Trailblazing tales: Chronicling Black pioneers over 30 years

It’s painful being a pioneer.

“Black Firsts: 500 Years of Trailblazing Achievements and Ground-Breaking Events” is a proud celebration of Black success. But its thousands of entries – groundbreakers in every field – often come with nagging questions and a kind of weary anger.

Why did so many others stand in their way? And why are we hearing about some of these achievements only now?

It’s not the fault of author Jessie Carney Smith. Her book, now in its fourth edition, was begun nearly 30 years ago. It remains dedicated to “the abounding success of our people who, despite the odds, continue to reach new heights.”

Jessie Carney Smith, author of "Black Firsts: 4,000 Ground-Breaking and Pioneering Historical Events," is a Ph.D. in Nashville. (Courtesy of Visible Ink Press)

Smith organizes her achievements first by field, then chronologically. People in government take up the most room, with more than 150 pages of entries. Athletes come next, with nearly 90.

Some of the most interesting people, however, are the least famous.

Readers likely know about George Washington Carver and his work with peanuts and other cover crops, and crop rotation, revolutionizing the Southern economy after the damage done by single-crop agriculture: cotton. But how many know about the first Black American to receive a patent, Thomas L. Jennings? He devised a dry cleaning process back in 1821, between running his Manhattan tailor shop and promoting the abolition of slavery.

Other black inventors gave America everything from golf tees to ironing boards. And some inventions saved lives. That metal fire escape bolted to apartment buildings? Credit J.R. Winters, who devised it back in 1878. The pacemaker? Thank Otis F. Boykin, who started working on the device in 1959.

Dr. Charles Drew, a Black American who created the blood bank. In a grotesque turn, his work for the public good could not save him after a car accident: A segregated hospital had no plasma to give him. (Public domain photo)

Dr. Charles Drew’s experiments with plasma inspired him to pioneer blood banks, opening the first one in Britain in 1940. His brilliance was less welcome in his native America once he explained that blood had nothing to do with race. He eventually resigned from the Red Cross after it insisted on segregating the blood of Black donors.

Drew died in 1950 after an auto accident in North Carolina. The segregated hospital to which he was taken “had no blood plasma that might have saved his life.”

Even when racist laws didn’t quash Black talent, so many Black achievements often went unknown.

Artist George Herriman’s immensely popular Krazy Kat debuted in 1910. The feline, and her violent admirer Ignatz Mouse, would star in comic strips and cartoons for decades. Herriman’s fans didn’t know he was Black and had been passing as white ever since he fled the South for California. His friends thought he was Greek.

The frontispiece of "Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral," 1773, first edition, by Phillis Wheatley. She was the first African-American poet to publish a book. (Courtesy of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation)

For other writers, being Black was essential to their identity. Since 1760, and the autobiographical “A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Surprising Deliverance of Briton Hammon, A Negro Man,” Black writers have been integral to American literature. Phillis Wheatley, born in Africa and 20 years enslaved, published a book of poetry in 1773, the first by a Black American. The debut of the first Black novelist, William Wells Brown, with “Clotel, or The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States,” came in 1853.

Author of the groundbreaking novel “Invisible Man”—which dealt with issues of African American identity, Black nationalism, and Marxism—Ralph Ellison had a huge impact on American thinking and politics in the 1950s and beyond. “Ellison’s view was that the African American culture and sensibility was far from the downtrodden, unsophisticated picture presented by writers, sociologists and politicians, both Black and white,” wrote Anne Seidlitz for PBS. “He posited instead that Blacks had created their own traditions, rituals, and a history that formed a cohesive and complex culture that was the source of a full sense of identity.” (United States Information Agency // Wikimedia Commons)

Since then, Black writers have won many honors. In 1950, Gwendolyn Brooks was the first to win the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, for “Annie Allen.” Three years later, Ralph Ellison was the first to win the National Book Award, for “Invisible Man.” In 1983, Alice Walker became the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, for “The Color Purple.” A decade later, Toni Morrison became the first Black American – and only the second American woman – to win the Nobel Prize in literature, for her life’s work.

“If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet,” Morrison advised aspiring authors, “you must be the one to write it.”

Perhaps even more widely known, celebrated and beloved, was Maya Angelou, who published poetry, plays and seven memoirs, including the bestseller “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” A Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award nominee, she fought for civil rights and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her poem “On the Pulse of Morning,” which she recited at Bill Clinton’s first inauguration, was only the second time, after Robert Frost, that a poet had read their work at the ceremony. And of course she was the first Black poet to read at an inauguration.

Maya Angelou became the second poet (after Robert Frost in 1961), and the first African American poet, to read at a presidential inauguration. On Jan. 20, 1993, she delivered “On the Pulse of Morning,” a poem that spanned the entire history of America and ended with a hopeful “Good morning.” For her performance she won the Best Spoken Word Grammy and a new audience. (Clinton Library // Wikimedia Commons)

Angelou, who died in 2014, insisted that writing and activism were synonymous to her and essential to life. “All my work, my life, everything I do is about survival, not just bare, awful, plodding survival, but survival with grace and faith,” she said. “While one may encounter many defeats, one must not be defeated.”

That perseverance was particularly crucial to Black performers, who faced racism the moment they stepped on stage.

One of the greatest Shakespeareans of the 19th century, Ira Frederick Aldridge, first appeared with New York’s African Theater Company. After he made his London debut in 1825, his European career continued for three decades. Aldridge was particularly praised for his performance in the title role of “Othello,” a part which would later bring breakthroughs for Paul Robeson, the first Black to play the role in an integrated cast in 1943, and for Laurence Fishburne, the first Black to play the role on film, 1995.

Black Americans moved into movie production with the Lincoln Motion Picture Co. in 1916, but progress was glacial. It wasn’t until 1969 that the multitalented Gordon Parks produced and directed a major Hollywood film, “The Learning Tree.” Two years later, his “Shaft” became a crossover hit. And it wasn’t until 2008 that the first Black movie mogul emerged when Tyler Perry founded his own studio.

Hattie McDaniel, whose role in "Gone With the Wind" made her the first Black winner of an Academy Award, had a response for those who criticized her for playing a maid. "Why should I complain about making $700 a week playing a maid? If I didn’t, I’d be making $7 a week being one.” ((Public Domain))

For years, Black actors were offered only small, stereotyped roles. Still, some, like Hattie McDaniel, brought artistry to the parts and found dignity in the work. “Why should I complain about making $700 a week playing a maid?” she asked once. “If I didn’t, I’d be making $7 a week being one.” She would win the Academy Award for best supporting actress in 1939′s “Gone With the Wind,” the first for a Black performer.

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It was the breakthrough for Black actors and followed by Sidney Poitier, best actor, “Lilies of the Field” (1963); Louis Gossett Jr., best supporting actor, “An Officer and A Gentleman” (1982); and Halle Berry, the first, and so far last, to take best actress, in “Monster’s Ball,” (2000). Among the Academy’s most honored? Denzel Washington, who won best supporting actor for 1989′s “Glory,” and best actor for 2001′s “Training Day,” and Mahershala Ali, who won supporting prizes for 2016′s “Moonlight” and 2018′s “Green Book.”

While the Oscars may be the most famous awards won by Black people in America, they illustrate a familiar and often frustrating story. Wins are often decades apart. Some years, no people of color are nominated at all. Like the story of Black achievement in every field, it’s a history of hard work and often incremental progress.

But the struggle goes on, and Jessie Carney Smith vows to keep chronicling it.

“I am not yet done with writing about first black achievers and black hidden figures,” she writes. “In the words of one of Fisk University’s dean of women, Juliette Derricotte, who reflected on her travels in India, Japan, and China in the late 1920s, ‘There is so much more to know than I accustomed to knowing — and so much more to love than I am accustomed to loving.’ ”

About the book

“BLACK FIRSTS: 500 Years of Trailblazing Achievements and Ground-Breaking Events”

Jessie Carney Smith

Visible Ink Press. 708 pp. $29.95.