Transcripts For CSPAN2 Clyde Ford Think Black 20240713

Programs across the nation. Clyde is here tonight to speak about his latest book think black which was just released shortlisted for the 2019 book price in social justice. Which you please join me welcoming to the planetarium at the Oregon Museum of science and industry clyde ford. [applause] thank you, leslie, i thank you all for being here. I cant tell you how special it is to be here again. I was just talking with your president nancy, and just reliving my First Experience at omsi over 40 years ago when omsi was up at washington park, and i was a volunteer. And i was working with a group at omsi that actually was involved in software. I had just come from ibm to go to Chiropractic College and i needed something to do around computers because ive been doing that for so long when i wasnt studying chiropractic, and i was able to get computer time by exchanging my work to help them develop the omsi compiler or anyone is old enough to remember what the compiler is, kind of date yourself, but thats how i got involved with the omsi. And i loved the place. I used to have the key, late at night i would go up there at one or two in a boring, bring some of my friends and say theres a visible lady there and we can punch buttons and see all the lights and some of you may know or remember what that was like. Where is she now, vicki . [inaudible] on the second for. Great. I didnt get to visit her when i was here yesterday, but you can visit her again and may have to stop by before i leave tomorrow just to say hello to the visible lady because such an important part of me being involved with the omsi. Again i want to thank you for being here, just the opportunity to share with you some thoughts and ideas about my latest book, chennai. Tonight will be what to do is im going to do both a talk about the book and also interspersed that with some readings and then towards the end will have an opportunity for questions and answers. If nobody has said this already, if you do have a cell phone and you want to put on vibrate or silence, that probably would be a really, really, really good idea. So i just have found this so surprising to learn more about my book after its been published. Often as an author you think to write a book on you know what youre writing about, you publish it and you go it and talk about what it is youve written. And what i felt and what im going to share with you tonight is some of the things that ive learned obviously and writing the book and ill be able to share those with you, but also some of the surprising things i learned after the book has been published. I thought that was just really interesting and it says a lot about the subject matter and the times i was writing about. I thought a really great place to start would be really were i start the book, which is contrasting my fathers first day at work with my first day at work, and really starting with my first day at work at ibm with his first day at work at ibm. Lets see if we can do that. I held fast and overhead bar as the elevated train i wrote in swayed from side to side, rocketing into manhattan from the bronx. When it dove beneath the harlem river, everything outside the car went dark and i caught a reflection of myself in a window. A ballooned afro, pork chop sideburns, a blue zoot suit with red pinstripes, a fire engine red turtleneck and a trench coat with its collar turned up. Half hour later i strutted from the subway to the light rain hanging over wall street, humming the theme song from the film shaft, which id seen the night before. I fancied myself as the movies like you wrote, about to engage in battle with the white hoops of injustice before me. I entered one of the skyscrapers, squeezed into the financial district and took an elevator up to a higher floor. There still so they blew the site on the glass doors red, ibm. Beneath it in white new York Financial office. I grasped the door handle but paused catching a glimpse of myself in the glass door pain. I shook my head unsure of what to make of this decision. Im ready to push through those glass doors, uncertain of what fate awaited me on the other side of that threshold. On that fall day in 1971, i was young and black, defiant and angry, and more than ever determined not to be like my father. Yet there i stood about to report to work at ibm, where he had worked for 25 years. So thats how i start the book. And i wonder, i kind of gave some of this way, but but i wor if you can dig when that photograph is. And i can tell you its not my dad. Its me. Many people ask. And its also not 1971. Can anybody guess what you that photo might be . Theres some hints there. [inaudible] no, its not. Lets do a couple things. First of all i am wearing bellbottoms. That dates it. I got pork chop sideburns. That dates it, and that is malcolm x, and that should date it kind of as well, too. I will keep you in suspense and ill just say it was 1968. Thats when the photograph was taken three years before it entered ibm but did somebody say that . There you go. I looked pretty similar to that. Maybe a little bit cleaned up with the zoot suit but i looked similar to that when it went to work for ibm. Anybody come for extra credit, that magazine is named mojo. Does anybody know what that magazine was connected to . So it was the magazine of the black Students Council at Clover University in 1968. And thats really important historically for a couple of reasons. One of the reasons it was so important is that 1968, that may, that spring was the spring of the columbia student uprisings and that was the spring which saw both the sbs group with mark rudd, the black Students Council with people like sam anderson and ray brown and also hispanic students at columbia, the young lords with felipe luciano, really very involved with trying to get more than just the education from columbia but try to get a university to make a difference in terms of social change and social justice as well. And a lot of what happened, back in those years, you take any student demonstration, whether its college or high school, i even look at whats going on now in terms of Climate Change and i can draw a direct line between what took place in 1968 and whats taking place right now. That was a really, really important place. I think young people, and i was among them, i was in colombia the time, i was in high school in new york city, but i think young people have the idea that we can make a difference if we raise our voices and organized in the right way. And have to make a little bit of a call out because this couple of folks in any audience here who along with me were young in those days. I havent seen lynn in 50 years and we were very involved in some of the real activism back in the 60s that i think laid the groundwork for much of what took place your this picture is revelatory because it is a classic picture of a radical young black man in the 60s, right . If i look at this, and, of course, those pictures from the black panthers, youll see theres not that much daylight between how i looked and how those Young Brothers in the black panthers looked as well. I certainly dont mind saying i was part of the black panthers, the intellectually of the black panthers in those days. Thats me when i started the book. Thats me when i stepped into ibm, started to work an idea. What about my dad . What about when a five years before . What was that like for him . It was the late 1940s. Postworld war ii america. Anything was possible. Duke ellington swung jazz, Jackie Robinson swung a big leak that. Brown v. Board of education swung through the courts. Nowhere with the possibilities and promises felt more deeply than in harlem which was then like americas gravitational center. In a city called classroom at the edge of harlem, an accounting professor invited one of her students to dinner. That black student arrived at her swanky apartment dressed to the nines. Thomas j watson founder of ibm stepped on the shadows. Watson offered my father a job in the Branch Rickey jakobson moment into. The start of an unknown chapter in history of modernday computers. Its a story i heard a lot growing up of watson, we used to call him the old man or mr. Watson. I heard a lot of names. My dad use for him. The story i heard most was my dad showing up to dinner. Watson stepping out from a back room and saying to my dad in no Uncertain Terms, im the only damn person in this company that could offer you the job. I thought when i started work on this book that what i was doing was writing kind of a Branch Rickey Jackie Robinson story about the early days of computers where my dad would have been obviously Jackie Robinson who broke the color line in major league baseball, but now my dad doing something similar in computers and high technology, and thomas j. Watson senior kind of in the role of Branch Rickey was the general manager of the dodgers acquired Jackie Robinson to actually in 1945, first to play for one of the farm teams of the brooklyn dodgers at the 1947 actually the same year that my father started working just a couple of months later actually got to step up to the plate for his first swing at bat. Lets just look a little bit more about what that time was like. Theres watson. Thats Thomas Watson, the founder of ibm, came from a back ground working at ncr, somewhat of a very rough and tumble businessman. He was part of ncrs what they called the knockout gang. In fact, he led the knockout gang. And the knockout gang was we dont take out our competition. We knock them out. [laughter] so this is a really tough businessman, and thats important to remember as we go on a little bit further. This was also at the very dawn of the computer age, and so one of the things that you see here is this picture of my dad. And this is another thing that i just learned after the book was published. So im going to ask you in this picture, and i hope yeah, you can still see it. What might you think is really significant about this picture . Other than the fact that theres just one black guy and two women in the picture. Anybody see anything unique in this picture . What i will tell you is the eyes have it. And by that i mean, if you look at the direction that every one is staring, look at who is staring directly at the camera and look at what is staring away or has their eyes hidden. All the white guys in this picture are staring directly tat camera, as if to say i belong. And my father and the two women are staring off in the distance. One of the woman has sunglasses on, as if to say im not sure i belong. I didnt realize that we were capturing that, but in many ways this captures that time really really really well and in some ways captures the time that we still have with us, in terms of being able to look at a sense of entitlement and privilege maybe. And i think thats a really important thing. Certainly it became an important part of what i was writing about in the book in terms of technology and race and privilege, and those of you who will be able to read the book can read more, but i found it so fascinating that it was in this picture. And i didnt realize it until it was actually published. So this is part of the time that my dad stepped into the company, again, first africanamerican software engineer. I should say really in all honesty that even using that term is a little bit because my dad went to work for ibm in 1947. He was hired in 46, and i think late 46 started working in january of 47, there was no such thing as software. Software hadnt been invented. Ibm called people who had his job systems engineers. They still do. And yes, he worked on the technology that would ultimately give rise to software. But when he started work, there were punch cards and there were punch cards machines, and you will see in a minute some of the other things that were involved as well too. This is really the dawn of the digital age. And the other thing i wanted to do with this book is because so much so many of us are so used to technology thats so accessible and so easy to use is kind of take a step back down memory lane of what technology was like back in my dads day and the technology that i grew up knowing. So do you have a cell phone that you can at least put your hand on and maybe even pull out of your pocket . I dont want you to turn it on, but i do want you to get a sense of how much it weighs, you know. What do you think . A couple ounces maybe . Maybe a half a pound . Maybe . Maybe, but more like maybe 4 to 6 ounces. Your cell phone is a programmable computer. No theres no doubt about it. Theres no doubt about it. You have somewhere between 8 and 512 giga bites of storage in that computer, in that, lets say, 4 ounces that youre weighing. Im going to show you a picture of the first ever programmable computer. Thats an ibm 407. It is the first ever commercially available programmable computer. By that meaning tf mass produced it was mass produced and leased by ibm to a lot of people. There were other Programmable Computers like that, but they were all one offs. This was the first one like your cell phone, you know, mass produced. This box alone, that 407 weighed 3 tons. When you put all the ancillary equipment around it, that it needed, the sorters, tabulators, printers, you could get a computer room in and of itself that weighs somewhere between 10 and 12 tons. That is a lot of weight to carry around in your purse or pocket. Let me tell you. [laughter] what are some of the pieces of this 407 . So on the left, on your far left, thats where cards were put into this machine. Cards were read. Right in the middle is a conv t converted typewriter that was used as a printer. Right here at this door, inside that door was this. Believe it or not, i found this on ebay, and this is what was used to program the earliest computer, the program an ibm 407. This board is actually from an ibm 407. My dad used to bring these home, and the way we programmed these, and i use the word program, because thats what we did is we would have patch cords. Kind of like a telephone operator in the old days, and we would plug one into a hole here and one into a hole there and one in there and there, and so you would end up with this network on here of brightlycolored patch cords that controlled how the circuits inside of that machine spoke to each other, read cards, added, because it didnt hardly even do subtraction. I think all the early ones did is add and then produced results. Pretty fascinating; right . So what you would end up with is something that looked like this. Yeah. So thats the board. Thats somebody who is actually working on it. And this is what the boards would look like. We actually called the process basket weaving, and when i say we, people who programmed computers in those days called it basket weaving for obvious reasons. When i was like 5, my sister was 3 or 4, my dad would bring home these boards, lay them on the table, had a basket full of these patch cords and had this as lets see, there you go, had that as the instructions for how to program that machine. He would say i want you to plug this into that and this into that. We would i guess do our best. He always told us the next day what you guys did was great, it worked fine, everything was just great, and it worked as i thought it would. I dont believe that. He probably had to do a lot of stuff himself, but at least there i was at 5 years old programming computers, and i have to say, i walked in a room, and and i know you hear the term digital native thrown out a lot but i have never been in a room where anybody has been a digital native longer than i have. I started 1956. I was 5 years old when my dad first did this, so a long time in computers. The other thing that was really important this is what was going on inside of hightech, but my dad was hired, you know, late 40s, early 50s, was when these computers were really starting to be used quite extensively, but there was also a whole social environment that was going on outside of ibm, and that was also really really important to my dad as well too. So lets kind of get a sense of what was going on outside of ibm. So lets see. On august 28th, 1963, i scanned the small black and White Television screen in my grandparents living room for glimpses of my parents. A baritone boomed. Im happy to be with you today and what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation. 11 years old, i searched through the millions of black faces lining the grassy mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial while i allowed Martin Luther king jr. s words to sere me deeply. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I never saw my parents on television that day, but that did not arrest my pride at knowing they marched for something really big, for something really important. They were marching for me, they said, upon leaving me behind with my grandparents. I knew the horrors of jim crow, even as a child. A few summers before the march on washington, wed taken a Greyhound Bus south to visit my mothers family in virginia. At the Mason Dixon Line in maryland, we were forced to change to a bus marked colors only, that waited behind the maryland house, now a popular rest stop, on i95. My father ushered claudia and me on to the waiting bus, though he said little on the ride from maryland to newport. Id become so used to my father extolling the promises of a digital future, that it stunned me to see him rendered impotent by the shackles of a draconian past. So you know, this was the world that was taking place outside of ibm. And the two collided in no Uncertain Terms for my dad. It collided inside of ibm because as the first black software engineer, i mean, he was faced with many challenges just to keep his job. And i talk about some of those in the book. For example, one of the stories that he told often was how when he had recently been hired, he was sent on a business meeting that turned out to be a meeting with a prostitute. The idea was that if he was caught on film, with a prostitute, he would be forced to leave his job. He was passed over for promotions. He trained the people who would later become his supervisors. He didnt have the opportunities to have machine time in order to really further his education. And i heard over and over and over from him growing up, when you might have expected your dad to be there to, you know, throw a ball with you or go out and play with you, and there he was working, you know, some software diagram or something, i heard so many times he would look up and say a black guy has to work twice as hard as a white guy in order to succeed and keep his job. And so that certainly infiltrated his consciousness and the outside world in that respect infiltrated his consciousness. I think the other thing that i talk about in the book is how not only did he have this sense of the racism he encountered working at ibm, but unfortunately, he also turned some of that racism in on himself. And so i grew up with a father who didnt like the fact that he was black because he felt the color of his skin held him back, the color of his skin made him less worthy, less intelligent even which i found so surprising. This is my dad, a really smart guy, championship chess player on the ibm chess team through many years, plays four instruments, an operatic baritone, on and on, and yet hes internalized, thats the word we use, hes internalized racism to such an extent that now he sees himself as not as worthy and capable. You can imagine here i am, you know, im a young man who is thinking wow i want to learn as much as i can about my history and who i am as a person in historical terms in terms of africanamerican history, so i would spend my afternoons at the Schaumburg Library in new york reading about the wonderful figures in africanamerican history that i never got in school. By the time i get home there was my dad lamenting the fact that he was black. That was really one of the first really strong instances of this kind of clash, both of generations, but also of cultures that happened between my dad and me because my dad, again, feeling and buying into this whole idea that if youre black, youre less capable, and me feeling no way. You can do anything. It doesnt matter what color your skin is. This also was a point in writing this book when my editor at Harper Collins started to ask me some questions also about what was it like then . And i remember this experience that we had, and its funny, as youre writing a memoir, in particular, very often you dont think about things until you start to write them, and so i remember how my dad also changed once he came back from the march on washington, and i saw that change in very practical ways that surprised me. And heres just a little snippet of what this was like when we went into the maryland house, several summers before, that we had to change buses there. After returning from the march, and this is the march on washington, something inside of my father had shifted a little. Our family went back to virginia that next summer, but this time we drove. On the return trip home, we stopped at the maryland house where a few summers before we had been forced to change buses. We sat at a lunch counter this time, reading our menus, when behind the counter, a waitress walked over to inform us we dont serve colored people here. She turned to walk away. My mother looked across to my sister and me and my father, and she whispered, stanley, nows the time for us to take a stand. She held her hand out in front of us, stay where you are she said to claudia and me. When we did not rise, the waitress returned. She snarled, i thought i told you we dont serve your kind. My father surprisingly snapped, and were not leaving until you do. Our waitress disappeared into the kitchen. I looked up. Moments later a man in a white shirt and tie, presumably a manager, pushed through the kitchen doors, a determined look on his reddened face. The waitress trailed behind him smirking. I twisted around on my stool. The entire restaurant had grown silent observing the events that were unfolding. Dont look at other people my mother scolded. Turn around. Just look at your menu. But the manager must have felt the stares as well and perhaps paused to ponder the wisdom of the others. By the time he reached us, the managers determination had dissolved into an insincere therapy southern smile. Hi, folks, what yall having, he asked . After we made our selections from the menu, the waitress stormed off. We sat and waited, while behind us the buzz of conversation slowly returned. When the waitress finally appeared with our order, she slapped down the plates on the counter. Dont know what you folks expect to accomplish, she hissed. So again, kind of the collision of what was going on, both inside and outside of ibm for my dad. And about the same time, my editor asked me, you know, what was going on in the world and how was your dad dealing with this . She also asked me this really important question that was to change the nature of this book, from just what i thought was initially this kind of feelgood story, about a Jackie Robinson moment in computers to something much larger. She asked me, and, you know, an obvious question, why did ibm hire him in the first place . Why did Thomas Watson in 1946 hire dad to go to work in 1947, for ibm . Why hire a black guy . I said to her, tracy, i dont really know that answer, but i guarantee you, by the time i deliver the finished manuscript to you, i will have that answer for you. That exploration opened up a window into technology, into the company i worked with, the company my dad worked with, that was in two words very shocking if not very horrifying, another two words. Because the first thing i discovered is that ibm was deeply involved in the eugenics movement. For those of you dont know what that is, it is the pseudoscience of race which attempts to find a pure stock, and it is often kind of a nordic ideal of a pure stock, and anyone who doesnt fit that certainly, people of color, jews, those who are infirmed, those who are infirmed mentally or physically, need to get rid of them. And back in the 20s, eugenics was quite a popular thing. Al command r graham bell was Alexander Graham bell was the president of the eugenics records association. Many people dont know that the founder of planned parenthood was deeply involved in eugenics. In fact saw her work in her words her work was Womens Health and Reproductive Health as culling the weeds, those were her words, of humanity because in those days, Family Planning was all about promoting this idea of eugenics. So just a couple of things here, that figure is madison grant. Grant wrote a book i think it was published if not 1920, just around that, wrote a book called the passing of the great race, and i wish i could say that that book sits in history someplace, and we can go back to look at it as a particular historical epic, but i cant. I cant because this book is still popular today. It is popular with white extremists, white nationalists because it talks about the concerns that are still expressed to this day of somehow the population changing so that your typical idea of whatever this nordic european idea of humanity is is going to shift here in the United States. And so madison grant. The next figure do i have a next figure . Oh, there it is. Okay. Thats Charles Davenport. Charles davenport was head of the eugenics record office. The Eugenics Records Office was out of the cold springs lab b r boir laboratory in new york, set up by the carnegie institute. I wish it was out of the news, but in january, some of you may remember the horrible incident that happened with james d. Watson, the dna folks where watson was spewing all of this kind of really racially negative hateful stuff, in some ways, reflecting this whole idea of eugenics, guess what laboratory watson worked for . Cold springs Harbor Laboratory out of new york, who yes took the step of actually spr lly st him of some of his rewards, but theres a history here. You know, thats something i wanted to communicate in this book, is that some of the issues we deal with today have roots so long ago that weve often forgotten them. So 1928, these are just some of the ideas that i was thinking of as i wrote this section of the book. But 1928, Eugenics Records Office under Charles Davenport gets a grant to do a study entitled the jamaica study. It was meant to identify mixed race individuals on the island of jamaica for forced sterilization and other means of population control. The problem with the jamaica study was that there was so much data that davenport couldnt figure out how he was going to store, sort, tabulate and print that data out in order to see who it was that they wanted to target for these various means of population control. Early 20s, 1922 now, theres a Young Company that a man named Thomas Watson is given the name ibm. Watson says to davenport, i know how to do this. Weve got the equipment that will allow you to store the information, collect it, sort it, tabulate it, and so ibm, one of the first large projects ibm went to work on was the jamaica study. Wow. I mean, in leading this, it was quite shocking to me. In reading this, it was quite shocking to me. But what was to come was even more shocking. One of the things we know we see in technology all the time particularly in computers and software if something works in one area, you dont just drop it or shelve it. If it is working out well, you figure out where else you can use it. 1928, the jamaica study, five years later, 1933, watson takes what they learned with the jamaica study to berlin, nazi germany. Again, wow. I dont think in the time that i have with you i could adequately describe for you the extent to which ibm was involved in the holocaust. I will try. At least let me see if i can read something from the book to give you a sense of the depth and the breadth of that involvement. Ibm machines identified and counted jews, traced back their ancestry through generations, marked them for transport to concentration camps, managed that the railroads that transported them there, kept track of which jews were killed and which remained alive, identified which jews possessed what skills and helped nazis allocate them for slave labor monitor the health and fitness for jews for medical experiments or being worked to death, kept records of the torture and execution of jews in all concentration camps, kept track of german soldiers, planned german tank and troop movements against the allies and scheduled bombing runs. Again, it was almost hard to believe this. I didnt do the primary research here. Fortunately, theres i dont even know if the word fortunately is right. I think it is fortunately that some light is shined on this history because so many of us dont know this history, but so there are some excellent source materials for this, which i used for my book, but to recognize this this was how Technology Got started, i have to tell you in writing and reading and studying this portion of the book, there were times where i was dry heaving and crying and i literally couldnt go forward to read about what this company i had worked for, my dad had worked for, had been engaged in in the early days of high technology. It was quite stunning. Every concentration camp had a room that meant labor fulfillment, just another word for forced labor. Some of you have probably remembered seeing the films of, you know, concentration camp prisoners where they have tattooed in you mean bers numbers, the part you werent told is many of those numbers were connected to a deck of punch cards which had those numbers in. I think it was column 22, i do say that in the book, there was even a column for example on those punch cards which said if you were a prisoner, how you were going to be exterminated, gas chambers, ovens, a firing squad, you name it. Now, those punch cards were made by ibm and ibm made sure that only their equipment would read those punch cards that they made. And the other part thats really important that recognizes that this was not equipment sold to nazi germany. Ibm never told equipment in those days. In fact, when i went to work, they still never sold equipment. They only leased it. They leased it so they could maintain control over it. Ibm maintained control over all that equipment as well as producing the punch cards and nazi germany bought billions and billions of punch cards in order to maintain all this information on german citizens. So this is starting to just this is turning into this really strange story. Work makes you free, of course thats this incredible misnomer because nothing behind that gate made anyone free in any real sense of the word. Those are the ovens. I have been there. I walked through the camp. It is a riveting experience only equivalent to, and i tell this story in the book, the experience of me walking through slave castles in west africa. Unfortunately, this is how people were treated, and there are the punch cards r made by this company that i went to work for, that my dad went to work for, that were used. Now, if you do something successful, with the technology, you dont just stop. You dont just stop. So yes, my dad was hired in 47 by ibm. And the question is why . Well, at the end of the war, companies that were involved in making money from the nazis, from the, you know, from nazi germany and italy, the axis powers during the war, they could not get that money back unless they passed through agencies involved in reparations. And the whole idea was, you know, if you made money, during nazi germany, you got to pay back something to the people whose lives you devastated. Only ibm didnt want to pay back any money. And watson, president of ibm, founder of ibm was really skilled manipulator of public opinion. Some of you probably recognize what im next about to say. He knew that if he could divert attention here, you might not realize what was going on here. So why not hire two blacks and a handful of jews . Wow, thats a pretty dramatic thing to do, in the late 40s well, mid 40s right after the war. People may not focus so much on how youre trying to get back the millions and millions of dollars that you made during the war. To the extent, for example, that watson had actually funded a group of Army Soldiers that were his former employees, called the ibm men. Thats what they were known as affectionately i suppose in the army. When a concentration camp was liberated, everybody went for the prisoners, but the ibm folks went for the machines to crate them up and make sure they got back to headquarters. This was a really oh, gosh, it was almost hurtful to read about this, to understand the depth at which this was going on, and i did ask edwin black. Hes written a book called ibm and the holocaust, a wonderful book that talks about this. Edwin and i were talking. He said to me why do you think ibm hired your dad . Im going to tell you what i think. I didnt ask him. I think they hired him because of this diversion thing, and he said to me, i think youre right. Youre absolutely right. He began to tell me about what they had done in hiring jews as well. I talk about in the book other instances in watsons history where he did this as well, divert attention in one way so other people dont realize whats going on in another part of your business. What i was about to say is if youre successful with eugenics, and youre successful with the holocaust, you dont stop there. Its now postworld war ii. Early 1950s. You look around the world, and you say, hey, were pretty good at identifying populations and separating out populations and figuring out who belongs and who doesnt belong and who gets control and who doesnt get control, and so a logical place to turn is south africa. And while there was no book written about this, it feels just at this point my guess, i bet you ibm was involved here. Wow, when i found out the depth at which they were involved. Ibm created the passbook system which was used to identify who was black, colored, asian, white, and therefore who was allowed certain privileges of citizenship and who wasnt. By this time, the late 50s, early 60s, watson has passed the old man, but a new Thomas Watson jr. , his son is in control of the company. The old time punch cards are passed. Now weve got more modern Computer Technology that affords databases and data storage and lots of other means to collect and store large amounts of information on a population. Most of that research or i should say i went to Court Records filed by south africans against the United States trying to recoup some of what was lost. They were unsuccessful, but the Court Records provided a wealth of documentation of what it actually what had actually happened. Let me put up a couple images here from apartheid. Now, i wished i could have said it stopped there. But it didnt. And i started to get a sense of i see whats going on, and this is what i began to write about in the book, that whats going on with technology is technology has this history which is not always on the right side of human rights and civil rights. And so just three days ago, i was reading a piece, maybe some of you read it about google and what google was doing with facial Recognition Technology where it was actually going into homeless areas, homeless shelters and identifying specifically africanamerican men and taking videos of africanamerican men in order to train its video analytics facial Recognition Software. By the time i had submitted my book to the publisher, someone told me hey youve got to read this article in the intercept. Thank god for that the intercept. Really love that magazine, that newsletter. This article was all about how ibm, post 9 11 had used footage of new yorkers unbeknownst to those individuals, given to it by the new York City Police department in order to be able to discriminate based on race using video analytics or facial Recognition Software. I found it really poignant and ironic that that facial Recognition Software is called watson facial Recognition Software. The important point here is and i think this is what i came to in the book is for us to understand that the technology we pull out and use so quickly has a history and not only does it have a history, it has a trajectory that unless we are as citizens are engaged in understanding how that technology is going to be used, we cant be sure that that technology is going to be used in ways that support the kind of society that we really want. Technology demands of us in engagement in how the technology is constructed, how the technology is released, and how the technology is used. Three weeks ago, boston, a jewish peace group called never again action marched from the Holocaust Memorial in boston to amazons headquarters in cambridge. While there were in front of amazons headquarters, i saw this on television, i thought wow these are young people who really get it. The young woman who spoke to the group talked about ibms involvement in the holocaust and said were here in front of amazon because we want the company to know this is the history of technology and its use. Weve seen this before we dont want this used on our borders in order to decide who belongs in this country and who doesnt belong in this country. That then became what this book was about for me. Not just a simple feelgood story about my dad and Thomas Watson and Jackie Robinson, but more of a cautionary tale about the importance of us as citizens really engaging in the technology that were using. I just give you just one other example, and i cite many in the book. Microsoft released a product it wasnt a product. They released a chat bot, a piece of software that acts like a person, gets on twitter, interacts with people, you can interact with the chat bot as though it was a person, and this chat bot is supposed to learn from the people it interacts with. The chat bot was called tay. It was released in 2016. Within 24 hours of being released, this is what tay would say. You would ask it did the holocaust happen . Tay would say the holocaust never happened. I hate jews. You ask it about women. And tay would say women should go to hell. You would ask it about lets say black lives matter, mckesson who was one of the people early on in black lives matter, tay would say like mckesson should be hanged. I couldnt believe this, and again, you know, this is out there. You can see this. I document it in the book. I give the source for that. Its not like something that were making up here. This is what can happen with technology thats not controlled. Just give you one more example so you will see that this really is something that we as a society need to address. A couple of years ago, a wellmeaning company decided they wanted to release a video game that would help people understand the atlantic slave trade. I think it is a great idea. I would like people to better understand that 60 Million People were killed or died in the middle passage, which is that passage from africa to the new world. They decided to call the game slave tetris. Heres the way the game looked, you had the hull of a slave ship. You played the game by walking slaves up a ladder, walking them off of a plank into the hull of the slave ship, and then moving them back and forth in order to tightly pack them. I dont even think i have the words to really communicate in what world do you think that that is going to represent something positive . And yet, the company said well, were really trying to do something worthwhile. And i think what i came to is something we used to say in programming, something i heard my dad say a lot, garbage in, garbage out. Racism in, racism out. We really need to not just hold Tech Companies feet to the fire, but help them understand the algorithms you produce in your software are only going to be as lets say welcoming and inclusive as the people who write those algorithms, and unless we are able to reach the people who work in hightech, with the history of their industry, with an understanding of the kind of product we want to produce, were going to keep getting slave tetris and all sorts of other kind of weird stuff coming out that really harms people more than helps people. Part of what i really tried to do and i hope i was able to at least make a little dent in the book was to say here are some of the things you can do. We do need to train people in hightech in the history of how tech is being used, not always on the right side of human rights. We do need to help Companies Realize that before you release a product, you probably want a focus group thats pretty darn diverse so people can give you some feedback and say slave tetris, you got to be crazy. You cant release a product like that. Those of us in the activist community, we need to make sure were really working on things like Digital Literacy. In the book i suggest to people, for example, to go to the bing search engine, not google because google changes. And type in the same search terms that dylann roof typed in before he executed nine people in south carolina. I did that in writing the book. And the search page i got up was not that different from what dylann roof got up and was a motivating factor for him doing what he did. On the first entry on the first page i got up was actually alex jones info wars. Now, theres no rational universe that alex jones qualifies for in terms of really being somebody to have a discourse on race and Race Relations in the United States. We need to help young people in particular and ourselves as well understand that just because something appears high up on a search result page doesnt make it more true because those results can be manipulated. Those results can be paid for. And these are some of the other things then, you know, this kind of teaching of Digital Literacy that we need to be about. My dad was very involved in creating the technology which underlies the backbone for cell phones and the internet and all the modern technology that we have and take for granted. And he and the men of his generation and some of the women as well too i think believed that what they were creating would help democratize society, would make it more color blind, would allow us to have algorithms making decisions which would be neutral. Unfortunately, thats not the reality that we have. I was talking to a woman recently whose father was also of the same generation, worked for ibm as my dad did, and she said, you know, my dad and i were talking down the street towards the end of his life and we saw all these people walking down looking at these things in their hands and he said to me, whats that . I told him those are cell phones, and explained what cell phones was and the networks behind this and he shook his head and he said we created a monster. I think it is up to all of us to recognize that we can also control that monster. My dad struggled with that. And i want to read almost at the end here, see if i can find the last section that i want to read about to you. I was really curious to know a little bit about the mindset of the engineers that created some of these things, you know, worked with ibm to develop stuff that was used in the holocaust and facial Recognition Technology and the article in the intercept actually interviewed a former ibm employee, and so i thought this was very revelatory for us to understand whats going on in the minds of folks like this. A former ibm researcher working on facial recognition during these years, when ibm was involved in facial recognition, provided a window into the minds of those behind ibms racial classification technology. Going as far back as eugenics. We were certainly worried about where the heck this was going, he said, to the intercept. There were a couple of us, always talking about this, you know, if this gets better, this really could be an issue. Well, facial Recognition Technology did get better. It did become an issue. Only as outside researchers, and theres a woman at mit, joy, a computer scientist, shes really trying to hold Technology Companies accountable. Now, i know that watson and his ibm did not create my fathers wound of color. But working at ibm, with its long history of technology in the service of racial purity and oppression appears to have never allowed my fathers wound to heal. My fathers belief in the importance of skin color in determining ones destiny only grew stronger over the years of his employment. In some ways ibms dark history, however unconscious, seems to have gotten under my fathers skin. Thank you all so much for allowing me to share some of that history with you, to talk a little bit about my father and my relationship with him, about these early years in computers and ibm, and i think about the dark sides of this technology that we need to know about so just like that group never again action says, we dont allow it to happen again. So on that note, im wondering if there are any questions, and we have our friends here from cspan who are going to have a microphone for you, if you do have any questions. And i will be more than happy to answer any of those questions, and we probably can also shut off the power point presentation at this point. Anybody have any questions . [inaudible]. Have you done a ted talk yet . Have i done a ted talk . I have not done a ted talk. Ive certainly written to the ted people to see if theyd be interested in a talk like this. Who knows, maybe that will happen. Thank you. Do you think our government was involved in knowing that all this was going on . Thats a really great question. I dont think that our government was involved. I know it. And i know it for this simple reason. I talk about this in the book. The internet and the technology to develop the internet was a really, really important part, and it was actually the first project funded by a government agency, Defense Advance Research project agency. Darpa had headquarters in an m. I. T. Building called tech square, 545 main street in cambridge. In that same building were darpa, m. I. T. Ibm, general electric, and the cia. My dad would occasionally and i kind of asked this question in my book, did my dad work for cia . My dad would occasionally say i have to go away and i cant tell you where im going or what im doing and im sworn to secrecy. I did later find out and i actually found a copy of a letter written by someone at tech square thanking ibm for my dads service that he went to work on a secretive project called cp 67. That project was one of the projects that came out of darpa funding, and the development of the technology for cp 67 cms, that was the full name, actually was the technology that became pretty much the foundation for the modern day internet. So i know the government was involved because it was the government providing the funds for the research in order to create the technology which now Tech Companies like google, apple, microsoft, are using. Without what was done there in cambridge, none of what were seeing, your cell phones wouldnt be available. You know, twitter wouldnt be around. None of that would be around. So yes there is real clear understanding, and cia was there because they also understood that they wanted to get out in front of that technology because it would be very useful for intelligence, and that is how intelligence would be gathered in the future. I dont know if my dad ever worked for the cia. But i do know this, when i went to ibm, eventually i got a job working on cp 67 cms. I thought it was just interesting that i was doing the same work that my dad had been doing, until in i think it was 1974, i was approached by the cia and asked if i wanted to work for them. I said no, but it made me question if my dad had also said no. Thanks. Yes . Could you wait until the microphone is there . Great. How old were you when you realized you were a part of the social experiment . You know, i did not realize the question was how old was i when i realized i was part of a social experiment perhaps at ibm . I did not realize that throughout my career at ibm. I worked at ibm from 1971 to 77. I didnt have any understanding of this history until i wrote the book, and really it was only when i tried to answer my editors question, who was watson . Who was ibm . That i uncovered any of this information, and i think thats one of the reasons why most people have no clue that this is the history of technology. In the book, i was also able to trace this idea of the relationship between technology and race and hatred back much further than even eugenics. I mean go back in the book to the 1500s, and you can see this pattern developing in technology so it is kind of a little bit of a leader to say i hope you read about it in the book because theres even more there think for all of us to digest and understand. Thank you for your question. Anyone else . At the time when you were working at ibm, with your background, with you being previously with the panthers, did you still feel the heaviness of you being a black man in an organization like that, within a Corporation Like that . Absolutely. You know, with my background, and i should say yes, so this was a couple of years after i had been more deeply involved with the panthers, and so i was going to work, but still felt and i think the word you used heaviness is a great word. I walked into ibm dressed as i described in the book with a specific purpose of them understanding i was going to be different, but what i didnt tell you in that reading, i do say in the book, and i have i laugh a little bit when i think about it. Here i am with my big hair sitting at my desk and theres another black fellow in the office who comes over to me and says do you know what youre doing . [laughter] now, what he didnt realize is that i had just come out of my managers office, and my manager had given me a silver pen and pencil set that you give to Second Generation ibmers, so heres this thing where i really know something about ibm and heres this guy, hes sitting there and he said, you know, white shirt, you want to be different, button down collar. [laughter] then he pulls up his pants leg because i didnt say this in the book, during the reading, i had on platform patten leather shoes. You know, you want to be different . The ones with the little holes in them or something. Then he pulls it up a little further, you know, dark socks, conservative. He looks at my hair and he said he had a crew cut. He kind of ran his hands through his hair, he said all that hair, i dont know what to tell you. Dont you understand youre work at ibm . He didnt understand i knew exactly what i was doing working at ibm, and yes, part of my way and i think might be it might have been a little naive but it was my way of dealing with that heaviness was also establishing my difference. Over time again i tell some of these stories in the book i talk about what my clash with ibm was like and how i experienced racism in a similar way but dealt with it in a different way than in the way my dad did. Great question. I appreciated the opportunity to answer that. Yeah . You were talking about your father in this book, and im thinking about how he influenced your life and your views of the world, and you also talk about how he is how he has internalized racism, and based on the person that im seeing, im thinking that other people influenced you as well . Yes. I wonder if you can tell us about who those people are and how they influenced you. Again, a beautiful question. Thank you very much for asking it. Yes. There were other people that had deep influences in my life. I will tell you one person. This persons name was vincent harding. I dont know if any of you know that name. You should. Some of you have probably heard Martin Luther king jr. s Riverside Drive speech, the speech in which he comes out against vietnam war. That and many of kings other speeches were written by my mentor and friend and teacher vincent harding. So vincent was really somebody who was very very close to me, really helped me understand he was an eminent black historian. He was a teacher of people like henry lewis gates, skip gates up at harvard. I had the wonderful opportunity to be a student of his, when i took some time off from Wesleyan University to go down to the king center in atlanta, and i helped because we took over some buildings at wesleyan, actually ended up getting money out of the university to help set up that first part of the Martin Luther king jr. Center which was an Educational Center called the institutes of the black world. Vincent was there. Another wonderful person who was there, very formative in my character was bennett. Eminent historian, wrote the shaping of black america, an editor for ebony magazine, back in the days when ebony was publishing some wonderful information. I feel very blessed that i had people like that helping with my character, and also i was living in new york, and so i had the opportunity and im looking other at my friends ross and lynn, the Community Church whether i grew up, one of the other people who was often in the congregation was somebody like pete seeger, so i had the opportunity at 12 and 13 years old to go up to this really tall guy and say mr. Seeger, would you sign would you autograph my Church Program . And he did. About two years before pete passed, i got a chance to speak with him for 45 minutes and to thank him for helping form my character and helping me understand how you can be passionate as an artist and equally passionate about social justice. So i really look back and feel very blessed with the individuals who have touched me, informed me and influenced my life. Thank you for that question. I have two questions if i can sneak them both in. Please. As the president you do have that opportunity. [laughter] one is, im reflecting on what you knew in 1972 about ibm and what you know today. If you knew then what you know now, would you have gone to work at ibm intending to make a difference . Thats one question. And then the other is more for those of us involved in teaching Digital Literacy, what is your advice . What do you think are the most important messages that we should convey . Yeah. Wow, great questions. Let me try the first one, which is if i knew today what i if i knew in 72 what i knew today, would i have gone to work for ibm . I think the question is probably yes. I would have for a couple reasons. You know, one of the things my dad always said to me, learn about computers because if you learn how to control computers, you wont be at such a disadvantage when computers are trying to control you. [laughter] it was great advice. And thats why i went to ibm. I knew i wasnt going to work with ibm forever and ever amen, like my dad did, for his entire career, but i thought this is a really Good Technology to learn about. Whatever i do, it is going to be really important. It turned out to be really important. It was the way i got as a volunteer. It helped me throughout all my schooling as a way to always feel i had a job, and when i needed to fall back on it, thankfully ive been able to essentially roll out of bed and do software because of, you know, my experience there, so i think i would have gone to work for ibm. I think i might have modified a little bit of how i worked at ibm. One of things i learned once i completed the book was my dad actually had a little more subtle way of dealing with the racism he encountered, not just the internalized racism, but the outright racism he saw at the company. I will give you a short piece of what he did i thought was so important for me to find. The bottom of one of his dresser drawers, underneath a stack of playboy magazines [laughter] okay, it couldnt have been a secret because my mom folded all his laundry, put it, you know, in the bottom drawer, so she must have known. I dont know, anyway. And yes, i did thumb through the playboys. But underneath them there was a gray envelope with ibms logo on it, dog eared, you know, one of those circular tabs with the string you tie around, the two tabs and do a figure eight. It took me a while to realize what was in that envelope. When i finally did, i realized my dad had bootleg copies of the ibm entrance exams with questions and answers. Every so often, this i knew before i knew what was there, i knew that these strange people would come to our house, you know, mostly young africanamerican men, and my dad would just tell my sister and i to get lost, and i would hear him go pull out the drawer, and hed have this envelope and they would sit down at the table and they would have hush conversations. I didnt really know what was going on. All of a sudden at dinner a couple months later, my dad would say you wont believe what happened today. Remember that guy that came over to visit us . Ibm just hired him. I didnt realize that my dad was running his own underground Railroad Operation at ibm, and i think i hope that i would have been slick enough to do Something Like that. Now, in keeping with the book, which is about my relationship with my dad, i am going to do a little bit of a spoiler alert and tell you the end of that story. So heres this dresser drawer with the playboys and the ibm thing, and so now i graduated from college, and its my time to take the ibm entrance exam. And the first place i head to is that dresser drawer, and guess whats no longer there . And when i go to my dad, i said, what examination questions . What do you mean . You dont need questions. Youre smart enough to take it. I was smart enough to take it. One of the things that i talk about you will see in the book is this conflict father and son, you know, theres always that tension there. My dad was always trying to see if he was better than me, if i was better than him. I didnt do as well as he did on the ibm entrance exam, and i heard about it for the rest of his life. [laughter] so you know, thats a funny way of simply saying i hope i could have been as aware as he was about some of the more subtle ways to counter what he encountered. Second part of your question, really great, really speaks to the mission, it couldnt be more important to teach young people to be digitally literate because really that means to teach them how to live in our current democracy. If people are digitally literate, then what happened in 2016 would never happen. Heres what i mean by what happened. In 2016, the ira i was just reading about this again today because more research has come through. Ira, the Internet Research association in russia, targeted africanamericans and in particular targeted young africanamericans. I talk about this in the book. And they target them through technology. They targeted them through facebook. They targeted them through twitter, with memes which were all about dont vote. And i talk about and i quote in the book young men, particularly some of the black lives matter activists, and i talk about hawk newsom i think his name was who specifically said he was repeating the memes, the themes, the ideas put into the discourse by the russian Internet Research association, and he then digested all of them down to a meme that we heard a lot in 2016 and a lot of us railed against which was i aint voting. So right there for me is the reason why you have to teach Digital Literacy. You have to know that just because you read it as news on a twitter account or a news or on facebook, it doesnt necessarily mean its true. You have to be smart enough to penetrate the headlines, to ask the questions, to go deeper into that to ask is this meaningful or not . I have to say for me, anybody, any time, anywhere who says dont vote, youre suspect. You are suspect, particularly as an africanamerican, when i know the history of many, mostly women, who died for the opportunity to go to a poll and vote, nobody in the world is going to tell me not to vote. I dont care. But that kind of consciousness is what e we need to instill in our young people many people who dont know the history, you know, the Mississippi Democratic freedom struggle and all that went on, so i think it is important. Digital literacy doesnt just mean teaching a person how to read a screen. Its really what is the information behind that screen that you need to know about. One where did that information generate from . But two, what is the history that exists . Thats important as well which is why Digital Literacy encompasses such a wide range, you know. Thats what i think is really important. So to been more specific, bringing in people who understand the history and helping students lets take a thought or an idea, lets type it in on a search engine, what results do we get . Well, isnt that interesting . Look who comes up first. Who are they . Whats the history behind them . It is Critical Thinking that you then start to develop in that way which we need more of. I can tell you as a former College Teacher we really need more of that in our population. Thats the way you do it. It is a great platform. The Technology Cob the technology can be a wonderful platform to help develop the Critical Thinking behind Digital Literacy. Thats a short answer to a long question. I say more about that in the book. I give 10 or 12 different specific strategies for Digital Literacy that might be of importance, and more than happy to have more of a conversation about that. Thank you. Anyone else . God, you guys have great questions. I really appreciate this. Yes . I just had a question about your fathers internalized racism. I was just wondering if that shifted just with the 60s, the you know, black panthers movement, you know black is beautiful and just this whole movement that happened. Did it shift his perception of how he viewed himself and how he viewed the black community . Thats a great question. Thats a great question and the short answer is no. What happened you know, did the movements outside shift my dads view of himself as a black man . My dad really bought into murray and jenkins en jenkins and all the bell curve stuff and all that craziness about africanamericans and people of color and intelligence. You would find him reading this stuff and would say well, they say it here. Not having the literacy there to understand that much of that research had been debunked because it fed into a narrative that he had about himself. My dad was born in 1919, which means he was born right at the ascendancy of the eugenics movement. That was everywhere, that belief that you were not competent because of color, it was everywhere. Unfortunately he never grew out of that. We had many fights about that. I mean, my sister and i say this in the book so i dont mind saying it now. My sister has children of different colors, and my dad would selectively whisper messages about their intelligence to each of them. I mean, it was really, really traumatic, and so again, what i really wanted to present in the book is this contrast, and you see these contrasts everywhere, the contrast between ibm as a Great Company and ibm with a dark history. The contrast between me and my dad, and the contrast within my dad himself. The book is about how do you reconcile, if you even can, all of these varying contrasts . So again, thank you for that question. I really appreciate it. Wow. This is cool. This is a really cool discussion. Thank you. Anyone else . Yes . And well probably make this the last question. I was wondering if you have any advice on we know that algorithms are totally biased and they are used for everything from the criminal Justice System and how long people are paroled for and probation measures versus and the idea that facial recognition is out of our control because its in the hands of other governmental agencies, other governmental countries, how can we as individuals who dont believe in these biases essentially, how do we overcome or work towards a different future, i guess . That is the question. Thats not just a good question. I think that is the question in front of us. I think there are a number of ways to do this. Again, i talk about some of these in the book. As activists, first of all, there are a couple of organizations that are doing algorithmic vetting, so they are looking at some of the algorithms, some of the software, products, and saying, you know, this actually passes the smell test of being more inclusive and not as biased. So aligning yourself with those organizations and helping to work with them and to help them do their work. Thats just one of the things that we can do. I think the other thing that we can do is just like never again action. If we need to, we need to say to we can sit down with microsoft or with an amazon, and it is one of the wonderful things about this book is its given me the opportunity to do some of these things, to sit down with folks and say look, if you really want to fulfill a vision of not creating a biased world through the algorithms that you write, you know, heres what you need to do, you need to bring in somebody who can tell you about the history of how this technology has been used because maybe if youve got a developer who is writing code and understands that history, he or she will think twice before they decide to create a game like slave tetris because they dont understand that history. I guarantee you whoever wrote slave tetris had no real clue about the atlantic slave trade and what really happened, but had they, they would have never created a game like that. Theres a lot of other games they could have created. So education just like we were saying before, not just with the technology, but the history behind that technology i think is also really really really important, and id say the best thing you can do is if you have Young Children or if you know of Young Children, help them be more digitally lit rate literate. When they sit down at a screen, point to whats going on. If you know something more than what they see on the screen, say it, talk to them about it. Thats where it is going to really make a change. When the young people who go on to become the developers and write the code have this level of understanding of what they are faced with, and the responsibility of creating an algorithm, when they understand that, i think things might be different. So those are just some ideas. Again, i say a little bit more in the book, more than happy to talk with you about any further. Thank you all so much. This has been great. [applause] im going to be outside, signing copies of books for anybody who would like this. Again, i want to thank you for this opportunity to share some of these thoughts and ideas with you. This has been a very special opportunity for me. Thank you. [applause] you are watching a special edition of book tv now airing during the week, while members of congress are in their districts, due to the coronavirus pandemic. Tonight the Supreme Court, first, Supreme Court associate Justice Neil Gorsuch reflects on his 30year career and offers his thoughts on the judiciary in and the u. S. Constitution. And then Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader ginsburg spoke at the 19th annual book festival in washington, d. C. Later legal analyst and Supreme Court biographer profiles chief justice john roberts. Enjoy book tv now and over the weekend on cspan 2. Cspan has round the clock coverage of the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic and its all available on demand at cspan. Org coronavirus. Watch white house briefings, updates from governors and state officials. Track the spread throughout the u. S. And the world with interactive maps. Watch on demand any time, unfiltered, at cspan. Org coronavirus. Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the latest edition of the author series. Tonight we are very pleased to have with us the authors who will talk about their latest m society how Dorothy Sayers and