Thomas L. Jennings

Thomas L. Jennings was born free in New York City in 1791. He apprenticed as a tailor through his teens and operated a tailoring shop on Church Street in Lower Manhattan from approximately 1820.

He developed in his work a chemical process for the dry cleaning of clothing — the technique he called dry scouring. He applied for a U.S. patent and received it on the third of March 1821, under U.S. patent number X3306. This was the first U.S. patent issued to an African American inventor.

The 1793 Patent Act had restricted patent applications to U.S. citizens, and the dominant judicial interpretation through the early nineteenth century held that enslaved people were not citizens — so the principle that Black inventors could not receive patents had operated through several decades of the American republic by absence rather than by explicit statute. Jennings's status as a free man at the time of his application meant the U.S. Patent Office could not deny his application on citizenship grounds. The patent stood. Subsequent African American patent applicants — including the inventor Henry Blair (1834, corn-planting machine) — followed in Jennings's wake.

Jennings used the income from his patented dry-cleaning process to support abolitionist organizing. He purchased the freedom of his wife Elizabeth (an enslaved woman from Delaware) in approximately 1827 and lobbied for the formal abolition of slavery in New York State, which took effect on the fourth of July 1827. His daughter Elizabeth Jennings Graham would in July 1854 successfully sue New York City for forcibly removing her from a public horse-drawn streetcar — a case that desegregated the city's public transit a hundred years before Rosa Parks.

He died in New York on the twelfth of February 1856, age sixty-four.

He is honored here as the first African American to hold a U.S. patent.