I. Roots
My great-grandmother's warnings
I come from a woman born in 1920s Georgia, who carried the weight of Jim Crow in her voice. When she moved to Cleveland, the geography changed but the fear did not. When I got in trouble at school for talking back to my white teachers, she would pull me aside and warn me I could become strange fruit.
As a kid, I had no idea how much she had seen for those words to come so easily. As an adult, I understand — she was trying to keep me alive with the only tools she had: caution, fear, and love shaped by terror.
My mother in the crack era
My mother, Crystal, gave birth to me at thirteen, in 1985 — the heart of the crack epidemic. That crisis didn't just hit our neighborhood; it lived in our house. She struggled with addiction, and because of it I never really got to know her as a steady presence. Where some kids had a mother to hold them up, I had stories about who she was, and a front-row seat to what addiction can steal from a family.
Loss, forgiveness, and a name
Years later, my mother became one of the women murdered on Imperial Avenue. The headlines talked about victims and a serial killer; I was living the reality of being a son who had already lost his mother to addiction, then lost her again to violence.
I walked through grief and anger, but I didn't want her memory to stay trapped in the worst thing that ever happened to her. When I started my company, I named it Crystal Clear Solutions so that every time someone says the name, my mother's identity is tied to something built, something healing, something alive.
Crystal Clear Solutions is named for my mother, Crystal — and for the clarity and possibility she never got to fully live.
II. Awakening
Against that darkness, I found light in the people who refused to be erased. The Tuskegee Airmen flying missions a country told them they weren't fit for. The Buffalo Soldiers. The poets, painters, and musicians of the Harlem Renaissance. The Civil War and the Civil Rights movement as turning points in the long fight for dignity.
I was born less than twenty years after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. When I sit with that math, it changes how I walk into rooms. I am not removed from that era — I am the very next breath after it.
I became the first Black college graduate in my family. Trained as an engineer. Started reasoning through complex systems for a living. It felt like stepping into something my ancestors could only hope for.
III. Becoming
From engineering I moved into leadership, and then into the executive seat. The deeper I got, the more I saw that great technology is rarely the bottleneck — great people working with the right clarity is. So I poured into the people around me. Coaching engineers. Developing leaders. Designing systems that serve humans instead of the other way around.
I still carry a deep wonder for what we build: cars, planes, microscopes, satellites, the silicon and the math underneath every AI breakthrough. Curiosity is not optional for me — it is the muscle I trained as a kid standing under my grandmother's dimmer switch, trying to catch the exact moment electricity becomes light.
IV. Today
I'm married. Together we're raising five children. I walk by faith — not as a slogan, but as a daily decision to believe people carry greatness even when they cannot see it yet. I sit on the bridge between my great-grandmother's fears and my children's future, and I take that stewardship seriously.
That is the story that shows up to work every day, sits behind every architecture diagram, and signs every Crystal Clear Solutions invoice.
