Bessie Blount was born on 24 November 1914 in Hickory, Virginia, and attended a one-room segregated school where she was punished for writing with her left hand. Rather than comply, she taught herself to write with her right hand, her mouth, and her feet as well — an early sign of the adaptability that would define her career. Forced to leave formal schooling after the sixth grade, she nonetheless trained as a nurse and went on to study physical therapy at the Panzer College of Physical Education and Hygiene in New Jersey, motivated in part by her father's death from injuries sustained in the First World War.
During and after the Second World War, Blount worked as a physical therapist with wounded veterans, many of them amputees relearning basic daily tasks. Frustrated by the lack of tools that let them eat independently, she spent years and much of her own savings developing an electrically powered feeding device that delivered food to a patient one bite at a time, at the press of a tube held in the mouth. She patented a related device, a portable receptacle support using a neck brace to hold a bowl or cup, in 1951. When the US Veterans Administration declined to adopt her invention, Blount donated the technology to the French government free of charge, and later worked with Theodore Edison, son of Thomas Edison, on further medical devices.
In the 1960s Blount began a second career in forensic science, training initially with police departments in Vineland, New Jersey, and Norfolk, Virginia, and specialising in graphology — the analysis of handwriting to authenticate documents. She rose to become chief document examiner for the Portsmouth, Virginia police department, and in 1977 became the first African American woman admitted to train at the Document Division of London's Metropolitan Police Forensic Science Laboratory, known as Scotland Yard — reportedly after the FBI had turned down her application. She went on to examine documents relating to slavery, the American Civil War, and Native American treaties, verifying their authenticity for law enforcement agencies and researchers.
Blount continued consulting in forensic document analysis into her eighties, and remained an outspoken advocate for the recognition of Black inventors and scientists throughout her life. She died in Newfield, New Jersey, on 30 December 2009, at the age of 95.