You may have FOMO (the fear of missing out) every now and then, but what about DtMF?
DtMF stands for I should have taken more pictures (translation: “I should have taken more pictures”), wise words closing the Super Bowl LX halftime show from Grammy-winning artist Bad Bunny (whose US government name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio).
But one thing about me is that I will have “50-eleven” photos and videos of every event (like here at the YouTube Super Bowl LX Party), so DtMF is not my battle.
Anyway, the Super Bowl LX halftime show ending with Bad Bunny’s DtMF reminds me of the striking words of historian Jan Batiste Adkins“The most important thing we can do is document our history.”
With photos, videos and words we can document history
Adkins said this in regards to Santa Clara County’s black history, and specifically Santa Clara County, California, hosted this year’s “Benito Bowl,” also known as Super Bowl LX.
So in honor of the convergence of DtMF, Black History Month, and Super Bowl LX in Santa Clara County, here is just one of the many Black history figures we should all know, since Black history is American history.
Known as the ‘Godfather of Silicon Valley’ Roy Lee Clay Sr. (1929 – 2024) was recruited directly by David Packard, one of the co-founders of Hewlett-Packard (HP), which would become known as a Silicon Valley giant at the time. Subsequently, Clay was a founding member of HP’s computing division, where he led the team that developed the groundbreaking HP 2116A.
Unfortunately, when Clay (and most who were not considered white at the time) moved to Santa Clara County, he encountered significant resistance from a housing market designed to exclude him.
More specifically, the California Real Estate Association (CREA) (now known as the California Association of Realtors) led a systematic campaign to legally maintain housing segregation through project writing and financing. Proposal 14a 1964 ballot initiative designed to dismantle the fair housing protections of the Rumford Fair Housing Act of 1963 (a landmark California law that prohibited property owners and real estate agents from discriminating against homebuyers or renters on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or ancestry).
At the time, Realtor Associations effectively led legalization efforts to exclude nonwhite residents from fast-growing neighborhoods, a barrier that Americans hoping to build a home in California, like Roy Clay Sr., had to overcome with extraordinary resilience.
The Realtor Association-led passage of Prop 14 meant that even financially competent Americans (like Clay, a highly paid executive at Hewlett-Packard during its arguable heyday) were often forced (merely because of their race or some other now legally protected class) to rely on rare, honest housing developers like Joseph Eichler (who made himself famous on the ability to pay, not race or skin color) to bypass the discriminatory “gatekeepers” of the mainstream real estate market.
This illustrates how institutionalized, unfair housing practices attempted to sideline financial resources (cash) simply because of race, but fortunately there were always dissenters.
Finding fair housing advocates
In California specifically, a small, dissenting remnant of Realtor members, including some leaders (such as Richard Hallmark, a state director of the California Association of Realtors and former president of Covina Valley Board of Realtors), supported and advocated fair housing during that notoriously precarious time, as evidenced by the following excerpts from my Fair Housing DECODER seminar presentation slides.
News clippings and a letter about California’s Realtors Association’s class action against fair housing, but some members disagreed and advocated for fair housing.
For those wondering, “Why would you want to live somewhere where you are not welcome?” the short answer is the rhetorical question and the answer: “Who wants a long commute? Usually no one.”
Imagine how much worse the commute could be “from sea to shining sea” on the likes of the 405, 285, I-95, and other already busy American highways without the opportunity and access provided by fair housing. To make it simpler, if you work in an area where you have the resources, fair housing means you can also live in that area.
Ultimately, Clay’s presence in the neighborhoods of Santa Clara County, along with a small group of rogue real estate agents committed to fair housing, partially helped break the geographic segregation of the tech industry (along with the various Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s), paving the way for our current generation of diverse innovators in Silicon Valley (though there is still room for improvement).
It’s fascinating that Eichler, Hallmark, and Clay may never have fought for the various Civil Rights Acts passed in the 1960s (including Title VIII, the Fair Housing Act of 1968), but they used the day-to-day work of real estate and homeownership to protest. I hope it inspires our generation to leave housing construction fairer than we found it.
Significantly, in 2020 the The National Association of Realtors has issued a historic apology for his decades of discriminatory policies that promoted unfair housing, followed in 2022 by the California Association of Realtorswhich specifically apologized for its “shameful” role in spearheading Proposition 14 and other exclusionary practices that significantly hindered Black Americans’ ability to build generational wealth, which Clay has continued to witness since he died in 2024 at age 95.
This move toward institutional accountability was echoed by several other organizations, including the Real Estate Agents in Minneapolis Area (2021), Atlanta Realtors Association (2021), St.Louis Realtors (2022) and preceded by the Chicago Association of Realtors (2018)all of which have formally recognized their historic role in promoting inequitable housing and the exclusion of Americans from the real estate profession based solely on race, gender, or some other now-protected class – protected as a result of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement and subsequent acts and future amendments.
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