Think Black

by Clyde W. Ford

  He glowered. “You do realize that informing another employee about an open position is grounds for termination?”

  I said nothing.

  “Even if that employee is related.”

  I still said nothing, even though I’d just been threatened with my father’s job.

  “Go back to work at the Fed, and in a year or two we’ll see what positions are open for you.”

  “In that case, I quit.”

  Art laughed. “No one quits IBM.”

  “Well, I just did.” I walked out of his office.

  At home, several hours later, my telephone rang.

  “Why don’t you take a year’s leave of absence instead?” Art said.

  While my father spent much of that year in Cambridge working on CP-67, I studied for my master’s in computer science at Rutgers University and taught computer science there. When I returned to IBM, that job at the New York Advanced Education Center magically appeared.

  I wanted a challenging position, and I got it. I stepped into a role teaching IBM’s most advanced computer offering—CP/CMS and VM/370—picking up, it turned out, where my father had left off. I worked with a group of really smart people and relished my good fortune. Then one day, while representing the company at a conference in Miami, I realized that working at the New York Advanced Education Center with CP/CMS and VM/370 may have had nothing to do with good fortune at all.

  A young Black man cornered me in a secluded hall. “We’d like you to come to work for the company,” he said.

  My head spun. My former manager’s voice reverberated in my mind. We know what you’ve been doing. My job. My father. My father’s job in Cambridge. My time at the New York Data Center. Artificial intelligence. DARPA. CP/CMS. VM/370. Virtual memory. Virtual machines. CID. Ghana.

  Intelligence analysts say it’s important to know when coincidence stops and real intelligence begins. It felt as though this young man had just presented me with the end of coincidence through his offer.

  “The company’s very interested in virtual technology. We keep an eye out for talented people like you.”

  This fellow must have been new to recruiting for the CIA. To me his approach seemed more clumsy than threatening.

  I played with him. “The company? What company?”

  “You know,” he said.

  “I don’t.”

  He whispered low. “The company. The CIA.”

  I listened to him go on about the next steps in my employment at the CIA—being vetted, the interviewing of family and friends, being trailed by covert operatives. I chuckled, thinking about the CIA dredging up the “angry young Black man” letter I’d sent my draft board.

  “Thanks, but I’ll pass on the offer,” I said.

  He stiffened. “No one refuses an offer by the company.”

  I wondered if my father had.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to reconsider?”

  “I am.”

  The young man walked away, incredulous, and shortly thereafter I left IBM again, this time for good.

  14

  A Mass Shooting at IBM

  On the morning of May 28, 1982, Edward Thomas Mann kissed his wife, Rosa, holding her in a tight embrace lasting far longer than usual. She knew then that something was wrong. He left their home in Mitchellville, Maryland, for the IBM Federal Systems Division office in Bethesda, thirty miles away. Mann drove his bronze 1977 Lincoln Continental over a route he’d taken many times as a systems engineer working at this IBM office.

  Somewhere between his home and his office, Mann slipped into military fatigues and a black ski mask. As he approached the IBM building, he drove around to the back of the facility. When the loading ramp came into view, he gunned the accelerator and zoomed up the ramp, crashing through the plate glass doors and entering the first floor of the three-story structure. Mann then jumped from his car, reached back for his automatic machine gun, two shotguns, and two pistols. He swung around in a wide circle as he opened fire.

  My father did not directly assist Edward Mann in gaining employment, but his underground railroad did have a cascading effect. Blacks entering IBM paved the way for other Blacks to enter, and once in the company, Black IBMers banded together to support one another. But this also led to a domino effect as revelation after revelation fell, laying bare IBM’s inequitable treatment of its Black employees and revealing a pervasive racism beneath the veneer of progress in high technology. On occasion, the results of these revelations had tragic consequences I’m sure my father could never have imagined.

  During the years I worked as an instructor at the IBM Advanced Education Center at 909 Third Avenue in New York, I had a desk at a window with a view of the apartment buildings on the other side of 52nd Street. Desks in our office were arranged in pairs, so many of my colleagues had partners. Yet the desk next to me always remained empty, except for those times when a Black IBM employee would stumble in and ask for a seat, explaining, “You’re the only person I feel comfortable sitting next to.” Often, these were employees at odds with the company.

  Richard (Dick) Hudson was one of the IBM employees I met that way. He’d appear at the desk next to me for weeks at a time, and then he’d disappear for weeks at a time before appearing once again. That desk seemed to be his home within the eye of the storm that swirled around him, a place he could relax next to someone he could talk with. When I knew Dick, he was simultaneously working for IBM, working on his PhD in sociology at City College, and working to show a pattern of wage and employment discrimination against Black workers at IBM. He always had a pencil in his hand and a number of charts that supported his principal assertions.

  From observing the company’s poor management and promotion record with my father, I found Dick’s contentions utterly believable. Furthermore, Dick was a leader of the Black Workers Alliance (BWA), a group of IBM employees who had organized to advocate for the rights of Black workers within the company. Formed in August 1970 in the Washington, DC, area, BWA had several main goals:1

  to ensure Black IBM employees received better promotional and career opportunities

  to insist that Black workers receive equitable compensation for their work

  to assist newly hired Blacks employees in adjusting to life within IBM

  to serve as a “watchdog” for IBM’s Equal Opportunities Program Office

  to improve upon IBM’s service to Black inner-city communities

  As a second-generation Black IBM employee, I knew something about the world that first-generation Blacks stepped into as new hires at the company. Many that I met were young, from poor inner-city neighborhoods, and straight out of college. They’d walk into an IBM office with a naive, starry-eyed sense of having made it to a promised land of milk and honey. The company stalked them like a lion after a young gazelle, dazed and separated from the herd. I was informed by one Black employee that IBM branch office managers actually had “Black employee” head count quotas they were required to meet.

  I’d not been with IBM long when a young Black man, a few years older than me, walked out of our manager’s office with a satisfied smile on his face. I casually walked over and sat down in the empty chair next to him.

  “How’s it going, man?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Pretty damn good.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You bet. I asked Art for a week’s advance on my pay, and he asked why. I told him I’d just started working and needed a down payment on rent for a new apartment in Brooklyn. In that case, he said, he’d give me two weeks’ advance, not one.”

  “That so?”

  “Then he told me if I ever needed anything, I should come to him first. New car. New stereo system. Money for a wedding. He’d make sure I got what I needed. Pretty damn cool.”

  “You ever hear of a ‘company town’?” I asked.

  “Man, whaddya mean?”

  “You know, a place where the company owns everything, and you get into debt with the company, and you can’t
leave until you pay that debt off, which never happens.”

  The young man frowned and then waved me off. “Nothin’ like that. Man’s just tryin’ to help.”

  He got up from his desk and walked away.

  Years later, when I worked as an instructor at the IBM New York Advanced Education Center, I ran into that fellow again, taking a class. He had a huge smile on his face, and he shook my hand vigorously.

  “For my second employee review, Art gave me an excellent appraisal but barely an increase in salary. When I asked, he said I should be thankful for all the company’s done for me and accept whatever I was given. I got what you meant then. I paid back every penny I owed IBM as soon as I could. I’ve never taken an advance since then. If my salary increases don’t amount to what I expect, I’m in Art’s face. The company may not like it, but I don’t care. It’s my life, and all I want is fair pay for my work.”

  With the BWA, IBM management now faced the kind of employees they’d not faced before. Unlike my father, who never openly criticized the injustice and racism he faced, these Black men and women were willing to stand up for equal opportunity and social justice, and press the company to do the same.

  Testifying before the District Council in Washington, DC, in 1976, one of the founders of the BWA, Edell Lydia Jr. (aka Kwame Kwasi Afoh), described a systematic campaign of threats, harassment, and intimidation by IBM, in an effort to rid itself of BWA members, especially the organization’s leaders.

  On numerous occasions I was threatened with being fired due to my participation in BWA activities such as trying to provide assistance to other Blacks who were literally catching hell. Also during this period, I was becoming quite active in D.C. in a number of issues such as the transportation and freeway battles, the Angela Davis case and many others. My work with IBM was always appraised satisfactory or better but not at one of the top ratings. After going two years without an increase in salary from March, 1970 until March, 1972 I was offered only a 6.9 percent raise. I indicated that this amount was not commensurate with either my expectations or my performance level on the job and that I would no longer work for such slave wages. After a few days of talking with upper management in the D.C. area, I was fired for insubordination as they called it. I felt as did a number of my co-workers that IBM had used its infamous “Appraisal and Pay for Performance Plan” to weed out one more Black worker who did not fit into their scheme of things.2

  The 1970s, the period Lydia references in his testimony, gave birth to the social, political, and economic polarization that is considered the norm today. Movements that flourished during the 1950s and ’60s clashed with burgeoning new countermovements. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, direct outgrowths of the Black freedom struggle of the 1950s and ’60s, for example, begot a new Republican Party and a profound realignment of American politics. Republicans siphoned off Democratic voters in the South by appealing to their sense of loss at the political gains of Blacks. This “southern strategy,” as the racially charged tactic was euphemistically called, helped elect Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes, and Trump. It gave rise to the anti-immigrant, anti-minority, anti–affirmative action, and voter suppression movements so potent in America today.

  In 1973, Roe v. Wade, seen as a victory for women’s rights, gave birth to a vocal, and often violent, anti-abortion, pro-life movement. A secular Left, committed to ending the Vietnam War, protecting the environment, and embracing social, political, ethnic, and sexual diversity, spurred the rise of a religious Right that was firmly opposed to these sentiments.

  In IBM, Black men and women, many of whom my father had surreptitiously assisted, were no longer content with simply having a job. They demanded equal pay for equal work, and they met with surprising resistance.

  Ultimately, Lydia filed a complaint with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), asserting racial discrimination. Ultimately, the EEOC ruled in Lydia’s favor, unearthing with their ruling what seemed to be a pattern of discrimination against Blacks in employment and pay at IBM. The company moved quickly to settle privately with Lydia and thereby avoid admission of any wrongdoing.3

  IBM had long used its secretive appraisal and pay system, the one upon which my desk mate, Dick Hudson, was trying to shine light, as a means to weed out problematic employees. Edell Lydia declared that Jerry Vallery, a founder of BWA and head of the group’s South Africa committee, met with then IBM vice president Buck Rogers and challenged him to answer for the company’s role in support of apartheid. But Rogers refused to answer Vallery’s questions, and soon after that meeting, Lydia testified, IBM harassed Vallery out of the company.4

  When someone anonymously slipped Dick Hudson a confidential copy of IBM’s internal pay guidelines, Hudson handed copies out at a BWA meeting. “We found,” said Hudson, “that independent of rating, and regardless of how long we’d been with the company, black workers were getting paid either in the lowest quarter [of the pay scale], or even below.”5

  For Black IBM employees, such findings validated what they’d experienced repeatedly in their own careers. For Edward Thomas Mann, something broke.

  On the day of the shooting, an early bullet caught sixty-nine-year-old security guard Robert Jesse Lewis in the neck, and he crumpled to the ground. Doors slammed shut. Desks slid into place as barricades. Mann marched from cubicle to cubicle, corridor to corridor, spraying bullets indiscriminately at anyone in sight. A burst from his automatic weapon felled forty-year-old programmer analyst Hung Phi Nguyen. Another dropped fifty-six-year-old industry analyst Larry Lewis Thompson.

  Someone wisely pulled the building’s fire alarm, sending everyone scattering outside and away from Mann, as he made his way to a third-floor perch, from which he held Bethesda police at bay. After nearly seven hours, Mann surrendered peacefully, but he’d killed two people and left ten others wounded. A week later, security guard Robert Jesse Lewis succumbed to his wounds, bringing to three the death toll for the largest mass shooting to date at an IBM facility.6

  At first, Mann pleaded innocent by reason of insanity. Then, against the advice of his attorneys, he changed his plea to guilty and requested the death penalty. In August 1984, Mann received three life sentences plus 1,080 years for the murders. Mann belonged to the Black Workers Alliance. His friends and acquaintances told the Washington Post that he believed IBM had denied him the promotions, cash awards, and preferential treatment given to Whites.7

  IBM “has continually maintained a practice of disparate treatment towards black employees,” Mann had said in a complaint filed with the DC Office of Human Rights. After a four-month investigation, his complaint was denied. Reporter Pam Coulter of radio station WTOP, now a correspondent for CBS News Radio, spoke to Mann by telephone as the siege unfolded. When asked about IBM, he said to her, “The company is very prejudiced,” but “they disguise it in a very businesslike way.”8

  BWA issued an official statement on the rampage:

  The National Black Workers Alliance of IBM Employees wishes to express its deepest sympathy and regrets to the victims and their families for the senseless shooting that occurred at the IBM facility on Fernwood Road on Friday, May 28.

  We do not condone the actions of Edward Thomas Mann and we feel strongly that this is not the way to express grievances and/or feelings of unjust treatment.

  The environment that leads an Edward Thomas Mann to express his frustrations in this violent way still exists within IBM. We implore the IBM corporation to investigate the conditions that black employees have been subjected to and are still being subjected to, that lead to this tragic incident.9

  Dick Hudson said in a Computerworld interview, “What happened to Mann was typical of what happens to blacks at IBM. . . . The slots above are reserved for whites—we just can’t go any further.”10

  My father knew the upper echelons of power at IBM were unavailable to Blacks twenty years before this senseless loss of life. IBM, of course, claimed stellar treatment of its Bl
ack employees. “IBM is proud of its equal opportunity record,” said corporate spokesman Dan Udell. “We believe there isn’t a major company in the country that has a better one.”11

  And it is precisely in IBM’s statement that a problem lies. The company’s equal opportunity record leaves much to be desired. The fact that other major companies may not have a better record simply compounds the problem of racism in the high-tech industry.

  After the shooting, IBM doubled down on mistreatment of Black employees they considered to be problematic. In January 1984, Bernard C. Dusé Jr., once a rising star at IBM, complained of racial discrimination. In the months that followed, the company made his life a living hell. IBM questioned his mental stability. False charges of sexual harassment were leveled against him. Security agents hired by IBM put him under 24-7 surveillance, tailing his car and spying on him through binoculars. IBM finally fired him.12

  “You can’t overcome situations where people are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to do the things that were done to me. It was racially motivated in the extreme,” Dusé told Stamford superior court judge Sidney Landau.

  In 1989, the Stamford court awarded Dusé a $3.2 million settlement against LSI, the security firm hired by IBM. By the time of the award, however, LSI was insolvent, so Dusé collected nothing.13 Then in 1992, IBM settled with Dusé for an undisclosed amount, which the company then reported to the IRS. Dusé considered this a breach of his nondisclosure agreement with IBM. He filed another suit but ultimately lost.14

  While the media gave much attention to Edward Thomas Mann’s horrific mass shooting, scant mention was made of his suicide. On March 10, 1986, Maryland Penitentiary officials reported, “Two Maryland Penitentiary inmates, including a man convicted for killing three people in a shooting spree at IBM’s Bethesda offices, apparently committed suicide over the weekend in separate parts of the prison.”15

  A mole within BWA reported Dick Hudson for handing out copies of confidential IBM wage scales, and the company summarily fired him for violating secrecy rules. Dick then filed a claim of racial discrimination with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). While the NLRB ruled against him, their report also revealed the extent of IBM’s wage and employment secrecy. An IBM employee, the report said, “knows only what he does and what he is presently paid. He does not know even his job title, and where that ranks him in relation to other employees. . . . Increases are not standardized, either by timing or amount. The employee’s individual supervisor has broad discretion whether to grant increases, when to grant them, and in what amount.”16