Please join us for a special program honoring unsung Black inventors, who persisted against tremendous odds and adversity to create inventions that changed lives for the better.

We are pleased to welcome James Howard, the Executive Director of The Black Inventors Hall of Fame.  Currently a virtual gallery, the BIHOF is working towards establishing the first museum entirely dedicated to honoring the groundbreaking ingenuity of African American inventors over the past 400 years.

From enslaved men and women inventors who were unable to patent their ideas due to not being recognized as citizens, to contemporary innovators in many fields, this talk will fill a crucial gap in our knowledge of how Black inventors have shaped our world.

Some of the men and women in the Hall of Fame include:

It is time that exceptional inventors are immortalized by being inducted into the Black Inventor’s Hall of Fame.

Registration is requested, and will allow us to send you a reminder before the program.

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James Howard is a lecturer, design historian, and industrial designer/inventor of some 300 products with 20 patents. He owns and operates Entrepreneurial U, a specialty private career school of Design Thinking.  He is also the recent recipient of the TAGIE award for his documentary film, The Gathering: Black Inventors Got Game, and the co-producer of the groundbreaking film, The Great Equalizer, examining fairness in the patent system. James was recently awarded Honorary member of the National Academy of Inventors, and has been a pivotal figure in promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the innovation ecosystem.  He is also a recent recipient of the United Inventor Associations’s Inspire Top 100 award.  For the past two years, James has served as a keynote speaker for various United States Patent and Trademark Office Black History Month symposiums.

“The 2025 Black History Month theme, African Americans, and Labor, focuses on the various and profound ways that work and working of all kinds – free and unfree, skilled, and unskilled, vocational and voluntary – intersect with the collective experiences of Black people.  Be it the traditional agricultural labor of enslaved Africans that fed Low Country colonies, debates among Black educators on the importance of vocational training, self-help strategies and entrepreneurship in Black communities, or organized labor’s role in fighting both economic and social injustice, Black people’s work has been transformational.”

–Association for the Study of African American Life and History