Scotland Yard At Sixty-Three
The Metropolitan Police Forensic Science Laboratory in London — commonly known as Scotland Yard, after the location of the Metropolitan Police headquarters — is one of the most prestigious forensic science institutions in the world.
In 1977, Blount was invited to join them for advanced studies in graphology at their Document Division.
She was sixty-three years old. She was an African American woman. She was accepted.
Multiple sources confirm the specific significance of this acceptance: she was the first Black woman to be accepted into the advanced studies course at the Document Division of Scotland Yard. Some sources describe her as “the first African American woman to train at Scotland Yard” and others specify “the first American woman admitted as a student” to that division.
This invitation, and her acceptance into the program, represents a form of recognition that her work had genuinely earned. Scotland Yard did not extend this invitation to her because of her identity or as a gesture of inclusivity. They extended it because her expertise in forensic document examination had become notable enough to attract the interest of one of the world’s leading forensic institutions.
She accepted. She traveled to London at sixty-three to study at one of the world’s premier forensic science laboratories.
The ambition that had taken her from a one-room schoolhouse in Virginia to the physical therapy profession, from her kitchen to the United States Patent Office, from her kitchen to France and Belgium, had now taken her to Scotland Yard.
“She wanted to be the first at anything,” her grandson Aaron Griffin recalled years later.
This was not mere vanity. It was a specific kind of ambition — the ambition to demonstrate capability in places that had not previously seen Black women demonstrate it.