ly 500 pages containing
a list of nearly 400 patents representing the inventions of colored
people.

Only a few years later a leading newspaper in the city of Richmond, Va.,
made the bold statement that of the many thousands of patents annually
granted by our government to the inventors of our country, "not a single
patent had ever been granted to a colored man." Of course this statement
was untrue, but what of that? It told its tale, and made its
impression--far and wide; and it is incumbent upon our race now to
outrun that story, to correct that impression, and to let the world know
the truth.

In a recent correspondence that has reached nearly two-thirds of the
more than 12,000 registered patent attorneys in this country, who are
licensed to prosecute applications for patents before the Patent Office
at Washington, it is astonishing to have nearly 2,500 of them reply that
they never heard of a colored inventor, and not a few of them add that
they never expect to hear of one. One practising attorney, writing from
a small town in Tennessee, said that he not only has never heard of a
colored man inventing anything, but that he and the other lawyers to
whom he passed the inquiry in that locality were "inclined to regard the
whole subject as a joke." And this, remember, comes from practising
lawyers, presumably men of affairs, and of judgment, and who keep
somewhat ahead of the average citizen in their close observation of the
trend of things.

Now there ought not to be anything strange or unbelievable in the fact
that in any given group of more than 10,000,000 human beings, of
whatever race, living in our age, in our country, and developing under
our laws, one can find multiplied examples of every mental bent, of
every stage of mental development, and of every evidence of mental
perception that could be found in any other similar group of human
beings of any other race; and yet, so set has become the traditional
attitude of one class in our country toward the other class that the one
class continually holds up before its eyes an imaginary boundary line in
all things mental, beyond which it seems unwilling to admit that it is
possible for the other class to go.

Under this condition of the general class thought in our country it has
become the fixed conviction that no colored man has any well-defined
power of initiative, that the colored man has no originality of thought,
that in his mental operations he is everlasti