By Ben Joravsky
Davidson was born and raised in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania (the steel-making town that produced Mike Ditka). His father was an auto mechanic, his mother a beautician (and both, incidentally, champion bowlers enshrined in the Pennsylvania Bowlers Hall of Fame).
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Throughout the 60s and 70s he was at the forefront of antiwar and civil rights protests, driving from town to town for several years as a Students for a Democratic Society campus organizer. “Mississippi, Berkeley, Columbia University–you name it, I was there,” he says. “I was on a list of people not to invite to universities. Of course that made students want to invite me.”
Soon after he took the job his company computerized operations, and Davidson had what he now calls a “breakthrough revelation.”
“If information’s power and that power’s on the Internet, then we better teach people how to get at it, unless we want them to be powerless and dependent all of their lives,” he says. “At the very least I can teach someone computer skills that society clearly values, so his services will be in demand and he can go out and get a job as a technician making $25 an hour or whatever.”
Among the people waiting to see him one day last week was Mordecai Jackson, a 27-year-old south-side resident from Nkrumrah-Washington Community Learning Center. “I learned a little about computers in grade school, but mostly what I know is on my own,” says Jackson. “It’s really not that hard. I think I have a gift for it. I just need to get at the computers. I like to take them apart to see how they work. I plan to go back to the south side and teach people what I know.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo by Jon Randolph.
