The reason I found your post so irritating and offensive is that I had to hear almost every day in school about Jan Matzeliger and his shoemaking machine, Charles Drew and blood transfusions, Benjamin Banneker and his wooden clock and surveying Washington DC. Even you've probably heard of George Washington Carver and his uses for the peanut. If you didn't, you probably just weren't paying attention.
I guess the teacher was afraid we'd all turn into racists if we didn't know about that stuff. It's easy to attack or satirize that sort of thing, and I suppose if we really got to know that teacher we'd find her preachiness and political correctness offensive -- she wasn't one of the best or most likeable teachers I had -- but at least it made it hard to simply dismiss a whole ethnic group.
If the argument is that none of these inventors was a Bell or an Edison, well, Carver came pretty close, Drew's work with blood can't simply be dismissed as insignificant, and one Black technician worked with both Bell and Edison. But beyond all that, none of us is a Bell or an Edison, so far as I know of -- or for that matter a Carver or a Drew. Black or white, most of us are in the same boat so far as great achievements are concerned.
I had seen this list before of “inventions” by black Americans. I needed a good laugh again. The biggest hoax of all was George Washington Carver, who the liberals like to say invented peanut butter. Truth of the matter is he invented nothing.
http://whitelocust.wordpress.com/black-invention-myths/