LAUSR

Histories of the 1960s revolution in digital electronic computing might mention student antiwar protests or how groups self-consciously aligned with the “counterculture” repurposed technology for their own aims, but rarely do they center the Black Freedom Movement. Pursuing the origins of today’s online social justicemovements has ledmedia and communications scholar Charlton D. McIlwain to a bold revision of this white-dominated narrative. “Black software,” the author’s concept, expresses a kind of polarity—perhaps even a binary. On the one hand, he refers to entrepreneurial experiments in computer networking by activists and business moguls to promote Black cultural exchange that have been all but erased from popular histories of the Internet; on the other, the computerized policing programs promoted by policymakers who framed Black people as a problem in need of a technological fix in response to the urban uprisings of the 1960s. Over 17 chapters that move back and forth across the past 60 years, McIlwain considers whether Black software can “outrun. . .the core programming” of white supremacy (p. 8). Book One follows a group of Black entrepreneurs McIlwain labels “the Vanguard” from the 1970s through the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, highlighting the diversity of ways they worked with computing technology. The paths of Derrick Brown and William Murrell illustrate how educational institutions and corporations selectively promoted access to computing. As a graduate student at Georgia Tech, Brown took the academic road but created the Universal Black Pages, a World Wide Web search directory of Black content. Murrell was a businessman who read the writing on the wall as an IBM technician and left to found Boston’s MetroServe Computer Corporation in 1983, a store and service provider that connected other members of the Vanguard to hardware. McIlwain shows his strengths as a communications scholar through his focus on Black women “connectors”—in the popular verbiage of Malcolm Gladwell—highlighting figures like Anita Brown, the techno-skeptic founder of Black Geeks Online, and Farai Chideya, founder of the early blog PopandPolitics. He reiterates the case for users as creators of the social infrastructure that enabled the Internet to take off. Beyond the group biography approach, Black Software offers a tantalizing glimpse into flawed student organizing and administrative indifference around integration and affirmative action in the 1960s at two of the signal institutions of modern computing: IBM and MIT. Efforts by IBM to integrate its predominantly white workforce through training programs and a feeder plant in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn showed early promise. However, McIlwain argues, halting efforts by elite universities—MIT in particular—to diversify their student bodies made it such that a generation of elite Black technologists never came about (p. 22). Though at times McIlwain risks repeating the extant literature’s preoccupation with MIT, Chapter Three’s account of the struggles to maintain a sit-in movement there is downright compelling. In another evocative section, McIlwain describes cocaine as “the perfect metaphor for black software” (p. 145). Expensive powder fueled the white business lifestyle and aspirations of Silicon Valley, while more affordable, purified crack was coded poor, Black, and disproportionately criminal through punitive legislation—same substance, dramatically different social impact. To this end, the book’s middle chapters unpack the often-criticized notion of a “digital divide” by narrating how businessmen and politicians framed questions of Black people’s access to computing and 1058-618