Programs across the nation he appears tonight you speak about his latest book think plaque which was just shortlisted for the 2019 prize of social justice. Please join me to welcome to the kendall planetary in at the Oregon Museum of science and industry. [applause] thank you leslie and all for being here i cannot tell you how special it is to be here. Was just talking with the president , nancy and just re living my First Experience over 40 years ago at Washington Park and i was a volunteer working with a group that actually was involved i had just come from ibm to go to Chiropractic College and i needed something to do around computers and i was able to get computer time by exchanging my work to help them develop the pascal compiler it is that will date yourself but thats how i got involved i used to have a key late at night i would go up at one or two in the morning and say there is a visible lady there we can punch the button some of you may remember what that was like. Where was she quex. I didnt get to visit her yesterday but you can and i may have to stop by before i leave tomorrow just to say hello because she was such an important part of me being involved. Again thank you for being here just the opportunity to share with you some thoughts and ideas of my latest book. Tonight i will do a talk about the book and interspersed with some readings into the end we will have an opportunity for questions and answers if you do have a cell phone and put that on vibrate or silence that would probably be a really good idea. I found this so surprising to learn more about my book after its being published for often as an author you write a book you publish and then you talk about it and what i found is some of the things i learned in writing the book but what i learned after the book has been published and its really interesting and it says a lot about the subject matter and the time i was writing about i thought a really good place to start is where i start to contrast my fathers first day at work with mine starting with my first day of work at ibm with his first day at work at ibm so lets see if we can do that. To the overhead bar to the train swayed from side to side coming in from manhattan from the bronx to go beneath the harlem river everything went dark i caught a reflection of myself in the window and afro and pork chop sideburns and red pinstripes fire engine red turtleneck and a trenchcoat with the caller turned up. At half hour later i strutted from the subway to the rain hanging over wall street i fancy myself as the movies black hero about to engage in battle for those before me and then i enter one of the skyscrapers and squeeze into the financial district taking an elevator up to a higher floor. There stenciled on the glass door was ibm and new York Financial office. I grab the door handle that paz getting another glimpse of myself i shook my head not sure 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 the threshold. On that day i was young and black and to be like my father put there i stood reporting to work at ibm where he worked for 25 years. So thats how i start the book and i wonder if i gave some of this away but i can tell you that photograph is me and its also not 1971. Can you guess what year that might be cracks first of all i wearing bellbottoms. I have pork chop sideburns and that is malcolm x. I wont keep you in suspense 19783 years before i entered ibm. There you go. And they looked pretty similar to that when i went to work for ibm. Anybody with extra credit does anybody know what that magazine was connected to . It was the magazine of the black Student Council 1968. One of the reasons it was so important that day, that spring was the columbia student uprising. And wht now so that was a really, really important place. I was certainly among them, i wasnt at columbia but i was in high school and i think young people got the idea that we could make a difference if we restored laces and organized in a right way. I have to make a little bit of callout because theres a couple folks sitting in the audience who were very involved it is a classic picture of a radical young black man in the 60s and of course you will see. What about my dad, with about 25 years before. What was that like for them . It was the late 1940s, anything was possible. Jackie robinson swung the bat, brown v. Board of education swung through the courts. Nowhere was the possibility and promise filled more deeply than in harlem which was then black americas gravitational center. In the city College Classroom at the edge of harlem and accounting professor invited one of her students to dinner. He arrived at her swanky apartment just to the nine. Thomas watson founder of ibm stepped from the shadows and offered my father a child and at the moment ensued. The start of a chapter in the history of modernday computers. The story i heard a lot of growing up of mr. Watson. I heard a lot of names, but the story that i heard most was my dad showing up to dinner, walked in and stepping out fro steppinm and saying to my dad in no Uncertain Terms im the only person in this company that could offer you the job. I thought when i started work on this book thats what i was doing was writing kind of a branch Jackie Robinson story about the early days of computers where my dad would have been obviously Jackie Robinson who broke Major League Baseball but now my dad doing something similar with computers and High Technology and thomas j. Watson senior plaintiff in the role of Branch Rickey who hired Jackie Robinson to actually in 19,451st play for one of the farm teams and then in 1947 actually the same year that my father started working just a couple of months later got to step up to the plate for his first spring atbat. So this is the story i started out thinking i was writing. In and of itself a great story, and i hope that by the end of tonight you will see one of the things you learn as an author is to follow the story that is in front of you, and sometimes the place that you get to is not necessarily the place you thought you were starting from and going to. So, that is the journey that im kind of telling the story. I dont want to give you the story ahead of time so lets look a little bit more about that time looks like. So that is Thomas Watson. He was the founder of ibm, came from a background working at ncr somewhat of a very rough and tumble business man. He was part of what they called the knockout game and we dont take out our competition, we knock them out. So its important to remember as we go on a little bit further. This was also at the dawn of the computer age. One of the things you see here is a picture of my dad and this is another thing i just learned after the book was published. Im going to ask you in this picture would make you think is significant about this picture other than the fact theres few women in the picture. Does anybody see anything unique in the picture . What i wont call you is the eyes have it. By that i mean if you look at the direction that everyone is staring at it is staring directly at the camera and who is staring away. All of them are sitting directly at the camera to say im belong into the two women are staring off in the distance, one has some classes on as if to say im not sure i belong. I didnt realize we were capturing that in many ways it captures the tying really well in terms of being able to look at this incident highlighted the privilege. That is a really important thing and certainly it became an important part of what i was writing about in the buck in terms of technology and praising the privilege and those who will be able to read the book can read more but i just thought it was so fascinating 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 for the first africanamerican Software Engineer and i should say in all honesty that even just using the term its a little bit anachronistic. There was no such thing as software. Software hadnt been invented. Ibm called people who have the job system engineers and they still do. And yes he worked on the technology that would ultimately give rise to software. But when he started work, there were punchcards and youll see an amendeyou will seein a minuts involved. This is the dawn of the digital age and the other thing i wanted to do with the public is because so many of us are so used to technology that is so accessible and easy to use is to take a step back down memory lane at technology was like back in my dads day into the technology i grew up knowing. Do you have a cell phone you can put your hand on and a b. And 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. A couple ounces, maybe half a pound, maybe. But more like maybe four, five, 6 ounces. So, your cell phone is a programmable computer theres no doubt about it. By that meaning it was mass produced by ibm to lots of people. There were other Programmable Computers before that they were all one off. This was the first bite the cell phone, massproduced. Thats one way to four times. When you put all of the ancillary equipment around it, you could get a computer room in and of itself somewhere between ten and 12 tons. That is a lot of weight to carry around in your purse or pocket. Let me tell you. So, what are some of the pieces of this . On the far left that is where cards were put into this. Right in the middle is a converted typewriter used as a printer and right here at this store inside of the door was this. Believe it or not i found this on the ebay, and this is what was used to program the earlie earliest. My dad used to bring these home and at the way that w we programmed beats and i use the word program because that is what we paid kind of like a telephone operator we would plug one in here and there so you would end up with a network of brightly colored patch cords that controls how the circuit inside of the machine spoke to each other, red cards because it didnt do any subtraction of the early ones did add edit and produce results. Pretty fascinating. So, what would end up with is something that looked like this. So thats the board. That somebody thats actually working on it. This is what the board would look like. We called the process basket weaving we call it that for the obvious reason. When i was five, my sister was three or four. As the instructions for how to program that regime. It worked fine, everything was just great and it worked as i thought it would. At least there i was at five 5d Programming Computers and i have to say i walked in the room and i know you heard the term youvm Digital Natives throwing out a lot but in the room where anybody that has been a Digital Natives longer than i have i started in 1956 i was 5yearsold when might at first this, so a long time and you curse. So this is what was going on inside of hightech. Early 50s is when the 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 important to my dad as well so lets try to get a sense of what was going on. August 28, 1963, i scanned the small blackandwhite Television Screen in my grandparents living room for a glimpse of my parents. On i am 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. 11yearsold, i searched through the millions of black faces lining the grassy mall in front of the wee the week and a more e i king jr. s words to steer me deeply. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be charged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I never saw my appearance on television that today, but that didnt arrest my pride and 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. We had to take in a Greyhound Bus south to visit my mothers family in virginia at the masondixon line in maryland we were forced to change to a bus parked color of the money that we did behind the maryland house now a popular rest stop on i 95. My father assured claudia and me onto the bus though he said little on the ride from maryland to newport. I have become so used to my father extolling the promises of a Digital Future that it stunned me to seek and rendered impotent by the shackles of a draconian past. So, this is what was taking place outside of ibm and the two collided and for no Uncertain Terms from my data. Data. A collided because it was the first black Software Engineer he was faced with many challenges just keep his job, and i talk about some of those. For example to one of the stories that he told often is how when he had been hired he was sent on a business meeting that turned out to be a meeting with a prostitute. The idea was if he was caught on film, 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 throw a ball with you or play with you and there he was working over 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 to succeed and keep his job. So, that certainly infiltrated his consciousness into the outside world in that respect. I think the other thing that i about in the book is how not only did he have this sense of the racism that he encountered working at ibm, but unfortunately he also turned some of that racism in on itself. So when i grew up with a father that didnt like the fact that he was blocked because he felt that the color of his skin held him back, made him less worthy, less intelligent event whic whii found so surprising, my dad was a smart guy, championship chess player for many years, plays instruments, on and on. And yet, he has internalized racism to such an extent that now he sees himself as not as worthy or not as capable. So, you can imagine here i am thinking im going to learn as much as i can about my history and who i am as a person in historical terms in africanamerican history so i spend my afternoons at the library in new york reading about these wonderful figures in africanamerican history that i never got in school and by the time i get home theres my dad lamenting the fact. That was one of the first really strong instances of this kind of clash both in generations and cultures that happened between my dad and me because my dad again buying into this whole idea that if you are black you are left coupled and me feel like nobody, you can do anything it doesnt matter the color of your skin. This also was the point in writing this book when my editor at harpercollins started to ask me some questions about what was it like. And i remember this experience that we had come and its funny as youre writing a memoir in particular very often you dont think about things until you start to write them into so i remembered how my dad also changed once he became back from the march on washington and i saw a change in the practical ways that surprised me at here is a little snippet of what this was like when we went into the house that several summers before we had to change buses. After returning from the march coming and this is the march on washington, something inside my father shifted a little. Our family went back to virginia the next summer but this time we drove. On the return home we stopped at the maryland house for a few summers before we ha have been forced to change buses. We sat at the 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, now is the time for us to take a stand. She held her hand out in front of us. When we didnt rise to the waitress returned. She snarled. I thought i told you we dont serve your kind. My father supposedly snapped. And we are not leaving until you do. Our waitress disappeared into the kitchen. I looked up and moments later a man and a white shirt and tie presumably a manager pushed through the kitchen doors with a determined look on his red face. The waitress trailed behind him smirking. I twisted around on my stool and the entire restaurant had grown silent, observing the events that were unfolding. Dont look at other people, my mother scolded. Turn around and look at your venue. The manager must have felt the stairs as well as perhaps paused to her the wisdom of alienating his white patrons many of whom stopped here heading north on their way home. By the time he reached us, the manager and his determination dissolved into an innocent fear and serve him smile. Hello, folks. What are you all having comedians. After we made our selection from the menu, the waitress stormed off. We sat and waited while behind us the buzz of conversations slowly returned. When the waitress finally appeared without orders, she slapped down the place on the counter. Dont know what you folks expect to accomplish, she hissed. So again for the kind of the collision of what was going on both inside and outside of ibm for mike. And about the same time my editor asked me what was going on in the world and how was your dad dealing with it, she also asked me this really important question that was to change the nature of the book from just what i thought was initially this kind of feelgood story about a tricky Jackie Robinson moment in computer history to something much larger. She asked me an obvious question why in the first place, why did Thomas Watson in 1946 higher dad to go to work in 1947 ibm . Why hire a black guy ask and like frederick i dont really know the answer but i guarantee by the t