Jennings’s case was exceptional rather than representative.

Most Black Americans in the early republic were enslaved, and their inventive work — whatever form it took — was not compensated or recognized.

The history of enslaved invention in America is a history largely without documentation, because the people doing the inventing had no legal identity that would allow their achievements to be recorded in their own names.

After emancipation, the formal barriers to Black patent-holding dropped, but the informal barriers remained and in some cases intensified.

The Jim Crow era, which consolidated after the failure of Reconstruction, created a set of legal and social barriers that affected Black Americans in virtually every domain of public life.