February 2024
In celebrating Black History Month, Rittenhouse Appraisals is highlighting the talents and impact of eight Black leaders and innovators.
First we recognize William S. Harps, MAI, the first African American to earn the MAI (Member, Appraisal Institute) designation.
Harps was the 1981 president of the American Institute of Real Estate Appraisers, and the first African American president in the organization’s history (the AIREA was an Appraisal Institute predecessor organization).
In 2023 the Appraisal Institute announced the establishment of the William S. Harps DEI Award. This annual award recognizes an AI professional who exemplifies the value of diversity, equity and inclusion within the valuation profession and has contributed to making the profession reflective of all the communities the organization serves.
Our next profile in celebration of Black History Month is of a man who was an attorney, entrepreneur, real estate developer, newspaper publisher and civil rights activist. The first African American to practice law before the Supreme Court of Virginia, Giles Beecher Jackson was a man of many accomplishments.
In 1888 Jackson helped incorporate the True Reformers Bank, one of the first black-owned and operated banks in the United States. In 1903 Jackson secured a charter from the Commonwealth of Virginia for the Negro Development and Exposition Company (NDEC) to facilitate the Negro Exhibit at the Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition in 1907. He also helped organize the Southern Negro Business League as well as the Richmond Negro Exposition of 1915.
Learn more here.
An activist against discrimination and segregation, our next profile in celebration of Black History Month is Maggie Lena Walker, born in post-civil war Richmond.
Beginning as a teenager Walker displayed an innate business acumen, and commitment to helping provide improve the way of life for African Americans and women. She is most often cited as the first African American woman in the United States to found a bank, the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank. She served as the bank’s first president, and later as chairman of the board of directors when the bank merged with two other Richmond banks to become The Consolidated Bank and Trust company. Until 2009 the bank thrived as the oldest continually African American-operated bank in the United States.
Learn more here.
At 16 years old our next individual taught himself mechanical drawing while in the Union Navy during the Civil War.
After his service Lewis Howard Latimer was able to get a job at a patent law firm in Boston as a draftsman. Through his professional career he was a significant contributor to many important projects, working alongside Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and Hiram S. Maxim. Beyond that work he received seven patents for his own inventions.
Learn more here.
Registering nearly 60 patents, our next profile in celebration of Black History Month is about Granville T. Woods, often called the “Black Edison.”
Born in Columbus, Ohio in 1856, Woods received little education as a youngster, but in his twenties he took engineering and electricity classes for two years while in New York City. Combined with his previous jobs including as a railroad worker, engineer on a British ship, and railroad engineer in a railroad machine shop, Woods went on to create important and key contributions to the development of the telephone, streetcar, and more. This included the Synchronous Multiplex Railway Telegraph which allowed communication between moving trains and train depots.
Learn more here.
Now we turn our attention to Hattie Scott Peterson.
At the age of 33 in 1946, Peterson graduated with her civil engineering degree from Howard University, earning the distinction as the first African American women to earn a civil engineering degree in the entire country.
Continuing to blaze a path of firsts, Peterson worked as a survey and cartographic engineer for the US Geological Survey in California. Then in 1954 she focused on flood risk reduction measures and became the first woman engineer to work for the US Army Corps of Engineers.
She left an endowment to Howard University for scholarships for future engineers at the time of her death in 1993.
Learn more here.
The subject of the next profile has a plethora of inventions used in all types of environments, from homes to the battlefield.
One of Garrett Morgan’s first inventions earned him a patent for an improved sewing machine. Working with the machines in turn led him to invent a solution that eventually became a hair cream which protected hair from hair straighteners. This provided him business and financial success, but his mind was ever thinking.
One of Morgan’s more well-known inventions was a breathing device that eventually became the precursor for the gas masks used during World War I.
Then in 1923 he developed a new type of traffic signal, which contained a light to alert drivers they would soon need to stop. He acquired patents for the signal which were the foundation for the modern three-way traffic light (hello yellow!).
Learn more here.
The final profile in celebration of is Black History Month is about Carter G. Woodson, the man behind this important month.
Woodson earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Chicago before entering Harvard. In 1912 he became only the second African American after W.E.B. DuBois to earn a doctorate from the institution. Three years after Harvard he helped found the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH). He also launched the “Journal of Negro History” in order to bring attention to the achievements of Black Americans.
A press release Woodson sent out in 1926 announced the first Negro History Week. He chose February as that contains the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. The idea took hold with schools and organizations and spread.
Woodson unexpectedly died in 1950, but a movement had already begun to expand the week-long event into a longer celebration. In 1976 the ASNLH shifted to Black History Month. Since then every US president has issued a proclamation honoring Black History Month.
Learn more here.
