In an attention economy that rewards spectacle, many Black inventors tackling unglamorous, structural problems such as clean water, grid reliability, accessible health care, and safer buildings, often go unrecognized, even when their work is patented, piloted, or deployed in the field.

In 1886, William Leonard Hunt, a Canadian showman better known by his stage name “The Guillermo Farini”, published a sensational travelogue claiming he had stumbled upon strange stone ruins deep in the Kalahari Desert. Newspapers of the time seized upon his story, dubbing it the “Lost City of the Kalahari.”

Despite decades of expanded historical scholarship, key facts about Black Americans’ role in U.S. history remain unknown to students. A 2021 study found that only 8% of high school seniors could name slavery as the Civil War’s central cause, and 68% had never heard of the Black Codes. These gaps underscore the ongoing erasure of Black Americans’ contributions from classroom curricula, museum exhibits, and public memory.