As a teenager, he earned two or three dollars a day mowing lawns and pulling weeds in nearby Ferguson. Roy Clay’s story began in Missouri in the all-Black town of Kinloch. "He's certainly one of them." From 'no jobs for professional Negroes' to Hewlett-Packard “I think there are a lot of unspoken or not famous contributors to technology and Silicon Valley that don't get mentioned," said Chris Clay, who works in business development and product management at software company SAP. His sons hope it will bring the recognition they think their father deserves. “Unstoppable: The Unlikely Story of a Silicon Valley Godfather” fulfilled the last wish of his wife, Virginia Clay, who died of cancer in 1995. Jackson, Clay tried to answer that question by publishing a memoir, a blend of family memories and career highlights. Last year, with the help of his three sons and writer M.H. “He understood exactly what I was trying to do because it was in line with how he had lived all his life,” Cotton said.ĭuring a Q&A session following the documentary’s premiere at San Jose City College, a student asked: “Where have you people been? Why don’t we know about you?” We saved ourselves.”Ĭotton bonded with Clay over their shared desire to fill in the historical gaps. “There were no heroes who came and saved us. In 2016, technology veteran Kathy Cotton made a documentary, “A Place at the Table: The Story of the African American Pioneers of Silicon Valley.”Ĭotton, who started out in Silicon Valley in 1976 and worked as a recruiter and human resources administrator for Motorola and HP, says she was determined to chronicle for the first time the early African American contributions to the tech industry.įellow Black tech veterans invited her into their homes and offices and poured out their stories. “All of us knew nobody had recorded any of this ever,” Cotton, 79, said. Black Americans fight to preserve their forgotten history in Silicon Valley Today, Black Americans are taking it on themselves to preserve the historical record before it's lost to the passage of time along with the legacy of Silicon Valley veterans like Clay, who at 93, is in frail health and no longer able to give interviews. “It’s going to take something tremendous to suck that water back out so we know what exists in those cracks,” said Ruffin, author of “Uninvited Neighbors: African Americans in Silicon Valley, 1769–1990.” Syracuse University historian Herbert Ruffin says missing accounts like these from the early days of Silicon Valley are slipping from the world like water into the crevices of a sidewalk. Yet very few people have heard of Clay. Tales like his have largely gone untold, much like Black female mathematicians in the 1960s NASA space race before "Hidden Figures," the Margo Lee Shetterly book and the Hollywood film adaptation showcased their exploits. “Roy was the firestarter,” said longtime technology executive Ken Coleman, the son of a Centralia, Illinois, maid and a heater factory laborer, who Clay helped land a job at Hewlett-Packard out of the Air Force in the 1970s. What’s more, the future hall-of-fame technologist was among the first to recruit math and science graduates from historically Black universities and colleges and show them the ropes in the fast-growing tech industry. Over nearly five decades in Silicon Valley, he was a key figure in the development of HP’s computer division, ran his own consulting firm, advised one of the world’s top venture capital firms on investments in future tech giants like Intel and Compaq and started a successful company that manufactured electrical safety test equipment. Clay hoped the Bay Area would be “a place for new beginnings.” One of the first African Americans to graduate from a previously all-white college or university in a former slave state, Clay was headed for a job at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to create a radiation tracking software system mapping the aftermath of a nuclear explosion.Īt the time, the world wasn’t welcoming to Black professionals. With few spots for Black travelers to stop for food or the night, Clay and his family were guided along Route 66 through a hostile terrain of Confederate flags and “colored only” restrooms by the Negro Motorist Green Book. That’s all we needed – so I thought,” he wrote in his memoir last year. “We had excellent road maps, some good old common sense, and my mother’s prayers. set off in a shiny 1956 Black Ford on a four-day, 2,300-mile journey from his hometown of St.
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