Each February, we like to spotlight a Black American who’s contributed to utility innovation. This year, we’re featuring Hugh Mason Browne, an American inventor and educator, whose commitment to vocational education and thoughtful pedagogy changed the way students in America learn.

Born in 1851 in Washington, D.C., Browne was a Presbyterian minister, a professor at Liberia College, and a teacher at Hampton Institute, where he invented a device to prevent backflow from sewers into people’s homes—a hygienic innovation that improved wastewater technology while ensuring public safety.

Following stints as a college professor and high school teacher, Browne authored “The Higher Education of the Colored People of the South,” an 1896 essay in which he argued that industrial and vocational education was the way of the future for American education, particularly for Black students. The Library of Congress has preserved this essay at this link.

A compatriot of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, was active in the civil rights movement of the early 20th century. Browne later became the director of the Institute for Colored Youth, a school whose mission was to provide “academic and industrial education” to Black students in Philadelphia. The school is now known as Cheyney University and remains committed to its mission.

We’re grateful for Hugh Browne’s advances in wastewater technology and for his tireless efforts to educate and employ Black American students—join us in celebrating his accomplishments this February!