As a 62-year-old African American mother and grandmother, I am embarrassed — and should be ashamed to admit but am not — that I still have much to learn about black history, especially when it comes to the contributions of specific black women and men to the advancement of our nation.
I was born at the height of the Civil Rights Era and I am old enough to remember Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon. I watched on TV as he said, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
Yet it was not until the release of the 2016 movie “Hidden Figures” that I, like most other black Americans and most of the world, first learned of the vital contribution made by three female African American mathematicians to our nation’s space program. Working for NASA, the three women worked out the complex trajectory calculations that allowed NASA to send John Glenn into space and bring him home safely.
Their names, for the record, were Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan.
Especially during Black History Month — but really all the time — we should be doing more to learn about and celebrate so many half-forgotten African Americans who have left their indelible imprint on the fabric of our nation.
From a children’s book, I recently discovered another such gem of a story.
“The Adventures of Pook and Boogee: The Boys Meet Mr. Jones,” by Eric R. Anderson, is the first volume in a series of adventure stories about a precocious preteen and his younger brother who travel through time and meet famous people.
In this first volume, which Anderson says he wrote specifically for Black History Month, we learn the story of Frederick McKinley Jones, a technology pioneer whose inventions in the science of cooling and refrigeration saved countless lives.
Jones, a veteran of World War I, invented a portable cooling system that was used in Army trucks in World War II to safely transport food, medicine and blood.
In 1991, three decades after his death, Jones became the first African American to be honored with the National Medal of Technology. President George H. W. Bush presented the medal to Jones’ widow at a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden.
Jones patented his portable air cooling unit for trucks in 1938. Later, in partnership with his former employer, James A. Numero, he co-founded Minnesota-based U.S. Thermo Control Company, which grew into the global cooling and refrigeration giant Thermo King Corporation. The company today provides cooling systems for trucks, airplanes, buses and railway cars worldwide.
Just how essential was Jones’ work?
When posthumously inducting him into its Hall of Fame in 1977, the Minnesota Museum of Science & Technology credited Jones with giving birth to the entire transport refrigeration industry.
“Jones’ technological breakthrough redefined the global marketplace, with cultural reverberations felt from the world’s largest cities to its most isolated villages,” Jones’ Hall of Fame citation states. “Consumers and distributors could now have year-round access to products such as meat, dairy, frozen foods and fresh produce. Temperature sensitive goods such as live poultry could be safely transported.
“Advancements in ‘containerization’ options soon translated the technology to boxcars, then to standardized refrigerated containers that could be moved from truck to ship to plane to rail without need for unloading and re-loading of contents.”
In 2009, Tom Berg, editor of Heavy Duty Truck magazine, crowned Jones “The King of Cool.”
I knew nothing about Frederick McKinley Jones and, chances are, you didn’t either.
As someone who’s been around now for more than half a century, I marvel at this.
And it’s great to think that even when I’m just reading a book to my five-year-old grandson, I can give him — and myself — a lesson in black history.
Denise I. O’Neal is a Sun-Times editorial assistant who also periodically writes stories for the paper.