What do the inventor of the potato chip, open-heart surgery and the induction telegraph have in common?
They were all African-Americans. And all three (among many others) are featured in the newest book by basketball-great-turned-historian Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, “What Color Is My World?: The Lost History of African-Americans.”
Written for children of middle-school age, the book highlights little-known achievements by African-American innovators, while continuing Abdul-Jabbar’s interest in a version of U.S. history that is, as he has put it, not all “Thomas Edison and other white guys.”
Speaking of Edison: “What Color Is My World?” gives due treatment to Lewis Howard Latimer, who toiled under Alexander Graham Bell and worked on many of the innovations for incandescent lighting that Edison would later incorporate into one of the great inventions of modernity. But while Edison went on to immortality, Latimer was thanklessly relegated to oblivion.