Lucean Arthur Headen: The Making of a Black Inventor and Entrepreneur by Jill D. Snider (review)

In Lucean Arthur Headen: The Making of a Black Inventor and Entrepreneur, Jill D. Snider has written a biography of a Black man who not only invented and manufactured new technologies but also constructed the social arrangements required to finance and produce those technologies. Born in Moore County, North Carolina, in 1879, Lucean Arthur Headen grew up surrounded by family members who worked as artisans. His great-uncle, a blacksmith and toolmaker, and his wheelwright grandfather showed Headen that technological pursuits engendered both respect and economic benefits. Over the course of his life, Headen worked as a Pullman porter, flew airplanes, and founded the Headen Motor Company and manufactured automobiles. In addition, he patented numerous devices such as cloaking mirrors for ships, deicing technologies for airplane wings, and fuel manifolds for automobiles and tractors. Moving back and forth between southern and northern states and finally settling in England in 1931, Headen produced innovative technologies and the social and economic networks required to create technological success.

This book participates in a growing literature that focuses on Black inventors and adds to that literature by highlighting the importance of networks and coalitions. Headen relied on social connections for successful innovation. Snider points out that Headen “had few hopes of joining the white inventors who were to become the vaunted ‘industrial scientists’ of DuPont, Ford Motor Company, and Bell Laboratories” (p. 75). The world of collaborative technological research that emerged in the United States developed as a white world; Lewis Latimer’s work for Thomas Edison was an exception that highlights the lack of Black inventors in these collaborative settings. Snider describes how Headen created coalitions of supporters using many different types of social resources. Pragmatically, Headen pursued technological entrepreneurship through what Snider terms “coalition economics” (p. 167). Headen used family, educational, publishing, and religious organizations to raise financial support. Lacking ways to promote his automobile company, he founded the Afro-American Automobile Association, a racing organization he used to advertise and sell the automobiles he manufactured. Snider shows how Headen, when faced with a social environment that denied opportunities to Black inventors, forged coalitions that enabled innovation and entrepreneurship.

In the epilogue, Snider specifically addresses issues of Jim Crow segregation and Headen’s attitude toward racial inequalities. The author portrays Headen as an inventor who “enthusiastically embraced attempts to improve the social and economic prospects of African Americans” (p. 163). Snider attributes some of this attitude to his upbringing in North Carolina and characterizes his subsequent technologies, particularly his automobiles, “as socially transformative, capable of bypassing Jim Crow and of building economic power” (p. 164). In this way, Snider views race as interlaced into Headen’s vision for innovation and business.

Researching and writing a book that addresses Black invention is not easy. Archival research on Black entrepreneurs is often difficult due to a lack of sources. Lucean Arthur Headen provides an example of how to use broader historical context to investigate and describe the biographical details of one person’s life. In order to write a biography based on scattered correspondence, statements to reporters, commercial brochures, patent records, and trade publications, all of which provide “glimpses” into Headen’s life, Snider has reconstructed the world around Headen (p. xi). The author builds “a larger scaffolding on which to hang the small number of personal sources . . . for Headen” (p. xii). This approach to sources enables historians to produce narratives and analyses of Black historical figures. Through this method, Snider has written a history of Headen, addressing experiences of Black entrepreneurs more generally that otherwise may have remained less visible.