The Final Account
She was born on November 24, 1914, in Hickory, Virginia.
She attended a one-room segregated school where Bible verses substituted for textbooks. Her education ended after the sixth grade.
She taught herself to write with a pencil in her mouth and with her feet, after being punished for writing with her left hand.
She earned a GED, became a nurse, studied physical therapy, became a registered physical therapist.
She worked with WWII veterans who had lost arms. She taught them to write with their teeth and their feet.
A physician told her the army couldn’t solve the feeding problem for armless veterans. She spent ten months and $3,000 of her own money building a solution in her kitchen. She was thirty-seven years old.
The director emeritus of the American College of Surgeons called her device “a most ingenious apparatus.” The press called her “the wonder woman.” The Veterans Administration said no.
She flew to Paris. She gave the rights to France. France used the device in military hospitals across the country.
She invented a disposable emesis basin. The VA said no. Belgium said yes.
She said, “A colored woman is capable of inventing something for the benefit of mankind.”
In 1969, at fifty-five, she started a second career in forensic science. She rose to chief document examiner for police laboratories in Virginia.
In 1977, at sixty-three, Scotland Yard invited her to study in their Document Division. She was the first Black woman they had accepted.
She came back to New Jersey and ran a forensic consulting business for twenty years.
She stopped when she was eighty-three.
She died on December 30, 2009, in Newfield, New Jersey.
She was ninety-five.
Her grandson Aaron remembers her attitude toward rejection: “OK, I’ll show you.”
She showed them.
Her name was Bessie Blount Griffin.
And she proved her point.