Emaline King: Meet Ford’s 1st black-American female designer
- Emaline King is believed to be Ford’s first African American female designer
- At 35, King became the creative hands behind the Ford Mustang 1994-year design
- King inked her name in Ford’s history as the company's first African American female designer with that creative feat
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At an early age, Emaline King discovered her love for Ford Mustang and her love grew into an obsession after she attended an auto show with her father before she turned nine-years-old.
According to Face2Face Africa, the daughter of a fiberglass-and-clay modeler for Ford, is believed to be Ford’s first African-American female designer.
She is said to have fallen in love with the 1968 Ford Mustang as a child.
King pursued one of her first loves to become a designer and that motivated her academic pursuit to study transportation design at the Art Center College of Design.
After she graduated, she joined the Ford Motor Company in 1983.
Source: UGC
The Chicago Tribune quoted King as saying in a 30 January, 1994, publication that she loved to play with toy cars.
''When I was a child. It was like an insult to give me a doll,'' The Chicago Tribune quoted her.
In that same year, 35-year-old King became the main designer of the 1994 Ford Mustang, with its striking two-tone, twin-arched dashboard-console and the doors that grow gracefully out of it like boughs from a tree.
After nearly 25 years of working with the company, King has contributed significantly to the company’s designs including the design of the 1990 Ford Probe and 2000 Ford Thunderbird, among other vehicles.
According to a biography about her, she patented a 15-inch wheel cover of the 1989 Thunderbird.
With that remarkable creative feat, she inked her name in Ford’s history as its first African American female designer.
According to Face2Face Africa, at the time, there were about 1 100 designers worldwide, with possibly 300 in the United States, less than 10 percent of whom were women.
In 2008, King, a Detroit resident, and Wayne State University graduate, retired from Ford. She now works as a freelance artist and author.
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Source: Briefly News
