Barry Cooper (1956- )

September 28, 2020 
/ Contributed By: Ross Coen

|Barry Cooper

Barry Cooper

Image Courtesy: Atlanta Daily World

Barry Cooper is a journalist, technology entrepreneur, and CEO who founded BlackVoices.com, a groundbreaking website in the early days of the Internet. Cooper graduated from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He began working as a sportswriter for the Orlando Sentinel in 1993. Cooper focused on African American athletes and the culture of sports, and he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for a series about disadvantaged athletes.

In 1995 Cooper launched Black Voices, a site dedicated to African American news and culture hosted by the Orlando Sentinel on its own webpage. The site included โ€œBlack Wall,โ€ a suite of message boards on topics of interest to like-minded people. The site helped pioneer the use of user-generated content, including photos and blogs, and it functioned as one of the first dating sites on the Internet. Black Voices also partnered with the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund to host the first Black College Virtual Job Fair. In 1997, with a $5 million investment by the Tribune Company, the Orlando newspaperโ€™s parent company, Cooper moved Black Voices to its own, independent site. Within a few years it had 400,000 registered users, nearly one million total users, and 14 million page views.

AOL-Time Warner bought Black Voices in 2004, and the site was eventually moved to the Huffington Post, the companyโ€™s news, entertainment, and culture site. Although Black Voices was never Black-owned and came under criticism for its corporatization, Cooper defended the site by pointing out that at its peak in the early 2000s, 90 percent of its staff was Black. He also noted that corporate ownership mattered less than editorial autonomy, which he maintained the site enjoyed under his leadership.

Cooper received the MOBE IT Award in 1999 and 2000, which recognizes African American technology entrepreneurship.

About the Author

Author Profile

Ross Coen is an instructor in the History Department at the University of Washington. He earned his Ph.D. in history there in 2021. Dr. Coen researches the political, social, and environmental history of the American West. He is the author of three books, including Fu-Go: The Curious History of Japanโ€™s Balloon Bomb Attack on America, published by University of Nebraska Press in 2014. Since 2016, he has served as the editor of Alaska History, the peer-reviewed journal of the Alaska Historical Society. He lives in Everett, Washington.

CITE THIS ENTRY IN APA FORMAT:

Coen, R. (2020, September 28). Barry Cooper (1956- ). BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/barry-cooper-1956/

Source of the Author's Information:

Charlton D. McIlwain,ย Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice from the Afronet to Black Lives Matterย (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020); David Dennis Jr., โ€œA blessing and a curse: The rich history behind โ€˜Black Twitter,โ€™โ€ May 19, 2020, https://theundefeated.com/features/a-blessing-and-a-curse-the-rich-history-behind-black-twitter/; Dave Peyton, โ€œBlack Voices Speak on AOL,โ€ South Florida Sun-Sentinel, February 11, 1996, https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-1996-02-11-9602060434-story.html.

Further Reading

|James Byrd & Harriett Elizabeth Byrd

Harriet Elizabeth “Liz” Byrd (1926- )

Harriet Elizabeth “Liz” Byrd is a former educator, state representative, and state senator in Wyoming.  She was born on April...