AALDS needs to read what was quoted from "Lurker" above. As for blacks and invention-funding, some got it and some didn't, some inventions were trivial, some were great, some caught on, some didn't, and many were stolen by richer or less-honest people.

And the race of any of the people in those categories was not the issue. Did blacks get robbed of their ideas? Yes. Did ALL blacks get robbed of their ideas? Hell, no.

And AALDS has Fleming's "awesome awesome concept [ ] in competitions (sic) with his native invention of the Banjo." I'm assuming that AALDS means the banjo was an invention of Fleming's race, not he himself, for if the latter were true, Fleming would have been something like 250 years old, given the earliest mention of banjos (banshaw/bango/etc.) among Africans in the New World.

And, given the description of Fleming's invention, I doubt it was even an "awesome concept." The latter half of the 19th century was a time of great commercial innovation, and instruments combining concepts such as guitar fingering plus banjo heads (or banjo-anythings, really -- mandolin, ukes [later], guitar, or [who knows?] violini) were rife. Heck, if Fleming had met the Marx Brothers (no, the makers of the ukelin, Hawaiian Tremeloa, Marxophone, etc., not the comedy act), he might even have gotten financing.

Was the late 19th Century hard on blacks? Yes, for sure. The end of Reconstruction brought on the Ku Klux Klan, Jim-Crow laws, "Coon" songs, and black flight to Northern cities were all part of that period. But to assume that all black inventors had no chance is to ignore evidence to the contrary, as well as to ignore the fact that Fleming's "improvements" to the guitar were not so very "improving."

It is not necessary to find a conspiracy when simple facts of commercial life will suffice to explain Mr. Fleming's commercial failure.

And trust-funds for inventors weren't even there for white inventors. That development in commercial product financing didn't come till probably the 1960s (if then).

I don't know why I got carried away, but I did. So sue me.

Bob