But it is an accurate truth, documented in the specific history of Mary Kenner’s career: the eighteen-year wait, the rejected manufacturing deal, the decades of running a flower shop while a patent sat in a drawer.

The discomfort of the truth is not an argument against acknowledging it.

It is an argument for taking seriously the gap between the America that claims to value invention and the America that practiced the racial discrimination that prevented one of its inventors from bringing her work to market on any reasonable timeline.

Mary Kenner held five patents.

She was overlooked.

She deserves to be known.