America was deeply segregated when Jackie Robinson broke into major league baseball in 1947. A year prior to his debut at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers, at least half a dozen blacks were lynched in the South. The president of the Brooklyn Dodgers at the time was a man named Branch Rickey. Rickey, known… Continue reading A Lasting Legacy
Author: willie jackson
Follow Your Passions: Career Lessons with Adam Saint-Prix
This article is sponsored by Atlassian as a part of our Companies That Care initiative. For the past five years, Adam Saint-Prix has enjoyed a fulfilling career in Silicon Valley. You might expect him to have studied at Stanford before taking the role of his choice, but you’d be sorely mistaken. The real story is… Continue reading Follow Your Passions: Career Lessons with Adam Saint-Prix
A Slave’s Christmas Story
Solomon Northup was a free black man from Minerva, New York who married the love of his life on Christmas Day in 1829. Northup was born in July of 1808 to a freed slave, Mintus, and a “woman of color” (reportedly one-quarter African-American, and three-quarters European) whose name is unknown. He was raised on the… Continue reading A Slave’s Christmas Story
Do Companies Care?
When Abernathy launched in January, I had a clear idea of who I wanted to reach and the kind of change I wanted to make in their lives. My thesis was that black men must take control of our own narratives, and that an online platform was a great way to quickly facilitate this. What… Continue reading Do Companies Care?
And Then There Were Three
Garfield asked me to write a letter of recommendation recently, and here’s what I said: It’s not uncommon for me to agree to write a letter of recommendation, but rarely is it such an honor and a pleasure to do so. I’ve known Garfield for ten years, which gives me a sound perspective to evaluate… Continue reading And Then There Were Three
Abernathy Man: umi selah
Abernathy Man is a series that spotlights remarkable black men and the work they’re doing. When starting Abernathy, we were shocked at just how pervasive the subjugation of black women by black men in the movement is. We weren’t prepared for it, especially when black women were reticent to work with us after having been… Continue reading Abernathy Man: umi selah
Making the Extraordinary Commonplace
I owe much of my technology career and many of my technical skills to the magic that occurs at the intersection of curiosity and opportunity. My career as a web performance engineer started with a friend asking me if I could host a WordPress website that her friend owned. He was a busy law student… Continue reading Making the Extraordinary Commonplace
Makers
Making things is hard. Making things with technology is even harder. Where do you start? What technologies do you use? Who can you trust? In my lifetime, I’ve witnessed dramatic shifts in the rate of technological innovation, and it only appears to be accelerating. Want to create a personal web page? That’s easy. Need a… Continue reading Makers
Seeing things through
I built my first website in 2005 for a class project. I was an information technology major and my class was tasked with building an “Interactive Resume” (in essence, a personal website). After hacking together my site using a free HTML and CSS template, I could have collected my passing grade and moved on to… Continue reading Seeing things through
It takes a village
Over the years, I’ve made it a point to prioritize experiences over income. This isn’t to say that these things are mutually exclusive, but the decision tree is pretty simple when you don’t know what you don’t know. Looking back, I’m pleased with the results of this focus. Anything I’ve left on the table in… Continue reading It takes a village