theunsungheroines:“On her first day on the job, Gertrude Jeannette, believed to be the first woman t
theunsungheroines:“On her first day on the job, Gertrude Jeannette, believed to be the first woman to drive a cab in New York City, got in an accident — on purpose. She had pulled up in front of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in Manhattan looking for a fare but was cut off by other taxi drivers. “In those days they didn’t allow black drivers to work downtown; you had to work uptown,” Ms. Jeannette, who was African-American, later recalled. “They said, ‘Say, buddy, you know you’re not supposed to be on this line.’” As cabbies hurled insults and hemmed her in, she remained calmly on the line — until, that is, a Checker cab lurched in front of her. “I rammed my fender under his fender, swung it over to the right and ripped it,” she said in 2011 at a ceremony in her honor at the Dwyer Cultural Center in Harlem. When the other driver got a good look at her, she recalled, he screamed: “A woman driver! A woman driver!” She was later reprimanded by an inspector, but she drove off with her very first customer. Ms. Jeannette, who was also one of the first women to get a motorcycle license in New York, and who later overcame a speech impediment to become a Broadway, film and television actor as well as a playwright, producer and director, died on April 4 at her home in Harlem. She was 103. Ms. Jeannette got her hack license in 1942. She had responded to an ad in a newspaper looking for women to replace the male cabdrivers who had been drafted into World War II. “Women were going into plants and everything else, taking over jobs,” she recalled in a 2005 interview. “I said, well, I know one thing — I can drive a car.” “Thirty-two of us took the test and only two of us passed,” said Ms. Jeannette, who learned how to drive a Chrysler truck at the age of 13 in Arkansas. “But the other girl didn’t get her license because she had citations on her driver’s license. And so I, I was the first….” VIA JONATHAN WOLFE/ @nytimes #theunsungheroines -- source link