The Meaning Of Ninety-Five Years
Bessie Blount Griffin lived for ninety-five years. This longevity is itself a fact worth noting in the context of her story.
She was born in 1914, at the height of the Jim Crow era, in a one-room segregated schoolhouse community in Virginia. She grew up in an America that systematically denied Black citizens education, economic opportunity, professional recognition, and institutional participation.
She navigated this America for her entire adult career, building expertise in two distinct technical fields, inventing devices that ended up in hospitals in France and Belgium, training at Scotland Yard at sixty-three, and running a forensic consulting business until she was eighty-three.
She died in 2009 — two years after the first iPhone was released, six years before the Voting Rights Act was gutted by the Supreme Court, and a year after Barack Obama was elected the first Black president of the United States.
She lived through virtually the entire arc of the twentieth century’s struggle for Black American civil rights: from the Jim Crow era through the civil rights movement, through the Black Power movement, through the Reagan era, through the Clinton era, into the early twenty-first century.
Her life spanned the period from before the NAACP was a decade old to the election of a Black president. She saw more American history than most people see.
That she remained productive and innovative through much of that span — working into her eighties — is a form of testimony to the kind of person she was.