Collection: Jerry Lawson & The Fairchild Channel F: The Birth of Gaming, The Legacy of a Black Genius

(On Display: 1976 Fairchild Channel F Home Video Game Console, Various Game Cartridges & Instruction Book)

Step closer and witness the legacy of Jerry Lawson, the visionary Black engineer who revolutionized the way the world plays.

I tell you this: this is more than a gaming console. This is the story of a revolution; crafted by a brilliant Black mind at a time when our presence in tech was ignored, erased, or outright denied.

In 1976, while the world was still digesting the cultural shifts of the civil rights movement, Jerry Lawson (one of the only Black engineers in Silicon Valley) designed the Fairchild Channel F, the first home gaming console with interchangeable cartridges. Yes, before Atari. Before Nintendo. Jerry Lawson was already coding the future.

What does this mean to Black America?

Everything!

It means our innovation isn’t new: it’s foundational. It means that behind every digital world we explore today, there stands a Black man whose vision made it possible. In a time when Black excellence was constantly under attack, Lawson quietly changed the world, not with protest signs, but with circuits, code, and courage.

The Channel F didn’t just entertain...it empowered! It opened the door to a multi-billion-dollar industry and said: Black brilliance built this. And even though mainstream history tried to forget him, we will not.

This console, this artifact: is sacred. It is testimony. It is resistance in plastic and wire.

Let every young Black child who scans this code know:

You come from inventors. From engineers. From revolutionaries.

You are the legacy of Jerry Lawson.

And your ideas can change the world, too.

“The real revolution is not televised...it’s coded!”

- Dr. Tracy P. Washington (Curator, United Crowns Mobile Museum of Black History & Culture)