Rhiannon Giddens Instagram – Hey everyone! In honor of the upcoming @biscuitsandbanjosfest, we are going to focus on the food and music contributions of many wonderful folks – starting with the second Black man to be given a US Patent on an invention, Henry Blair. His life really exemplifies the multiple layers and complicated makeup of historical American life – he was not enslaved, living in antebellum Maryland. There was a small group of either freedmen or people descended from folks who were never enslaved (a tiny percentage of Black folks were actually indentured – never forget that chattel, race-based slavery was a choice that the folks setting up their nation on Turtle Island actively chose, with the backdrop of the common indenture system, which wasn’t great but only lasted 7 years instead of life and generations).
“In claiming credit for his two inventions, Henry Blair became only the second African American to hold a United States patent. While Blair appears to have been a free man, the granting of his patents is not evidence of his legal status. At the time Blair’s patents were granted, United States law allowed patents to be granted to both free and enslaved men. In 1857, an enslaver challenged the courts for the right to claim credit for an enslaved person’s inventions. Since an enslaver’s enslaved people were his property, the plaintiff argued, anything in the possession of these enslaved people was the owner’s property as well.
The following year, patent law changed so as to exclude the enslaved from patent eligibility. In 1871, after the Civil War, the law was revised to grant all American men, regardless of race, the right to patent their inventions. Women were not included in this intellectual-property protection. Blair followed only Thomas Jennings as an African American patent holder. Extant records indicate that Jennings received a patent in 1821 for the “dry scouring of clothes.” Though the patent record contains no mention of Jennings’s race, his background has been substantiated through other sources.” — Biography.com
Go to the link in bio for more details. | Posted on 05/Feb/2025 02:10:12
