Author: Pooksta

In the segregated South, in a town near Clarksdale, Mississippi, there lived a young Black boy named Samuel Reed, age 12. He walked five miles to school each day—not unusual at the time. But what made Samuel stand out was that he walked barefoot. Every single day.His family, like many others during the Great Depression, could not afford shoes. Samuel’s mother had patched his soles with burlap and wrapped them in twine during winter. Still, he never complained—not once.
One day, Samuel was stopped by a white shopkeeper on Main Street who accused him of “stealing glances” at boots in the store window. The man called the sheriff. Samuel was humiliated, yelled at, and told he didn’t “deserve shoes he couldn’t buy.”
He walked home in silence. That night, his mother found him soaking his feet in cold water, silent tears rolling down his cheeks. She sat beside him and told him something he would never forget:
“They can take your shoes, baby, but they can’t take your path.”
What happened next became legend in the Delta.
The next morning, the entire Black student body—nearly 60 children—showed up to school barefoot. Word had spread fast. Teachers didn’t speak a word, but they removed their shoes too. For one week, the entire school walked barefoot together.
White townsfolk mocked them. Some were furious. But they could not stop it. Samuel, once shamed, now walked with pride.
Years later, Samuel became a cobbler, opening his own shoe repair shop. Above the door hung a sign:
“Respect walks farther than leather.”

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—Frederick Douglas Patterson was the first African American to build motorized cars. His father, Charles Rich Patterson created C. R. Patterson and Sons Company located in Greenfield, Ohio. Beginning in 1865, the company built fashionable carriages. Frederick Patterson inherited the company upon the death of his father in 1910 and began building motorized vehicles. The first Patterson automobile, the Patterson-Greenfield, rolled off the line on Sept 23, 1915. Unfortunately, Henry Ford debuted the Model T on Oct 1, 1908 and by that point had captured most of the American car-buying market. —Named after abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Patterson was born on Sept 17, 1871 in Greenfield, Ohio to Josephine and Charles Richard. In 1888, Patterson attended Ohio State University where he played football and may have been the first Black player at the school on the varsity team. His passion, however, lay in the family business so he moved home in 1897 and joined his father and brother at C.R. Patterson and Sons. When his father died in 1910, Frederick assumed leadership of the business. —The Patterson-Greenfield sold for $850 and was reputed to be a higher quality automobile than Henry Ford’s “Tin Lizzy” or Model T. The Patterson-Greenfield car had a forty horsepower Continental four-cylinder engine and reached a top speed of fifty miles per hour. Unfortunately, the Model T had cornered the automobile market. It sold initially for $825 in 1908 when first introduced to the public, but over the years as Ford production expanded, the price by 1915 was $360, the year the first Patterson-Greenfield debuted. —From 1915 to 1920, the company produced 150 Patterson vehicles of two styles, the two-door roadster and the big four-door touring car. The company slogan, “If it’s a Patterson, it’s a good one” described the company’s carriages as well as the motor vehicles. C.R. Patterson and Sons, however, could not obtain capital to continue manufacturing the automobiles. By 1920 it had shifted production to buses and trucks and Patterson renamed the company to the Greenfield Bus Body Company. During the 1930s competition from Detroit became increasingly more intense.

 

The Golden Thirteen were the thirteen African American enlisted men who became the first African American commissioned and warrant officers in the United States Navy. Throughout US history untill the end of WorldWar I, the Navy had enlisted African American for general service,they were barred from joining from 1919-1932. In June 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the executive order (8802) that prohibited racial discrimination by any government agency.Although all sixteen members of the class passed the course, only Thirteen were commissioned in March 1944: John Walter Reagan (b.1920-d.1994), Jesse Walter Arbor (b.1914-d.2000), Dalton Louis Baugh, Frank Ellis Sublett (b.? – d.2006), Graham Edward Martin (b.1917- d.?), Phillip George Barnes, Reginald E. Goodwin,James Edward Hair (b.1915-d.1992), Samuel Edward Barnes, George Clinton Cooper, William Sylvester White, and Dennis Denmark Nelson were commissioned as Ensigns; Charles Byrd Lear (b.1920-d.2006) was appointed as a Warrant Officer.
Because Navy policy prevented them from being assigned to combatant ships, early black officers wound up being detailed to run labor gangs ashore.