By Tamara Shiloh

Emeline King is recognized as the first African American female transportation designer at the Ford Motor Company.

Let’s take a look at her life and career at the Ford Motor Company.

King’s fascination with cars began during her childhood. Growing up, she was captivated by the sleek designs and mechanical complexities of automobiles. She loved playing with toy cars and considered it an insult if anyone gave her a doll.

King pursued her interest in cars by studying at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena. There, she improved her skills in transportation design, gaining the technical expertise and artistic vision she needed to break into the male-dominated industry.

However, her true inspiration came from her father, Earnest O. King, Sr., who worked for Ford as a Fabrication Specialist. She remembered the father-daughter trips to the auto shows, and the Saturday mornings with the famous Black sculptor, Oscar Graves, who her father assisted in some of his commissioned art works.

She said Graves would mentor her in clay relief sculptures. She was always fascinated by the smell of clay that was a constant in his studio.

However, it was her first visit to her father’s job that became the catalyst for King to want a career in transportation design. At the company’s annual employee Christmas parties, she got the chance to meet his co-workers and learned about the roles they played in the auto industry. It was a chance to see some great cars, too.

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Her career at Ford began in the 1980s, when women — particularly women of color –were scarcely represented in the automotive industry. King’s role at Ford was groundbreaking, as she became the first African American woman to work as a transportation designer at the company.

At Ford Design, she worked on the Ford Mustang SN-95’s interior. She also made several design contributions on other vehicles, too, including the interior components of the 1989 Thunderbird, the 1989 Corporate Steering Wheel, the 1989 Thunderbird Wheel/Wheel cover design program, the 1990 Thunderbird Super Coupe, the 1993 Mach III, the 1994 Mustang, to name a few.

King also served three foreign assignments: Turin Italy; Koln, Germany; and Brentwood, Essex, England — designing Ford cars for Europe.

Leaving Ford after about 25 years of service and along with her many speaking engagements, she wrote an autobiography about being Ford’s first female African American transportation designer titled, “What Do You Mean A Black Girl Can’t Design Cars? She Did It!”

She’s quoted as saying, “I’m now so proud to have written a book that I hope will inspire young girls and boys to never give up. To influence them so that they can stay focused and alert, and so they never look back. There are mentors who are placed in our lives to serve as our ‘Bridges to Destinations’ and allow us to cross over them to reach our dreams. Hoping they gain inspiration from my book, my motto for them is simple: ‘OPPORTUNITY IS NOW, SO GRAB IT! IF I DID IT, SO CAN YOU!”

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Join us for a LIVE Virtual Town Hall on the Impact of Racism hosted by Post News Group Journalist Carla Thomas and featuring Oakland, CA NAACP President Cynthia Adams & other Special Guests.
Thursday, November 14, 2024
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• Since the pandemic, what battles have the NAACP fought nationally, and how have they impacted us locally?
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When grants were announced Oct. 1, it was noted that seven of the 22 fellows were African American. Among them are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit.

Their names are Ruha Benjamin, Jericho Brown, Tony Cokes, Jennifer L. Morgan, Ebony G. Patterson, Shamel Pitts, Jason Reynolds, and Dorothy Roberts. This is the fourth in the series highlighting the Black awardees. The report below is excerpted from the MacArthur Fellows web site.

Jennifer L. Morgan is a historian deepening understanding of how the system of race-based slavery developed in early America.

A life-long New Yorker, professor Morgan, 59, is currently on leave from New York University as a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

She is a 1986 graduate of Oberlin College where she majored in Africana studies and received her PhD in history from Duke University in 1995.

Using a range of archival materials—and what is missing from them—Morgan brings to light enslaved African women’s experiences during the 16th and 17th centuries. She shows that exploitation of enslaved women was central to the economic and ideological foundations of slavery in the Atlantic world.

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Morgan has established gender as pivotal to slavery’s institutionalization in colonial America, and her attention to the full ramifications of slavery for Black women sheds light on the origins of harmful stereotypes about Black kinship and families that endure to this day.

Morgan wrote her groundbreaking first book, “Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery” (2004), at a time when most scholarship focused on the transport, labor, and resistance of enslaved men.

In Laboring Women, Morgan argues that enslavement was fundamentally different for women because of their reproductive potential. Enslaved women were expected to both perform agricultural fieldwork and produce children, who were born into enslavement.

Morgan’s analysis of wills, probate proceedings, and purchasing records reveals how slaveowners understood forced procreation as a strategy to maintain their labor supply (rather than importing more people to enslave as laborers from Africa).

In her second book, “Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic” (2021), Morgan examines the development of accounting practices that transformed enslaved people into commodities within a system of trade.

She argues that such data obscured and justified the violence enslavers inflicted upon human beings. Record-keepers largely left gender and parentage out of demographic and accounting records. By refusing to acknowledge kinship among enslaved people, enslavers could rationalize family separation.

Morgan links the so-called neutral data of the slave trade to the consolidation of a hierarchy of race, based on false narratives about the difference and inferiority of enslaved Africans. At the same time, Morgan recovers the humanity and agency of enslaved women.

She demonstrates that enslaved women understood that their captors exploited their ability to produce children to create wealth. Morgan also charts their efforts to resist the commodification of their motherhood.

Morgan is currently at work on “The Eve of Slavery”—a book about African women in 17th-century North America. It is organized around the life of Elizabeth Key, a woman of color who sued for freedom in 1656 on the grounds that her father was a free white man.

The lives of Key and other Black women who tried to protect themselves and their children offer an intimate window into the development of American slavery.

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