National Network for Equitable Library Service

John Stanley Ford became IBM's first black software engineer. But not all of the company's white employees accepted having a black colleague and did everything in their power to humiliate, subvert, and undermine Ford. Yet Ford would not quit. While Ford remained at IBM, it came at great emotional cost to himself and his family, especially his son Clyde who followed him to IBM two decades later. As he, too, experienced the same institutional racism, Clyde began to better understand the subtle yet daring ways his father had fought back.