With so many “communities” influencing the opportunities possible for an individual, it can be challenging to discern what makes a community, what communities’ matter for a history of computing, and the relationship between the community and the individual. However, as a technology that constructed the symbolic narrative of Dodson and connected that narrative to a black audience, publications like Ebony Magazine were technologies that held African-American computing communities together. Dodson, through Ebony, could influence readers like Anita Taylor to act on their dreams and work towards their “high goals.” Likewise, through the story of Dodson, a special kind of black individual was constructed. This individual, not always a “Computer Whiz Kid,” was to be emulated by the reader, reproduced in black society, and was shared by the media repeatedly. Looking at media made for and by black people, African American computing communities consisted of the audience for “The Computer Whiz Kid” and people like Robert Dodson, who allowed their stories to be shared. African American computing communities also include the organizations that decided that the black readers of Ebony in 1969 needed to meet “The Whiz Kid.”
Civil rights and black betterment organizations fighting for equality and freedom sought to create symbols of black defiance, hope, future, and success. An example of their work is Rosa Parks, who be- came a symbolic individual representing defiance and resistance to the system of inequality that bolstered the segregation system but not by chance. In 1955, civil rights organizers from the NAACP waited to find the right person to build a public legal case around. Rosa Parks was not the first person of African descent to be arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for disobeying segregation bus laws. She was, however, the one that civil rights organizers identified as being best suited for the spotlight (Tufekci 62-63).
African American computing communities consisted of an audience hungry for a better future, civil rights and black betterment organizations fighting to make opportunity possible, and the black press that deliberately connected audience and organizers to improve the status of black people in America. As the elements that comprise African American computing communities, audience, media, symbolic individuals, and civil rights organizing are also characteristic in the history of other black communities. The literature on black labor, media, activism, class, and culture of the 19th and 20th centuries purposes that the large collective “African-American community” was formed out of smaller communities (in fields of work, in neighborhoods, on HBCU and college campuses). These smaller communities networked for full citizenship, creating cultural products (literature, language, attitudes) that organized black people nationally into a people with a distinct voice in American history. First shut out of mainstream society by racist classifications as other than American, human, and citizen, the response to this willful stifling of black futures found in histories and legacies of inequality shaped black people into a demographic with unique language, culture, and politics (Foner and Lewis 511).