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NetNoir and the Afrocentric Web

Abstract

Before the web, Black computer users built their own corners of the online world: a network of Black-owned bulletin boards known as the Afronet, the AfroLink HyperCard disks that the lawyer and artist Kamal Al Mansour made on a Macintosh SE from the late 1980s, and GO AFRO, a CompuServe forum that opened in 1994. NetNoir, launched on America Online on Juneteenth 1995 by E. David Ellington and Malcolm CasSelle with $500,000 from AOL’s Greenhouse programme, carried the idea onto AOL and then the web. All of them were gone or sold by the early 2000s, outspent in a market that had become commercial. Their audience moved to BlackPlanet in 1999 and, a decade later, to what Twitter users began calling Black Twitter.

AfroLink

Kamal Al Mansour grew up in Los Angeles, in the Lafayette Square neighbourhood, drawing from the age of five. A civil-rights lawyer across the street talked him out of an art major, and he graduated from UCLA in political science in 1981, then took a law degree at UC Hastings in San Francisco. His first job was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, negotiating technology-transfer and software licence agreements, where he was the only Black lawyer on his floor. Conversations with a cousin who had worked in tech in Germany started him filling notebooks with information about Africa and the Caribbean that he could not find in American reference works.

His first venture took its name from a put-down. “CP time”, colored people’s time, was the joke about Black people arriving late. He registered CPTime as a trademark and turned it around: it was time for people of colour to be online. CPTime On-Line was a dial-up bulletin board. In 1985, as he remembers it, he bought his first computer, a Macintosh (he recalls it as a Mac Plus, a model Apple released only in January 1986), and drew artwork for the brochures and flyers his partner laid out on it for soul-food restaurants, beauty salons and the new Afrocentric shops; within a while he had a hundred images, then more than three hundred, sold as CPTime Clip Art.

The software came from a television programme. Working by then for GTE’s Government Systems Division in Boston, he saw a Princeton professor on PBS demonstrating an interactive program called Culture. “You’re calling it Culture, but you’re showing Michelangelo. You’re showing DaVinci,” he said later. “I’m not seeing pyramids. I’m not seeing the Sphinx.” He sat down that night with HyperCard, which came free with the Mac, made a button that flashed and played a sound when clicked, and in the next few nights storyboarded what he first called Mac Africa. It shipped as Africa Insight, a HyperCard stack on three 3.5-inch disks, followed by Who We Are, hundreds of questions and answers on Black civilisations, and later Caribbean Insight, Afro-American Insight, a program on Islam and Pride and Purpose, about self-esteem for Black children from kindergarten to sixth grade. The company was AfroLink Software.

The first customer was Molefi Kete Asante, the Temple University scholar of Afrocentricity, who read about the disks in Emerge magazine, called, asked what was ready and what it cost, and sent a cheque. Coverage in Black Enterprise, MacWEEK and the Seattle Times followed after Al Mansour moved to Washington State and made AfroLink his full-time work; a two-minute CNN segment around 1994 brought orders from Australia, Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, the Caribbean and West Africa. The disks were ported to MS-DOS. The bulletin board, which needed a modem and patience, lost its users to the disks.

The Afronet and GO AFRO

The Afronet was the name for a loose FidoNet-style network of Black-owned dial-up bulletin boards that linked college towns with their surrounding communities from the 1980s to the mid-1990s (see The BBS Era). William Murrell, one of IBM’s early Black engineers and later owner of MetroServe, Boston’s largest computer store, advertised his SpiritDatatree board and its “Blackware” forum in Boston’s Bay State Banner in April 1992.

In February 1994 the magazine American Visions co-hosted a Capitol Hill summit with the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation on “African Americans in the Telecommunications Age”. Timothy Jenkins put its premise this way: “We who were the victims of the technology revolution in agriculture… cannot afford to be bypassed by the multimedia communications revolution.” Al Mansour demonstrated AfroLink at a Caucus Foundation conference that year and came away finding no politician interested in what Black technologists were building.

On 6 May 1994 CompuServe opened GO AFRO, a forum owned by American Visions and run by Murrell, with message boards and live chats with writers and celebrities. It had passed 68,000 posted messages by March 1995. A survey in October 1996 counted 13,000 members, 77 percent of them men. The forum closed in May 1999, when CompuServe had been absorbed into AOL.

NetNoir

E. David Ellington, born in New York in 1960, had worked for the House Subcommittee on Africa and as an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles. A friend introduced him to Malcolm CasSelle, ten years younger, who had studied computer science at MIT, worked for NTT in Tokyo and was a graduate student at Stanford. They launched NetNoir on America Online on Juneteenth, 19 June 1995, billed as “The Cybergateway to Afrocentric Culture”, with $500,000 from AOL’s Greenhouse programme, which invested in outside content companies for the service (see The AOL Era). AOL members typed the keyword NetNoir to reach sections on music, sports, education and business. In July 1995 the journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault interviewed Haiti’s president Jean-Bertrand Aristide there online, and Fortune listed NetNoir among its 25 “cool companies” of the year. CasSelle’s line on the audience was: “This is by Black people, but it’s for everyone.”

The pages were built by two people. Lettie McGuire, the art director and programmer, hired Sean O’Connor, a New York designer of Jamaican parentage, as assistant art director in 1996. On AOL they had to work in Rainman, AOL’s own page language, in which “one site looked like another”; the web version that followed in 1996 let them design freely. Motown and Vibe supplied music content, the sprinter Carl Lewis wrote on sport, and the site had member profiles and chat rooms when most of the web did not. The Black History Month spotlight of 1997 covered the Harlem Renaissance, the Atlantic slave trade, African American folklore and Frederick Douglass. McGuire and O’Connor were also in the 1996 beta test of FutureSplash, the animation tool that became Flash.

By late 1997 the founders were in the office less often, other Black-oriented sites had appeared, and New York’s Silicon Alley was competing for the same advertisers and investors. O’Connor’s section was shut down and he was let go. In August 2001 eChapman, an African American internet company in Baltimore, bought NetNoir’s net assets, mostly for stock and without its liabilities. NetNoir.com and its shopping site Blackshopping.com reached about a million people between them; their operation moved to Baltimore.

What Came After

AfroLink fell to the same shift. Schools that had budgeted for its disks three years earlier were only just getting the money, while their students were being told that information on the internet was free. Al Mansour turned down a purchase offer from the CD-ROM publisher Davidson & Associates out of loyalty to his customers; within a short time CD-ROM publishing as a whole was collapsing (see Britannica and the CD-ROM Encyclopedias). He went back to law and later spent fifteen years in Silicon Valley.

BlackPlanet, started by Omar Wasow and Benjamin Sun on 1 September 1999, took the community side further, with 6 million unique visitors a month by 2008, when Radio One bought it with its sister sites for $38 million. In November 2009 Choire Sicha of The Awl, commonly credited with coining the term, gave a name to the dense, late-night conversations among Black users of Twitter: Black Twitter (see The Social Media Revolution). The historian Charlton McIlwain, whose 2019 book Black Software reconstructed this history, put the outcome bluntly: the Black pioneers had the skills, but “people who had more money simply overtook us.”

Dead End

None of these ventures failed for want of an audience. AfroLink’s disks sold to customers on four continents, GO AFRO had thousands of members and NetNoir reached a million people. Each was built on a medium that was ending: the bulletin board, the floppy and CD-ROM title, the walled online service. When AOL and CompuServe lost to the open web, the content deals and forums they hosted went with them, and building a web company in 1997 to 2000 meant raising venture money at a scale none of these founders had access to. Their users did not leave the internet; they moved to platforms that other people owned.

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