This summer, billions of red-eyed, black-winged cicadas will swarm the eastern United States for the first time in 17 years. As the insects known as Brood X emerge from their mysterious underground retreat, they’re sure to put on an astonishing—and noisy—show, molting, mating and dying all in a manner of weeks.
Nearly 272 years ago, in 1749, a young Benjamin Banneker (1731–1806) witnessed a different crowd of cicadas throng and “sing” on his 100-acre Maryland homestead. An astronomer, almanac author, polymath and free Black man, Banneker watched the cicadas carefully, writing down observations about the strange insects whenever they reappeared. He would go on to track the bug’s life cycle and accurately predict the brood’s return in 1800.
In doing so, notes historian Cassandra Good on Twitter, Banneker may have become one of the first scientists to observe and chart the cicada’s bizarre 17-year life cycle. But as researchers—and married couple—Asamoah Nkwanta and Janet E. Barber argued in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics in 2014, Banneker rarely receives credit for this remarkable scientific find.
Speaking with Billy Jean Louis of the Baltimore Sun, Nkwanta says Banneker’s identity as a Black man has “absolutely” played a role in this oversight.
“[W]e have a long way to go with correcting U.S. history in a sense [of] getting the correct history out there so we all [can] be well-informed of the past,” the scholar tells the Sun.
Born in 1731 to Mary, a free woman of mixed racial heritage, and Robert Bannaky, a formerly enslaved Black man, Banneker grew up on his parents’ homestead near Baltimore, according to the Benjamin Banneker Historical Park and Museum. (Spellings of his family surname varied over his lifetime; the one used here is generally accepted as the most common.)
A voracious learner, Banneker was tutored in reading and writing by his grandmother, an Irish-born former indentured servant. He later continued his education at a one-room Quaker schoolhouse alongside Black and white peers, writes Louis Keene for the White House Historical Association’s Slavery in the President’s Neighborhood initiative.
In his 20s, Banneker hand-carved a wooden clock that kept precise time, cementing his status as local celebrity renowned for his mechanical skill and intellect. Per the Library of Congress, he went on to study astronomy and accurately predict a 1789 solar eclipse. Opting not to marry or have children, the talented polymath made his living publishing popular almanacs replete with sophisticated astronomical predictions. He also participated in a survey project that outlined the future Federal Territory of Washington, D.C.