I was a little intrigued to turn the page of the new History Channel Magazine and find a story about a 14-year-old boy from Newark, N.J., in 1940.
The kid’s name is Frank Morgan, a 9th-grade student with an assignment from his teacher to write a report on an American inventor.
Frank Morgan wondered whether anyone named “Morgan” had ever invented anything, and if so, how great it would be to have an inventor in his family tree.
So the 9th grader found Garrett Morgan, who invented the electric stoplight in 1923. Frank Morgan got an A, but he was more than a little surprised to hear from his teacher, Sister Clare Josephine, that Garrett Morgan was one of the greatest “Negro” inventors who ever lived.
“I thought, ‘A Negro? Holy smokes!’ It made me annoyed that I spent all that time writing about a black person,” Frank Morgan told me over the phone from his home in Florida. “In 1940, it was a segregated society. You could never think of blacks as inventors and doing great things.”
The story came back to Frank Morgan recently when he read about how Garrett Morgan also invented the rudimentary gas mask in 1916, a version of which was used in World War I. During one battle, some soldiers were running out of food so they retreated a few hundred yards to catch a meal. Just as they settled in, the alarm went off for poison gas.
One soldier ignored the warning and kept eating. The other soldier put on his mask. The first soldier died. The second survived, and he eventually married and had four children. One of those children turned out to be Frank Morgan.
“It’s funny how it all worked out. [My dad] used the gas mask,” Frank Morgan said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”
Frank Morgan wrote in his letter to History Channel Magazine: “After 60 years, the shock of Garrett Morgan being black has mellowed into an appreciation of a man’s achievements regardless of the color of his skin and a pride in sharing the Morgan name with such a great man.”