A Brief History and Literature Review
Our webinar series highlighted new perspectives on Black inventors and innovators by showcasing multiple lines of inquiry that have flourished in the new millennium. This essay provides a brief history of Black American inventors and innovators by reviewing some of the key publications since 1845. This scholarship provides a foundation for current and future explorations of Black ingenuity.
When the first enslaved Africans arrived in colonial America in 1619, they brought centuries of technical knowledge with them. Once they reached American shores, enslaved people expanded their technical skills by learning various artisanal trades amid the brutalities and trauma inflicted by the American slavery system. They demonstrated creativity and resilience while transmitting their specialized skills to their descendants through practice and oral tradition.
Scholars have drawn on surviving artifacts and fragments from the archives to recover these stories of early Black ingenuity. Enslaved Americans built extensive water infrastructures to irrigate rice fields and introduced numerous crops, botanicals, and agricultural techniques into North America (Carney 2002; Carney and Rosomoff 2009). They deployed nets, traps, and watercraft to fish American waterways (Perry 2018). They developed homeopathic medicines and ingenious methods for preparing and preserving foods (Covey 2007; Lee 2017; Harris 2011; Twitty 2017). Enslaved Black people wove straw baskets, turned clay pots, and mined for gold (Pollitzer 2005; Goldberg and Witcoski 2006; Daly forthcoming).
These forms of “Black vernacular technological creativity” did not conform to the racist preconceptions of antebellum European Americans and failed to meet their narrow definitions of ingenuity (Fouché 2006, 640; Baraka 1971). Historians have traced the roots of anti-Black racism to ancient Greece; these attitudes and ideas coalesced in fifteenth-century Europe and were present among America’s first European settlers (Eliav-Feldon, Isaac, and Ziegler 2009; Bethencourt 2013; Kendi 2016). Therefore, both free and enslaved Black people persistently faced racist assumptions about their supposed intellectual inferiority and technical incompetence, or what Bruce Sinclair has called the “deeply ingrained and long perpetuated myth of black disingenuity” (Sinclair 2004, 2).
Practically, these assumptions functioned to exclude Black contributions from the early history of invention and technology. Among antebellum White men, “invention” generally meant building (and often patenting) a mechanical device that would replace animal or human labor, improve the efficiency of some task, or otherwise contribute some economic value. In a society where labor was rigidly divided by sex and race, the work of women (e.g., cooking, housekeeping, sewing) and enslaved persons (e.g., agriculture, various trades) simply did not count as invention under this narrow definition. Occasionally, the work of a Black inventor was recognized—and duly recorded—as meeting this White, Eurocentric standard of invention. For example, John Latrobe published an early biographical account of Black astronomer, surveyor, and instrument-maker Benjamin Banneker (Latrobe 1845).
The Patent Act of 1790 was ostensibly colorblind; it had no language—and thus no restrictions—limiting patentees based on gender, race, age, religion, nation of origin, or any other category. In 1821, Thomas L. Jennings became the first known Black inventor to earn a US patent for his dry-cleaning methods (Johnson 2019). While free Black citizens like Jennings were permitted to obtain a patent, enslaved Black people had no legal standing and were denied the same right. In 1858, a White Mississippian named Oscar J. E. Stuart attempted to patent the double cotton scraper invented by an enslaved artisan named Ned who worked on his plantation. However, Attorney General Jeremiah S. Black ruled that “a machine invented by a slave, though it be new and useful, cannot, in the present state of the law, be patented” (Yancy 1984; Frye 2018; Swanson 2020). White enslavers circumvented this legal barrier—and capitalized on it—by appropriating the patentable inventions of those they enslaved. For example, Angela Lakwete has documented the African and enslaved Black innovations underlying the modern cotton gin, and how Eli Whitney, a White guest at Catharine Greene’s Georgia plantation, eventually earned the patent (Lakwete 2003). With few exceptions, the antebellum inventions of free and enslaved Black people were either ignored or claimed by contemporary Whites, so many of their stories of ingenuity remain lost to history.
Following the Civil War, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution abolished slavery and (ostensibly) granted full citizenship rights to all Black Americans, including the right to earn patents. Invention soon became a way for Black Americans to gain social status and economic mobility. When Black inventors earned patents—objective, government-issued proof of their creativity and ingenuity—racist arguments concerning their supposed intellectual inferiority became more difficult to sustain. With industrialization in full swing in the nineteenth century, Black leaders sought to publicize the accomplishments of an emerging class of Black inventors; they hoped these individuals might serve as inspirational heroes for their communities. For example, as the federal government and individual states began underwriting major international fairs and expositions, Black elected officials began demanding a list of Black patentees to aid the development of displays featuring Black inventors (Winton 1947; Wilson 2012). The Patent Office obliged by compiling partial, unofficial lists for the Cotton Centennial in New Orleans (1884), the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893), and the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta (1895). In this context, a Black Congressman and inventor, George Washington Murray (R-SC), entered the names and inventions of 92 Black patentees into the Congressional Record—including eight inventions of his own—during an 1894 floor speech (Murray 1894; Marszalek 2006).
Murray’s roster of Black inventors was compiled by a Black patent examiner named Henry E. Baker. Baker was the first critical scholar of Black inventors and remains a towering figure in the historiography. Most of what we know about early Black American inventors derives from his efforts to compile and publicize their contributions. In preparation for W. E. B. Du Bois’s planned “Negro Exhibit” at the 1900 Paris Exposition, Patent Commissioner Charles Duell directed Baker to extend his earlier efforts and compile a comprehensive list of Black patentees. Baker queried his fellow examiners and mailed a questionnaire to thousands of registered patent agents and attorneys seeking information about “colored inventors.” Some racist respondents believed Baker’s inquiry was a joke. However, Baker identified 370 patents by Black inventors and assembled reprints of their specifications into four leather-bound booklets for display at the Paris Exposition (Baker 1900).
Baker subsequently published his list and highlighted the achievements of Black inventors such as Jan Matzeliger (shoe lasting machine), Elijah McCoy (lubrication system), and Granville T. Woods (telegraphy and telephony). This compilation, Baker concluded, provided irrefutable evidence to anyone who would erroneously “assert that the Negro has made no contribution to the civilization of the age” (Baker 1902, 405). An expanded search in 1913 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation turned up 1,200 leads, but Baker could confirm only 800 patents as definitively earned by Black inventors. In his subsequent book The Colored Inventor, Baker explained that many Black inventors refused to acknowledge their heritage for fear that “publication of that fact might adversely affect the commercial value of their inventions.” Given these hesitations, together with decades of White appropriation of Black inventions, Baker believed that perhaps half of all Black patents might remain hidden forever “in the unbreakable silence of official records” (Baker 1913, 6).
Baker’s lists emerged from a growing interest among Black Americans to display the inventive genius of their community. Richmond attorney Giles B. Jackson founded the Negro Development and Exposition Company (NDEC) to capitalize on that interest. Jackson secured funds from Congress, the Virginia state legislature, and individual donors to erect a “Negro Building” for the Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition of 1907, which marked the 300th anniversary of America’s first permanent English settlement. The Negro Building showcased sculpture and handicrafts by Black artisans, books by Black authors, recitals by Black musicians, a hospital exhibit featuring Black physicians and nurses, and an operating branch of the Black-owned True Reformers Bank. Notably, the pavilion included a 1,200-square-foot Inventions Section that displayed 50 prototypes and 351 US patent specifications contributed by African American inventors. With D. Webster Davis, Jackson described these accomplishments in a combination treatise and exposition catalog, The Industrial History of the Negro Race of the United States (Jackson and Davis 1908). Black Americans continued to host additional expositions highlighting the work of Black artisans and inventors, including the 1908 Negro National Fair in Mobile, Alabama, and the fiftieth anniversary “Emancipation Expositions” in Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC, held between 1913 and 1915 (Winton 1947; Wilson 2012). The extant catalogs, ephemera, and contemporary news coverage of these expositions provided further evidence of Black ingenuity at the turn of the twentieth century.
In general, the fiftieth anniversary of emancipation spurred Black Americans to enthusiastically explore their history and culture. In September 1915, Harvard-trained historian Carter G. Woodson and several colleagues founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH, now called the Association for the Study of African American Life and History). Through the ASNLH, Woodson established the Journal of Negro History (1917) and the Negro History Bulletin (1937). In the second week of February 1926, Woodson and his colleagues established the first Negro History Week to coincide with the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Fifty years after that first weeklong celebration, President Gerald Ford recognized February as Black History Month in 1976 (Goggin 1997; Dagbovie 2007). Thanks to ASNLH, the annual celebrations of Black history inspired new research initiatives, publications, and educational content about Black inventors and innovators (Picott 1977; Yancy 1979).
As Black history grew steadily into a robust academic subdiscipline in the early twentieth century, Black inventors struggled to overcome the persistent disenfranchisement, segregation, discrimination, and racial violence of the Jim Crow era. Black students were systematically prevented from entering mainstream White institutions, so community leaders established their own historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), such as Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute and Virginia’s Hampton University (Anderson 1988; Margo 1990; Wharton 1992). Soon George Washington Carver, an agricultural scientist and inventor based at the Tuskegee Institute, joined Benjamin Banneker as an inspiration for new Black inventor biographies (Zuber 1929; Hunter 1942; Allen and Murray 1921).
Beyond the academy, Black people were also excluded from membership in professional engineering societies and technical associations such as the Franklin Institute (Slaton 2010; Lerman 2006). With limited access to wealthy backers and mainstream banks, Black inventors were forced to develop alternative networks to access the start-up capital and expertise necessary to commercialize their inventions (Cook 2011). Even worse, the specter of lynchings and extralegal violence suppressed patenting and commercialization rates for Black inventors through at least the 1940s (Cook 2014). In response, some Black inventors— including gas mask and traffic signal inventor Garrett Morgan—purposefully obscured their racial identities and featured White actors in their advertisements to avoid prejudice in the marketplace (Cook 2012).
Black inventors persisted despite these difficulties and inspired a burst of publishing activity by scholars beginning in the 1960s. Several factors propelled this new wave of scholarship. First, renewed enthusiasm for all kinds of Black history followed the reinvigorated civil rights movement of the 1960s, an energy that reverberated through the academy. Inspired by the Black Power movement, Black college students organized hundreds of protests to demand a more diverse system of higher education that was relevant to their community. In 1968, San Francisco State University introduced the first of dozens of new Black and African American Studies departments (Rojas 2007; Kendi 2012). Collectively, these departments trained hundreds of new scholars and encouraged new research on Black history. During the same period, preK–12 educators recognized the importance of providing diverse racial and gender representation in reading materials and educational programming. This impetus inspired, for example, the pathbreaking Sesame Street beginning in 1969 (Morrow 2006; Davis 2008). Inspired by these twin movements, historians and educators wrote masters’ and doctoral theses, government reports, and curricula demanding more books featuring Black characters, including scientists and inventors (Haber ca. 1960s; Pryor 1970; Lyles 1976; Scott 1977; Walcott 1980; Hambrick 1993).
Amid these calls for change, authors of juvenile literature developed dozens of new children’s books featuring Black inventors. Juvenile literature has often been in the vanguard of Black inventor biographies. Children’s books tend to be short, so even with limited or fragmentary primary sources, authors could assemble a concise book that covered its subject with adequate detail for young audiences. Indeed, children’s book authors are often the first biographers for many Black inventors. They identify the most important evidence and establish the basic facts of inventors’ lives, creating a foundation for subsequent scholarly research.
Beginning in the 1970s, authors of juvenile literature published several biographical collections that profiled multiple Black scientists and inventors under one cover (Haber 1970b; Klein 1971; Hayden 1972; Jenkins 1975; Williams 1978; Brodie 1993; Gibbs 1995; Aaseng 1997; Sullivan 1998; Webster 1999; Hudson 2003; Abdul-Jabbar and Obstfeld 2012; McLaurin 2016). These collections, and several individual biographies, greatly expanded the domain of Black inventor subjects beyond Benjamin Banneker and George Washington Carver. Individual children’s biographies have profiled, for example, Garrett Morgan (Jackson 1993), Elijah McCoy (Towle 1993), Madam C. J. Walker (Simons 2018; Lee 2019), Lewis Latimer (Turner 1991; Dickmann 2020), Frederick McKinley Jones (Ott and Swanson 1977), William Kamkwamba (Kamkwamba and Mealer 2012), Lonnie Johnson (Barton 2016), Sarah Goode (Kirkfield 2019), and Patricia Bath (Lord 2020).
Alongside these literary developments, various federal agencies commissioned new publications to document the history and resilience of Black inventors. For example, during the Great Depression, the Writer’s Program of the Works Progress Administration published a series of pieces on Negro Inventors, Architects, and Engineers (Writer’s Program 1936–1938). In the 1960s, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare commissioned Louis Haber to develop a report considering “The role of the American Negro in the fields of science” (Haber ca. 1960s). From these findings, Haber eventually published a biography of Benjamin Banneker and a collection titled Black Pioneers of Science and Invention (Haber 1970a; Haber 1970b). In the 1970s, the Department of Energy compiled a report documenting Black Contributors to Science and Energy Technology (Dept. of Energy 1979). In 1986, several offices of the Department of Commerce, including the US Patent and Trademark Office, the Economic Development Administration, and the Minority Business Development Agency, produced an educational film and associated study guides titled From Dreams to Reality: A Tribute to Minority Inventors (US Patent and Trademark Office 1986).
The Smithsonian Institution likewise encouraged a resurgence of new scholarship on Black inventors. In 1989, curator Portia James developed an exhibition titled The Real McCoy: African American Invention and Innovation, 1619–1930. The exhibition opened at the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum, which had been established in 1967 to bring the Smithsonian directly to the predominantly Black residents of southeast Washington, DC. The exhibition and companion book interpreted three centuries of Black ingenuity and uncovered many previously unknown stories (James 1990). In 1996, the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation hosted a workshop on “Technology and the African American Experience” at the National Museum of American History. The symposium featured papers by several historians of technology and generated both an edited volume and a critical edition of relevant primary sources (Sinclair 2004; Pursell 2005). The symposium also jumpstarted an ongoing collecting initiative to archive the records of Black inventors such as ophthalmologist Patricia Bath (Oswald 2000).
Black people have persistently faced racist assumptions about their supposed intellectual inferiority and technical incompetence, what Bruce Sinclair has called the “deeply ingrained and long perpetuated myth of black disingenuity.”
The early 2000s witnessed a flourishing of new and rigorous historical scholarship on Black inventors and entrepreneurs. For example, Rayvon Fouché published Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation, a deeply researched history drawn from archival sources that focused on the experiences of Granville T. Woods, Shelby Davidson, and Lewis Latimer (Fouché 2003). In 2004, Patricia Carter Sluby published The Inventive Spirit of African Americans: Patented Ingenuity, a synthetic history of Black inventors that was broader in chronological scope than James’s Real McCoy and brought the story forward into the new millennium (Sluby 2004). Sluby—a chemist, former USPTO patent examiner, and registered patent agent turned author—inherited and extended the legacy of Henry E. Baker. Her book’s appendix featured a comprehensive list of approximately 2,000 US patents earned by African American inventors between 1821 and 2003. In The Entrepreneurial Spirit of African American Inventors, Sluby further examined how Black inventor-entrepreneurs commercialized their inventions in the context of the racist obstacles they faced (Sluby 2011). Collectively, the books by James, Fouché, Sinclair, Pursell, and Sluby developed a strong methodological foundation and uncovered several new stories to inspire future historical work on Black inventors.
As in the juvenile literature, scholars have continued to produce individual biographies to complement their synthetic, multi-inventor collections. In many cases, these scholarly biographies provide the critical, contextual, and nuanced accounts of inventors that were condensed and oversimplified in the heroic accounts of children’s books. For example, Smithsonian curator Silvio Bedini published a definitive scholarly biography of Benjamin Banneker (Bedini 1972). A’Lelia Bundles published a biography of Madam C. J. Walker, who became a self-made millionaire at the turn of the twentieth century by marketing beauty products to Black women (Bundles 2001). In 2020, Netflix developed Bundles’s biography into a mini-series (Self Made) starring Academy Award winner Octavia Spencer. Since 2015, historians have also produced scholarly biographies of inventors George Washington Carver, Jan Matzeliger, and Lucean Arthur Headen (Vella 2015; Plet 2015; Snider 2020).
In the new millennium, scholars introduced several thematic studies that explored various aspects of Black technoscience and the diverse ways that Black Americans have experienced technology. For example, scholars have documented how Black people have historically been the objects of technologies—like Atlantic slave ships, shackles, and predictive policing algorithms—that were deliberately built to surveil, incarcerate, and account for them (Walton 1999; Browne 2015; Eubanks 2017; Rosenthal 2018; Benjamin 2019a). Moreover, digital media scholars have found that ostensibly neutral apps, algorithms, and search engines are hard coded with racist assumptions that perpetuate negative stereotypes and deepen social inequality (Noble 2018; Benjamin 2019b).
But Black people are not just passive victims of oppressive machines; rather, they are influential agents who have invented and reconstructed various technologies to express themselves and serve the needs of their communities. For example, scholars have documented how Black innovators such as Grandmaster Flash reimagined turntables and mixers as musical instruments and developed new techniques such as scratching that defined rap and hip- hop music (Rose 1989; Rose 1994; Goldberg 2004; Fouché 2006). Likewise, Black engineers, entrepreneurs, and users shaped the nascent internet, including early online communities such as Usenet and BlackPlanet.com (Burkhalter 1999; Byrne 2007; McIlwain 2020). Along these lines, scholars developed numerous critical studies in the early 2000s that considered the “digital divide” and constructions of Black racial identity on the internet, in video games, and across various social media platforms (Kolko, Nakamura, and Rosman 2000; Nakamura 2002; Banks 2005; Nakamura 2007; Nakamura and Chow-White 2012). Indeed, Black expressions of frustration, joy, community, and playful mischief have defined the norms of twenty-first- century cyberculture for all users—not just Black ones—on digital platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube (Brock 2012; Brock 2020).
Scholars have also documented how Black activists have deployed various media technologies to promote the social, economic, and political interests of their communities. For example, beginning in the 1920s, community leaders leveraged Black-owned radio stations to mobilize listeners to participate in the civil rights movement (Ward 2004). More recently, Black users have deployed mobile phone cameras and social media platforms to document police brutality and protest various forms of injustice. Black advocates have also used social media to fight for voting rights, education, economic empowerment, and better health outcomes (Freelon, McIlwain, and Clark 2016; Tufekci 2017; Florini 2019; Jackson, Bailey, and Welles 2020).
Beyond specific studies of invention, innovation, and technology, scholars have used race and Blackness as critical analytical tools to study a broad range of technoscientific topics (Nelson, Tu, and Hines, 2001; Wright 2015; Jackson 2020). For example, scholars have demonstrated how traditional African knowledge and indigenous practices inform several technoscientific disciplines, from botany to mathematics and computer science (Kimmerer 2013; Eglash 1999). Scholars have also reclaimed Black people’s rightful place in studies of nature, the environment, and the great outdoors (Glave 2010; Finney 2014). Recent studies have also demonstrated how ideas about race and Blackness have literally been built into skyscrapers and other architectural structures (Brown 2017; Cheng, Davis, and Wilson 2020).
When viewed in its entirety, three distinct strains of literature emerge from 175 years of scholarship regarding Black inventors and innovators. First, scholars have assembled lists of Black patentees, individual biographies, and biographical collections to recover the stories of Black innovators. Lists of Black inventors document the enormous achievements of Black inventors and provide definitive evidence of Black ingenuity (Baker 1900; Baker 1902; Baker 1913; Sluby 2004). Narrative biographies vary in their sophistication, from short, highly illustrated books aimed at children to detailed, critical biographies geared toward academics. For young Black readers in particular, these stories provide inspirational examples of inventors who share their same racial identity. Moreover, critical biographies provide unvarnished evidence of the many challenges that Black inventors have faced and overcome. As Rayvon Fouché noted during the webinar series, his biographical subjects—Granville T. Woods, Lewis H. Latimer, and Shelby J. Davidson—encountered different varieties of racism (ranging from fistfights to workplace discrimination) that were specific to each man’s social and professional context (Fouché 2003). As a genre, this biographical work will continue in perpetuity with the emergence of each new generation of Black inventors. The success of those efforts will depend on the continuing work of museums and archives to seek out and preserve Black inventors’ artifacts, records, and oral histories.
Black people are not just passive victims of oppressive machines; rather, they are influential agents who have invented and reconstructed various technologies to express themselves and serve the needs of their communities.
A second strain of literature has marshaled demographic data and other empirical indicators to make aggregate, statistical studies of Black inventors and their opportunities within the innovation ecosystem. Scholars have counted and analyzed the number of patents issued to HBCUs; the number of advanced STEM degrees granted to Black students; the number of federal research grants awarded to Black scientists; the amount of venture capital funding invested in Black entrepreneurs; and the number of Black technical workers employed at high-tech firms (ThePLUG 2019; Cook 2019; Ginther et al. 2011; National Venture Capital Association 2019; Nager et al. 2016). Additional studies have assessed the degree to which lynchings and extralegal violence suppressed the output of Black inventors and conversely, the estimated annual economic growth that is unrealized because Black inventors have not been fully utilized (Cook 2014; Cook and Gerson 2019). Empirical studies of IP attorneys, patent examiners, and venture capitalists have likewise highlighted the lack of Black representation across the innovation ecosystem (Lopez 2020; National Venture Capital Association 2019). Collectively, these studies document the scope of Black inventors’ participation—and underrepresentation—in the economy. They also provide measures of accountability and progress as reformers strive to make the innovation ecosystem more equitable.
A third genre includes thematic studies that analyze Black Americans’ complex relationship with technology. These studies have emerged from numerous disciplines, including history, sociology, African American studies, science and technology studies, media and communications, architecture, and political science. Collectively, these thematic studies decenter traditional White narratives and instead adopt the Black epistemological perspective. While acknowledging the digital divide and other barriers to technological access, this genre celebrates Black technological enthusiasm, agency, and the many creative ways that Black users reshape existing technologies to express themselves and serve their communities (Banks 2005; Fouché 2006; Fouché 2011; Brock 2020). These studies also document how Black people have experienced various technologies—from the cotton gin to internet search engines—as the material expression of discrimination, oppression, incarceration, and violence (Walton 1999; Noble 2018; Benjamin 2019a; Benjamin 2019b). Finally, this genre describes how Black Americans have deployed digital technologies to advocate for social justice and economic empowerment (Ward 2004; Freelon, McIlwain, and Clark 2016; Tufekci 2017; Florini 2019; Jackson, Bailey, and Welles 2020).
Even considering the expansive literature on Black inventors and innovators, there are still many underexplored areas for future study. For example, the vast majority of inventor biographies document Black men; future scholars may wish to explore the stories of Black women inventors, entrepreneurs, and investors such as Patricia Bath, Marian Rogers Croak, Jessica O. Matthews, LaTanya Sweeney, Aicha Evans, Ruthie Lyle Cannon, Angela Benton, Candace Matthews Brackeen, and Arlan Hamilton. Future scholars may also wish to explore how other aspects of identity—including gender, LGBTQ+ status, national origin, and disability—intersect with Black racial identity to influence the experiences of Black innovators (Bell 2012; Weheliye 2014; Pickens 2019).
As researchers seek out new stories of Black technologists, they should remember that the legacy of enslavement, Jim Crow, and the Great Migration profoundly influenced where Black people lived and settled. Beyond the southern United States, twentieth-century Black innovators most likely lived in northern or western industrial cities such as New York, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Oakland, and Seattle (McKittrick 2006; Wilkerson 2010). Locales that offered federally-funded technical employment—such as Washington, DC, military bases, and NASA installations—should also present rich opportunities to uncover the stories of Black innovators (Yellin 2009; Odom and Waring 2019). Researchers should also find Black inventors by engaging with the faculty and alumni of HBCUs, Black sororities and fraternities, Black churches, and Black social clubs such as The Northeasterners, The Links, and the Jack and Jill clubs (Lovett 2011; Brown, Parks, and Phillips 2005).
Although not comprehensive, this essay and the accompanying bibliography present a brief history and review of the literature concerning Black inventors and innovators. During our webinar series, historians, inventors, economists, educators, and media scholars generously shared their new perspectives and the latest scholarship. The session descriptions summarize their insights on this important topic while providing a roadmap for future study.
See the bibliography for sources cited above.
Circular image above: Inventor, entrepreneur, activist, and philanthropist Madam C. J. Walker was a pioneer of the modern Black hair care and cosmetics industry.