Black History Fun Fact Friday – Emmit McHenry

The internet. We all know it, and in 2024, babies are born with it in their hands.

In today’s world, looking something up on the web is normal behavior, and for some, the first thing they do when they wake up in the morning. Whether you grab your phone or use the computer to log in at work, we don’t go a day without typing something into a search bar or scrolling on social media.

But it was not always this way.

Before anyone ever heard of the internet, its seeds were planted in 1957 in the historical context of the Cold War. In the 1960s, government researchers also used it to share information.

Today, we are learning about the man who created the computer code for .com.

Emmit McHenry was born in Forrest City, Arkansas, in 1943 and was raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, renowned for being a prosperous Black community. While McHenry came of age years after the Tulsa Race Riot, footage from Pastor Solomon Sir Jones shows that by 1925 and even into the 1940s, Black Wall Street was rebuilt.

Thus, McHenry grew up surrounded by people with a strong sense of community and entrepreneurship.

“It was in a way kind of an extended family and they took pride in your doing well. So if you did well, the teachers really got excited about that and worked with you on it. Yeah, it was a really wonderful experience for me.”

– Emmit McHenry on growing up in Greenwood

The Victory of Greenwood

McHenry’s great-grandfather was a carpenter and whiskey still operator by trade. Great-grandmother McHenry was a businesswoman in addition to a farmer. When it came time to bring their crops to market, the Black farmers and sharecroppers in Arkansas knew they could rely on her to negotiate fair rates for them.

Emmit McHenry graduated from Booker T. Washington High School and pursued a Bachelor of Science in Communications from the University of Denver on a wrestling scholarship. He majored in physics, but when he discovered communications, he changed his major. He graduated with a degree in communications in 1966.

McHenry and his partners established the engineering firm Network Solutions in 1979. However, like many other black-owned businesses, they had trouble getting funding. McHenry and his associates maxed out their credit cards and mortgaged their residences. The business prospered. Still, a deal with the National Science Foundation was the diamond in the crown for Network Solutions. The first internet domain name addressing system for the US government was covered under the contract.

That’s when McHenry created a complex computer code that was not complex to ordinary people searching the web. It allowed those of us without communications degrees to understand the internet and send and receive emails without having to study computer science.

We know McHenry’s invention today as .com.

Emmit McHenry’s work paid off on Dec. 31, 1992, when Network Solutions was the only bidder on a National Science Foundation grant to further develop the domain name registration service for the Internet. Network Solutions was granted an exclusive contract as the sole domain name registrar for .com, .net, and .org. These top-level domain (TLD) names continued the work Network Solutions was already doing. 

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