Five years of Blacktocats
What started in 2015 as a small group effort is now GitHub’s first official Employee Resource Group, with more than 60 members across the US, Asia, Europe, and Australia. Blacktocats members work across the company — as software engineers, product managers, designers, lawyers, sales leaders, and marketers — helping shape both GitHub’s products and its internal culture.
One landmark moment came with the creation of the first Black Octocat, released nine years after GitHub’s official mascot Mona debuted. In true GitHub fashion, the effort began as a GitHub issue exploring an Octocat to commemorate Black History. Working with the creative team, Blacktocats launched Benjamin Bannekat on February 28, 2017, honoring Benjamin Banneker. Banneker is best known for his published almanacs on mathematics, astronomy, and farming, but his legacy also includes his correspondence with Thomas Jefferson challenging assumptions about racial inferiority.
“Embrace every opportunity to eradicate that train of absurd and false ideas and opinion which so generally prevails with respect to us.”~ B. Banneker, 1791, letter to Thomas Jefferson |
Beyond representation, Blacktocats creates spaces for Black employees to connect with each other and the wider GitHub community.
FLOSS and Code in Atlanta
FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) and Code is a scalable, reproducible hack day format aimed at underserved engineering communities. The Atlanta event focused on bringing Black engineers into open source, connecting 75 HBCU students with maintainers from projects like Electron, Probot, and GitHub Desktop during the event. Student feedback highlighted the impact:
“Not only did I get exposed to the world of open source coding, I was also introduced to music programming! I also had the opportunity to download and work with developer tools that will help me accelerate my learning!”
— Niara Patterson, HBCU student, now Software Intern at Apple
Seeding the ReadME Project
In 2019, Blacktocats co-founder Leithia proposed using GitHub’s platform to amplify Black open source maintainers and influencers during Black History Month. That idea grew into The ReadME Project, which launched in August 2020 and continues to publish monthly profiles of developers doing impactful work, such as Monica Powell, Jerome Hardaway, and Segun Adebayo.
Read stories of Black maintainers on GitHub
Spreading the mission
GitHub’s commitment to building a team and community that reflects the world includes supporting six other communities of belonging alongside Blacktocats. That support takes many forms — hack days, community champions, and even stage appearances. For more on Blacktocats’ five-year history and upcoming work, visit the group’s landing page or follow on Twitter.
