The Inventive Spirit of African Americans: Patented Ingenuity (review)

Within the study of African-American life, black inventors have taken up a unique position as celebrated race champions and heroes who have contributed to the development of American society. Unfortunately, all that is needed to make such a claim about an African American is evidence of having received a patent. As a result, black inventors are systematically reduced to their elemental lists of names, artifacts, and patent numbers. Black inventors also exemplify the way in which African Americans have been written out of U.S. history and the history of technology. A considerable amount of research and writing has been directed toward recovering the lost patented work of African Americans. It is this tradition to which Patricia Carter Sluby is contributing.

Sluby's book demarcates different historical moments and then discusses a sampling of black inventors who fit into these temporally bounded periods. In the first section, she indicates that, if the origins of humankind can be traced to Africa, then the tradition of scientific and technological creativity has to have an African connection. Throughout the history of Africa, great scientific and technological civilizations flourished, and African slaves brought to the American colonies African forms of scientific and technological knowledge.

The next period begins when the first enslaved Africans were brought to the American colonies in the 1620s, and ends with the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. The inventive efforts of people of African heritage are divided into two categories: inventions by the enslaved, and inventions by freemen. Because the enslaved were not American citizens, they could not receive patents, even though they performed most of the agricultural work within a plantation structure and therefore almost certainly had to innovate. Still, the first person of African heritage to receive a patent was a freeman, Thomas L. Jennings.

Moving forward from this period, Sluby's narrative is directed toward the work of black inventors around the turn of the twentieth century. The black inventors that we presently know best did their work at this time, men like Jan Matzeliger and Lewis Latimer. Sluby emphasizes that while African-American inventive successes were not often documented in the mainstream press, black periodicals remain an untapped resource. In addition, the Paris Exposition of 1900 and Jamestown Exposition of 1907 both had Negro buildings and exhibits that not only highlighted the domestic skills of Americans of African heritage, but also displayed items they had patented. Her research reminds us that documenting the lives of black inventors is difficult at best, and that nontraditional sources can yield important information.

The final sections of the book bring the reader up to the present. In a major departure from most works on African-American inventors, Sluby devotes as much of her narrative to their activities after World War II as before it. I believe that even more attention should be devoted to the postwar years.

As informative as this book is about black inventors and their work over a long time-span, it fails to place them in a broader cultural context that would enable readers to understand what, if anything, makes the inventive experiences of African Americans different from those of others. The author never fully engages the issues of racial leadership, the cultural meanings of blackness, or the complexities of an evolving black identity. Her text only scratches the surface and never fully explores the terrain beneath in an effort to reveal how black inventors negotiated ever-changing American racial landscapes. Nevertheless, this book does suggest that the research on black inventors both before and at the turn of the twentieth century should be linked with the subsequent work of black inventors during the latter half of the century.