15 JUNE 2019 BODY OF CHRIST NEWS Jan Ernst Matzeliger Jan Ernst Matzeliger (1852-1889), born in Paramaribo, Dutch Guiana, the son of a Negro woman and a white Dutch engineer, in whose machine shop he began working at the age of ten. Jan earned his passage to the United States as a sailor. He found work in Philadelphia and later moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, where he learned shoemaking, a trade in which he worked for the remainder of his young life. Before he died, he had invented the lasting machine which revolutionized the manufacturing of shoes and made Lynn, Massachusetts the shoe capital of the world. Mechanization of shoe- making had been applied to the cut- ting and stitching of leather, but the final problem of shaping and attaching the upper portion of the shoe to the leather sole remained a problem. This slow, tedious task, which was done by the shoemakers working by hand, produced a bottleneck: the shoemaker could not finish the shoe as rapidly as the machine produced its parts. Matzeliger recognized the problem. In secret he experimented with a crude wooden machine and with an iron model, on which he worked for ten years, until he perfected it. He sent his diagrams to Washington, D.C., for a patent and on March 20, 1883, he received his grant for the "lasting machine." Jan Ernst Matzeliger had invented a machine that held the shoe on the last, gripped and pulled the leather down around the heel, set and drove in the nails and then dis- charged the completed shoe. And now you know! source: International Library of Negro Life and History Preston Roberts The number of free Negroes in the United States, who fought to per- petuate slavery is not exactly known, but there must have been thousands. In June, 1861, Tennessee began to recruit Negroes between the ages of 18 to 50. South Carolina did the same in 1862. In a review of 28,000 Confederate troops held at New Orleans on November 23, 1861, seven months after the outbreak of war, there was one regiment of 1400 free Negroes. Preston Roberts, a Negro, was unofficial quartermaster of General Nathaniel Forrest (first president of the KKK). He was given the Cross of Honor, the highest Confederate medal, and until his death in 1910 was treated in all respects like a white man in the South. And now you know! source: 100 facts about the Negro By Randy McCowan, Publisher He had invented the lasting machine which revolutionized the manufacturing of shoes. He was given the Cross of Honor, the highest Confederate medal. Know Our History — Empower Your Future Did You Know?