Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's book on African American contributions

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http://www.c-span.org/Events/LA-Times-Festival-of-Books/10737429992/

6pm ET - Interview and call-in with basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar about his book, What Color Is My World?: The Lost History of African-American Inventors.

The Official Website of Kareem Abdul Jabbar

What do the inventor of the potato chip, open-heart surgery and the induction telegraph have in common?

They were all African-Americans.

 

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LA Times Festival of Books | C-SPAN

6pm ET - Interview and call-in with basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar about his book, What Color Is My World?: The Lost History of African-American Inventors.

The Official Website of Kareem Abdul Jabbar

What do the inventor of the potato chip, open-heart surgery and the induction telegraph have in common?

They were all African-Americans.

Not by a stretch:

Daniel Hale Williams - Introduction: African American Doctor Daniel Hale Williams is credited with having performed open heart surgery on July 9, 1893 before such surgeries were established. In 1913, Daniel Hale Williams Williams was the only African American member of the American College of Surgeons.
Dr. Daniel Hale Williams in 1893? No!

Dr. Williams repaired a wound not in the heart muscle itself, but in the sac surrounding it, the pericardium. This operation was not the first of its type: Henry Dalton of St. Louis performed a nearly identical operation two years earlier, with the patient fully recovering. Decades before that, the Spaniard Francisco Romero carried out the first successful pericardial surgery of any type, incising the pericardium to drain fluid compressing the heart.
Surgery on the actual human heart muscle, and not just the pericardium, was first successfully accomplished by Ludwig Rehn of Germany when he repaired a wounded right ventricle in 1896. More than 50 years later came surgery on the open heart, pioneered by John Lewis, C. Walton Lillehei (often called the "father of open heart surgery") and John Gibbon (who invented the heart-lung machine).

Who performed first open heart surgery

 

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More native American than African American, probably lighter than a paper bag:

George "Speck" Crum (1822–1914), son of "a mulatto jockey and an Indian maid", according to a menu used at Moon's Lake House,[1][2] was the cook at Moon's Lake House, a resort at the south end of the lake in Saratoga Springs, New York, USA. He is widely credited as the inventor of potato chips.

George Crum - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

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One out of three:

The Induction Telegraph System
Granville T. Woods invention of the induction telegraph system allowed messages to be sent to and from moving trains, enabling train conductors and engineers to avoid collisions and report hazard on tracks ahead. This invention actually anticipated today's wireless LAN Network (Local Area Network). In this particular technology was used as a multiplex wireless cab signal system for railways.

BHRA: Granville Woods