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Dr. David R. Hedgley, Jr. and Other Genius with Strong African Features

This is our designated month to celebrate African people. We speak the words “Black History Month” in the English of our captivity to commemorate people who accomplished the incredible.

The world of computer technology is not ‘free’ (in the Bush sense of the word) from African accomplishments. BDPA-Nevada member Mr James I Neusom reminds us of Dr. David R. Hedgley, Jr.:

In 1985 he solved the decades old problem of computer graphics by developing the mathematical algorithm that would tell computers which lines on a computer screen could and couldn’t be seen from various perspectives (or what we call today 3D). As he explained in the March 1986 issue of Ebony magazine, “The program came under immediate fire from the scientific community and was not accepted for at least a year. There were people in the field who had constantly begged the issue,” Hedgley recalls, “They gave me a hard time saying we don’t believe you. Being a Black man your credibility is questioned anyway.”

This level of achievement does not surprise me because I know who did not build the pyramids of the Old Kingdom. I make the effort to quote this trained professional referring to himself as Black—and referring to having problems because of it. I have since learned the hard, hard way that people who clearly have strong African features may not want to be associated with Black being. Sometimes our geniuses are “too smart” to get into this Black ‘thing’ so I take care to not disappoint these sophisticated agents of change with my ‘cartoon drawings’ of African suffering.

In the early days of my computing life I was so very pleased to see other people of African inheritance—especially people of my generation (the personal-computer generation—not the punch card elders of FORTRAN and COBOL). I have since found the hard, hard way that my pleasure would be short lived and the more ‘reasonable’ feeling of belonging religiously to a ‘larger’ society instead of ‘clinging’ to a ‘distant’ past has quite a life of its own. This is a stiff necked people.

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