Schools have been named for her and programs for young inventors have honored her memory.

But in the long middle decades of the twentieth century, while she was living and inventing and working a day job to pay the bills and filing patents for ideas that she knew were good — during all of that time, the world largely didn’t know she existed.

That is a story worth telling carefully and completely.

A Family That Invented

Mary Beatrice Davidson was born on May 17, 1912, in Monroe, North Carolina.

The family would not stay in Monroe — her father, Sidney Davidson, worked as a teacher and minister, and the family eventually settled in Washington, D.C., where Mary would spend most of her life.

But the origins in North Carolina are part of the story, a reminder that the African American experience that produced Mary Kenner was rooted in the South, in communities where educational attainment and professional achievement were hard-won and fiercely valued.

The Davidson family was a family of inventors and achievers, which is one of the most important facts in understanding how Mary Kenner came to be who she was.

Her father Sidney was himself an inventor who held a patent for a signal to help the blind navigate.

The specific invention — a device designed to assist visually impaired people in navigating intersections or other environments — speaks to the family’s characteristic approach: identifying a real problem that real people faced, and designing something practical to address it.

Mary’s grandfather, too, had inventive tendencies, though the specific documentation of his work is limited by the historical record’s frequent failures to preserve the achievements of Black Americans of earlier generations.

The family carried an inventive tradition, and Mary grew up understanding that ordinary people — not only formally educated scientists or wealthy industrialists — could solve problems through applied thought.

This is worth dwelling on.

The image of invention that dominated American culture for most of the twentieth century was a specific one: the lone genius in a well-equipped laboratory, usually white, usually male, usually connected to a university or corporation.