LITMIR.BIZ

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today.

      She stressed the importance of possibility, and she did this well with how she shaped our “village.” Growing up in a middle‐class Black family with others who had migrated meant that our parents were keen on exposing us to “Blackness” outside of Seattle. Representing a very small percentage of the total population meant that we had all grown accustomed to being one of very few Black or brown students in a classroom. For us, underrepresentation, outside of our immediate homes and circles, was the norm.

On Saturdays, after we cleaned the house and ate breakfast, Mom transported me to the Central Area, a predominantly Black community, for a few hours of Black history and entrepreneurship learning at the Delaney Learning Center. We met at the Central Area Motivation Program (CAMP) space on Martin Luther King Jr. and Jackson Streets—a space that got its start in 1964 as a community‐led initiative during the War on Poverty, as one of the first programs to receive funding from the Office of Economic Opportunity.

      A group of volunteer parents and their children would spend a few Saturdays a month with us. We'd dig through history books, as they helped us contextualize the lacking information on African American experiences our classrooms were neglecting to share. We learned about the economic and cultural contributions of Black Americans. We designed projects centered around group economics and how building community wasn't just a nice thing to do, but was part of our responsibility to work together to progress and support our neighbors. We hosted car washes, where we would sell stock in our informal business to our family members in order to help us purchase supplies. We developed business plans using a curriculum designed by the national student entrepreneurship education program Junior Achievement.

      I hated not being able to sleep in on Saturday mornings. Instead of letting me watch cartoons and eat cereal, Mom dragged me to class, or a board meeting, or anything that did not include me staying home and playing with my friends.

      Looking back, I now appreciate the environment and understand the privilege of learning and growing in the community I did, and the intentionality our parents instilled as they shared responsibility in our growth, development, and leadership.

Delaney was just one of many groups that defined Black Seattle and my learning experience. Black legacy organizations like the Delta Sigma Theta and Alpha Kappa Alpha sororities spent time in local schools helping young Black girls explore college options. The National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) chapters of professionals set up groups at select schools across the city to help connect students to professionals in engineering who looked like them.

      Black Seattle worked hard to ensure that Black and brown kids growing up in a mostly white city had access to cultural as well as educational opportunities they might not otherwise have experienced.

      Annual fundraising efforts to take students on tours of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) were organized by alums, and local organizations that aided in exposing students to college options helped to cover fees. Black‐owned businesses like the Wellington Tea Room in Columbia City served as a staple for Black community gatherings, parties, fundraisers, nightlife, and debutante balls.

      Family friends with elder children became immediate surrogate older siblings and mentors, filling me with stories about the software games and programs they were developing at their respective schools and boasting about their co‐op and internship programs at companies like General Electric. They filled me with dreams of a life of success and capabilities through what I could build with my mind and my hands—just like my grandfather.

      Fortunately, I would get a chance to do just that.

Just before I was set to enter high school, Mom grabbed a flyer off a community board at one of my after‐school programs. A technology training program through a nonprofit called the Technology Access Foundation was accepting students for its program teaching computer literacy and programming languages, and providing college readiness and mentorship support. The program was just four years old at the time, launched in 1996, and was quietly changing the trajectory of some of Seattle's most vulnerable families. As the story went, Trish Millines Dziko retired from Microsoft as a senior software engineer and was making it her mission to help kids of color learn about and get into the field of technology.

      The program would provide training, paid internship opportunities, college prep support, and a $1,000 scholarship for each year of program completion. Best of all, there was no cost to families. For a single parent who needed to keep a rambunctious teenage daughter busy and on the road to college (with added financial support, of course), my mom needed little coercion to add my name to Millines Dziko's initiative.

      I was accepted and started the introduction to technology programs, taking apart and learning the different components of the computer, eventually spending time learning things like C# programming, a bit of JavaScript, ASP.NET, and my favorite class, network administration.

      TAF ran the duration of the school year, with summers dedicated to paid internships with local technology companies. Twice per week, I'd hop the 48 bus from Franklin High School in Seattle's South End and get off at Judkins and 23rd in front of Parnell's corner store in the Central District—the same community in which I'd attended the Delaney Learning Center just a few short years prior. Classes ran from 3:30 to 5:30, which meant long days juggling classes and homework and taking the bus back home to the South End.

      Both were predominately Black and brown neighborhoods of mixed‐income economic situations and social paradoxes, harboring stories of gang violence and community picnics, Black, Hispanic, and Asian‐owned businesses contrasted with street‐corner weed dealers, poverty, and affluence.

Beyond the offered classes, TAF also provided SAT test prep, interview techniques, and resume building, and even took us on tours of local colleges. It was kind of like the Motown of training centers—they taught us how to walk and talk and land opportunities afforded to very few teenagers in the city. Between the fall of 1997 and spring of 2008, TAF trained 500 Seattle‐area high school students of color within its technical teens internship program.

      Today, the TAF Academy is a public 6th‐ through 12th‐grade learning campus and operates as one of the leading public STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) schools and consults with school districts around the country. Over 75 percent of the students are students of color, and many come from households where English is not their first language. Over 95 percent of students graduate on time and 100 percent of students are accepted to a two‐year or four‐year college.

      TAF also runs a fellowship program teaching a body of diverse current and future instructors' best practices for delivering a STEM curriculum to kids of color. Two of my cousins attended and graduated from both the middle and high school programs.

Redlined to Regulation

      I spent a great deal of time between the South End of Seattle and the Central District. This wasn't an accident. Most of Seattle's Black and brown communities lived between these two neighborhoods.

Seattle was no exception to the racial covenants that were established as early as the 1920s to prevent ethnic minorities from purchasing or living in homes and other property in certain neighborhoods. Before federal anti‐discriminatory housing laws and the Fair Housing Act were enacted in 1968, people of color in Seattle were relegated to housing in Seattle's International Districts, the Central Area, and other neighborhoods bordering downtown. Even with laws being in place to prevent these restrictions since the 1940s, Realtors and sellers would not sell to Indigenous, Black, Asian, Italian, or Jewish Americans.

      In the 1960s, Seattle was roughly 92 percent white. Over 60 percent of the Black population pushed into Seattle's Central District (the CD, as it was called colloquially). By the 1970s, that number had swelled to 73 percent Black residents.

      Despite its densely populated area close to downtown, amid the suburbs, it was an undesirable location outside of the Black community. The area anchored Black homeowners and their families, as well as the Black business community.

      My grandfather purchased his first home with his second

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