She invented in the spaces between the regular work of earning a living.

She invented in a tradition that her father had established before her and that her sister would continue alongside her.

The tradition of American invention is more various, more distributed, and more embedded in everyday life than the canonical image suggests.

It changes the understanding of what has been lost.

Every patented invention that was not commercialized because of racial discrimination represents a product that did not reach the market, a problem that was not solved as quickly as it could have been, a woman who did not receive the financial reward that her work deserved.

Multiplied across all of the Black inventors who experienced this pattern, across all of the women inventors who experienced it, the aggregate loss — in economic terms, in human welfare terms, in the terms of justice — is enormous.