The First File · Episode 001
They drove him out.
He built the record anyway.
The third African American admitted to the U.S. Naval Academy, driven out by violence he was blamed for. He answered erasure with evidence — spending decades inside the U.S. Patent Office building the first great record of Black inventors, so their names could never be dismissed as absence.
He made the list. We open the files — his, and the ones no one ever thought to keep.
B
Henry E. Baker
The Record Survived
Not Forgotten