Black Pioneers In The High-Tech World

Ebony, June, 2000

THERE has been a lot of talk about the "digital divide," a chasm between the Internet access of Whites and Blacks. But less known are the stories of Black pioneers who are shaping the future with their successes--people like John W. Thompson, the first Black CEO of a major Silicon Valley firm. And 28-year-old Darien Dash, whose Digital Mafia Entertainment Interactive Holdings Inc. (www.dmeinteractive.com) is the first Black-owned publicly traded Internet company. And Air Force veteran Earl Stafford who founded Unitech, Inc., a multimillion-dollar military technology firm in Fairfax, Va.

The visionaries include scientists, executives, celebrities, professors and everyday people whose faith and dreams are carving new opportunities for Blacks. "We have been leaders in the development of the cell phone," says Yvette Moyo, president of MOBE IT (www.mobe.com) Influencers and Innovators of the Internet & Technology symposium series, a biannual technology conference. "We have been architects of the Internet. We have web sites that allow us to see ourselves in so many ways. We have taken a leadership role in everything that is being written today."

One of the biggest frontiers for Blacks has been the Internet. A 1999 U.S. Department of Commerce report, "Falling Through the Net," revealed that while more Americans are using the Internet, there are far more Whites online than Blacks and Hispanics. But there's also a more encouraging picture.

More than half of Blacks with college degrees are online. Eighty-three percent of African-Americans with household incomes over 90,000 are connected--a number slightly higher than Whites of similar incomes--says a recent poll by the Joint Center of Political and Economic Studies. That untapped community inspired people such as E. David Ellington to follow their visions for cyberspace ventures.

"I never worried about the audience," says the 39-year-old Ellington, CEO and chairman of NetNoir (www.netnoir.com), one of the first Black Internet companies. "I know Black folks will adapt to any technology and use it regularly whether it is computers, cellular phones, pagers, cable TV or boom boxes. For me it wits just a matter of time."

Ellington left his practice as a Los Angeles entertainment lawyer and joined three partners to create a global Black online community. They found seed money through a program for entrepreneurs funded by America Online and launched their Internet site on Juneteenth (June 19) 1995. But their early success was both a curse and blessing, he says. They were unprepared for the reluctance of the financial world to embrace their idea. "I first went to Black media companies and asked them to invest," he says. "But instead of investing or trying to develop the product, they wanted to buy us or close us down."

Finally, they found a Black venture capital fund that believed in their business. In its third month of operation, the site had 15,000 "hits," or page views, and became a national sensation. Today, NetNoir is a multimedia company whose web site gets tens of millions of page views each month. And it is no longer alone. "If someone would say, `I want to search for Black web sites and see what African-Americans are doing, they would be searching for days," says Moyo, whose business partner is her husband Kofi. "I just love the names --Black Voices, BlackPlanet, Black-Cyberspace. They give you a vision of what the future will be. They basically say no limit."

The Black online community includes information/portal sites such as Africana.com (www.africana.com), a Black history and culture site founded by a group of Harvard professors supported by Microsoft, Blackvoices.com (www.blackvoices.com), TheBlackworld today.com (www.tbwt.com), BlackGeeks.com (www.blackgeeks.com) and BlackPlanet.com (www.blackplanet.com), named the most visited African-American information site by Alexa, a firm that monitors traffic on the World Wide Web.

African-Americans have also made inroads in the world of e-commerce. Dwayne M. Walker heads shopnow.com (www.shopnow.com), a Seattle-based general market site whose million-dollar customers include StairMaster, Corel software and Zale's jewelers. Willie Richardson and Gwen Daye Richardson's Cushcity.com (www.cushcity.com) has become the most popular Black e-commerce site on the web.

Along with the work of Black Internet pioneers, other technological advances have come through Black scientists and engineers. Colleagues Dr. Mark Dean, IBM's director of advanced technology development, and Dr. Sandra Baylor, a master inventor in IBM'S research division, are among the new wave of Black computer architects. Dean, who designed the ISA systems bus--a device that allows modems and printers to link to computers, holds three of the nine original patents which made desktop computers available for personal use. He also directed the team of engineers responsible for building a 1,000 megahertz chip, which can complete one billion calculations per second. Dr. Baylor helped develop the prototype for IBM's chess machine, "Deep Blue." She holds seven patents and has four others pending.