In 1958, Roy Clay Sr. set off in a shiny 1956 Black Ford on a four-day, 2,300-mile journey from his hometown of St. Louis to San Francisco. “We had excellent road maps, some good old common sense, and my mother’s prayers. That’s all we needed – so I thought,” he wrote in his memoir last year.
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.
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.
At the time, the world wasn’t welcoming to Black professionals. Clay hoped the Bay Area would be “a place for new beginnings.”
It was.
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.
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.
“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. “He lit the first match.”
Yet very few people have heard of Clay. Tales like his have largely gone untold, much like Black women mathematicians in the 1960s NASA space race before “Hidden Figures,” the Margo Lee Shetterly book and the Hollywood film adaptation showcased their exploits.
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.
“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.”
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.
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Source: msn.com