Queenswalk: The Lewis H. Latimer Story, Part One, The Early Years

The next time you go into a bathroom on a train, or turn on the air conditioning, take an elevator, or more importantly, the next time you turn on an electric light, you should thank an African American inventor named Lewis H. Latimer. None of those things would have been possible without his inventive mind, yet he remains unknown and off the list of the great American inventors. Did you learn about him in elementary school? Is he a household name like Thomas Edison, with whom he worked closely, and called a friend? No. The fact that he is more or less forgotten by most is one of the great flaws in our selective history. Why isn’t he up there with Edison, Bell, Otis, Westinghouse, Firestone, and the other greats of the 19th and early 20th century? Did you know he lived for a time in Flushing, Queens?

Lewis Latimer was the son of slaves. His father George had been the property of a slave owner in Virginia named James B. Gray. His mother Rebecca was owned by a different slaveholder in a nearby household. Slave marriages between plantations were not uncommon, and helped the owners keep their people in line. A visit could be a reward for good behavior or service. Married couples could be punished by being kept apart, and the marriages themselves were never guaranteed permanence if the masters wanted to sell one of the parties for any reason at all.

Vowing never to bear a child into slavery, Rebecca Latimer devised an escape plan. George was very fair skinned, fair enough to pass for white. He would pose as a master and travel north with Rebecca as his servant. It worked. In 1842 the couple headed north from Norfolk, Virginia and eventually made it all the way north to Boston, a hotbed of Abolitionist activity.

Boston and the state of Massachusetts were vehemently anti-slavery. Boston was home to some of the movements most famous voices, including William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. The abolitionists in the state were known for aiding fugitive slaves, and the Latimers found shelter in the city. But George Latimer’s former owner sent slave catchers to look for him in Boston, and one of them spotted Latimer and had him arrested and jailed pending his return to Virginia. James Gray came up from Virginia to take him back.

The Boston abolitionist movement galvanized their efforts around rescuing George Latimer. Their weapons were not mobs, cudgels and violence, but the power of the pen and public opinion. The poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a poem that was distributed everywhere. It was called “Massachusetts to Virginia.” The poem accuses the state of Virginia of forgetting the ideals of the Founding Fathers, and states, “No fetters in the Bay State! No slave upon her land.”

George Latimer ended up spending a month in prison while his case was tried in the courts and the court of public opinion. Each day in jail intensified the public outcry. Finally after a month, George’s former master accepted payment of $400 for him, which was paid by a black minister in Boston who had collected money from supporters of the cause. George Latimer was released, a free man. But it didn’t end there.

The case had brought out an important fact that the Abolitionists jumped on eagerly. Public taxes were paying for the use of local jails, constables and other legal and government officials to detain fugitives. Massachusetts’ citizens, who opposed slavery, were still paying for it. It wasn’t right. They circulated petitions and sent them to the Massachusetts Legislature and to the United States Congress. It was called the Latimer Great Petitions of 1844, and over 65,000 people in Massachusetts alone had signed it. That year, Massachusetts passed a Personal Liberty Act which made tax-supported aid to slave catchers illegal.

The Act was one of the factors that prompted Southern senators and their supporters to push past the anti-slavery wing of Congress and pass the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, a federal law that overrode Massachusetts’ law. This act made it legal for slave owners and their agents to force local law enforcement and the courts to return captured runaway slaves to their owners. It was the defining law of the 1850s that set into motion the intensification of the Underground Railroad movement, as well as an inexorable path towards the Civil War.

Meanwhile, the man who had been at the center of Boston’s anti-slavery efforts was not doing well. Rebecca and George had four children, all born into freedom. Their youngest child, Lewis Howard, was on September 4, 1848. The family had found life hard. George never really recovered from his capture and ordeal in prison. Today, he probably would have been diagnosed with PTSD. He never stopped looking over his shoulder, and in spite of being legally free, even in Virginia, he was always afraid he was going to be arrested and taken back there in chains. He had trouble holding down a job, and one day, he just left for parts unknown, leaving his wife and children behind.

Rebecca Latimer and her children survived, but just barely. In 1860, when Abraham Lincoln was elected president, Lewis Latimer was 12. The Civil War started a few months later. Massachusetts was one of the first states to have African American regiments, and Lewis’ older brothers immediately signed up with the Army. When he was 16, Lewis enlisted in the Union Navy. He served on board a side-wheel gunboat called the USS Massasoit. Ironically, the boat was in battle on the James River, near Norfolk where his parents had been slaves.

Returning from the Civil War, Lewis Latimer felt that America would allow his people to assume their rightful place as American citizens. He thought the bravery and patriotism shown by the black soldiers would convince America that they were worthy. He was proud of his service, and in later life, became an officer in the Grand Army of the Republic, the Civil War veterans’ organization. He would wear his GAR uniform with pride on many civic occasions. But he was wrong about America. It was not ready for equality.

Back now in Boston, Lewis was looking for work. He couldn’t find any even after going street to street, knocking on business’ doors, asking for employment. A black woman who cleaned in a copyist’s office finally told him that a patent law firm was looking for a black office boy. He would be working for the office’s draftsmen, who drew the drawings of client’s inventions for patents. One of the prerequisites of the job was that he would have to have an affinity for drawing. Lewis had always liked drawing, so he applied for the job and was hired.

While cleaning up and running errands, he took the time to watch the draftsmen. He took notice of their tools and what they were doing with them. Going to a secondhand book shop, he bought a book on drawing and the drafting trade and purchased some used drafting instruments. After his days at work, he spent his nights teaching himself how to draft. He continued to watch the men in the office, and then went home to practice. He mastered the craft and decided it was time to test it out. One day he asked one of the draftsmen if he could give a project a try.

The draftsman laughed at the thought, but allowed Lewis to give it a shot. Lewis sat down and showed he was a true draftsman. His employers at the firm, Crosby & Gould, saw his work, and allowed him to continue, and soon realized that Lewis was as good, if not better, than everyone in the shop. They hired him as a draftsman, increasing his salary from $3.00 a week as an office boy, over time to $12 a week as a draftsman. He stayed with the firm for eleven years. Now making a living wage, Lewis was able to get married. He and his bride, Mary Wilson, were married in 1873. They would go on to have two children, Emma Jeannette, born in 1883, and Louise Rebecca, born in 1890.

Working at the patent office gave Latimer an opportunity to see how the process of invention worked. He realized that most inventors did not come up with their inventions out of nowhere; they all improved on the ideas or products of others. An invention was more likely to be an evolutionary process, rather than a “Eureka” moment, where an idea came out of the blue. He realized that he had this same knack; the ability to see a product or idea and know what the next step was. He could make what someone else had come up with even better. This process is at the core of our great inventions, from Bell to Edison to Jobs to Gates.

Next: Lewis Latimer’s first inventions, and a move to Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he meets Hiram Maxim, the chief engineer of the United States Electric Lighting Company, and from there; Thomas Edison. Can a life in Queens be far behind?

GMAP