In celebration of Black History Month, I have been reflecting on what my scholarship might have to say about the history of African American computer programmers. I have posted previously about race, class, and gender in history of computing, but that was many years ago, and there have been some exciting developments in the literature in the past few years.

When I was writing The Computer Boys, there was almost no literature available on the intersection of race and computing. Nor was there much data to be found in the primary sources.

In their analysis of data the 1970 Census and the Department of Labor’s Area Wage Surveys, Bruce Gilchrist and Richard Weber suggested that out of a total of 161,337 working programmers in the United States, 5,837 (3.6%) were African American. Of male programmers (124,956 total), just 3.2% (4,008) were African American. Of female programmers (36,381 total), slightly more than 5% (1,829) were women.¹Bruce Gilchrist and Richard Weber, “Enumerating Full-Time P Communications of the ACM 17, no. 10 (1974): 592–593.

The 1970 Census data also tracked programmer’s of “Spanish heritage”. There were 2,957 male programmers and 602 female programmers in this category.

I have already written about why I think the official numbers underestimate the total number of working programmers. Given the fluidity and limitations of racial categories in Census data in this period, I have similar concerns about this data.

In addition to purely quantitative data, there were indications in my historical sources of not only the contributions of African Americans, but to some interesting questions related to race and computing. For example, in the late 1960s, during a time a particularly visible and violent racial strife, there were several attempts to provide programmer training to black communities. But while some of these were legitimate (and a few were government-sponsored) there were also a number of exploitative vocational schools that preyed on Black communities. In Chapter 3 (“Chess Players, Music Lovers, and Mathematicians”) of the book I write about the larger phenomenon of these schools and their problematic reputation within the industry.

Update: the artist ann haeyoung is developing an oral history project on the IBM Black Workers Alliance that overlaps with the period I cover in book. This is a fascinating project! I had no idea this group existed.

Since The Computer Boys was published, there are a number of histories of Black programmers that have been written. The most prominent of these is Margot Shetterly’s 2016 book Hidden Figures (dramatized in the film, also from 2016), which tells the stories of some of the African American women who worked as “human computers” and programmers in the space program.²Shetterly, Margot Lee. 2016. Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the African American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race. HarperCollins The film in particular focused on just three of these (Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson), but there were many others: Christine Darden, Annie Easley, Melba Roy Mouton, Jeanette A. Scissum, to name just a few.³See for example Jade Reyerson, “Places of Hidden Figures: Black Women Mathematicians in Aeronautics and the Space Race,” National Park Services. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/places-of-hidden-figures.htm

One of the earliest scholarly discussions of race and computing in the scholarly literature is Arvid Nelson’s “Race and Computing: The Problem of Sources, the Potential of Prosopography, and the Lesson of Ebony Magazine,” which was published in 2017 in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.⁴Nelsen, R. Arvid. 2017. “Race and Computing: The Problem of Sources, the Potential of Prosopography, and the Lesson of Ebony Magazine.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 39 (1): 29–51. I was editor-in-chief of the Annals at that point, and so can say definitively that in the almost four decades that that journal served the journal of record for the history of computing community, that was the first article that explicitly addressed the historiography of race and computing.

More recently, there are a number of scholarly articles and books that deal with questions of race and computing. A few of these are historical, although most deal with more contemporary issues. Here are a few that focus specifically on the African American experience.

Eglash, Ron. 2002. “Race, Sex, and Nerds: From Black Geeks to Asian American Hipsters.” Social Text 2 (20): 49–64.

Browne, Simone. 2015. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness.

Shetterly, Margot Lee. 2016. Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the African American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race. HarperCollins

Williams, Jeannette, Yolande Dickerson, The Invisible Cryptologists: African-Americans, WWII to 1956. United States, National Security Agency/Central Security Service, and Center for Cryptologic History. 2001.

Noble, Safiya Umoja. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism.

Brock, André L. 2019. Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures.

Benjamin, Ruha. 2019. Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge: Polity.

McIlwain, Charlton D. 2020. Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter.

Katz, Yarden. 2020. Artificial Whiteness: Politics and Ideology in Artificial Intelligence. Columbia University Press.

Also, since African American inventiveness is not a recent phenomenon, here are a few classics from the history of technology

James, Portia P., and Anacostia Neighborhood Museum. 1990. The Real McCoy: African-American Invention and Innovation, 1619-1930. Washington, D.C.: Published for the Anacostia Museum of the Smithsonian Institution by the Smithsonian Institution Press.

Fouché, Rayvon. 2005. Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation: Granville T. Woods, Lewis H. Latimer, and Shelby J. Davidson. JHU Press.

Sinclair, Bruce, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 2004. Technology and the African-American Experience: Needs and Opportunities for Study. Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Green, Venus. 2001. Race on the Line: Gender, Labor, and Technology in the Bell System, 1880-1980. Durham: Duke Univ. Press.

Follow

• 1
  Bruce Gilchrist and Richard Weber, “Enumerating Full-Time P Communications of the ACM 17, no. 10 (1974): 592–593.
• 2
  Shetterly, Margot Lee. 2016. Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the African American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race. HarperCollins
• 3
  See for example Jade Reyerson, “Places of Hidden Figures: Black Women Mathematicians in Aeronautics and the Space Race,” National Park Services. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/places-of-hidden-figures.htm
• 4
  Nelsen, R. Arvid. 2017. “Race and Computing: The Problem of Sources, the Potential of Prosopography, and the Lesson of Ebony Magazine.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 39 (1): 29–51.

A recent article in the New York Times described an innovative vocational training program recently launched by Pathways in Technology Early College High School in Brooklyn, New York.   In this six-year program that provides both a high-school degree and an associate’s degree, students pursue an alternative path towards careers in the computer industry.  The curriculum was developed in part with help from IBM.

The idea that a traditional college degree was not necessary (or even appropriate) for training in the computer fields is not new.   From almost the very beginning of the computer industry, the pressing demand for programmers, and the unique nature of the skill-set that seemed to be required by programmers, caused considerable concern about how to train programmers cheaply and effectively.  Much of the Computer Boys book is, in fact, about the various responses to this perceived problem, which included the widespread use of aptitude testing and personality profiles, as well as the formation of vocational schools.  The resemblance of the history to the program described in the recent NY Times article is not the subject of this particular post.

What struck me most about the NY Times piece was not the article itself but the accompanying images.  All of the students in these images are either black or Hispanic.  In part this reflects the demographics of the Brooklyn neighborhood in which the Pathways High School is located, but the total absence of white faces is a reminder of one of the unanswered questions in the history of computing: namely, what about race and class?   As anyone who has studied any of the social sciences knows, race, class, and gender represent the holy triumvirate of analytical categories.  It is often productive to ask questions about any (and all) of this trinity, because interesting answers almost always result.

In recent years the history of computing has done a much better job dealing with gender.   Race and class, however, are still almost invisible.  When I present on my work on gender and computing, and talk about the ways in which the computer industry, in its infancy, at least, was unusually open to women, I will frequently get a follow-up question about race.  Presumably the same openness and lack of barriers to entry that made programming appealing to women would have made it equally appealing to other minorities, the questioner implies.  This is an excellent question, and I wish I had a better answer…

There is some evidence that computer programming was perhaps more open to non-whites than other technical professions.  Particularly for those who equated “programming” with “coding” (that is to say, low-skilled, largely mechanical labor), the use of ethnic minority workers (like female workers) represented a way to inexpensively increase the output of the “software factory.”  A number of high schools, often in the southern states, started vocational programs aimed at training African-American youth to work in the computer industry.  In fact, in 1967 the New York Times published a piece on a Commerce Department program that is striking similar to it recent 2012 article.  The target of the Commerce Department program was “boys from lower economic levels,” but again the accompanying photo was of a young black man.¹ Joseph Loftus, “Commerce Agency Trains Youths on Computers, New York Times,  Aug 13, 1967. A few years earlier, the Times had published another piece whose headline claimed “Computer Seen as a Boon to Negro.”²  William Smith, “Computer Seen as Boon to Negro, New York Times,  Dec 4, 1964  The argument was that although automation might be disproportionately affecting African-Americans, it also potentially promised them new opportunities working as computer programmers: “Computer people are in short supply, and if a company needs a good programmer, they don’t care what his race, creed, or color are as long as he can do the job.”

The language of this last piece is strikingly similar to that used to describe the opportunities for women.   But whereas getting data on women in the computing professions is difficult, getting data on race is almost impossible.  The earliest data I have is from the 1970 census, which noted that, out of 161,337 total programmers, 5,837 (3.6%) were black and 3,559 (2.2%) were Hispanic.   For the formative first few decades of the computer industry, I have nothing but anecdotal data.

It is clear, however, that just as computer programming was made masculine over the course of the 1970s (in the sense that the idealized stereotype of the programmer was transformed from female to male), computer programming also became increasingly white (again, if not in numeric terms, at least as a cultural category).  The sociologist Ron Eglash has a beautiful piece on contemporary attitudes towards race and computing entitled “Race, Sex and Nerds: from Black Geeks to Asian-American Hipsters” that I use all the time in my teaching.  But a larger history of race in computing has still to be undertaken.  Graduate students, be aware!

Follow

• 1
  Joseph Loftus, “Commerce Agency Trains Youths on Computers, New York Times,  Aug 13, 1967
• 2
    William Smith, “Computer Seen as Boon to Negro, New York Times,  Dec 4, 1964