Wasow, Omar
1970-present · Contribution: 1993-2008
Co-founded BlackPlanet in September 1999, one of the first true social networking sites — predating Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook by years — built specifically as a digital gathering space for Black internet users
Portraits are AI-generated interpretations, not photographs.
Impact on the world
Building on a pre-web dial-up bulletin board system he'd run since 1993, Wasow launched BlackPlanet with Community Connect CEO Benjamin Sun in 1999, at a moment when investors doubted a Black-audience internet community would find users; the site grew to over 20 million registered members at its peak and pioneered features — public friend lists, persona-based profiles, home-grown social software encouraging active connection over passive content consumption — that MySpace's own founders later cited as a direct influence on their design. The company was sold to Radio One (now Urban One) for $38 million in 2008. Wasow went on to earn a PhD in African American studies and statistics from Harvard, becoming a political science professor first at Princeton and now UC Berkeley, where his research on the 1960s civil rights movement and protest tactics drew international attention when it was republished amid the 2020 George Floyd protests.
Life & background
Born December 22, 1970, to a German Jewish civil rights activist father who had participated in the 1964 Freedom Summer voter registration project in Mississippi and an African American mother, Wasow grew up in New York City and graduated from Stuyvesant High School, where he served as student union president. He earned a BA in race and ethnic relations from Stanford University in 1992, then spent the 1990s building internet communities — first New York Online, a pre-web bulletin board system, in 1993, then BlackPlanet in 1999 — before earning a PhD in African American studies alongside master's degrees in government and statistics, all from Harvard, completing his doctorate in 2012. He became an assistant professor of politics at Princeton in 2013 and later moved to UC Berkeley's political science department, where his scholarship focuses on race, ethnic politics, and social movements; his sister is filmmaker Althea Wasow.
Sources
- NPR (All Tech Considered); Stanford Magazine; Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure (UMass Amherst)
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