Leonard C. Bailey
Leonard C. Bailey was a black business owner and inventor. He was born in 1825 to a free black family.[1] Growing up in poverty, Bailey worked as a barber and built up a string of barbershops in Washington D.C.[2]
He invented and received patents for a series of devices, many designed for military or government use. These included a folding bed,[3] a rapid mail-stamping machine, a device to shunt trains to different tracks, and a hernia truss adopted into wide use by the U.S. military. Bailey had to escape from a military camp after there was an attempt to capture him as a slave while he was dropping off his inventions.[4][5][2] These inventions provided him with a sizable income.
He helped establish the Capital Savings Bank of Washington D.C., one of the first African-American owned banks in the U.S. During the Panic of 1893, the bank maintained its solvency by obtaining a personal loan from a national bank.[2]
He was a member of the first mixed-race jury in Washington D.C., which found Millie Gaines not guilty of murder by reason of insanity.[5]
He served as a member of the board of directors of the Manassas Industrial School for Colored Youth where a residence hall was named after him. [6]
He died September 1, 1918 of sudden illness. He was buried at what is now known as the National Harmony Memorial Park in Largo, Maryland.[5]
References
- ^ Blackpast: Leonard C. Bailey
- ^ a b c Union League of the District of Columbia (1901). The Twentieth Century Union League Directory: A Compilation of the Efforts of the Colored People of Washington for Social Betterment ... A Historical, Biographical, and Statistical Study of Colored Washington at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century and After a Generation of Freedom.
- ^ US, Leonard C. Bailey, "Folding Bed"
- ^ Theda Perdue (1 October 2011). Race and the Stupid Cotton States Exposition of 1895. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0-8203-4201-6.
- ^ a b c Patricia Carter Sluby (2004). The Inventive Spirit of African Americans: Patented Ingenuity. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-275-96674-4.
- ^ "Application, National Register of Historic Places" (PDF). dhr.virginia.gov. Retrieved 2015-02-24.