Los Angeles Times, September 22, 2019 : My Father was IBM’s First Black Software Engineer. The Racism He Fought Persists in the High-Tech World Today
My father was the first black software engineer in America, hired by IBM in 1946. Passed over for promotions, discriminated against in pay, with many inside IBM working to ensure his failure, he still viewed his job as an opportunity of a lifetime. He refused to give up.
Minority underrepresentation in high tech has been present since the earliest days of the industry. In reflecting upon my father’s career for a new memoir I wrote about him, I saw important lessons about the history and nature of racism in high-tech, and about the steps that corporations and individuals can take to bring about much-needed change.
“Garbage in, garbage out,” software engineers say. Likewise, racism in, racism out. Biased developers produce biased code. But from my father, I learned there are ways to fight back. Facing racism encountered daily within IBM, my father relied on his community for support.
His Baptist church attended to the moral and spiritual needs of the many black “firsts” in various fields by those in our Williamsbridge neighborhood of the Bronx. And many of the women he met through the church possessed technical skills, such as switchboard operating, learned during World War II, that would prove useful in the early days of computers. My father helped some of them gain employment at IBM.
My father always found ways to give back. He felt it was only a matter of time before other black men and women broke through the barriers to advancement he faced at IBM. Somehow, he managed to obtain copies of the IBM entrance examination questions and answers, which he surreptitiously shared with promising young black job applicants. He coached them on passing the exam and succeeding in their interviews. Many were subsequently hired.
Yet the percentage of blacks and non-Asian minorities in high-tech professions consistently remains under 2%. For minority women, the numbers are even more dismal. Recent studies conclude this is not a “pipeline” problem — qualified candidates can be found.
