This article was first published on Bainbridge Island Review on Sep. 24

If all politics is local, perhaps all history is personal.

“If we’re going to make progress, we have to understand history: To move forward you have to look back,” said author and Humanities Washington speaker Clyde Ford.

“You have to make sure history doesn’t repeat itself, and too often, in too many places in high-tech right now I see history repeating itself in terms of the negative impacts of technology on human rights, on race relations. I’d like to do something, and I think my dad would really support doing something, that would allow that to change. And the first place is to understand where we’ve come from.”

The “we” in question takes several forms as Ford follows his own advice in a new memoir “Think Black” (available now in print and digital versions); a frank and poignant story of family, progress, technology, racism and corporate secrets that stretches from today’s hashtag-headlines to the dawn of the digital age.

Read more.