 Welcome everybody. I'm gonna get started in just a second. So glad to have you joining us for the panel, African American Histories in Silicon Valley, archiving the innovations of Black Americans in the Bay Area's tech. So glad to have you joining us today. I'm Shauna Sherman, and I'm just gonna go through a few announcements and then we'll get started with our panel. I'm really excited and thankful to have everybody here today. So we'll get started with our land acknowledgement. We are broadcasting from the San Francisco Bay Area. And as part of the San Francisco Public Library, I wanna acknowledge it that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytu Sholoni peoples who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their original homeland. As uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to the elder ancestors and relatives of the Ramaytu Sholoni community. Next, as part of the African American Center of the San Francisco Public Library, we like to do an ancestor acknowledgement. And this is adapted from the reparations task force of San Francisco. So as the ancestor acknowledgement, we honor the gifts, resilience and sacrifices of our black ancestors, particularly those who toiled the land and built the institutions that established this country's wealth and freedom despite never being compensated nor fully realizing their own sovereignty. We acknowledge this exploitation of not only labor but of our humanity and are working to repair some of the harms done by public and private actors. Because of their work, we're here and we'll invest in the descendants of their legacy. And now I'm just gonna go over a few of the programs that we have coming up. And this program is based on a bookmark and an exhibit. Here's the bookmark and an exhibit we have here at the main library called Black Excellence and Black Invention. It opened on February 5th and is ongoing through May 7th at the main library's African American Center which is on the third floor. You can also see these plaques at our 28 branch libraries and they just highlight how we have black invention all around us like in the elevator where you can see that Alexander Miles helped improve elevators by inventing a mechanism to automatically open elevator doors. Next slide. And this month is March. So happy Women's History Month. We have a ton of programs at the San Francisco Public Library to visit sfpl.org to see all that we have on offer including a new program from the African American Center. I believe that's the next slide called Womfulness. It's a dialogue on with Wanda Sabir, Opa Palmer-Adisa, Ariska Rizak and Mai Lingay and Marje talking about our wombs and healing from the myriad of ways that they have been affected over the years. So please join us for that on Saturday, March 19th. Yep, next slide. We are also celebrating post-colonial love poem as are on the same page selection this April and join us for a book club on April 18th at 7 p.m. and a conversation with the author Natalie Diaz on April 26th at 7 p.m. I'm so excited that we're doing a poetry book for our on the page selection and I really recommend this book, Post-colonial Love Poem, available at all libraries. And it shouldn't, we need to always recognize the friends of the San Francisco Public Library for their ongoing support of our programs. Thank you very much to them, much gratitude. So thank you again for being here with us today. I don't know if I properly introduced myself. I'm Shauna Sherman, the manager of the African-American Center here at the San Francisco Public Library. And like I mentioned this spring at the San Francisco Public Library in partnership with the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, we are distributing the black in black excellence, black invention bookbarks created by the Reverend Dr. Carolyn Ransom Scott. The bookmark and accompanying exhibit on the third floor of the main library in the plaques at the branches that I showed you earlier filled upon the work of scholars, many of whom are African-American who have been studying black invention since the early 19th century. And I'm specifically referring to Henry Baker. And, but even though we know something about black invention, there's still so much to learn and black inventors that are still out there to be discovered. And as the Lemelson Center at the Smithsonian at this Lemelson Center, the study for the study of invention and innovation concluded in a recent report on black invention and I'm quoting here, museums and libraries have a particularly urgent calling. They are tasked with collecting, preserving and telling the stories of little known and forgotten black marginalized inventors. What is more, they are being asked to do so at least in part as a corrective to their own historical processes, the traditionally Eurocentric nature of these institutions has meant that for many years black histories and stories were not sought out for preservation. This negligence had the effect of reinforcing and perpetuating the false assumption that few or no such stories existed in the first place. We need this archival research into our black lives now more than ever. That's why I'm really excited today to welcome our guests from the Stanford archives and Kathy Cotton who are working on a new project to document the histories of African-Americans in Silicon Valley. It aims to document the contributions of black people and was started by Kathy Cotton, a digital storyteller. Here with me today to talk about this project at the Silicon Valley archives at Stanford University, so I wanted to correct that. Our Kathy Cotton, Henry Lowwood, Elysia Montgomery and Rodney Carter. I'm just gonna read their bios really quick and then we'll get started with our discussion. Kathy Cotton is working to bring the history of African-Americans in technology past and present to light. Mrs. Cotton began her career as a human resources professional, working first with several startup companies and ending her career at Hewlett Packard. Before Kathy retired from Hewlett Packard, she began studying digital storytelling and digital preservation at the Digital Media Academy at the Stanford University campus. Her latest documentary is A Place at the Table, a documentary featuring the African-American pioneers of Silicon Valley. So why don't we get started with you Kathy to talk about this project because I understand and I just wanted to tell everybody out there that like I first met you about five years ago when we showed your documentary, A Place at the Table at the library. So I understand it's you that contacted the Stanford libraries about archiving black innovations in Silicon Valley. So can you talk to us a little bit about why you contacted them and about your process and why you are doing your projects because you have a documentary as well as a podcast called Cotton Tales. Well, when I showed my documentary in San Jose, there was a ex-engineer there named Francine Billson who watched the film and after the film was so excited about it, she was the one that encouraged me to get in touch with the Stanford archives because she felt that it was that important and which was great. So I did and Harry, myself, Leslie Berlin who I just read her book while I was researching some of the people that I put in my film. I read her book and so when I got to meet her it was just such an honor. But we all realized we were all on the same page. Just mine was a little more technicolor than theirs. That's all. So we were just trying to make sure that the history of Silicon Valley was complete and correct. And so with that in mind, we started working together. We met twice with groups of people that I wanted to put in the film and then later with people who had been in the film and wanted to continue and make a second, possibly a second film. And we talked about, we let them talk about themselves because so many of them came here just following a dream and trying to make a living and not realizing that what they were doing was historical or would change anything. And they didn't, to this day didn't think they had done anything historical. And it took us, you have to take them aside and talk to them and make them understand what you did was history making because everything that happened in this valley was history making, it literally changed the world. And so they were a big part of that. The other piece I found out after my research is that many times they didn't wanna talk about it because they were hired by large government facilities that were working on highly sensitive and secretive projects. And so they couldn't talk about it. They had, there was an inborn habit of not talking about their work. And one of the ones that brought this out was Henry, pardon me Henry, Roy L. Clay Sr. who was the developer of the first computer division for Hewlett Packard. Before that he had worked for Livermore Labs on the discovery of how distant you had to be from radiation when a bomb fell. And before that he'd worked on some projects at McDonald's but he couldn't talk about either one of those. In fact, in my documentary his son says my mother never allowed us to talk about my father's work at the dinner table. And I thought, that's odd. And that's what came out of that was that he couldn't talk about it. And so he developed the habit of never talking about it. And he was not alone on that. Many of the people that were hired were hired after 67, which would have been after the Civil Rights Act. And these huge government contracts required that they have a diverse staff working on projects. And so they hired them in under this government contract but yet the work they were doing they couldn't talk about. But now we can. And so the first person I talked with was a guy named Bob White which he never let me film him. He wouldn't do it, but he was a recruiter for IBM. And he then led me to other people. And what happened, once they realized once you get through the interview they go, wow, I really did do something, you know? And then they say, well, you need to talk to Joe. Joe did more than I did. And so then you, it leads you to Joe. And then you go to, Joe opens his home. I mean, they opened their homes to me. They opened their offices to me because then they began to get excited about the project. And the word got out that this crazy woman was walking around with a camera and lights and she would show up with her grandchildren and her husband and film you. So I ended up with hundreds of hours of interviews. And I had to sit down and figure out how I was gonna tell the story because each story was so interesting. But I've, unfortunately, you can't have a four hour film. You can have a series but not a film. And so I had to break it down to under 50 minutes because schools can't play it for more than an hour. Film festivals don't like very long films. They wanna hour film, that kind of thing. So a lot of the conversations that we had are what they call, we cut them out and they're just laying on the floor. There's no conversation there. I did make a hard copy of what they said. So I have the actual conversation in a book of my own but I had to kind of bring it in to make people understand what happened there. So I thought the important thing was at this point was to show how it happened. And so I circled, I centered on the Peninsula Association of Black Personnel Administrators and showed how pivotal they were for bringing these African-Americans to the Valley. And one of the guys who started that was Roy L. Clay again. He was the first to have a head-hunting firm that literally went back to the HPC user, historically Black colleges and began to recruit those young Black engineers and bring them out to California. And another thing happened too. There was a shift of the technology from the East Coast to the West Coast. Many of the East Coast companies began to change their focus. And here we were in the West Coast developing all of these small, minute pieces of technology that would bring things down to eventually where we can have a watch that basically is a computer that all was starting on the West Coast with Fairchild, with Lockheed. And so a lot of the people were laid off on the East Coast and the companies on the West Coast began to recruit out of those companies as well. And that was going on probably in the late 60s and 70s and up into the 80s, well, even to this day. But so there was a effort of the companies themselves to send out recruiters like myself and Ken Coleman of Hewlett Packard and Bob White of IBM to go to these black colleges and convince these young engineers to come out to California. Interesting thing. They didn't see much value in computers. They thought it was a fly-by-night situation, wasn't gonna be around very long and they were encouraged to be doctors and lawyers and ministers and that type of thing. So it took some talking. We had to make friends with the department head and convincing that a material engineer or a civil engineer was just as valuable as electronics engineer. And so what we would do, what we did at Hewlett Packard, I should say is that we started in their sophomore year bringing them to Hewlett Packard for the summer and letting them work in our engineering department and then bringing them back every year until they were seniors. And then when they were seniors, we would offer them a job. By that time, they're pretty much sold on working in technology. And so that was one way we recruited. And then HP began to recruit all of their engineers like that. That, you know, where did they go out into the public and hire someone who was experienced? They were hiring straight out of colleges. So anyway, here we are, we got here and the film I made basically is about how we got here. And so my second effort will be all the glorious things that we actually did when we did get here. And that's way down the road after COVID. But we'll give it back. So you had thousands of hours of documentary footage when you're talking to these engineers and innovators in Silicon Valley. What motivated you to give, though, to think about a place for those in the archive? Well, because first of all, the word archive, to me, that is a permanence. There's a permanence about that. And it says that history will continue and it will be accurate and then we'll go forward. And so that was very appealing to me because that's exactly what I was looking for. Because I knew, I had worked with many of these men and women, or at least knew them on a social level and knew how brilliant they were, how resilient they were and how much they had worked and to do the work that they did. In spite of the fact that they were, many times were not recognized, not just by the overall public, but even by the people they worked for in their companies. So to me, to have their story in the archives means that someone who never heard of Roy L. Clay when they either read about him there or see him on a video talking about his work will go away knowing that this man had an integral part in putting the computer division together. Great, I think, thank you for telling us a story about these recruitment efforts. It sounds like it would be helpful for folks nowadays who are still trying to diversify the tech industry with more people of color. Why don't we show a clip from one of your films now? And I believe we have a clip of Wilbur Jackson who worked at IBM as an IBM executive. And you set up the film pretty nicely for us in this clip about networking. And I'll introduce everybody else you see on the screen after the clip and we'll get on with our story. Networking is a tremendous tool for gaining entrance to the tech world. Once you're inside a company, mentoring becomes a catalyst for career growth. Meet Wilbur Jackson, an IBM executive that felt he made it entirely on his own until he found out he had a mentor. Then I realized that nobody, absolutely nobody makes it on their own. And remember what I said about how I got stuck? I thought I had to do everything myself, but I realized that having mentors and being a mentor for other people is really what it's all about. When I was young, I didn't get that kind of mentorship. And as I was advancing my career, I realized that other people were advancing faster than I was and I couldn't figure out why they were because they weren't smarter than I was. They didn't work hard at it, but they knew something that I didn't know. Where did they learn that? And they learned that around the kitchen table, growing up from uncles and aunts and mothers and fathers who had important careers, whatever that career might have been with this law or medicine or whatever, that's where they learned how to be successful in whatever career they chose. And not to say that my parents weren't supportive, they just didn't know. My parents didn't know anything about how to advance your career in whatever you were choosing to do. They just knew how to work hard, how to study hard, how to get the grace and that type of thing. And that's the kind of encouragement that I got. But the idea of seeking out proper mentorship and then being able to provide mentorship to others was not something that I learned at the kitchen table. I think I first realized one of my mentors because about the second year I was with IBM, I had my second manager and he called me into his office one day and he said, you need to come in and talk to me periodically. I know you're doing your job and you're getting everything done, you're meeting all your schedule, but just come in and talk to me. Let me know how you're doing. And I said, okay, he would sit. It just never dawned on me that it was important to talk to my manager because I didn't need his help. And there was nothing that he was gonna do for me and I was able to get my job done. So I learned later, many years later that he was a big advocate behind the scenes for me. So a lot of times your mentor, it's not someone who's in your face, it's someone who's behind the scenes speaking on your behalf. And I actually worked with him in New York and when I came to California, I got a job right away. And I said, after I got the job, about six months later, I realized that I was working for him again. And I said, why am I working for you again? He says, I'm the one responsible for you getting this job. And again, it was an aha moment where I realized that to be a mentor and to have mentors is very important. So it meant a lot to me in terms of how I was gonna advance my career moving forward. It also meant a lot to me in terms of what I was gonna do for other people because I didn't feel it was sufficient to just be successful in my own but also to reach back and help others. Sorry, I was muted there for a second. That was amazing clip from a place at the table, Kathy Cotton's documentary on Silicon Valley Innovators and we'll put links to that in the chat and welcome back everybody. I'm gonna introduce the rest of our panelists and then we'll continue with our story. And if you have any questions, you can put them in the chat and we'll try to incorporate them into the show. There's also a question and answer session at the end. So I'm gonna do a few more introductions and then we'll continue the conversation. So also on this screen is Henry Lowwood. Henry Lowwood is the Harold C. Hobat Curator at Sanford University responsible for the history of science and technology collections and film and media collections in the Stanford libraries. He has combined interests in history, technological innovation and the history of digital games and simulations to head several long-term projects at Stanford and is the author of numerous articles and books on the history of Silicon Valley and the development of digital game technology and culture. He is part of the oral history team for the histories of African-Americans in Silicon Valley project at Stanford libraries. Alicia Montgomery, PhD is an ethnographer who works as a subject specialist for sociology, psychology and qualitative data at Stanford libraries. Her book, Greeting the Black Urban Regime, the Culture and Commerce of Sustainability in Detroit from Wayne State University Press tells the story of the struggle to shape green redevelopment in Detroit. She also is currently part of the oral history team for the histories of African-Americans in Silicon Valley project at Stanford libraries. And lastly, Rodney Carter began working at Stanford in 1986. In 2019, he became the first program lead for the people of color and technology, otherwise known as POC-IT affinity group under the Ideal IT Initiative. Today, he is the Amitrious, I'm sorry, I struggled with that word, lead for the program and is focused on moving the needle on the jointly released CIO Council and POC-IT statement of solidarity and commitment to action. Two efforts that have come out of the commitment to action are the Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative and the Explore Careers and Technology Event. Look forward to hearing from our panelists and thank you so much for being here. We're gonna go back to Mr. Henry Lowwood. Can we talk a little bit about, let's see. Could you talk to us a bit about of the state of documentation of Black American Innovation at Stanford libraries and US libraries and archives in general and why you guys chose to take on this project of histories of African-Americans in Silicon Valley? Thank you, Shawna. Well, there's kind of a two-fold problem that we're trying to solve with the histories of African-Americans in Silicon Valley project. The first problem which goes directly to your question is that Black Americans are underrepresented in the archive. I mean, there's no other way to say it. In particular, if you look at the vast history of it, you will find records of Black Americans, African-Americans of all sorts going back to the 19th century probably earlier in various places. Many of these records are parts of larger collections. They're perhaps a little bit hidden in some cases, but there are available records. In the Silicon Valley context, the record tends to be organized around people, individuals, entrepreneurs, innovators, inventors, scientists, engineers, all of that. And so the records very often are organized either around people or around companies. And the history that results from that is reflects whose papers, whose collections are in the archive, and those kinds of collections. The papers of individuals, papers of companies have in particular really underrepresented the contributions of African-Americans and other groups as well, women, Asian-Americans, immigrants, there are other groups you could mention, but this project's focused on African-Americans. I can think of only one prominent Silicon Valley engineer whose papers have been collected by an institution in the US. That's Jerry Lawson whose papers are at the Strong Museum in New York. He basically invented the first game console that could accept multiple cartridges, the Channel F at Fairchild. And other than that, it's very difficult to think of collections like that. And the reason is archives and libraries have not created connections with the community. They haven't developed ways of contacting people in the African-American community and just talking to them about the kinds of records that we would find interesting for whatever reason. Okay, so that's the basic problem. Another problem that springs out of that at a university like Stanford is the students at Stanford represent a much more diverse community than the records as I have just described them represent. So if you think of the role that archival records, library collections might have in showing students, people who look like them, who are like them, who have been, you know, have a lot of accomplishments and who might in some ways, maybe not as mentors as we just heard in the clip, but maybe as inspirations or just making them feel like there's a, you know, a path into a technology field or, you know, business field, things like that. Our collections don't really do that very well as they are now. So the two things that we need to do is first of all, we need to do a better job of collecting more recent a Silicon Valley history, which would of course mean talking to a much more diverse group of people. And we've begun doing that, our all history project in part helps us with that. And we have brought in a few collections. Maybe I'll talk about that a little bit later. So that's one thing is just kind of looking at what's around us now and seeing that as the history of 50 years from now. So we want to, you know, by doing a better job of archiving the contemporary situation that will help in the future. But, and this is where sort of Kathy came in for us, is we don't want to create the impression by saying it the way I just said it, that it's only in the last few years that this diversity has been here. As Kathy's film shows, there have been, you know, African-Americans have been prominent in companies since the 1950s. I mean, the Roy Clay example is, you know, you're talking about the first computer at Eulah Packard. That's not a small thing. But that happened really quite a while ago. That happened before Silicon Valley was called Silicon Valley. So we also want to try through oral histories and other means to change this. Last thing I'll just say really quickly is oral histories are a great way to start a project like this when you're trying to fill gaps in the archival records. So a film like Kathy's or our oral history projects serve a purpose there. But we also would like to do, to sort of build a basis for talking more about other kinds of records that people have. Those could be letters, you know, back home or they could be family photographs. They could be photographs people took at work. They could be records that somebody kept, maybe of a small company that they founded, all sorts of things like that. So we need to do there a lot more to bring in those kinds of records. Thank you, Henry. And let's move on to Rodney. Now, I know that even though that there are recent employment trends in the tech industry, show that representation is still low for people of color in the tech industry. Like you said, you've been in the tech industry for a while now and you're part of a group people of color and technology at Stanford University. Could you talk a little bit about your work in that group? And like as Henry mentioned, you know, there are people out there and they're, you know, it's an affinity group and you're not really a unicorn. Can you talk about what it's like working in the tech industry and why you think also it's important that we are documenting these contributions? Thanks, Shona. Excuse me. So Stanford has a university wide initiative called Ideal which stands for inclusion, diversity, equity and access in a learning environment. Ideal IT is ideal for the IT technology community at Stanford and Pocket is a program within Ideal IT. Sorry, my voice is going for some reason. So the other programs within Ideal IT are Neurodiversity in IT, Europe, Stanford Women in Technology and our newest program, Accessibility in IT. So after George Floyd was murdered in 2020, our sponsors, the CIO council wanted to put out a statement of solidarity with the black community who better to work with them than Pocket's advisory group. But everybody was putting out statements and we wanted to go a step further. Thus our statement of solidarity and commitment to action was born. Three of our actions that I think would be relevant to this community is the first one, all 30 plus members of the CIO council readily agreed to the creation of a CIO council sponsorship program. So sponsorship starts with mentorship and as a spectrum of activities, including advocacy. So we just completed a six and a half month pilot program with nine pairs of CIO sponsors and Pocket and WIP protégés. Even though it was a short pilot, six of the nine protégés got new or potential opportunities as a result of being in the pilot. We're currently working on incorporating the lessons learned and hope to launch the full program within the next month or so. Another action was to create a quote unquote tech clinic for the technology community. We quickly rebranded that to Excite which is explore careers in technology event. Excite is a place where the technology community comes together to find out about available upcoming job openings, have opportunities to chat with hiring managers, find out about development opportunities and find support for career development and to network with each other. Our inaugural event was last November. It was Zoom only, but we had over 100 attendees and got a 4.79 out of five approval rating from those who completed the follow-up survey. Our next Excite is next week actually. Finally, we're working on gathering representational data for everyone who works in an organization led by a person on the CIO council. So Stanford does have a dashboard for all staff that can be grouped by a job category but that only includes people within certain technology centric job classifications. As a reminder, the IT in pocket stands for in technology and not in IT. So we wanna capture everyone in a technology role or who works in a technology field. And that includes managers, directors, admins, project managers, et cetera. Until we know where we're starting from, we have no way to measure progress. So I think it's important to know the history of the Valley because there's often a lot of pressure involved with being the first to do anything. There's often less pressure involved in being the next one to do something even if the first person did it many years ago. Pockets efforts are geared towards increasing minority representation at all levels within the technology community. And nothing would make me happier than to have the first black CIO at Stanford to come out of pocket. That's amazing. Thank you, Rodney. Then thank you for all the work of pocket. And I think that's part of the reason why we're so into celebrating these black convention bookmarks. And I should have mentioned earlier that we did have a program that's available on our YouTube page, the San Francisco Public Library YouTube page about the bookmarks and their creation. But that's so that young youth know, and black youth and the rest of the country knows that black inventors existed, you're not alone. If you have, everybody can be creative and have inventive thoughts. And it's hard when you're, like you said, when you're coming in as the first or even like a lot, a later day, second. So it's important to thank you for all your work in encouraging people of color to get into the technology field. And as part of our archiving efforts, that's part of the archiving efforts at Stanford, Alicia, I believe you've been doing oral histories. And could we, before we move on to more questions, could you talk a little bit about what it's like for you to work on building oral histories in this archive? Like maybe there's some cool stories that you've gathered that you'd like to share. Sure, I'd like to share one story in particular because that's the particular story I'm gonna share with you shows a bit of the history of African-Americans in technology because the person that we interviewed, his parents were in technology tied to MIT. So I wanna share my screen with you. And let's see here. And then I'll do slide, show slide. I'll take just a second for it to come up here. So can everyone see my screen? Yes. So I wanna tell you about Mark Ramsey. Mark Ramsey is an engineer who was born in 1954. Most recently, he worked as a staff research programmer in the civil and environmental engineering department at Stanford University. He's had a long career in high tech in Silicon Valley. Now Ramsey's mother and father, we did an oral history with him. He told us his mother and father were the first generation in their families to go to college. And they had quite distinguished careers. His mother got a BA in applied mathematics from Simmons College in 1951. You remember Henry said, we can go back to the 1950s talking about African-Americans in technology. This was 1951 when she got a degree. She went to work as a coder at MIT instrumentation lab. And she worked on the landmark whirlwind computer that was commissioned by the Navy. So this is an archival picture of what that computer looked like. And then his father got his BA in electrical engineering in 1951 at MIT. Okay. And he had a career as a flight test engineer at MIT's flight dynamics. And he worked as a program manager for RCA. And that's a little bit of a brochure from that time. So there's a long history of African-Americans breaking through and working in the high tech industry. But here's the reality that we're facing today. Black workers comprise 11% of all employees. And this snippet is from the Pew Research Center. Black workers comprise 11% of all employed adults compared with 9% of those in STEM occupations. Their share is even lower in engineering and architecture jobs. And you can see in computer science jobs, the low number. So there's been a struggle. So why is this the case? Some of the problems are in adequacies in K through 12 education. And also hostilities in some workplaces are hostile to African-Americans. And not all of our interviewees mentioned hostility, but some of them did, including Mark Ramsey. And he talked about one of the companies that he worked for back in the 1980s. And I wanna read you just a little bit of what his experience was and how he overcame that challenge of that hostility that he was facing. He said, so during the 1980s, I worked in a team in which the project manager was Black as well as was the lead hardware engineer. I eventually became the lead software engineer. Oops, I'm sorry, it went back to this but you can still see it. I eventually became the lead software engineer. Another programmer was Black, a woman from Argentina was also part of our team. Other engineers at the company called us the ghetto. We were outcast. They weren't friendly or helpful to us. And he described a bit of that to us about what was the circumstances there. But okay, so then there came this challenge, right? The company wanted to develop new technologies for an upcoming trade show. Our team and another team at the company competed to develop the new system. Our team had something to prove. So we worked 24-7. In the end, our system worked and theirs didn't. So he made his mark despite the challenges that he faced in the industry. So that's just one of the stories that are in our archive. And that we hope that not only Stanford students can seek inspiration. I know that someone in the chat mentioned teaching K through 12. We want to be able to share these stories with everyone so that young people can know about our history. And also researchers. Researchers who are studying the history of, just the history of tech in general, that this is part of the story. And to leave this out is problematic. And researchers who are studying the history of the black middle class and the black upper classes there's much to learn here from these stories. So I'll stop sharing my screen. So that's just a little snippet that I wanted to share with you. Thank you, Alicia. I'm like a archive nerd. I'd love to go into archives and like, search through the documents and read what might be in the past. And like I just want to do a little full exposure here and honor my father, Henry S. McCoy who also worked for IBM in Hawaii in the 1970s as a customer service engineer. And I was reminded of it when you showed that picture because he was responsible for fixing the main frames and a lot of the contracts in Hawaii. We want to talk to you. Right. I'm an IBMer growing up. They had the amazing Christmas parties. I always look forward to the presents they gave. They ever gave every kid a present at the Christmas party. Anyway, but I also wanted to point out in the chat somebody mentioned the hostility and anti-blackness in the Bay Area, which makes getting a foot in the door in science and tech much harder around here. And thanks for highlighting that. I'm also the co-chair of the Racial Equity Committee at San Francisco Public Library. And we totally understand some of the struggles that we face as black employees and institutions that might have been started in the era of white supremacy. So thank you for that. And Kathy, you are still working on gathering stories. I know you have your cottontails, podcasts. What are you doing? Can you tell us a little bit about that and what you're working on now? Yes, it evolved because I could not go out and film. I couldn't continue my filming. But I knew there were hundreds of stories that needed to be told. And some of them are stories of retirees who may not be around much longer, that kind of thing. So I started off with the older employees, but as I ventured out, like I say, they would recommend someone else I talked to. And so I was determined to get their stories out. I have about 58 podcasts that are on Apple Podcasts and also on YouTube under Kathy Cotton and also Facebook, wherever I can put them, they're sticking there. But they really are opening up the doors for me. And I thought, you know, because I worked in the valley and was a recruiter, I thought that we had over and have since left it, I thought we had overcome a lot of this racism and exclusionary stuff. Well, I'm finding the higher I go up, I talked to a gentleman who is now working for the Pentagon. He was, he's an incredible engineer of starting out at NASA back in the day. And this guy, that was the first thing out of his mouth was discussing how he had been excluded. He was literally one of the inventors of the first robot, the artificial intelligence robot that went into Chernobyl to test out the, test to see if there was, you know, radiation. And that model has been used for the robot that's on Mars today. He worked on a team for that. But he said once he got to the very top where recognition would be made, all of a sudden he'd be given another assignment or someone would be assigned over him to make the public announcement about the projects and that type of thing. And, you know, it may happen once you don't notice it, but when it happens over and over again in your career, it becomes very noticeable. So it was very important for him to talk about that in our podcast. And again, the higher up I got, even in the areas of film where I was talking to a young woman who was a robotics expert for Disney and for the Star Wars movies and things, she experienced that type of behavior. So I was frankly a little shocked because I thought we were more about the technology than we were about this personal vendetta against anyone who isn't European born or whatever it is going on in their little heads. But there it is. It pops up every time. So, you know, we have a lot of work to do. And I think the more we see people who are not of the European background in place and hear about them and read about them, the more we'll become to understand that everyone is the same. We're just, you know, there's some smart ones and dumb ones and some good ones and some bad ones, but they just may have a little more technicolor than others, and that doesn't make them, you know, you shouldn't be excluded. So that's my experience with working and that's why I keep doing my podcasts because I think these conversations are very important. I think you need to hear that arc in their life when they start and how they're doing and what they're doing and that type of it. So that's what I try to do. I know I'm gaining little pearls of wisdom even for my career as a librarian, just like, you know, from that mentorship clip. And we'll put a link to your Cottontails podcast in the chat. And it is interesting that, you know, yeah, we're celebrating these black inventors and they achieve so much, but like they did achieve so much within, you know, I'd noticed in doing the exhibit. And I think there's been research on this and I believe it's Professor Cook that's shown that, you know, black invention sort of died down after Jim Crow happened and, you know, because it's, I mean, how could you invent when you're having, you know, all this racism against you, but people are achieving and we want to switch and, you know, be positive. So how about we talk a little bit about what is in the archive now? Henry, you mentioned that you were having, that you, you're collecting oral histories. And I think you mentioned there's a reason for that because it's more of a contemporary history, but what else is in the archive? And as somebody mentioned public or private, is it a public archive? Can people see it or go to it? Yes. First of all, Stanford, of course, is a private institution and there's, you know, restrictions in all parts of the campus where you can go in and not go in. However, our collections are generally in the Department of Special Collections which is completely open to the public. It's a little trick, by the way, if you want to get into Stanford Library, just say you're going to the special collections and you can go in the door. So yes, they're absolutely open to the public. Also, the records of what collections we have, what's in there, the descriptions, the box level, folder level descriptions of the archival collections and all of that is in a thing called the online archive of California, OAC. And by the way, it's not just Stanford, it's all across California, all the institutions that have archival records. We put our finding aids there. It's not in a private Stanford place or anything like that. You can look up the collections that we have there. We currently, you know, we just moved into a new space in the library here and we now have an exhibition space. And so, you know, to your question about what do we have, we, you know, we put up a historical exhibition to just show our collections and kind of lay them out A to Z, just with a few samples from exciting collections. And as you would imagine, there's, you know, companies like Hewlett-Packard, Varian Associates, Atari, Apple, Ampex, all these well-known companies, there's well-known history here. And we were somewhat dissatisfied by the lack of diversity and representation in that, in the way we sort of unrolled things. Really, there was not a lot we could do given the kinds of collections that we have. So we added a couple of wall screens, interactive wall screens to the exhibit, one of which we decided to devote to the collections we do have, they're more about diversity. So we found, we have photography collections, for example, there's a photograph we have in that are the collection that shows the work that the Black Panthers did in Oakland around sickle solanemia testing. So we have some photographs of an event there from, I wanna say, 19, right around 1970, early 1970s, I think. We have, of course, the oral histories that we've done here. Also, for other groups, some interesting collections relating to LGBTQ communities, Asian-Americans and such, but it's still a pretty small part of the archive overall. Now, I did wanna maybe say a little bit about that, again, about the different kinds of materials that we would like to have so that people feel like they can be part of a conversation about whether what they have might be of interest to us. And I should say there that Silicon Valley Archives sounds like it's only about technology. We're only interested in you if you started a company or if you invented something. So let me take that off the table right away that we're interested in people who participated in any way in a company or in other walks of life as well here in this region and this valley as it changed and basically participated really in any way. And also that help us understand if they have anything that helps us understand the environment people lived in, the kinds of problems they faced or maybe other kinds of accomplishments that might be related to the way Silicon Valley developed so that might be in something like education, for example, or maybe something financial, you know, in banks. We hit one of the oral histories, Pam Isam's oral history was about what do you do if you have an idea but venture capitalists won't listen to you? What kinds of financing can you rely on to be able to launch an initiative? In her case, her company is called In Case of Emergency Solutions, it's about emergency preparedness, CPR training, you know, different things like that. And she'd come up with an idea for using virtual reality to do remote training in those kinds of areas, right? So she was looking around for financing, it's a great idea, couldn't get financing that way. So she relied on a long relationship she'd had with a bank to get the financing that made it possible for her company to develop that technology. And guess what? She had it ready before COVID hit. And can you imagine, I mean, I don't know that she said it in exactly these words, but so this is me saying it, but I can imagine that that probably led to the survival of her company to be able to continue this training remotely with people using this virtual reality system. If she hadn't found funding through some other means, we wouldn't have had that, she wouldn't have had that, but we just wouldn't have happened. So there are other sectors of life, as I mentioned, things like finance that propel these histories, and we wanna find out about all of that as well. So I guess basically the message is, if you've got anything about that relates to the last 100 years in this area, through your family or friends maybe or a neighbor who might have something to say, just let us know. And we wanna start those conversations so people have a better idea of the kinds of contributions they can make. Thank you. And I just wanna highlight that in the chat, somebody mentioned, are you guys still, you're still closed with the COVID restrictions at Stanford? Yeah, so. Yes, very briefly, where we are right now is we can only make very few exceptions to that, but if I was a betting person, which I'm not, but if I was, I would say probably we have a spring quarter starting at the beginning of April, that might be a time when maybe those things will open up a little bit more, we sure hope so. Great, thank you. And so how do people get in touch with you and talk to share what they might have? Well, the nice thing about having been at Stanford as long as I have been here is I just have my last name as my email address. So it's just lowwood at stanford.edu. Just send me an email. I don't remember exactly, Kathy, but I think that's what happened. You mentioned Leslie Berlin. There was some interaction there in some way and you just sent us an email message and that led to, I mean, that was three, more than three years ago. We've been doing a lot of stuff together since then. So send us an email and send it to me. You can also find Silicon Valley Archives in the Stanford Library's website if you forget my name and just contact one of us and we'll be happy to talk to anyone who wants to offer something to us. Thank you. And I don't know, like, Kathy, are your digital stories in the Stanford archive? Is that, can you guys talk a little bit more about how that is working? Well, COVID hit and we all got stymied on that, but they can go to my website. I have a page where you can meet the people that were at the time were intended to be in the film. I just made little shorts like the one you saw of Wilbur. There's also one of a entrepreneur by the name of Ernest Priestley. It talks to the woman that really got me started and I was Mary Sutton. So you just, there are little three and four minute snippets that I was using to promote the film and to encourage people to come and talk to me. So, yeah, so that's there on my website. Yeah, and I'll just add, the plan is to archive everything and as I was listening to Kathy earlier, I was thinking like, hmm, we need to talk about the podcast series too. So it's a, and then let me just recommend that series because it's, you know, 50, 58 people. I think you said Kathy, there are a lot of things people talk about that maybe you didn't even think that, you know, you sort of wanted like, oh yeah, I guess somebody has to do that or that came from somewhere. It's a really incredible range of stories that she's able to tell through that. Thank you. And Rodney, are there any, are there, what are the histories of Silicon Valley and like what, you know, what are, do you, what do you guys talk about? Like when you get together in your affinity groups and like, you know, what are the current contemporary histories of Silicon Valley of African-Americans? We have a speaker series and of course I'm going to blank on her name, but we had a Stanford alum, Stacy, and I can't remember her last name, who founded not one, but two companies. One is international, has offices in Jamaica and in the US and she was one of our speakers. So we got to highlight a current African-American woman in technology who's running her own company. So we're a little more focused on today than we are the history, but on our list of things to do is to have Kathy come and do a presentation for us. Kathy doesn't know that yet, but now she does. Yes. So again, COVID, we launched in January of 2020 and COVID hit two months later. So we pivoted and then after George Floyd, we pivoted again. So we're still, although we're two years old in many ways, we're still growing. Thank you. So where do we find, we're, so I've got a couple of questions actually. So I'm wondering from you, Alicia, where do you find all these, where do you find these histories to get, you know, to interview, where do you find these people to interview? And I'm also wondering too, like, what, who, what, if I'm at the technology and you mentioned, like, if you had letters or whatever, like, what should I, should I be saving anything if I'm working as a... Yes, please, please say. Some people that we talked to would say, well, we didn't think that that was important. So we just threw it out. And yes, as Kathy and Henry have mentioned, all of that stuff is so important to preserve, to preserve the history, because people sort of don't think of themselves as being important, as contributing to history. But yes, all of that stuff is very important. And you asked, I believe, how do we find people through word of mouth, through some research? And then because we're at Stanford, we have, we can sort of follow networks of people. We have an upcoming interview with a young person at Stanford who is the next generation of engineers that we're looking forward to. So that's how we find folks. Oh, sorry, I was muted again. You'd think I'd learn after how long? Two years, I assume, like? But it happens to me all the time too. Right. So can you give us a sense of how big the, what the archive looks like now? And like, there's oral histories. And what else is in it? The histories of, in the histories of African-Americans in Silicon Valley. I'll turn that one over to Henry. Well, that's a couple of different components. And again, that's the caveat here is that we need more. I mean, the collection is not where it should be for this, but still there are places one can look. I mentioned Pam Isom earlier. And Pam, we did an oral history. This is, it's really common with oral histories that when you talk to somebody in an interview like this, you say, you can talk about different things. You ask them if they have maybe some records or some photographs and you start to understand. And then maybe by the end of the interview or after it, you ask that person if they might contribute something else like archival materials besides the interview. And that happened with Pam too. In fact, we have a case in our exhibit right now which is just on materials about her company. She sent us the photograph album, one of the dummies they use. Probably a smart dummy is probably accurate in the way you would describe it for doing this, for doing the training that they do, VR goggles, some posters, some t-shirts, you know, with the company. And by the way, those can sometimes be pretty interesting. So she sent us some materials after the oral history to add to that and now we have them in the exhibit as kind of a sign that this is the kind of material we want to add to the collection. Now, what could people look at for earlier periods? Well, there have been Stanford engineers in the faculty, students. We have records of some of those professors and students who were collected, those were collected of course, not because they were African-American necessarily, but because they happen to have that status and so the university archives would have picked up those materials. And likewise in some of our other collections, we have people who you find, but weren't necessarily the reason we got those collections. So to give you one example, we have a collection of a couple of hundred thousand photographs taken in the valley by a photographer who had untreated into companies like Apple and Adobe and did these photography projects in the 1980s and 1990s. And you do see people of color in those photographs. One example like that that I want to mention specifically because it's an example that shows how unexpected this kind of thing can be sometimes. And this is a collection we received from a very well-known photographer named Ira Nowinski who we have several collections from here at Stanford on various topics. He had in the early 1980s because of a tip that he got from somebody that were these new things called video game arcades in the Bay Area. He'd gone around to Santa Cruz, the boardwalk arcade there, East Bay, San Francisco Bay Area to about six or eight different arcades and took all of these photographs of these arcades. And it put them away. It wasn't an area that interested him. He knew nothing about these arcades but he had just got this tip and took these photographs as with the eye of a really well-known art and documentary photographer. So we acquired those photographs and the interesting thing about them that everyone sees and when students see these photographs the same thing comes up over and over again is how diverse the people were in these arcades in the early 1980s. And not, you know, color is one aspect of that but also there are a lot of women, a lot of young girls. And so this aspect of this collection is so well-known that it's been used as a documentary evidence for books about the way that culture changed in the 1980s to become mostly about white adolescent teenage boys, basically what changed from the early 1980s through later. And that's an example of something where the appearance of people of color in these photographs is incidental. It's not why we particularly bought that collection. We didn't know what those photographs would show us but now that becomes a document about the presence of all of these different communities from Asian men wearing business suits to African-American boys in these arcades in that time period. And that makes us think about what was going on, what changed, you know, all of those sorts of things. That's cool. I wanna see those photos. Well, you know, there's something that I wanna add to that as I do my work and I'm still doing it. One of the things that I want to emphasize is that we were not in a vacuum by ourselves, that there was always someone of a different race or ethnicity that was there either to help us or to give us an opportunity. And that is part of our American history. We seem to forget is that it's not just black history. It's not just white history. It happened simultaneously. And so I think one of the things that I hope the archives will do is show that, you know, this timeline, you had Roy L. Clay who was a genius at computers when there was no idea what a computer was. But at the same time, you had Henry Packard from a Hewlett Packard who decided, I wanna get involved with this and gave this man an opportunity to start a division for his company. I think that's important. That's two people who came together and made an incredible product in the long run. So it's not just a black guy getting over. It was all of them getting over together and using those skills that they had to go forward and change this valley. So I think that should come out. I try so hard to bring that out in every conversation I have. And I say, well, who helped you? And it's always, because they were there first, it's always a white guy or a white woman who helped them. But think of the risk they took, think of who they had to go up against to get you in there. And so their story is important as well. Yeah, thank you for that, Kathy. I think that we're here, we've always been here and we work together as a community. And I know that I came across, I can't quote it exactly, but I know there's research showing that, the more diverse our work groups are, the more productive we are. And the history of black invention isn't just for black people, it's for everybody, right? Because we're all in this together. And that's ultimately where we wanna be is working together to build strong countries, strong words, strong humanity. Before we get, if there are any questions, please put them in the chat. And before we close up, I was wondering, is there anything else anybody else wants to say that we might have missed today or that I didn't mention or ask about? No, we covered it all, we covered it all. We covered it all unless, less time that I allocated, but, and I think I see that people are going back to their jobs at one o'clock that, you know, in this noon hour, we only have an hour. So there's nothing else I think we could close up, but I really wanna thank you all for being here with me today and talking about black invention and archiving the African-American histories in Silicon Valley. Thank you all so much for your work. Please go to the websites we've posted in the chat to learn more. Please contact Henry. I was looking at the chat. So I think I got all the questions that were already in the chat. Please contact Mr. Lowwood. Henry, Lowwood, we put his address in the chat. If you have any documents or things you wanna share with Stanford Silicon Valley Archives, I always get that wrong, got it right, right? Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford Libraries. Thank you all again. Any final part of your work? Thank you so much. Well, thank you so much for inviting us. I agree. Thank you. Yes, thank you. And really don't be shy about contacting us. We're happy to talk to anyone. Well, I wanna thank Shauna because she, when I was trying to get my film off the ground, I wrote to all the libraries in the Bay Area and she took the bait and gave me an incredible presentation at the Public Library in San Francisco. And thank you, Shauna, for coming through again, kid. No, you're entirely welcome. I'm all about promoting all the good work that our community is doing. So thank you, Kathy. Thank you, everyone. And thank you for attending. This will be on our San Francisco Public Library YouTube page for further viewing. We'll see you all later. Bye-bye. Bye, everyone. Bye.