Motorvatin' Vol 3 (CD)

Release Date: 09/03/21

3rd volume of the ultimative collection of car songs seen thru the eyes of black folks - sang by Rhythm & Blues artists

After putting y'all wise about Victor Green, the man behind the 'Green Book' (Motorvatin' vol.1) and Nick Dreystadt, the German immigrant that saved Cadillac from financial ruin giving it to black folks (Motorvatin' vol.2), I would like to tell you about Garrett Morgan, the African American inventor that gave the world the modern traffic light in 1923. Morgan was not the first one to come up with the idea, but his invention with the famous three-colours traffic signal we all know is the one that has been adopted all over the World since the 1920s. Since then, every traffic light has been just an updated variant of his original patent. According to his biographies, Garrett Augustus Morgan was born in Paris, Kentucky on March 4, 1877. He was the seventh of 11 children. His mother, Elizabeth Reed, was of Indian and African descent, and the daughter of a Baptist minister. His father, Sydney, a formerly enslaved person freed in 1863. When Morgan was in his mid-teens, he moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, to look for work, and found it as a handyman to a wealthy landowner. Although he only completed an elementary school education, Morgan was able to pay for more lessons from a private tutor. But jobs at several sewing-machine factories were to soon capture his imagination and determine his future. Learning the inner workings of the machines and how to fix them, Morgan obtained a patent for an improved sewing machine and opened his own repair business. Though Morgan only had a sixth-grade education, he was a mechanical genius and had an entrepreneurial bent. Finding work in a textile factory, he learned how the machines worked, and became the only Negro adjuster, fixing and improving mechanical problems. In 1907 he opened his own repair shop, and soon launched a clothing business with his German wife, an immigrant seamstress from Bavaria. It was an era of difficulty for African Americans, but Morgan made money, becoming the first black man in Cleveland to own a car.