Big Chief Mason

Garrett Morgan of Cleveland patented a safety hood in 1914, a breathing device that let its wearer walk into fire and smoke and come back out. It worked. It won first prize at the International Exposition of Safety and Sanitation. Fire departments wanted it.

Southern buyers did not want it from a Black man.

So Morgan hired a white friend, Charles P. Salan, to travel the South posing as the inventor. Morgan came along too, as the assistant: "Big Chief Mason," billed as a full-blooded Native American from the Walpole Island Indian Reserve in Canada. At demonstrations the crew erected a canvas tent, lit a fire of tar, pitch, sulfur, formaldehyde and manure, and let it fill with smoke thick enough that a searchlight could not cut three feet into it. Big Chief Mason strapped on the hood and stepped inside. The one person on earth who knew for sure the hood would hold was inside it.

He stayed twenty minutes.

He emerged unhurt every time. Papers reported it as a curiosity. Fire chiefs placed their orders with Mr. Salan. The Cleveland Fire Chief himself, having watched Big Chief Mason walk out of the tent, recommended his department buy the hoods.

Which they did, from the white man selling the invention of the Black man playing the Native American testing it.