Why Teach About Black Inventors? A Review of Rayvon Fouché’s “Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation”
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In recent semesters I have used the picture book Blackout by John Rocco to encourage technoskeptical thinking about the role of electric lights with teacher candidates. This led to me to seek to learn more about the invention of electric lights, and before long, I came across someone who I hadn’t heard of before: Lewis Latimer, a Black patent draftsman and inventor in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. I will share that inquiry lesson in a future blog post. But here I’d like to share my review of Rayvon Fouché’s 2005 book, Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation: Granville T. Woods, Lewis H. Latimer, and Shelby J. Davidson. My review was published in the Journal of Social Studies Research. You can read the full review by clicking the button below, but I’ll include a blurb:
In the final chapter of his 2003 book, Rayvon Fouché tells the story of a Black teacher at a primarily white elementary school who asked him to speak to her class about Black inventors. In doing so, Fouché wrestled with a question that I asked myself as I read his book, why teach about Black inventors? He suspected the teacher wanted him to show students the contributions Black inventors made to society, and this was confirmed when he saw her “African American invention display” case that named Black inventors, their inventions, and their patent numbers (p. 179). This was not the talk Fouché planned to give.
It is the 20th anniversary of Fouché’s Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation: Granville T. Woods, Lewis H. Latimer, and Shelby J. Davidson, but the book remains relevant to the social studies field. Dr. Fouché contended that Black inventors are often “elevated to race champions” alongside “leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Rose Parks,” particularly during Black History Month (p. 182). Originally, these Black inventor lists served the practical purpose of combating an outwardly anti-Black racism that purported that Black Americans lacked inventive and technical expertise and creativity. Black invetor counterstories thus placed Black inventors within a larger story of technological progress that created the modern technological world. The stories often were provided as evidence of the American dream. However, this narrative is grounded in racist assumptions and it can also be historically inaccurate.
Fouché offered detailed chapters featuring three inventors who lived at the turn of the 20th century. These stories are far more complex than those often included in school materials. Granville T. Woods was a mechanical and electrical engineer from Australia and then Ohio who is most well known for inventing an induction telegraph that used telegraph lines to send messages between train stations and moving train cars. Lewis H. Latimer was a patent draftsman from Massachusetts who helped Alexander Graham Bell secure the patent for the telephone, and an inventor who patented improvements to the incandescent lightbulb. Shelby J. Davidson was an inventor from Kentucky who made improvements to adding machines to improve the U.S. Treasury Department’s calculating processes and increase productivity. Teaching through the stories of these three Black inventors can help disrupt the Black inventor myth.
Fouché, R. (2005). Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation:
Granville T. Woods, Lewis H. Latimer, and Shelby J. Davidson.
Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. 225 pp., $30.00
paperback, ISBN-13 9780801882708.
Review by Dan Krutka
I then provide brief summaries of each of the four tenets of Fouché’s Black inventor myth:
Black Inventors Had Financial Success Because They Secured Patents
Black Inventors Invented to Contribute to Racial Uplift
Black Inventors Were the Only Ones Who Could Have Invented Their Object, Device, or Process
Black Inventors All Experienced and Reacted to Racism Similarly
I then make connections to scholarship in the field of social studies education. I discuss how Fouché’s rejection of heroic myths is similar to the rejection of heroification (Loewen, 1995) and villainification (van Kessel & Crowley, 2017). In short, this means that educators should avoid simplifying inventors like Latimer as a perfect hero because it’s hard for students to identify with such characters. What Latimer accomplished in his life is impressive, but even President Biden once claimed that Latimer, not Edison, invented the light bulb. I’ve had students tell me Edison stole the light bulb idea—making him an easy villain.
However, the story is more complex. Many people contributed to the invention of the light bulb, including Edison and Latimer. Just as importantly, both of them also contributed to building out the electric light infrastructure. Edison did many villanous deeds, both as a ruthless capitalist and because he literally electrocuted animals because he couldn’t accept that he was on the wrong side of the current wars.
While Latimer’s accomplishments and life were impressive, Fouché details his 1904 letters to Booker T. Washington that portray a more conservative, assimilationist racial politics. In short, he contended that Black people must pull themselves up from their bootstraps. He lets anti-Black systems and white supremacist ideologies off the hook. However, I caution students from judging Latimer (and most historical figures), but seeking to understand. Latimer was able to gain arguably the most success within the inventor communities that were almost exclusively white men. In the end, Latimer had gainful employment working for Edison as part of the legal team who defended his patents in court. Latimer took pride in being a member of the Edison Pioneers, a social club for those who worked with Edison before 1886. In discussing Latimer’s racial politics, I make connections to the Black historical consciousness framework of Dr. LaGarrett King (2020), particularly around Black historical contention (also see Brittany Jones, 2024) and the diversity of ideas within Black communities.
The story is complex and it matters for the present. When I think of how Latimer navigated the white ideologies and structures of electric light industry, I can’t help but think of how Timnit Gebru was fired from Google for emphasizing justice over profits (Hao, 2020). If Latimer had been more vocal for Black lives, would he have been fired like Gebru? The answer is almost assuredly yes.
Finally, Fouché also touches on some technoskeptical and critical ideas reminiscent of Ruha Benjamin, Meredith Broussard, Safiya Noble and other Black women with the following quote from page 2 of the book:
Many historians have ignored technology as an institutionalized force that marginalizes black people within American society and culture. Many scholars have overlooked technology because of the perception that it is just “stuff” and therefore value-neutral, non-gendered, and nonracist. This perception allows the unproblematic acceptance of technology as a simple black box, which, in turn, supports the assumption that technology can be fully understood by its most simple materials form and function.
Fouché’s 20 year old book about Black inventors taught me a lot about the past, but it was easy to draw connections to the present and future. There’s a lot more in the book, and Fouché doesn’t hestitate to get into the weeds of issues like patenting process. I highly recommend the book.
If you’re not going to read the full review, then I want to return to Fouché’s opening story, which is how I ended the review:
When Fouché visited the elementary school he did not disrupt the Black inventor myth as he had planned. When he looked out at a gym full of primarily white children and teachers (yes, his class visit unexpectedly turned into an all-school assembly), he “felt uneasy about exposing some of the contradictions in the lives of black inventors unless there was someone to besides the lone black teacher to do the clean-up” (p. 181). He was concerned that Black historical figures were likely taught about so little that it “seemed disrespectful to perform criticism during the one month of the year when black cultural heroes and icons are publicly celebrated,” and he did not want his criticism to be “misinterpreted as a devaluation of their inventive work” (p. 181).
As I read Fouché’s book I felt uneasy as a white educator who would trouble the lives of Black inventors. I worried that students may know little about Black histories and Black inventors. What if my critiques grafted to white supremacist narratives about Black inferiority in the minds of students? The answer, of course, is that I must teach Black histories across the curriculum and year, not limit it to February. We must, as James (2023) implored, teach “Black history any day, every day, and all year long.” When social studies educators teach through, not about, the complex lives of Black inventors, students start to understand them as people, not patents (King, 2020).
References
Fouché, R. (2005). Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation: Granville T. Woods, Lewis H. Latimer, and Shelby J. Davidson. John Hopkins University Press.
Hao, K. (2020, December 4). We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s what it says. MIT Technology Review.
James, D. (2023). Beyond February: Teaching Black history any day, every day, and all year long. Routledge.
Jones, B. (2024, January 30). You should be teaching Black Historical Contention. EdWeek.
King, L. J. (2020). Black history is not American history: Toward a framework of Black historical consciousness. Social Education, 84(6), 335-341.