Bridget “Biddy” Mason was born as a slave in Mississippi in 1818, but little did anyone know that she would grow up to become one of the first prominent citizens and landowners in Los Angeles. Throughout her turbulent early life, which included being uprooted several times to live in Georgia and South Carolina with other slaveowners before being returned to Mississippi to become the slave of Robert Marion Smith. As a Mormon, Smith moved his family and slaves to establish a Mormon community in what was then Mexican territory. That community would become Salt Lake City, Utah.
Mason’s turbulent life also included meeting free Black couple Charles H. and Elizabeth Flake, who told her to legally fight her slave status once she and her slaveowner reached California, where Smith wanted to move to despite California’s laws against slavery. After spending five years in California as a slave, she did legally challenge Smith for her freedom, which she earned via the court. She eventually became a midwife and a nurse and used her earnings to buy land in what is now downtown Los Angeles. She also established Los Angeles’s First AME Church, the city’s oldest Black church. Her wealth, which she used for charitable endeavors and for establishing an elementary school for Black children and a traveler’s aid center, was estimated at three million dollars. Mason died in 1891.
Mary Ellen Pleasant was an abolitionist who helped slaves escape with the Underground Railroad, helped finance John Brown’s failed slave uprising, and sued San Francisco for Black Americans’ right to use streetcars. Pleasant spent her childhood in Philadelphia and worked with the Hussey family in their store. After her service to the Hussey family ended in her twenties, she became a tailor’s assistant and a church organist. It was during that time that she met her first husband, James. W. Smith, a rich plantation owner with African ancestry from his Cuban heritage. Smith had gone through his own journey before he met Pleasant; by the time they finally met, he had pledged himself to the abolitionist movement.
Interestingly enough, both Pleasant and Smith were able to pass for White people, which they used to their advantage. However, Pleasant knew very well how her bread was buttered. She might have utilized her privilege to advance in the corporate world, but she used her earnings to advance the cause of civil rights. For instance, during her first marriage, she became friends with abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, the latter of whom promised her his estate if she kept fighting for the end of slavery. Pleasant and Smith also were a part of the Underground Railroad, helping slaves escape to Canada.
Pleasant eventually remarried, this time to JJ Pleasant, a shipboard cook who decided to try his luck in the California Gold Rush. Pleasant followed him with the hopes of running a boarding house and restaurant. Her restaurant, which became known as “Black City Hall,” was where Black Americans who arrived in San Francisco after slavery could find work. She later invested in a boarding house for wealthy businessmen in the area as well as a Sonoma Valley ranch that included a vineyard and horse-racing track.
When most people think of the lightbulb, they think of Thomas Edison, but the story of the lightbulb continues with Lewis Latimer, the son of runaway slaves who grew up to work at a patent law firm after his stint in the Navy during the Civil War. It was during his time with inventor Hiram Maxim at the US Electric Lighting Company that he patented the carbon filament for the incandescent lightbulb. This small invention made lightbulbs more affordable and accessible for families, which made electricity more accessible for all. Latimer later worked with Thomas Edison in 1890 at the Edison Electric Light Company as a patent expert and chief draftsman. While at Edison, he wrote the book Incandescent Electric Lighting: A Practical Description of the Edison System. Latimer’s electrical expertise led him to become one of the company’s charter members. Electricity wasn’t all Latimer was interested in. He also put his mind toward the telephone. While the credit is given to Alexander Graham Bell, it is actually Latimer’s drawings that Bell used to patent the telephone in 1876.
These early businessmen and women have provided the groundwork for future Black businesspeople to follow in their footsteps.
Businesspeople of the Twentieth Century
Lonnie Johnson should be well known to kids who grew up in the ‘90s, since he is the inventor of the Super Soaker, one of the biggest toys of that era. Johnson is the president and founder of Johnson Research and Development Co., Inc., as well as several other companies in science and real estate. As a Tuskegee graduate, he started out his career as a research engineer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory before joining the Air Force and serving as the acting chief of the Air Force Weapons Laboratory’s Space Nuclear Power Safety Section. In 1979, he joined NASA as a Senior Systems Engineer within their Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he was part of the team that worked on the Galileo mission to Jupiter. He returned to the Air Force in 1982 and acted as the Advanced Space Systems Requirements Officer at Strategic Air Command. He also came back to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1987, where he worked on the Mars Observer project and was the fault protection engineer during the beginning stages of NASA’s Cassini project.
After his time in NASA, he created his own engineering firm in 1989 and developed the toy that became every kid’s dream, the Super Soaker. He licensed his invention to the Larami Corporation, and the toy was an instant hit, earning over two hundred million dollars in sales and becoming the number one toy in the nation. The toy became even bigger once Larami was sold to Hasbro, the second largest toy manufacturer in the US. The Super Soaker isn’t Johnson’s only invention; he has over a hundred patents to his name with over twenty more pending, and his products include a new generation of rechargeable battery technology and thermodynamic energy conversion technology.
James Edward Maceo West has helped many in the music business create better sounding art. Born in Virginia in 1931, West currently holds over 250 US and foreign patents for microphone design and production and techniques for creating polymer foil electrets. West received a master’s degree in physics from Temple University in 1957. In 1962, West invented the foil electret microphone while working on instruments for human hearing research. The invention has had immense popularity throughout the industry; about 90 percent of more than two billion microphones are based on this invention. Even more impressive: many of our everyday products, including camcorders, telephones, baby monitors, recording devices and hearing aids are also built with this invention. West continues changing the world with his inventions. His latest one? A device to detect pneumonia in the lungs of infants. And for Black American burgeoning inventors, West provides support with the Corporate Research Fellowship Program for graduate students pursuing terminal degrees in the sciences. Combined with his Summer Research Program, he has given five hundred non-White grad students their chance in the science industry. West also cofounded the Association of Black Laboratory Employees. The group was formed to address the concerns of Black employees within Bell Laboratories.
You know that home security system many parents have? The one that kids have to remember the code for? Guess what? It’s a high-tech version of the original system developed by a Black woman who wanted to feel safer in her neighborhood. Marie Van Brittan Brown is credited with inventing the home security system. Born in 1922 in New York City, Brown, who worked as a nurse by trade, came up with her idea for the closed-circuit television security system in 1966 with her husband Albert Brown when she realized the police in her area were responding too slowly to emergencies on her street. She probably felt like she’d have to rely on herself since the actual police weren’t doing their job. Thus, the home security system was born, so Brown could have peace of mind while staying at home alone.
One could see her invention as an indictment on the local police, since it’s not said whether or not the police were slow to her neighborhood because of racist reasons or because of an actual backlog of crime they were trying to attend to. We can give them the benefit of the doubt and say that maybe the police were understaffed. Regardless, Brown’s invention showed that there was a gap in the city’s protection services for its citizens, and her invention found a needy market that still exists today.
Her system is essentially what all home security systems