Entertainment lawyer Lisa E. Davis has built her career protecting and advancing the rights of musicians, writers and filmmakers. At the New York firm Frankfort Kurnitz Klein + Selz, where she is a partner, she has worked with fellow summer Oak Bluffs resident Spike Lee and many other innovative Black creators for nearly 40 years.

Ms. Davis, who was recently named one of Forbes magazine’s top women lawyers in the country and has appeared on the Hollywood Reporter’s “power lawyers” list five times since 2020, is also the author of the eye-opening new book Our Minds Were Always Free: A History of Black Brilliance — and the Fight to Retake Control.

On August 12 at Cousen Rose Gallery in Oak Bluffs, Ms. Davis will read from and discuss her book, which follows the interweaving strands of Black agency, creators’ rights and financial exploitation from slavery to the current digital era.

“It’s not just for lawyers. It’s for people who care about culture, people who care about Black history,” she told the Gazette last month, over brunch at Lucky Hank’s in Edgartown.

The story of Black intellectual property in this country, whether literature, music, film or the carbon filament for light bulbs (invented by Lewis Latimer in 1881), begins with a Constitutional contradiction: The founding fathers allowed people to be enslaved, but did not deny them the right to own what they invented.

“This meant that while slaveholders could physically torture people to pick more cotton, they could not own the poems that they wrote or patent the inventions that enslaved Africans devised,” Ms. Davis writes her introduction.

The rest of the book focuses on the entertainment world of the 20th and 21st century, told through the stories of individual creators. Composer Harry Burleigh, blues singer Bessie Smith, guitar-picking gospel star Sister Rosetta Tharp, actor-director Sidney Poitier and filmmaker Melvin Peebles are among the artists whose careers Ms. Davis traces in the book, which was published by Simon & Schuster earlier this year.

All faced racism, of course, but unscrupulous business partners could be Black as well as white, as Ms. Davis shows in her deeply-researched book.

Against this forbidding structure, Black artists’ most powerful tool was literacy — including financial literacy, which allowed composers like Mr Burleigh and Thomas Dorsey to retain the copyrights to their works and create wealth for their descendants while Ms. Smith and Ms. Tharp earned most of their money by performing and died in poverty.

Law enforcement also played an outsized role in blocking Black artists from success — or even survival, as in the chapter Jazz and the War on Drugs, which recounts the shameful story of singer Billie Holiday’s persecution by federal agents who handcuffed her to her deathbed.

Ms. Davis also uncovered the hidden history of Vee-Jay Records, the Beatles’ first American label, which was founded by a Black female disc jockey named Vivian Carter and lost the rights to the British band’s records — apparently by accident — just as Beatlemania was arriving.

“I knew nothing about that story at all when I started researching. I had never heard of Vee-Jay. I didn’t know that they were the first label to have the Four Seasons and Beatles in the U.S.,” Ms. Davis said.

Later in the book, Ms. Davis gives a clear and thorough explanation of how 21st-century digital music platforms have made consumers unwitting participants in exploiting artists on a greater scale than ever.

“We know that Spotify is radically decreasing the amount of revenue that musicians can make,” said Ms. Davis, who would like to see an alternative music streaming service that provides meaningful royalties to the recording artists.

For herself, she’s invested in a turntable and is buying vinyl records by the artists she supports because digital media can be withdrawn at any time, no matter how much a customer paid for it.

“People don’t understand that they are renting libraries. They don’t own anything, and so that means that if these oligarchs decide that a certain type of music isn’t something that they want people to have access to, they can take it off the platform,” Ms. Davis said.

“What are you sacrificing for convenience?” she asked.

Lisa Davis will speak at the Cousen Rose Gallery on Wednesday, August 12, beginning at 4 p.m. The gallery is located at 71 Circuit avenue in Oak Bluffs.