Activists,
pundits, politicians, and the press frequently proclaim today's
digitally mediated racial justice activism the new civil rights
movement. As Charlton D. McIlwain shows in this book, the story of
racial justice movement organizing online is much longer and varied
than most people know. In fact, it spans nearly five decades and
involves a varied group of engineers, entrepreneurs, hobbyists,
journalists, and activists. But this is a history that is virtually
unknown even in our current age of Google, Facebook, Twitter, and
Black Lives Matter.
Beginning
with the simultaneous rise of civil rights and computer revolutions
in the 1960s, McIlwain, for the first time, chronicles the long
relationship between African Americans, computing technology, and the
Internet. In turn, he argues that the forgotten figures who worked to
make black politics central to the Internet's birth and evolution
paved the way for today's explosion of racial justice activism. From
the 1960s to present, the book examines how computing technology has
been used to neutralize the threat that black people pose to the
existing racial order, but also how black people seized these new
computing tools to build community and wealth, and to wage a war for
racial justice.Through archival sources and the voices of many of
those who lived and made this history, Black
Software
centralizes African Americans' role in the Internet's creation and
evolution, illuminating both the limits and possibilities for using
digital technology to push for racial justice in the United
States
and across the globe.