Black Americans helped bring us men on the moon, online gaming, donate-by-text systems, and so much more. Read below for four exemplary Black achievements in tech.
Black Americans and Groundbreaking Tech
Hidden Figures helped us understand the important role Black women played in NASA’s early work. Meet another essential contributor to space exploration: mathematician Evelyn Boyd Granville, who helped program the mission that first put humans on the moon.
Boyd Granville became the second African American woman to earn a PhD in mathematics in the U.S., in 1949, and later joined IBM as a programmer. Eventually, she worked with NASA to plan the flight paths of manned space missions, including Vanguard, Mercury, and eventually Apollo. She also taught at UCLA, Texas College, and University of Texas.
She was honored during her lifetime by the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, and was awarded an honorary doctorate by Spelman College. She died last summer at the age of 99.
Do you like playing games online and streaming Hulu shows? Of course you do. Thank Lisa Gelobter, who invented Shockwave while working at Macromedia, and went on work in senior management on the launch of Hulu.
Gelobter also worked on digital initiatives in the Department of Education during the Obama administration, and founded tEQuitable, a platform designed to address issues of bias and inequity in the workplace.
If you throw a stone in the tech industry, there’s a 98.3% chance the person it hits will be someone other than a Black woman. That’s right: only 1.7% of positions in the tech industry are occupied by Black women.
After struggling to find any coding classes that felt welcoming to her daughter, electrical engineer Kimberly Bryant set out to even the odds. In 2011, she founded Black Girls Code, a nonprofit focused “introducing Black and brown girls ages 7-17 to computer programming to ignite their interest in technology and change the face of STEM.”
Black Girls Code has served over 30,000 girls through 15 chapters across the United States and South Africa. Is it working? Maybe so! Considering that in 2011, only 0.5% of positions in tech were held by Black women, the situation has improved considerably since the organization’s founding.
Marion Croak is a formidable force in tech. She was responsible for developing VoIP and a number of other essential internet technologies. She’s also responsible for enabling more than $43 million in donations in support of Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, and every other fund you’ve donated to via text message.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and inspired by American Idol’s recently developed vote-by-text system, Croak co-created the technology we now know as text-to-give or text-to-donate. This fundraising method is now standard for charities, churches, and campaigns, allowing fundraisers to collect relief donations immediately in response to disasters, and be responsive to news cycles.
