The VA Rejection: Understanding The Context
The Veterans Administration’s rejection of Bessie Blount’s feeding device is a fact that appears in every account of her life, usually as a simple statement of injustice without much analysis of what the rejection meant or why it might have occurred.
Understanding the rejection requires understanding the context of the VA in the postwar period and the context of who Bessie Blount was in that same period.
The Veterans Administration was a large, established bureaucratic institution tasked with an enormous problem: the medical and social rehabilitation of millions of veterans returning from the most destructive war in human history. The scale of the demand was unprecedented. The scale of the administrative challenge was unprecedented. And the organization was, like most institutions of its era, shaped by the racial and gender hierarchies of mid-twentieth-century America.
Bessie Blount was a Black woman. She was asking a predominantly white, predominantly male bureaucracy to adopt a device created in her kitchen rather than in a certified engineering or medical laboratory. She had a nursing background and physical therapy training, but she was not a doctor, not an engineer, not a veteran.
Multiple sources suggest that the VA was not simply uninterested in the feeding device — it was uninterested in the person offering it. “The Veterans Administration wanted nothing to do with Blount’s invention” is how one source puts it. Another notes that the VA “showed no interest” and that the same fate befell a second invention she brought to them: the VA “declined both of her inventions along with the U.S. [government’s interest].”
The “U.S.” dismissal here refers to the broader government bureaucracy, not just the VA specifically.
Blount offered the device to the VA for $100,000. They declined.
This refusal represents a specific failure by the institution that was supposed to serve disabled veterans. Blount’s device addressed a real, documented need — the inability of amputee veterans to feed themselves independently. The doctor who had challenged her to solve the problem had told her that the army had been unable to produce a viable solution. She had produced one. And the VA, the institution responsible for those veterans’ welfare, declined to use it.
The reasons for the rejection are not fully documented. They may have included bureaucratic inertia, budget concerns, skepticism about a device developed outside institutional channels, or the specific resistance that a Black woman inventor in 1951 would have encountered in a white male-dominated institution. The most likely answer involves all of these factors operating simultaneously.
What Blount did next is the most remarkable part of this particular chapter.