Enslaved inventors could not patent their inventions, and neither could free African Americans.

Evidence

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1 “In 1858, Attorney General Jeremiah S. Black issued an opinion on the patentability of a ‘new and useful machine invented by a slave.’ He needed only three sentences to explain that an invention by an enslaved inventor could not be patented…. This reasoning also placed free African Americans outside the bounds of patent law.” Kara Swinson, “Race and Selective Legal Memory: Reflections on Invention of a Slave,” Columbia Law Review 120, no. 4 (2020): 1077, 1078 (citations omitted). — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 672

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects to the saturated-system harm argument — the patent exclusion is a concrete mechanism denying Black Americans property in their own innovation, useful ammunition for the legal-brief framing.

Related

• Antebellum patent law denied enslaved and free Black inventors alike (similarity 0.95)