
graphite · the person, and the ground they chose
PLATE I · THE KINGS
David L.
Steward
World Wide Technology · the boy from the wrong side of the tracks who built the company that connects the world
He grew up on the far side of a Missouri railroad track, in a house with no indoor plumbing, barred from the town pool — and he named the company he built World Wide Technology, because the one thing the tracks taught him was that division does not work. In the lean years a collection agency repossessed his car right out of the company parking lot, and he never once missed a payroll — he carried his people through his own humiliation. The largest Black-owned company in America was built by a man who decided early that the wall between people was a lie, and spent his life wiring around it.
The drawing is how we see them; the photograph is the proof we looked. Co-founded World Wide Technology in St. Louis, 1990 · car repossessed in 1993 — payroll never missed · “I literally lived on the other side of the railroad tracks — but I learned that division doesn't work.”