Kathy Cotton filming

The lives and experiences of African Americans past and present in California’s Silicon Valley will be featured in a new collection at Stanford Libraries. Set to debut online later this year, “Histories of African Americans in Silicon Valley” is a project within the university’s Silicon Valley Archives. Dedicated to documenting the scientific and technological innovations that define the Bay Area’s high-tech region, the archive has existed for more than 30 years.

Henry Lowood, Harold C. Hohbach Curator at Stanford University, said Kathy Cotton’s 2017 documentary A Place at the Table, about Black tech trailblazers, helped inspire the new collection.

“We realized our archive had very little that intersected with the lives of the people that she had profiled in her documentary,” said Lowood. “The archive wasn’t very representative of the African American community in the Valley.” Cotton’s film profiles figures like Roy L. Clay Sr., architect of the first computer developed by Hewlett Packard, and Mary Sutton, the first female African American engineer hired by Lockheed in 1967, whose work on the Polaris missile was instrumental.

“Every screening someone says, ‘Who are they and why don’t we know about them?,’” said Cotton. “The film opens the door to discovery.” Cotton’s former career as a human resources professional and consultant in Silicon Valley provided insight into how Black workers arrived and thrived in the area.

Lowood and his team are currently conducting interviews for the online exhibit, which he said will launch midyear. So far, the project consists of oral histories, but the hope is that it will grow to include other types of documentation, photos, and artifacts. “It's a time when the archival community, I think, is generally paying more attention to areas in which there needs to be more archival activism. More of an effort needs to be made because there isn't this tradition of interaction between large libraries, museums, archives, and African American donors of collections, except in some very narrow areas,” said Lowood. The field has historically been dominated by white researchers and donors, and systemically centered whiteness in the collections as a result.

Cotton also continues to delve into the stories of African Americans contributing to the community’s success on her podcast Cottontales, which will be included in the new archive along with her film and unedited footage. “We want to show that while Silicon Valley was growing, we were right there contributing, living, loving, going to church, having our festivals. The Black community was just as strong. We were all contributing to making the Valley what it is and what it was,” said Cotton.

Lowood said he hopes the new collection will also have a positive influence on the lives of students. “It's not just the history, research, and instruction aspect of it, which of course is centrally important; it's also this possibility that the existence of these interviews will maybe have an impact on students’ lives or on other lives as they’re thinking about these stories and how they might relate to them,” said Lowood.

Cotton agrees. “If Black children, Black people don’t see themselves in these roles then they’ll never believe that they can be a part of something, so I want particularly African Americans to understand we do it all and when we do it we do it very, very well,” she said.

The project is meaningful for Lowood, too, who said, “You feel like you're actively engaging to solve a problem that goes beyond the archive, in this case that brings the experiences of a community in the Valley to light, that hasn't received much attention before. It's an interesting mix of thinking about the ways in which archives have failed. As a curator and historian that's not a happy feeling to realize so much has been neglected, but the silver lining in this case is I'm able to do something about it.”

Thanks to a major gift from the Hohbach family, Stanford is renovating a new space inside the Green Library that will house the Silicon Valley Archives. Hohbach Hall is expected to open in early 2022. Asked what it means to have her work preserved at Stanford, Cotton said, “It means it's worth the work. It means you'll be able to go back and see us in history. You'll see yourself in history.”