On August 28, 2020, the day 43-year-old actor Chadwick Boseman passed away from colon cancer, Jon Cropper says he had a revelation.
Cropper is the founder of Futurlogic Advanced Concepts, a multicultural marketing and trend forecasting firm. He is also on the steering committee of the Edison Awards, the annual celebration that awards innovative companies with gold, silver, and bronze prizes that honor the legacy of the inventor Thomas Edison.
“You know, we were so proud of Chadwick Boseman and so proud that his movie, ‘Black Panther’––about Afrofuturism––went on to become the biggest box office success in the world. We were so proud,” Cropper said. “And then we were dealing with George Floyd. And Donald Trump. It was on that day that I called Frank Bonafilia, who runs the Edison Awards, and said, ‘You know, there’s this guy named Lewis Latimer who was Edison’s right-hand guy, he helped him invent and refine the filament in the light bulb. Then he went on to work with Alexander Graham Bell and helped him to develop the telephone. He invented air conditioning and the water closet on trains—he was a pianist, a poet, a painter: I mean, this guy was unbelievable.’ And we decided that we wanted to do something to support future Latimers––future young, emerging talents who could go on to become…the Lewis Latimers of this era. That’s really how it all started.”
Three years ago, Cropper co-founded the Lewis Latimer Fellowship Program along with Bonafilia and entrepreneur-investor Dr. Carmichael Roberts. Each year, the fellowship selects six Black inventors and entrepreneurs, and offers them a one-year learning course that helps them delve deeper into their respective fields and shows them how they can use science, art, and culture to create new ideas.
The Latimer Fellowship Program is currently accepting nominations for its 2024 cohort of Latimer fellows. They will be chosen by a group of advisors, based on the innovative ideas they present.
The fellowship used to be an invitation-only program—this is the first year it’s being opened up to more people. Anyone conducting research or working on a new venture concept with the potential to affect society is welcome to apply for the Latimer Fellowship Program at www.latimerfellows.com/inquire, or to email info@latimerfellows.com for more information.
The construction engineering company Black & Veatch and Bill Gates’s investment firm Breakthrough Energy Ventures, are also working in association with the Latimer Fellowship to promote the work of the program’s Black innovators.
The fellowship program is modeled on the MacArthur Genius Award, as well as the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, so the six yearly Latimer Fellowship winners will have a supportive curriculum developed to help them advance their ideas. They will also be aided in creating a financial and advertising model that will help bring their ideas to market.
Fellowship awardees are mentored, taken on field trips to factories, introduced to major thought leaders in various industries, and then guided toward the successful development of their designs.
In its first three years, Latimer fellows have included people like former Miami Dolphins cornerback Byron Jones, who is developing a new system for building low-income, affordable housing; Vanderbilt University Professor Audrey Bowden, who is creating a light-based biomedical photonic tool that can be used for early cancer diagnoses; actor Shameik Moore, the voice of Miles Morales in the 2018 animated film “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” who has created an Etsy-like e-commerce platform called The People’s Pact (TPP) that features offerings from Black entrepreneurs and creatives; scientist Lisa Dyson, who founded the company Air Protein, which is developing a technology that converts elements in the air into “air meat”; and MIT professor Asegun Henry, who has invented a new battery technology that has already received major investment interest.
Latimer Fellows are encouraged to push their ideas forward and honor the achievements of past Black inventors, like Latimer himself. Several fellows came together to place a headstone at Latimer’s gravesite in Fall River, Massachusetts, this past September 23. Latimer’s headstone was custom-made by the same sculptor and artist who created the Martin Luther King Jr. statue in Atlanta.
“Now more than ever, society needs to cultivate a new army of elegant inventor-artist-statesmen and women, who work together to imagine a brighter future, just like Lewis Latimer,” according to the Latimer Fellows Selection Committee website,
“Fundamentally, this is about futurism,” Cropper added. “We’re in the middle of such radical societal change, a lot of which is obviously being driven by technology and artificial intelligence. I think that as Black people in America, we have to, as the old saying goes, ‘work twice as hard for half as much.’ We have to stay current with new technologies in the rapidly evolving nature of our culture. We’re really interested in education; we want to teach people about how to develop their ideas into something commercial.”