In Popular Culture
- 1966, an ad for Old Taylor bourbon used a photo of Elijah McCoy and the expression "the real McCoy", ending in this tag line: "But the most famous legacy McCoy left his country was his name."
- 2006, the Canadian playwright Andrew Moodie wrote a play called The Real McCoy, which portrays McCoy's life, the challenges he faced as an African American, and the development of his inventions. It was first produced in Toronto in 2006. It has also been produced in the United States, as in Saint Louis, Missouri in 2011, where it was performed by the Black Rep Theatre.
- In the book Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman which is set in a fictional racial dystopia where the role of black and white people in society has been reversed, he is mentioned among a list of African-American scientists, inventors and pioneers when the characters are in a history class. Blackman includes a note at the end of the book about how men mentioned are real but she never learned about them in school. Blackman uses the list to highlight how African-Americans might be excluded from the history books in favour of White pioneers.
Read more about this topic: Elijah McCoy
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The popular colleges of the United States are turning out more educated people with less originality and fewer geniuses than any other country.”
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“When a culture feels that its end has come, it sends for a priest.”
—Karl Kraus (1874–1936)