Bringing light for all

Lewis Howard Latimer was born on September 4, 1848, in Chelsea, Massachusetts, only a few miles outside of Boston. He was the youngest of George and Rebecca’s four children. Although he was born in a state where slavery was illegal, Latimer and his family still lived in the peculiar institution’s shadow. His parents had escaped enslavement in Virginia in 1842, and made it to Boston, where they thought they would be safe.

It wouldn’t be so.

Days after their arrival in the city, George Latimer was recognized by an associate of his enslaver and captured. As enslaved people were considered property by law at this time, George was charged with larceny—the act of stealing himself. The notoriety of the case forced Rebecca—who was pregnant with the couple’s first child—into hiding, staying with abolitionist friends throughout George’s ordeal. With the trial attracting considerable public attention, including that of famed abolitionists Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison and a Black minister paying $400 to George's enslaver for his freedom, George was eventually released from custody. The Latimer family settled in Chelsea.

Unfortunately, their troubles were not over.

Fifteen years later, George Latimer disappeared, upending the family’s stability once again. Left without adequate income to support her children, Rebecca made the painful decision to split up her family. Lewis’s two older brothers, George and William, were sent to a state-run farm school, which placed them into jobs as a farm laborer and a hotel worker, respectively. Their sister, Margaret, was sent to live with family friends. As the youngest, Lewis remained at home.

Possessing only a grade school education, Lewis spent his early teen years working odd jobs to help support his family.

By 1864, the nation was three years into the Civil War. With African Americans now permitted to enlist in the United States military, Latimer wished to serve. The problem? He was too young. Then 16-year-old Latimer solved this problem the same way many young men did during the conflict — he falsified his age and enlisted in the U.S. Navy. Latimer served as a cabin steward aboard the USS Massasoit, a “double-ender” steam gunboat that served as a patrol boat from the New England coast to the Carolinas and engaged with Confederate forces on the James River in Virginia.

Despite their willingness to serve their country and help secure the freedoms of all Americans, Latimer and other Black sailors were often restricted to military occupations such as stewards, cooks, or other lower-paid positions. Although the struggles of wartime service — compounded on account of his skin color — were ever-present, Latimer's naval enlistment set him on a trajectory that would shape his life.

In his studies of Latimer’s life, Hugh Price, chair of the board of the Lewis Latimer House Museum in New York, said Latimer’s exposure to complex machinery and a hierarchical organization during the war sparked an early interest in how both operate.

“In addition to being bright [and] naturally savvy, I think he had a capacity to understand hierarchical systems, how they function, how you get ahead,” said Price, who is also Latimer’s great-grandnephew. “I think maybe because of his service on that ship, he became very interested in how mechanical things work.”

Although the 13th and 14th amendments abolished slavery and guaranteed citizenship to all Black Americans, they remained marginalized in nearly every facet of American life. Latimer, however, pushed himself into the center of what became a technological boom in the post-Civil War era.

His rise to fame began modestly. Following his honorable discharge from the Navy at the end of the Civil War in 1865, Lewis was hired as an office boy at Crosby, Haltsted, and Gould, a Boston patent law firm, at a $3 per week salary. In addition to his job duties, Latimer took it upon himself to read and observe the firm’s draftsman. Eventually, he used this knowledge to teach himself mechanical drawing and drafting. He purchased his own set of drafting implements and spent his precious free time after work perfecting his skills with the equipment. Impressed by his ability, the firm’s partners made Latimer their draftsman when the incumbent resigned. Although Latimer was pleased with his salary increase from $3 to $20 per week, he was paid $5 less than the previous draftsman.

“He climbed up the ranks while quietly shattering glass ceilings in the mainstream business world along the way,” Price said. “When you look at the career trajectory, he was always looking beyond the immediate confines of what he had been hired to do and figuring out how else he could add value to the organization and find fulfillment.”

Ran Yan, the director of the Lewis Latimer House Museum in Flushing, New York, noted that Latimer’s wife, Mary, and daughters Jeanette and Louise, were also intellectuals, which is even more remarkable since Black women had fewer career opportunities than Black men did during that period. Yan noted that Jeanette studied at the predecessor of Juilliard, and Louise studied at Pratt Institute in New York — formal education that Lewis Latimer had not been able to obtain.

“At the time, a lot of Black women only had access to professions such as seamstresses or house cleaners, but his wife, Mary, was intellectual and educated, (and) had learned how to write (when growing up),” Yan said.

Despite the lack of a formal education, Latimer never allowed that to slow him down. Described as “very much a gentleman of that Victorian period,” by Yan, Latimer taught himself enough French to complete a lighting project in Montreal and also immersed himself in the humanities.

“He was versed in music and poetry. He wrote poems,” she said. “He enjoyed playing music. He also wrote plays. He had a very full life in terms of having different interests in the arts outside his job as a draftsman, inventor, and patent expert.”

Having overcome racist perceptions while quietly shattering ceilings in the business world during this career, Latimer would spend his twilight years focusing on expanding educational opportunities like those afforded to his daughters and increasing employment options for the Black population and other minority groups as a community and civil rights activist.

He taught mechanical drawing and English to immigrants at the Henry Street Settlement, a neighborhood-focused social services organization in New York. Latimer was also instrumental in supporting the White Rose Mission, a place for young Black women to learn job skills who had been lured to New York with false promises of employment by scam artists. His years of advocacy for equality and increased opportunities for the Black community garnered the attention of civil rights leader and close friend Booker T. Washington, who invited him to the 1895 National Conference of Colored Men. While Latimer did not attend in person, he sent this message to the conference:

“If our cause be made the common cause, and all our claims and demands be founded on justice and humanity, recognizing that we must wrong no man in winning our rights, I have faith to believe that the Nation will respond to our plea for equality before the law, security under the law, and an opportunity, by and through maintenance of the law, to enjoy with our fellow citizens of all races and complexions the blessings guaranteed us under the Constitution.”

He continued to work as a patent consultant, helping others make their ideas into reality, until failing eyesight forced him to retire in 1922. Latimer died December 11, 1928, at age 80 in Flushing, New York, four years after Mary passed.

Nearly a century after Latimer’s death, Price and Yan help keep the inventor’s legacy alive under their leadership at the Lewis Latimer House Museum. Established in 1998, the museum highlights the accomplishments of Lewis Latimer and other innovators of color through cultural programs, and science, technology, education, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) programs.

“Our mission is to tell his story; to engage everyone to learn about this important history, especially because people like Lewis Latimer — and their contributions to science and technology throughout American history — have often been overlooked,” Yan said in an interview with Simons Foundation in 2022.

Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Price admits he didn’t know a whole lot about his innovative ancestor either, although he did stay with Latimer's daughter Louise, who lived in the family house that is now the museum during the 1950s and 1960s.

“Aunt Louise put me up in the front bedroom. I may have even slept in his bed,” Price said. “And Aunt Louise would always say to me, ‘I'd like for you to come down to breakfast tomorrow morning, and I'm going to tell you all about your famous uncle Lewis Latimer and about his famous parents, the fugitive slaves.'"

Initially, Price declined invitations to join the museum’s board from relatives and acquaintances, but he agreed to join after retirement. Now he and Yan work to shine a light on the man who routinely deflected that to others.

Although he worked side-by-side for decades with men like Edison and Maxim, who sought fame for their innovations, Yan said Latimer spurned the spotlight.

“The reality is any invention is developed over a long period of time, through multiple iterations with contribution from many different people,” she said. “And then in that process, oftentimes people like Latimer don't get credit for what they've done in order for the whole process to happen and [be] complete[d].”

“I think he viewed it as for the greater good,” Yan continued. “I'm sure he and his family members were very proud of his achievements, but I didn't get the sense that he was doing it for personal credits or financial gains or fame.”

Price agrees, noting Latimer was very much an activist, but he was an activist working inside the system “on a part of the continuum between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois” that focused on economic self-sufficiency, survival, and breaking down barriers internally.

“My audacious hope is that when we the American people turn on a light switch, we think of Lewis Latimer,” Price said. “And better yet, that we thank him for his historic role in bringing light into our lives.”