent twelve years as a sewing machine repairman, saving enough money to start his own repair business. His one business soon turned into several businesses, including a tailoring business, a newspaper company which published the Cleveland Call, and a company that made personal grooming products. By the time 1920 rolled around, Morgan’s empire made him extremely wealthy, allowing him to pass on working opportunities to his many workers.
Several of Morgan’s inventions have helped shape America into the place it is today, such as the “safety hood” or gas mask, which he invented in 1916 after seeing firefighters struggle with smoke on the job. The device helped save a group of trapped miners who were stuck in a shaft under Lake Erie. The incident instantly made his gas mask a success, and he received orders from mine owners and fire departments throughout the US