Munro College

The first and only black-owned automobile in history was the Patterson-Greenfield Automobile Company, pioneered by Frederick Patterson and his father Charles R. Patterson. —Frederick Douglas Patterson was the first African American to build motorized cars. His father, Charles Rich Patterson created C. R. Patterson and Sons Company located in Greenfield, Ohio. Beginning in 1865, the company built fashionable carriages. Frederick Patterson inherited the company upon the death of his father in 1910 and began building motorized vehicles. The first Patterson automobile, the Patterson-Greenfield, rolled off the line on Sept 23, 1915. Unfortunately, Henry Ford debuted the Model T on Oct 1, 1908 and by that point had captured most of the American car-buying market. —Named after abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Patterson was born on Sept 17, 1871 in Greenfield, Ohio to Josephine and Charles Richard. In 1888, Patterson attended Ohio State University where he played football and may have been the first Black player at the school on the varsity team. His passion, however, lay in the family business so he moved home in 1897 and joined his father and brother at C.R. Patterson and Sons. When his father died in 1910, Frederick assumed leadership of the business. —The Patterson-Greenfield sold for $850 and was reputed to be a higher quality automobile than Henry Ford’s “Tin Lizzy” or Model T. The Patterson-Greenfield car had a forty horsepower Continental four-cylinder engine and reached a top speed of fifty miles per hour. Unfortunately, the Model T had cornered the automobile market. It sold initially for $825 in 1908 when first introduced to the public, but over the years as Ford production expanded, the price by 1915 was $360, the year the first Patterson-Greenfield debuted. —From 1915 to 1920, the company produced 150 Patterson vehicles of two styles, the two-door roadster and the big four-door touring car. The company slogan, “If it’s a Patterson, it’s a good one” described the company’s carriages as well as the motor vehicles. C.R. Patterson and Sons, however, could not obtain capital to continue manufacturing the automobiles. By 1920 it had shifted production to buses and trucks and Patterson renamed the company to the Greenfield Bus Body Company. During the 1930s competition from Detroit became increasingly more intense.

“Soooo you mean to tell me that someone down your ancestry line survived being chained to other human bodies for several months in the bottom of a disease-infested ship during the Middle Passage, lost their language, customs and traditions, picked up the English language as best they could while working free of charge from sunup to sundown as they watched babies sold from out of their arms and women raped by ruthless slave owners. Took names with no last names, no birth certificates, no heritage of any kind, braved the Underground Railroad, survived the Civil War to enter into sharecropping... Learned to read and write out of sheer will and determination, faced the burning crosses of the KKK, everted their eyes at the black bodies swinging from ropes hung on trees... Fought in World Wars as soldiers to return to America as boys, marched in Birmingham, hosed in Selma, jailed in Wilmington, assassinated in Memphis, segregated in the South, ghettoed in the North, ignored in history books, stereotyped in Hollywood... and in spite of it all someone in your family line endured every era to make sure you would get here and you receive one rejection, face one obstacle, lose one friend, get overlooked, and you want to quit? How dare you entertain the very thought of quitting. People, you will never know survived from generation to generation so you could succeed. Don’t you dare let them down! Give this to your young people who don’t know their history and want to get weak! It is NOT in our DNA to quit!”