A daily Black History Month fact that has nothing to do with George Washington Carver, MLK, Jr., or Harriet Tubman. Promise!

In honor of Fashion Week: Jan Matzeliger was born in Suriname to a Dutch father and an African mother in 1852. He moved to the United States at 18 and became a shoemaker. At the time, shoes were handmade…until Matzeliger revolutionized the process by inventing the shoe lasting machine. His machine attached the top of the shoe to the sole in less than a minute. Working by hand, a person could make 50 pairs of shoes a day, but his machine could produce between 150 to 700 pairs of shoes a day. When Matzeliger died of tuberculosis at the age of 37, he hadn't yet seen any profit from his invention, although he left lucrative stock to his friends and his church. Perhaps the most important result of his machine was that as production costs lowered, the prices of shoes dropped by 50 percent, making shoes far more affordable for the poor.

This concludes your daily dose of BHM.

Send tips to lauren AT stereohyped.com!

A daily Black History Month fact that has nothing to do with George Washington Carver, MLK, Jr., or Harriet Tubman. Promise!
Here's one South Carolinian who would no doubt be thrilled that in 2008, the people in his state have yet to relinquish the Confederate flag. Robert Smalls was born a slave in 1839, and as an adult, who worked on a Confederate steamer based out of the Charleston Harbor called the Planter. Once the war started, Smalls hatched a plan to take over the Steamer with a group of 12 other slaves. On the morning of May 13, 1862, Smalls smuggled his wife and children aboard the ship and took command with the rest of his crew. They waved the Confederate Flag until they reached the Union waters, where they turned the ship over as contraband. Smalls and his crew were honored by Lincoln. The former slave became became a captain in the U.S. Navy, and officially commanded the Planter throughout the Civil War.

During Reconstruction, Smalls returned to South Carolina and served in the state senate from 1868-1870. In 1875 he was election to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served for five terms and fought for equal travel accommodations for blacks and for the rights of children of mixed race.

He died in 1916.

This concludes your daily does of BHM.

*Feel free to send me your black history month suggestions at lauren AT stereohyped.com. Thanks!

A daily Black History Month fact that has nothing to do with George Washington Carver, MLK, Jr., or Harriet Tubman. Promise!
A loyal reader* and graduate of the Mary Ann Shadd Academy in Montreal pointed me toward Mary Ann Shadd Carey for today's obligatory BHM post. Carey was born in 1823 in Delaware to parents who were free blacks and leaders in their community. Her father worked for William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator and was a key figure in the Underground Railroad.

As an adult, Shadd opened a school for black children in Westchester, PA, but emigrated to Canada in 1850. There, she founded a racially integrated school and became the first black woman to edit a North American newspaper when she launched her anti-slavery publication, The Provincial Freedom. She moved back to the states and opened another school for black children, this time in Washington, D.C., where she also got her law degree from Howard University. When she graduated in 1870, she became the first black female lawyer in the United States. She dedicated her law career to fighting for women's, particularly black women's, rights.

This concludes your daily dose of BHM.

*Feel free to send me your BHM suggestions at lauren AT stereohyped.com.

A daily Black History Month fact that has nothing to do with George Washington Carver, MLK, Jr., or Harriet Tubman. Promise!
Garrett Morgan might not have discovered 300 uses for peanuts, but he is responsible for several inventions — a hair straightener (he used it on his own hair), a smoke hood that would evolve into the modern-day gas mask and the traffic signal are the most notable. Morgan, who was born in 1877 in Kentucky but later moved to Cleveland, would often travel with a white partner who would take credit for the inventions in order to make his product more marketable. He sold the rights to his traffic signal to GE for $50,000. He died at the age of 86 in 1963.

This concludes your daily dose of BHM.

A daily Black History Month fact that has nothing to do with George Washington Carver, MLK, Jr., or Harriet Tubman. Promise!

Katherine Dunham was a dancer, choreographer, actress who performed in Broadway's Cabin in the Sky and in like movies Star Spangled Rhythm (1941), Pardon My Sarong (1942), and the black musical, Stormy Weather (1943). In 1945, Dunham opened a dance and theater school, where she taught a young Eartha Kitt, James Dean, Shelly Winters, and Warren Beatty, among others. Despite her dedication to dance, Dunham was also outspoken about civil rights — she once refused to sign a Hollywood studio contract after execs requested she replace some of the darker members of her company and she frequently refused to play at venues that did not allow blacks. At the age of 82, she went on a 47-day hunger strike to protest the U.S.'s policy to repatriate Haitian refugees. Dunham, who was also a writer and anthropologist, died in May of 2006 at the age of 97.

This concludes your daily dose of BHM.

A daily Black History Month fact that has nothing to do with George Washington Carver, MLK, Jr., or Harriet Tubman. Promise!

Ever heard of Dr. Charles Richard Drew? Born in Washington, DC, in 1904, he was the physician who invented the process for storing and preserving blood in blood banks. He established the American Red Cross blood blank and organized the first world-wide blood bank drive. His innovations were used extensively for the first time during WWII, and the techniques he developed are still in use today. After the war, he served as the chair of surgery at Howard University until his death in 1950.

This concludes your daily dose of BHM. Carry on.