Bessie was born in Hickory, VA.
She attended Diggs Chapel Elementary School in Hickory. It was one of the institutions created after the Civil War to educate black children.
It was like every other school in America in those days. It taught conformity in all of its bland, mundane and sometimes cruel ways. To be different was to be maladapted, and everyone knows that the best way to deal with maladaptives was to beat them.
Bessie was left-handed.
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Bessie forced herself to use her right hand in school, but she was clearly the type of kid who would look you dead in the eye and think "challenge accepted".
She kept using her "wrong" hand when she wasn't in school. She trained herself to be ambidextrous.
That clearly wasn't enough.
She taught herself to write while holding the pen in her teeth.
She also taught herself to write with her feet.
Why? Who knows? Possibly she just wanted to see how many other "wrong" ways she could write.
Unfortunately for Bessie, when she got to sixth grade, Hickory ran out of money to fund her school, so they closed it.
Her family moved to New Jersey,
Bessie finished her education through homeschooling. Eventually, she earned her GED and enrolled in Community Kennedy Memorial Hospital's Nursing Program.
She attended Panzar College of Physical Education and then Union Jr. College.She trained to be a physical therapist.
She was one of the few African American physical therapists at the time. She blended interpretive dance into her work.
Then, WWII slammed the world. Soldiers with broken bodies flooded the VA system. Physical therapists were needed to help these wounded warriors find their way back to some kind of normalcy.
Bessie worked with lots of soldiers. She realized that there were some basic functions that amputees could not do alone and they were the very functions that would help them live independently or at least gain some sense of self.
So, she started employing skills that she'd gained in elementary school. She taught amputees how to write with their teeth. She taught them how to use their feet instead of their hands, and she started inventing devices to help them live better lives.
One of her devices was a self-feeding machine. It consisted of a device with the food in it and a tube that went to the mouth. An amputee only had to bite down on the tube, and the machine would dispense a bite of food.
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She patented the device, but the VA in America was not interested in using it. So, she sold it to the French. The French employed it in all of their hospitals and their colonies. She started making a name for herself in the field of physical therapy devices.
During her career, she worked as a physical therapist for Thomas Edison's son Theodore. She was a frequent guest in his home and talked over her ideas for inventions with the family.
She created an emesis basin and had the design patented. Again, the American hospitals were not interested. She sold the idea to the Belgiums. They still use this device in their hospitals to this day.
In 1969, Bessie decided on a career change. She went into law enforcement doing forensic work.
She'd spent so much time writing with every single limb of her body and retraining others on how to do it in various states of emotional distress that over the years she'd become an expert on handwriting.
Bessie was hired as a medical graphologist.
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She worked freelance for a number of years with the police departments in New Jersey and Virginia. In 1977 she was invited to train and work with Scotland Yard.
After her stint at Scotland Yard, she applied to work with the FBI. They were not interested.
So, she opened her own business where she used her extensive forensics training to authenticate pre-Civil War documents. Bessie continued to run this business until she was 83.
Respect!
Bessie Blount Griffith earned it.
Celebrate Black History!
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