Innovations center stage in '1,001 Black Inventions'

The Pin Points Theatre production scheduled for Saturday at the Carnegie Library Lecture Hall culminates with what seems like a strange take on "It's a Wonderful Life."

A typical, modern American family tries to survive in a world where suddenly the kids can't get vaccinations, traffic lights have disappeared, bicycles are nowhere to be found, and no one can find a fire extinguisher.

It's a world without the inventions and innovations of African Americans.

A place with no cellular phones, typewriters or fountain pens …

Those creations are the crux of the Pin Points' play "1,001 Black Inventions." Pin Points, based in Washington, D.C., performs it and other educational plays mostly in schools.

"We just wanted to create something that bounced off the misconceptions about African Americans," says Pin Points' president, Ersky Freeman. Freeman wrote the play, which was first performed in 1986.

Freeman's company is carrying on the same battle waged more than 200 years ago by Benjamin Banneker, one of the subjects of "1,001 Black Inventions." Banneker, a mathematician and astronomer, in the 1790s published a yearly almanac that publicly challenged the beliefs of future president Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner who considered blacks intellectually inept.

Years before, Banneker had built the first clock in the United States, based on a pocket watch someone had given him.

… no spark plugs, lawn mowers or self-starting gasoline motors …

In his publication "A Study in History," the British historian Arnold Toynbee claimed the "black race" had never made a creative contribution to any civilization.

Freeman and company, obviously, beg to differ. They researched patent and genealogical records for their own publication to refute such ideas, a pamphlet that details the inventions and innovations discussed in "1,001 Black Inventions."

It sheds light on the work of people such as Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, the Hollidaysburg, Pa., native who founded Provident Hospital in Chicago. Williams is widely credited with performing the first successful open-heart surgery in 1893, suturing a knife wound in the heart of a stabbing victim.

Or Jan Ernst Matzeliger, who in Massachusetts invented a machine that could tack together the top and bottom of a shoe, allowing for the mass-production of shoes.

… no clothes dryers, hair brushes, or ironing boards …

And "1,001 Black Inventions" doesn't neglect that prolific inventor, George Washington Carver. In the early decades of the 20th century, the brilliant Tuskegee Institute professor helped implement scientific agriculture in the southern states and developed hundreds of products derived from peanuts, pecans and potatoes — soap, flour and shoe polish are among them.

Freeman's play imagines Carver on trial for witchcraft, in which his prosecutors claim no one could have created so many inventions.

"I daresay he might've been a wizard, he created so much," Freeman says.

… no rolling pins, biscuit cutters or peanut butter …

"The main point of the play is that all people have their superstars," Freeman says, "and we thank them for letting us show ours."