Upper Hand. Sherrell Dorsey
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that helped Black people enter the middle class and chart new trajectories out of low wages and into family‐stabilizing jobs in manufacturing and engineering. Very few of these jobs required any education credential beyond a high school diploma or a certificate.
Prior to the Civil Rights Act, the service sector was overwhelmingly Black and brown. Black Americans, and slowly growing Latinx populations, were likely to hold jobs in janitorial services, secretarial support staff, or in lower‐level machine work that made very little room for promotions or long‐term economic stability.
Boeing's move to hire Black workers in critical roles was thus monumental, particularly as large employers in Seattle like Nordstrom, Safeway, J.C. Penney, and the Bon Marché (before it was purchased by Macy's) refused to hire Black workers at the time.
The wave of corporate America's shifting attitude toward the employment of Black workers spelled change and opportunities for Black communities and became the bedrock on which my grandfather would thrive.
Ultimately, my grandfather chose Seattle for what he believed would be a calm transition. Riots were erupting across Florida as Black residents protested mistreatment and demanded the right to vote. My grandfather elected to skip out on the unrest and get to earning money to send home to his family.
So, in 1960, with his trade certificate in hand, he took off on the three‐day journey to Seattle on the Greyhound bus, with one small suitcase and a few sandwiches he'd stuffed into a brown paper bag.
He arrived in Seattle a year before the iconic Space Needle was constructed, with just $30 in his pocket and no place to stay. He didn't have any “people” or family members to help him get set up. He had no housing, no vehicle, or any idea whether the job in a mystery city would work out long term. But he no longer had a choice. He'd have to make it work.
The Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) on 23rd and East Olive Streets would be the place he'd call home for $10 a day. With limited resources, he ate only french fries, awaiting his first day of work and his first paycheck from Boeing, where he earned $2.38 an hour.
At the time of my grandfather's arrival, Seattle's Black population hovered at just over 16,000 people or just 2.4 percent of the total population, which was overwhelmingly white. A farming and manufacturing class of people ushered in a melting pot of migrants from Mexico, traveling from working in California agriculture, and Southeast Asian communities setting up businesses across the neighborhoods that bordered downtown, and a trickling influx of eastern African immigrants.
My grandfather was an early settler in a slowly changing demographic of the city. His timing was perfect, entering an industry that would have gross implications for progress as the city increasingly became an industry leader in aircraft manufacturing and then eventually software development.
Boeing proved to be the launching pad my grandfather needed to enter into a middle‐class life. With a paycheck or two under his belt, he'd been able to secure long‐term housing and advance within his career. He spent seven years at the company before moving on to operate the cameras at the local television station KING‐TV, where he remained for 25 years until his retirement.
There's no way he could have predicted how much his life, and decision to move to a growing city sight unseen, would impact my world and an environment that would define the world's trajectory by the time I came onto the scene in 1987.
Living Legacy
By the end of 1983, my mom had finished college and left Detroit to join my grandfather in Seattle. By that time, he'd married his new wife Rosella, had my aunt Rhonda from a previous marriage, and had become stepfather to my uncle Philip.
When I came along, it was Grandpa who helped fill in the gaps. Single‐parent life for my mom was facilitated by a village of family and friends. My grandfather, who lived a two‐minute drive “up the hill” and had long since retired, was the designated helper of pickups and drop‐offs. He was the one with the patience to help us with science products, cutting wood and metal in his garage to help me build a robotic arm for my seventh‐grade science project. His knack for technology and the mundanity of retirement made me and my cousin prime targets for his evangelizing of technology into our lives.
Grandpa was also the “Inspector Gadget” of our family, known for his affinity for gizmos, the latest television and VCR home equipment, and any other electronics he could wire into his home or garage workshop. Before home security tools became the norm, a keypad would let you enter the garage. A push of the doorbell triggered a camera upstairs to confirm guests before someone would travel downstairs to unlock the door.
He even set us up with our very first personal computers in the mid‐1990s, convincing my mom to get an extra phone cord for dial‐up internet. As the default designated babysitter for me and my cousins when school was out, our morning activities included accompanying Grandpa to Costco for groceries and an afternoon perched in front of his upstairs computer learning how to type via the Mavis Beacon CD‐ROM program that circulated in the computer's disk tower.
Mavis was a beloved annoyance in my grandfather's house. She was our very first engagement of a Black person's face on a software program. She looked more like an Ebony magazine cover model than a woman who spent her days forcing children to learn the quintessential home row on the computer keyboard. My cousin Otis and I would take turns going through each lesson while Grandpa watched a game of golf or built a new piece of furniture in his garage.
Grandpa normalized technology and our access to it in our everyday lives as a tool for learning, discovery, and a route to greater efficiency. Since he was retired and spent his days carting us around or running back and forth from the hardware store for any given random construction project he was managing at home, he had a lot of time to also curl up in front of a series of infomercials. This meant that every new CD‐ROM available for the low price of $19.99 was ours to behold.
We had digital literature on the anatomy of the body with the ability to build 3D models of every body part we were curious about. Grandpa believed these tools would help us advance in our learning of science as well as technical skills. He bought us other software tools for increasing our reading comprehension, even making us sit for speed reading instruction. Grandpa was adamant about introducing tech‐based learning games and software programs that were supposed to turn us into instant geniuses. We toyed around with these for a while before eventually begging to take a break from the screen to go outside to play with the other kids who would begin to gather around my grandfather's garage in the late afternoons to take advantage of the basketball hoop that hung over the garage and the miniature putting green he'd built into the yard (that to this day he has used maybe once).
What we were learning and discovering at Grandpa's was supplemented at home through my mom's intentional collection of an analog library of books and literature written by Black authors and researchers. After my dates with Mavis Beacon, my mom encouraged my relationship with Maya Angelou, Mona Lake Jones, Toni Morrison, Jawanza Kunjufu, Walter Dean Meyers, and other Black literary voices.
As the digital age became more accessible, and our collection of encyclopedias became obsolete, she purchased CD‐ROMs like Microsoft's 1999 Encarta Africana—one of the early digital encyclopedias that used text, images, and storytelling to present narratives on Black Americans and African culture. For personal exposure, and for research for school projects, having access to a living, digital encyclopedia was my early experience in doing research online.
My mom was certainly no technologist, but she adapted to the environment as technology at work transformed and she prioritized its usage at home. She worked in leadership roles across social service agencies, running the office of child welfare before transitioning to nonprofit management and foster care advocacy work, where keeping up digitally was a requirement to staying competitive in the market. In addition to ensuring that we replaced at‐home equipment once new models came out, Mom frequently purchased gadgets like Game Boys and Walkmans, and upgraded the home sound systems for playing Anita Baker for Saturday morning cleaning sessions. In 1996, she even owned a Palm Pilot—an