Benjamin Banneker

Maryland Historical Society

Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806), a tobacco farmer, amateur astronomer and maker of almanacs, was recognized as the first African American man of science. Born free on November 9, 1731, in Baltimore County, Maryland, in what later became the community of Oella, his father was a former African slave. His mother was the daughter of an English indentured servant, Molly Welsh, and Bannka, later "Banneky," the enslaved son of a Wolof tribal chieftain.

Banneker had minimal formal schooling and was taught to read and write by his grandmother from an imported Bible. He demonstrated unusual natural mathematical and mechanical skills and had a great love of reading. In his youth he constructed a successful striking clock, carving each piece by hand from wood. Later, with borrowed books and instruments, he taught himself to make astronomical observations and to calculate ephemerides, or tables showing predicted positions of a heavenly body for every day during a given period, for almanacs that were published with his name in at least twenty-eight editions between 1792 and 1797.

Algebraic calculations from the Almanac

Maryland Historical Society

When early in 1791 the surveyor Andrew Ellicott was appointed to survey a ten-mile square for a Federal Territory in which to establish a national capital, he selected Banneker to assist him, and Banneker worked with Ellicott for four months in the field. In that year he also sent a copy of his first ephemerides to Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, enclosing with them a letter in which he made a strong plea for ending the injustices experienced by his race, and urging recognition that black people were equal with those of the white race.

Banneker worked on his family farm all his life. He never married, and when poor health forced him to abandon tobacco culture at the age of fifty-nine, he continued to live in retirement on his farm, tending his bees and orchards until his death on October 9, 1806. He was buried in the family burial ground on his farm, which recently became the county-operated Benjamin Banneker Historical Park and Museum in Oella.

Bedini, Silvio A. The Life of Benjamin Banneker: The First African-American Man of Science. Revised and Expanded Edition. Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1999.

[Mason, Susanna].Selections from the Letters and Manuscripts of the Late Susanna Mason; With a Brief Memoir of Her Life, By Her Daughter. Philadelphia: Rackliff & Jones, 1836, pp. 242-46.

[Tyson Martha E.]A Sketch of the Life of Benjamin Banneker; From Notes Taken in 1836. Read by J. Saurin Norris, before the Maryland Historical Society, October 1854. Copy in the Library of the Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, Maryland.