5 Black Entertainers & Inventors

I was excited to see this challenge from Sam Spinelli inviting to educate him and his kids about black people who made significant contributions to their professional fields and humanity in general. I was especially excited because Sam wanted the story to feature at least three women (out of five people).

So I'm going to start with women:

1. Bessie Blount Griffin (1914–2009)

This remarkable woman had to overcome a lot of challenges in her life, starting with education: She trained herself to become ambidextrous because the teacher at her elementary school disciplined her for using her left hand. Blount Griffin had to work on her own GED because there were no schools for African American children in Hickory, Va, where she lived at the time. She later finished the courses to become a nurse and physical therapist. While working as physical therapist, Blount Griffin invented devices to help amputees and other wounded soldiers returning from World War II so that they could eat on their own. Though her inventions would help many, she struggled to find support for her ideas and gave the patent for her "eating machine" to France for free. She had to go on a TV show to demonstrate her other inventions, such as emesis basin that was later sold to Belgium. She was also known for her work in forensic sciences and contribution to the field of forensic graphology - study of handwriting.

2. Katherine Johnson (1918–2020)

A trailblazing mathematician, Johnson performed calculations that propelled NASA’s spaceflight program. She mapped the flight of Alan Shepard, who became the first American in space in 1961. Her contributions to the exploration of space were so significant that she, together with other African American mathematicians and engineers, was celebrated in the 2016 Hollywood blockbuster Hidden Figures. Barack Obama awarded her Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.

3. Deborah Washington Brown (1952–2020)

A talented computer scientists who was the first Black woman to graduate from the Harvard doctoral program in 1981, Brown spent a lot of her career working at the AT&T Bell Lab and other companies on sound technologies. While she is most famous for developing speech recognition software programs, she was also a gifted pianist who even performed at Carnegie Hall. I feel a special connection to her because she spent a lot of her life and died in Atlanta, where she was featured on the local NPR station educating children and adults about music and piano.

There are a lot more Black women inventors, of course, but these are the ones that I knew about off the top of my head. Many more are featured on Kiddle (kiddie Wikipedia), including Marie Van Brittan Brown, a remarkable woman I just found out about without whom we probably wouldn't have developed home security systems.

As for the men, since I teach media and communications, I've always admired two mixed-race entertainers, trailblazing comedians who became accomplished as mature artists. Starting out as the Key & Peele duo, they popularized the concept of code-switching, i.e. people's ability to speak different "languages/codes" in different communities and to effortlessly switch between them when they are in those communities, usually associated with mixed-heritage and multi-lingual individuals. Their movie "Keanu" has a lot of examples of code switching, just like their signature show Key & Peele that ran on Comedy Central for 5 years from January 31, 2012 – September 9, 2015. After the show ended, they went their separate ways but remain friends.

1. Jordan Peele (1979-)

Peele has become an accomplished movie director. His first movie, Get Out (2017), was made as an indie film with a laughable by today's standards budget of one million dollars. It instantly became a cult classic. When asked why he had made that movie exploring so many issues of race and class inequality in the US, and in a horror genre, Peele said that he just wanted to make a movie that he had never seen as a mixed kid growing up. Since Get Out, he directed two more films - 2019 Us and 2022 Nope exploring the same themes and experimenting with mixing genres. He is also a producer who set up his own production company, MonkeyPaw Productions, to support emerging black artists.

2. Keegan-Michael Key (1971-)

Key has an accomplished movie career with over 50 character and main roles. He also is an amazing animation voice artists with credits for the 2019 Lion King's Kamari and Toy Story's 4 Ducky, 2023 Migration's Delroy among others. He is a recurring guest performer on the reincarnated "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" show and the former host of TV shows Brain Games and Game On! In 2022-23, he created and starred in the Schmigadoon! musical with the SNL alumna Cecily Strong on Apple TV+. He wrote a book on the history of sketch comedy. With all that, he often admits that people mostly remember him as Luther, Obama's anger translator, a character from Key & Peele (Peele played Obama) who even accompanied Obama to the White House Correspondents' Dinner in 2015:

Thank you for reading, this story was such a joy to put together.

Here's Sam's unofficial challenge so that you could participate as well: