On May 5, 1868, Martha Jones of Amelia County, Virginia is believed to be the first Black woman to receive a U.S. patent for inventing a machine that husks and shells corn all in one procedure. The Patent No. 77,494 granted to Jones three years after the Civil War for her “Improvement to the Corn Husker, Sheller” was for a device that pulled off and cut up the corn husk and stripped the kernels off the cob, all at the same time, a key technological step in automating agricultural progress. 

Records show Jones was the first Black woman to receive a patent. Little is known about Jones herself. And it is unknown whether other Black women before her were blocked from claiming credit for their inventions since enslaved people and free Blacks could not be citizens of the United States under the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision. Therefore, they could not swear to the citizenship oath required by country’s patent law. Some owners allowed their enslaved people to apply for patents, but kept the profits. Black Codes in effect in some states also blocked African Americans from owning property and patents. 

Forty-seven years before Jones, Thomas L. Jennings became the first African American to receive a patent in 1821 in New York City for inventing “dry scouring” to remove dirt and grease from clothing, a precursor to dry cleaning. Twelve years before that, Mary Kies became the first white woman to receive a patent in 1809 for weaving straw with silk and thread, a process adopted by the New England hat making industry. 

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BY: HISTORY.COM EDITORS

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A lawmaker introduces the pun “May the Fourth be with you” on the floor of U.K. Parliament

On May 4, 1994, in a groan-inducing moment on the floor of U.K. Parliament, a lawmaker uses a pun that will spawn its own holiday far, far away from the halls of government.

The first recorded appearance of “May the Fourth Be With You” occurred on May 4, 1979, when the UK Conservative Party placed a congratulatory advertisement in the London Evening News after Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister. The ad read:

“May the Fourth Be With You, Maggie. Congratulations!”

This is the earliest documented instance of the pun being used in print.

In 1954, the Supreme Court issued a momentous ruling that clarified how the American legal system handled charges of discrimination. In Hernandez v. Texas, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment applied to all racial and ethnic groups facing discrimination, effectively broadening civil rights laws to include Hispanics and all other non-whites.

The defendant, Peter Hernandez, was a Mexican American agricultural laborer, part of the influx of such workers that had come to Texas during and after World War II. Hernandez was convicted of killing a man in cold blood in Jackson County, Texas, but his legal team, which was drawn mostly from one of the oldest Latino civil rights groups in the nation, the League of United Latin American Citizens, appealed. They pored through the records of jury selections in Jackson County, an area with a substantial Hispanic population, and found that not one of the roughly 6,000 jurors selected over the previous 25 years had a Hispanic last name. Citing the Fourteenth Amendment, which had been passed in 1868 and guaranteed equal protection under the law to all African Americans, Hernandez’s lawyers claimed he had been deprived of equal protection because discrimination prevented him from being tried by a jury of his peers.

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