African-American Inventors

Reggie Lindsey

Computer Analyst and Computing & Telecommunications Systems

Five-year-old Reggie Lindsey was playing alone on the woodpile behind his grandparents' house near Little Rock, AK, one afternoon in 1962 when the overheated passions of the civil rights movement spilled over into his life. He heard a commotion out front and got to the porch in time to see a black youth approach the passenger side of a white man's truck and shoot into the window with a double-barreled shotgun. The shot missed the driver, spraying Lindsey in the head and chest from a distance of less than 15 feet. The last thing he ever saw was his grandfather running down the street to call an ambulance.

Lindsey spent the next three weeks in a coma, and a total of 10 months in the hospital. "I didn't go home till they just gave up," he says. "They said I'd never walk or see again." They were half right. About 18 months later, he climbed down off a chair, let go, and started putting one foot in front of the other.

Still, he says, "My mother was apathetic. She thought I would never amount to anything." Despite his insistence that he would grow up to be a doctor or lawyer, she refused to send him to the school for the blind in Little Rock until a social worker convinced her he could always come home if it didn't work out.

In the beginning, Lindsey had his own doubts. He was the only black student in his class during the first year of integration, and even his own teacher wanted no part of him. "She put me over to the side to play with Tinker Toys while the other kids were learning," he says. Another teacher stopped two girls from escorting him to the gym on his first day, abandoning him in the hall to "wait and wait and wait" for help. "I thought maybe my mom was right," he says, "maybe I didn't belong there." But she wasn't right: Twelve years later, Reggie Lindsey graduated as the school's first black valedictorian.

From there, he went on to the University of Missouri at Rolla—one of the nation's top engineering schools. "A lot of teachers were afraid of teaching a blind student," he says. Even his advisor, who had smoothed the way for him before, questioned whether Lindsey could pass physics. But the physics professor was unfazed, asking the advisor, "Well, does he have a brain?" Lindsey answered by acing the course.

When Lindsey earned his B.S. in computer science with honors in 1982, Big Business came knocking. He was deciding between IBM and Hewlett Packard when his advisor said "a company out of Oak Ridge, Tennessee" had called. Lindsey doubted ORNL could match the IBM or Hewlett Packard offers. "But," he says, "ORNL gave me the best opportunity for what I wanted to do. At IBM it would have taken two or three years to get to that point." In January 1983, he hired on.

Today, Lindsey is responsible for maintaining ORNL's electronic mail network, enabling five email systems to communicate with each other ensuring that the 50,000 messages employees send every day can negotiate the Lab's computer highways and byways. Lindsey controls it all from a workstation that includes a PC, monitor, Braille printer, and speech synthesizer that reads aloud from the screen.

Off the job, Lindsey divides his time between one public pursuit and one private one. As state president of the National Federation of the Blind, he works to help blind people become more independent, to link them with local services and jobs, and to appeal to government officials when necessary.

And while he isn't prepared to relinquish any responsibility, he has curtailed his travel schedule. The reason: two foster children entrusted to him and his blind wife, Earlenia, after their mother "dumped them at a crisis center and disappeared."

Two years ago, when the Lindseys agreed to take them in, the girl, 15 months, was experiencing exeruciating pain, probably from cocaine withdrawal; the boy, age 3, appeared to have fetal alcohol syndrome. "They were near starved and way underweight," he says. "Neither was potty trained. They had rashes, bites, everything. Both had nightmares. The pediatrician didn't expect the little boy to live." But he not only lived, he flourished. "The pediatrician was in total shock he had done so well," Lindsey says.

As always, Lindsey is in for the full ride: Later this year, he plans to file papers to adopt the children. "Determination," he says, "is the root of all success."

Be sure to read about how other African-American inventors helped shape our history and make our world what it is today.