My name is rosalie and im here to introduce our guest, clyde ford. He is a former Systems Engineer with ibm. He graduated from the university of western states in portland as a doctor of chiropractic and is a trained psychotherapist area is also the awardwinning author of 12 works of fiction and nonfiction area clyde is the recipient of this or on the other Person Injured right award in africanamerican literature as well as numerous other awards for his books. Hes been a guest on the oprah show and npr and radio and tv programs across the nation. Clyde is here tonight to speak about his latest book, think black. Which was just released shortlisted for the 2019 goddard book prize in social justice. Would you please join me in welcoming to the kendall planetarium at the Oregon Museum of science and industry clyde ford. Thank you leslie and thank you for being here. I cant tell you how special it is to be here at odyssey again. I was talking with president nancy and just reliving my First Experience over 40 years ago when i honestly was up at Washington Park and i was a volunteer and i was working with a group that actually was involved in software. I had come from ibm 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 pascal compiler anybody whos old enough to know what the pascal compiler is kind of dates yourself but thats how i got involved with ansi and i love the place red areas have a file at night i go up there and one or two in the morning and agreed some of my friends and say theres a visible lady there and we can punch buttons see all the lights and some of you may know or remember what that was like. Where is she now vicki . Great, so i didnt get to visit her when i was there yesterday. But you can visit her again and i may have to stop by before i leave tomorrow just to say hello to the visible lady because she was such an important part of me being in full with ansi and i want to thank you for being here and just the opportunity to share with you some often ideas about my think black. I want to you both talk about the book and also interspersed with some reading from the book and then toward the end we will have an opportunity for questions and answers as well and if nobody has said this already, if you have a cell phone and you want to put it on vibrate or silent, that probably a really good idea. So i just have found this so surprising. To learn more about my book after its been published. You know, often as an author you think you write a book, you know what youre writing about. You publish and you thought about what it is youve written area and what i found in what im going to share with you tonight is some of the things that ive learned obviously in writing the book and ill certainly be able to share those with you also some of the surprising things i learned after the books and published. And i thought that was just really interesting and it says a loti think about the subject matter and the times i was writing about. I bought a really great place to start would be really where i start the book which is contrasting my fathers first day at work with my first day at work and starting with my first day of work ibm with his first day at work at ibm. So lets if we see if we can do that. I held fast to an overhead bar at the elevator train i wrote in swayed from side to side, rocketing into manhattan from the bronx. When it does beneath the harlem river everything outside the car went dark red and i caught a reflection of myself in a window. It ballooned afro, pork chop sideburns. A blue suit suit with red pinstripes area a fire engine red turtleneck and a trenchcoat with his collar turned up. I halfhour later, i started from the subway through the light rainhanging over wall streets. Humming the theme song from the film shaft. Which i had seen the night before. I fancied myself as the movies black hero, about to engage in battle with the white hoods of injustice arrayed before me. I entered one of the skyscrapers, squeezed into the financial district and took an elevator to a higher floor. There stenciled in blue, the sign on the glass doors read ibm. And beneath it in white, new York Financial office. I grasped the door handle paused. Catching another glimpse of myself in the glass door pain. I shook my head unsure of what to make of this decision. Unready to push through those glass doors, uncertain of what state awaited me on the other side of that threshold. On that all day in 1971, i was young. And a black, defiant and angry. More than ever determined not to be like my father. Yet there i stood, about to report to work at ibm. Where he worked. For 25 years. So thats how i start the book. And i wonder, i gave some of this way but i wonder if you can date when the photo is and i can tell you its not of mydad , its me area many people ask and its also not 1971 area can anybody guess what year that photo might be less and theres actuallysome hints there. [inaudible] its not. First of all im wearing bellbottoms. That data. Ive got pork chop sideburns, that makes it and that is now complex and that should date it as well too. I will keep you in suspense and ill just say it was 1968. Thats when that photograph was taken twoyears before i entered ibm but did somebody say that . There you go. And i looked pretty similar to that, maybe a little bit cleaned up with that suit suit on buti looked similar to that when i went to work for ibm. Anybody for extra credit . That magazine has named mojo. Anybody know what that magazine was connected to . It was the magazine of the bsc, the black Students Council at columbia in 1968. Thats important historically for a couple of reasons area one of the reasons is so important is 1968, that may, that spring was the spring of the columbia student uprising and that was the spring which saw both the sts group with mark rudd, the black Student Council with people like sam anderson and ray brown and also the hispanic students at columbia. A young lords like luciano, really very involved in trying to get more than just the education columbia but trying to get a university to make a difference in terms of social change and social justice and a lot of what happened in that 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, i can draw select line between what took place in 1968 and whats taking place right now so that was a really important place because i think young people and i was certainly among them, i wasnt in columbia at the time, i was in high school in new york city but i think young people the idea that we could make a difference if we raise our voices and organize in the right way. And i have to make a little bit of a call out here because theres a couple holes sitting in the audience here along with me were young in those days i havent seen lynn 50 years and we were very involved in some of the real activism back in the 60s that i think laid the groundwork of what took place. I think those pictures also is revelatory because its a classic picture of a radical young black man in the 60s. So 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 and the black panthers looked as well read i certainly dont mind saying i was part of the black panthers and part of the intellectual wing of the panthers in those days. So thats me when i started the book. Thats me when istepped into ibm, started to work at ibm. What about my dad . What about 25 years before, what was that likefor him . It was the late 1940s. Postworld war ii america. Anything was possible. Duke ellingtons some jazz, Jackie Robinson along a big lead. Brown versus board. Of education formed through the courts. Nowhere was the possibilities and promises more deeply than in harlem. Which was then black americas Gravitational Center area in a city College Classroom at the edge of harlem, and accounting professor invited one of her students to dinner. Black pi arrived at her slinky apartment dressed to the nines. And watson, founder of ibm stepped from the shadows. Watson offered my father a job and Branch RickeyJackie Robinson moment ensued. The start of an unknown chapter in the history of modernday computers. Its a story i heard a lot growing up. Of watson, we use to call him the old man or mister watson. I heard a lot of names my dad used for him but the story i heard most was my dad showing up for dinner. Watson kind of stepping out from the back room saying to my dad in no uncertainterms , im the only dam in this company that could offer you a job. Click. This is the story i really started out thinking i was writing. In and of itself, a great story, and i hope by the end of tonight, you will see that one of the things you learn as an author is to follow the story thats in front of you, and sometimes the place you get to is not necessarily the place you thought you were starting from and going to. And so thats the journey, but im kind of telling the story. I dont want to give you the story ahead of time. Lets just look a little bit more about what that time was like. Theres watson. Thats thomas j. Watson, the founder of ibm, came from a background 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. 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 back 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 ayes have it. And by that i mean, if you looked at the direction of everyone who is staring, look at what is staring directly at the camera look who is staring directly at the camera. Look at whose eyes are away. All the white guys in the picture are staring at the picture, as if they are saying im belong. And the others are not looking at the camera, as if they say im not sure i belong. This captures the time really well and in some ways captures the time we have with us, in terms of being able to look at a sense of entitlement and privilege maybe . Certainly that 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 just found it so fascinating that it was in this picture. I didnt realize it was until it was actually published. This is part of the time that my dad stepped into the company. Again, first africanamerican software engineer. I should say really in all honestly just even using that term is a little bit my dad went to work for ibm in 1947. He was hired in 46 and started working in january of 47. Software hadnt been invented. They called people who had his job Systems Engineers. They still do. 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 card 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. The other thing i wanted to do with this book because 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 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, but more like maybe 4, 5, 6 ounces. So your cell phone is a programmable computer. There is absolutely no doubt about it. Youve got somewhere between eight and, i dont know, 512 giga bites of story in that computer. Okay . In that, lets say 4 ounces that youre weighing. Im going to show you a picture of the first ever programmable computer. Its an ibm 407. Its the first ever commercially available programmable computer. By that meaning it was mass produced and leased by ibm to lots of people. There were other Programmable Computers before that, but they were all oneoffs. This was the first like your cell phone, you know, mass produced. This box alone, that 407 weighed three tons. When you put all of these ancillary equipment around it that it needed, the sorters and the tabulators and the printers, you could get a computer room in and of itself that weighs somewhere between 10 and 12 tons. Thats 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 407 . On the left, on your far left, thats where cards were put into this machine, cards were read. Right in the middle is a converted typewriter that was used as a printer, and right here, at this door, inside that door was this, believe it or not, i found this on ebay. Wow. And this is what was used to program the earliest computer, to program an ibm 407. This board is actually from an ibm 407. My dad used to bring these home. The way we programmed these i use the word program because thats what we did. We had patch cords, kind of like a telephone operator in the old days and wed plug one into a hole here, and one in there and 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 do subtraction. Only the early ones added. What you would end up with is something that looked like this. 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. When i was 5, my sister was 3, 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. And he would say to us, okay, i want you to plug this into this and plug this into that, and, you know, wed i guess do our best because he always told us the next day what you guys did was great. It worked fine. Everything was just great. It just 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 walk in a room, and i know you heard the term digital native digital native thrown out a lot. I have never been in a room where somebody had been a digital native as long as i had. A long time in computers. 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 on august 28, 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 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 masondixon 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. 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 cently been hired, he was sent on a business meeting that turned he recently was hired, he was on a business meeting that turned into a meeting with a prostitute, with the idea if he was caught on film with a prostitu 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. Im heard 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, over some software diagram or something, i heard so many times that 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 t