Rutgers University Press’ engaging, accomplished graphic interpretation of The Souls of Black Folk confirms it as W.E.B. DuBois most prescient and indelible work.
This is what could have been. If the computer geeks at MIT in 1960 had just held on just a little while longer with the Mississippi freedom riders. If uprisings in Watts, and Detroit, and Newark and Kansas City did not make Black people the computing revolution’s first problem to solve. If Black people had averted the collision between civil rights and computing technology that Willard Wirtz once predicted. If Black people had bothered to seriously engage Roy Wilkins’ admonition to “computerize the race problem.” This talk will walk the attendees through the alternative black technological futures that some had already begun to imagine and design more than fifty years ago. Who, what and why were those futures foreclosed upon, and how did they impact the tech present? Can Black people still salvage our former technological dreams to imagine – and realize – a different kind of Black future?