While writing this book, I faced a challenge that many memoirists face: How do I relate an important story or account for which I have no firsthand recollection and for which no factual documentation exists? I did not want to deceive the reader by suggesting that I was knowledgeable of, present at conversations with, or had insights into the motivations of individuals mentioned in the book, when such knowledge, presence, or insights on my part were just not possible. Since so much of this memoir centers on my father’s career at IBM, I wrote to the company requesting his employee records and mine. I contacted IBM many times before reaching the conclusion that the company would not release this material to me. There are, of course, other sources of corroboration that I did use. Books, newspaper accounts, articles in magazines and on websites, and the few source documents I found among my deceased father’s effects. I documented my reliance on these sources in notes for each chapter.
In writing this memoir, I relied heavily on discussions I had with my father over many years. Dialogue is not written to represent word-for-word documentation; rather, I’ve retold conversations in a way that evokes the real feeling and meaning of what was said and the mood and spirit of any given event. In some instances, I used my understanding of a person I knew well, like my father or my grandmother, to suggest how they would have responded in a given situation. In other instances, I described the actions of individuals as told to me by my father using words that clearly convey my description as a secondhand account.
For the purposes of narrative coherence and in consideration of the privacy of individuals still living, some names have been changed and some details relating to events and characters have been modified. At times, I have collapsed several characters into one.
Finally, memoir derives from the French word memoire, which means “memory.” Memory, as has been shown so often, is fallible. I stand by any mistakes, gaps, and failures of memory, given in this book, as my own.
Clyde W. Ford, March 2019
Bellingham, Washington
Acknowledgments
It thrilled me to learn that Tracy Sherrod had acquired Think Black for HarperCollins. Authors, if we are lucky, get to entrust our manuscripts to good editors, but I got to entrust Think Black to a great editor. Tracy heads Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins, and I knew from the many books that she’d brought into being that she would understand what I hoped to achieve. Furthermore, I knew that Tracy would add her discerning eye, her keen sense of narrative, and her loving touch to bring out the best in this book—and she did. But author and editor do not stand alone, and along with Tracy came the opportunity to work with an incredibly talented, robust, and dedicated team at HarperCollins, under the wise and experienced hand of publisher Judith Curr.
Adam Chromy, of Movable Type Management, my agent, has been involved with this book at every stage, from its inception to its completion. What I appreciate so much about Adam is his fine understanding of, and deep commitment to, great storytelling. He would not put my proposal out for acquisition, nor would he allow me to submit my completed manuscript to Tracy, until what I wrote met his high standards. My trust in him was well-placed.
I could not have written this memoir without the help of my sister, Dr. Claudia Jeanne Ford, a professor of ethnobotany and women’s studies. When my memory of events with our father was unclear, she provided clarification. When I needed to talk through sections of the manuscript, she listened. When I went in search of pictures relating to our father’s life, she sent along some wonderful images from her personal collection.
My friend Toni Burbank, who was my editor at Bantam Doubleday Dell, offered me much encouragement to tell this story. Toni assured me that I was in the best of hands at HarperCollins.
The late Dr. Vincent Harding—my mentor, teacher, and dear friend—reminded me that history is a great river and that the stories of all those along its banks matter.
There’s an unseen hand behind this book, and it belongs to Dr. Joan Winter, founder of the Family Institute of Virginia. Many years ago, while in therapy with Joan, she challenged me to interview my father. I am very grateful she did. Over the course of three summers, and through long walks along the Hudson River, I came to better understand my father, the challenges he faced in his professional and personal life, and the challenges he presented in mine. What I learned during those summers became the foundation of this memoir.
I had not met my cousin Edna Messick until the results of a recent DNA test brought us together. Edna had done extensive research on my father’s side of the family, and thanks to her I was able to piece together important elements of my paternal lineage.
Historian of technology and friend George Dyson reviewed an early version of this book and made some important suggestions regarding my descriptions of early computers.
Potter Christopher Moench and environmentalist and author Jennifer Hahn have been wonderful friends and gracious benefactors in support of my work as an author.
Finally, Peter Forbes, Helen Whybrow, and the crew at the Knoll Farm retreat center in Waitsfield, Vermont, were kind enough to invite me there as a fellow during the summer of 2018. I spent a marvelous week at Knoll Farm working on this book while the farm provided for my other needs: beautiful vistas, a place to stay, blueberries to pick, and delicious organic food to eat.
Notes
Chapter 1: First Days
1.John Florio and Ouisie Shapiro, “Revisiting Jackie Robinson’s Major-League Debut, Seventy Years Later,” New Yorker, April 15, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/revisiting-jackie-robinsons-major-league-debut-seventy-years-later.
2.Florio and Shapiro, “Revisiting Jackie Robinson’s Major-League Debut.”
3.Earl Chapin May, “This Ford’s a Pullman Porter,” Collier’s Weekly, July 5, 1924, 8.
4.Zack Friedman, “IBM’s HR Chief Shares Best Advice on the Future of Work,” Forbes, August 6, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2018/08/06/ibms-hr-chief-shares-best-advice-on-the-future-of-work/#456094e3dc41.
Chapter 2: A Sacrificial Pawn
1.Willie Lynch, “The Willie Lynch Letter: The Making of a Slave,” December 25, 1712, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/stream/WillieLynchLetter1712/the_willie_lynch_letter_the_making_of_a_slave_1712_djvu.txt.
2.Lee Edson, “Jensenism, n. The Theory That I.Q. Is Largely Determined by Genes,” New York Times Magazine, August 31, 1969, 40.
3.Charles Lane, “The Tainted Sources of ‘The Bell Curve,’” New York Review of Books, December 1, 1994, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1994/12/01/the-tainted-sources-of-the-bell-curve.
4.Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
Chapter 3: The Bones of the Machine
1.Donald C. Johanson and Maitland A. Edey, Lucy, the Beginnings of Humankind (New York: Touchstone, 1981).
Chapter 4: The Book of Changes
1.Richard Wilhelm, trans., The I Ching or Book of Changes (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1950), 3.
2.“The Hollerith Machine,” US Census Bureau, n.d., https://www.census.gov/history/www/innovations/technology/the_hollerith_tabulator.html.
3.American Guild of Organists, “Trinity Baptist Church,” http://www.nycago.org/Organs/Brx/html/TrinityBaptist.html.
4.Earl Chapin May, “This Ford’s a Pullman Porter,” Collier’s Weekly, July 5, 1924, 8.
5.For instance, see https://www.asciiart.eu.
6.IBM Corporation, Songs of the IBM (New York: IBM, 1937).
7.IBM Corporation, Songs of the IBM, 5.
8.IBM Corporation, IBM Online Archives, https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/music/music_IA1.html.
Chapter 5: Voices of the Dead
1.I first wrote about my experience at the Elmina slave castle in my book The Hero with an African Face: Mythic Wisdom of Traditional Africa (New York: Bantam, 1999).
2.Erika Beras, “Traces of Genetic Trauma Can Be Tweaked,” Scientific American, April 15, 2017, https://www
.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/traces-of-genetic-trauma-can-be-tweaked.
3.Ford, Hero with an African Face.
4.Principally Dum Diversas (Rome: Vatican, 1452) and Romanus Pontifex (Rome: Vatican, 1455).
5.Stefan Goodwin, Africa in Europe (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 57.
6.David Reich, “How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race,’” op-ed, New York Times, March 23, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-race.html.
7.American National Election Study (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan, 2012).
8.General Social Survey (GSS) (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago National Opinion Research Center, 2016).
9.Anthony Walton, “Technology versus African-Americans,” Atlantic Monthly, January 1999, 14.
10.Gomes Eannes de Zurara, Chronica do Descobrimento e Conquista da Guiné (Paris, 1841), trans. Edgar Prestage, The Chronicle of Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, vols. 1 and 2 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1896–1899).
11.Pope Nicholas V, Dum Diversas (Rome: Vatican, 1452), emphasis added.
12.Duarte Lopez, A Report of the Kingdom of Congo and of the Surrounding Countries, trans. Margarite Hutchinson (London: John Murray, 1881), 39.
13.Lopez, A Report of the Kingdom of Congo, 40.
14.Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, “Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790 to 1990, and by Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, for Large Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States” (working paper no. 76, Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, 2005).
Chapter 6: To Speak of Rivers
1.Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” The Crisis 77, no. 9 (New York: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1970), 366.
2.Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981).
3.W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997).
4.Bolster, Black Jacks, 6.
5.Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, “Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790 to 1990, and by Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, for Large Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States” (working paper no. 76, Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, 2005).
6.Bolster, Black Jacks, 4.
7.Frederick Douglass, “My Escape from Slavery,” Century Magazine, vol. 23 (1882), 125.
8.Bolster, Black Jacks, 14.
9.Briton Hammon, A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man (Boston: Green & Russell, 1760).
10.Robert L. Duffus, “Pullman Porter Wins as College Lecturer,” New York Times, April 13, 1924, 188.
11.Allissa V. Richardson, “The Platform: How Pullman Porters Used Railways to Engage in Networked Journalism,” Journalism Studies 17, no. 4 (2016): 398–414, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1461670X.2015.1110498.
12.Duffus, “Pullman Porter Wins as College Lecturer.”
13.Richardson, “The Platform,” 403.
14.Duffus, “Pullman Porter Wins as College Lecturer.”
15.Earl Chapin May, “This Ford’s a Pullman Porter,” Collier’s Weekly, July 5, 1924, 31.
16.Richardson, “The Platform,” 404–5.
17.Cameron McWhirter, Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America (New York: Henry Holt, 2011).
18.Richardson, “The Platform,” 405.
19.Claude McKay, “If We Must Die,” Liberator, July 1919, 21.
20.Richardson, “The Platform,” 409.
21.Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Random House, 1964), 82.
22.May, “This Ford’s a Pullman Porter,” 8.
23.Duffus, “Pullman Porter Wins as College Lecturer.”
Chapter 8: Twice as Hard
1.A field engineer worked to repair malfunctioning IBM computers, while a systems engineer worked to program functioning IBM computers.
2.Robert D. Friedel and Paul Israel, Edison’s Electric Light (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2010), 20.
Chapter 9: The Arrangement
1.Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 91.
2.Davis and Dee, With Ossie and Ruby, 92.
3.Davis and Dee, With Ossie and Ruby, 97.
4.Davis and Dee, With Ossie and Ruby, 317.
5.Davis and Dee, With Ossie and Ruby, 218.
Chapter 10: Doing Small Things in a Great Way
1.Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream,” August 28, 1963, US National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/files/press/exhibits/dream-speech.pdf.
2.W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover, 1994), 2.
3.Thomas J. Watson Jr., letter to IBM management, September 21, 1953. Policy Letter #4 can be read online at https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/equalworkforce/transform.
4.IBM, “Employee Inclusion,” in 2012 Corporate Responsibility Report, https://www.ibm.com/ibm/responsibility/2012/the-ibmer/employee-inclusion.html.
5.William H. Rodgers, Think: A Biography of the Watsons and IBM (New York: Stein & Day, 1969).
6.Kenneth Brevoort and Howard P. Marvel, Successful Monopolization Through Predation: The National Cash Register Company (Columbus: Ohio State Univ., n.d.), 40, https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/economics/pdf/marvel/ncr.pdf.
7.Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust (Washington, DC: Dialog Press, 2001), 35.
8.Black, IBM and the Holocaust, 35.
9.Black, IBM and the Holocaust, 36.
10.Black, IBM and the Holocaust, 36.
11.Brevoort and Marvel, Successful Monopolization through Predation, 32.
12.Brevoort and Marvel, Successful Monopolization through Predation, 32.
13.James D. P. Graham, “Static Tremor in Anxiety States,” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry 8, no. 3–4 (1945): 57–60; “Tremor Fact Sheet,” National Institutes of Health, May 2017, https://www.ninds.nih.gov/Disorders/Patient-Caregiver-Education/Fact-Sheets/Tremor-Fact-Sheet; “Essential Tremor and Stress Management,” WebMD, September 16, 2018, https://www.webmd.com/brain/essential-tremor-stress-mgmt#1.
14.It is entirely possible that T. J. Laster’s family could have been to the IBM Country Club before us. Still, in the many years our family went, we never saw another Black family there.
15.King, “I Have A Dream.”
Chapter 11: Covert Ops
1.Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley (New York: Ballantine, 1964).
2.Malcolm X, Autobiography, 44, 94.
3.Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons: 1916).
4.Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (Washington, DC: Dialog Press, 2012). This well-researched and heavily documented book is the basis for the assertions in this chapter regarding IBM and the eugenics movement.
5.Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927).
6.Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 154, 93 S. Ct. 705, 727, 35 L. Ed. 2d 147 (1973).
7.Black, War Against the Weak, 258.
8.Black, War Against the Weak, 292.
9.Meilan Solly, “DNA Pioneer James Watson Loses Honorary Titles over Racist Comments,” Smithsonian, January 15, 2019, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dna-pioneer-james-watson-loses-honorary-titles-over-racist-comments-180971266.
10.Solly, “DNA Pioneer James Watson,” 291.
11.Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust (Washington, DC: Dialog Press, 2001), 444–58. Here, Black devotes an entire chapter to IBM’s attempts to block access to their archives and to deny or obfuscate involvement by the company, or its founder, with the Third Reich.
12.Black, IBM and the Holocaust. This extensively researched, comprehensively documented book is the basis for the assertions in this chapter of IBM’s and Watson’s collaboration with Nazi Germany.
13.Bl
ack, IBM and the Holocaust, 210.
14.Black, IBM and the Holocaust, 8.
15.Edwin Black, “IBM’s Role in the Holocaust—What the New Documents Reveal,” March 17, 2015, Huffington Post, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/edwin-black/ibm-holocaust_b_1301691.html.
16.Black, IBM and the Holocaust, 77.
17.Black, IBM and the Holocaust, 235, 403.
18.Black, IBM and the Holocaust, 419–24.
19.In the 1933 census of Germany and Austria conducted by the Rasse Statische Amt (the Race Statistical Office), column 22 of the punch card represented a person’s religion. Row 1 was punched if the person was Catholic; row 2, Protestant; row 3, Jewish; and so forth. These results were then used to identify Jews for exportation and extermination. Columns 14 and 15 might represent a person’s birth day of the month (1 to 31); columns 16 and 17, a person’s birth month (1 to 12); columns 18 through 21, a person’s birth year. Column 34, for prisoners in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, represented the reason for their departure. Row 2 meant transfer to another camp; row 3, a natural death; row 4, execution; row 5, suicide; row 6, “special handling” for extermination via the gas chamber, hanging, or gunshot. See Black, IBM and the Holocaust, 22, 58.
20.Black, IBM and the Holocaust, 22.
21.Black, IBM and the Holocaust, 57.
22.Black, IBM and the Holocaust, 44.
23.Black, IBM and the Holocaust, 383.
24.Black, IBM and the Holocaust, 130.
25.Black, IBM and the Holocaust, 96.
26.Black, IBM and the Holocaust, 320–32.
27.Black, IBM and the Holocaust, 111.
28.Black, IBM and the Holocaust, 43.
29.Black, IBM and the Holocaust, 377.
30.Black, IBM and the Holocaust, 409.
31.Peter G. Neumann, “Peopleware in Systems,” in Peopleware in Systems (Cleveland: Association for Systems Management, 1977), 15–18.
32.Meilir Page-Jones, Practical Guide to Structured Systems Design (New York: Yourdon Press, 1980).
33.Nelson Mandela, “Africa It Is Ours,” transcribed in New York Times, February 12, 1990, https://www.nytimes.com/1990/02/12/world/south-africa-s-new-era-transcript-mandela-s-speech-cape-town-city-hall-africa-it.html.
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