Garrett morgan biography for kids nickelodeon

Garrett Augustus Morgan, Sr. (March 4, 1877 – July 27, 1963) was an African-American inventor and community leader.

He is known for his inventions which included a type of protective respiratory hood (or gas mask), a traffic signal, and a hair-straightening chemical.

He is also known for a heroic rescue in 1916 in which he and three others used the safety hood device he'd developed to save workers trapped within a water intake tunnel, fifty feet beneath Lake Erie. He is also credited as the first African American in Cleveland, Ohio, to own an automobile.

Early life and education

Morgan was born in 1877 in Claysville, Harrison County, Kentucky, an almost exclusively African American community outside Paris, Kentucky.

His father was Sydney Morgan, a son and freed slave of Confederate Gen John H. Morgan of Morgan's Raiders. His mother, also a freed slave, was Elizabeth Reed, daughter of Rev. Garrett Reed; she was part Native American. He had at least