| Original caption: “Riveter at Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. Burbank, California.” Original caption: “Georgia Williams is shown in this picture drilling on the Lockheed Lightning P-38 final assembly line.” Georgia Williams (1909 – ????), an African American woman, wearing a scarf to protect her hair but no hearing protection from the rivet gun in her right hand, works on the left nacelle of a Lockheed P-38 Lightning, installing an Allison V-1710 engine. During World War II, Lockheed Aircraft Corporation extolled its record on the factory floor, boasting that “no color barrier” existed there. A company publicity manager reported to the War Manpower Commission (WMC) that African American women were employed in highly preferred “production and assembly departments” much more than in maintenance jobs, where they represented just a “small percentage” of the workforce. Lockheed’s record of “complete harmony” among workers was attributed to fairness in hiring and the company’s policy of “putting democracy to work in their plants.” Lockheed’s “face” of such success belonged to Georgia Williams, a riveter in the final assembly stage of P-38 Lightnings. With 2 sons in high school, a husband in the United States Army, industry experience, and additional technical training, Williams had the profile of an ideal female employee. The WMC’s publicity arm needed this kind of appeal for mobilization to work, with team spirit and smiles, the most important elements in the organization’s message. African-American women found themselves excluded from most industrial jobs until the war; they most frequently worked as domestics in the homes of white women. African-American men and women were also denied well-paying jobs in the aircraft and shipbuilding industries. When the President’s Committee on Fair Employment Practice held hearings in Los Angeles in October 1941, it uncovered evidence of widespread discrimination against African Americans by military contractors. Douglas Aircraft Company employed 33,000 people, among them 10 African Americans; Bethlehem Shipbuilding employed 2,880 people, but only 2 African Americans; North American Aviation, 12,500 employees, 8 of them African Americans; Lockheed-Vega had 48,000 employees, 54 of them African Americans. Several corporations did not discriminate against Mexican Americans to the extent that they did against African Americans. The Douglas Aircraft representative, for example, said that his company employed “a large number of Mexicans.” Nearly 1/10 of Bethlehem Shipbuilding’s employees were Mexican Americans. These figures suggest that African Americans and Mexican Americans rarely worked alongside one another in Los Angeles. In Pasadena, Paul Little (October 27, 1906 – 1987), the director of the California State Employment Service declared that his office was continually approached by competent African American mechanics desiring work in the aircraft industry. Although African American mechanics often possessed the very skills the firms sought, the vast majority could not be placed. The personnel representative of a large aircraft plant admitted that although the company had hired many thousands of men in the previous year and was still in desperate need of skilled workers, “there isn’t a Negro in the entire plant.” The company maintained its restrictive racial policy, he wrote, because “many of the white men would object to working with a Negro.” In the spring of 1941, J. H. Kindelberger (May 8, 1895 – July 27, 1962), president of North American Aviation, took an equally hard line. “While we are in complete sympathy with the Negroes;’ he declared, “it is against the Company policy to employ them as mechanics or aircraft workers…There will be some jobs as janitors for Negroes.” He insisted, however, that “Regardless of their training as aircraft workers, we will not employ them in the North American plant.” For African Americans in Los Angeles and, for that matter, throughout the nation, the incongruity of fighting a war for democratic ideals abroad while maintaining segregationist policies at home led to large-scale protests. Ironically, the most successful of these was a march that never took place. The proposed march, organized by A. Philip Randolph (April 15, 1889 – May 16, 1979), was to have brought to Washington, District of Columbia, on July 1, 1941, more than a 100,000 African Americans demanding equal rights. The march was called off when United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt (January 30, 1882 – April 12, 1945) met with Randolph and agreed to issue an executive order outlawing discrimination. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802, issued June 25, 1941, forbade “discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin.” The President then created the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to enforce the order. In Los Angeles, which even before the Great Depression had a substantial African American community, protests between 1940 and 1942 grew stronger as a result of the “Double Victory” campaign. National in scope, the “Double Victory” campaign signified African American efforts to win victory over the Axis powers overseas and over discrimination at home. To help attain these ends, a variety of African American organizations worked together documenting instances of discrimination against minorities in the workplace. Among the most successful of these groups was the Negro Victory Committee. Formed in April 1941, the Los Angeles Victory Committee sought to remind the city’s white majority of the American African American community’s historic loyalty to the nation while aggressively pursuing equal rights. Under the leadership of Rev. Clayton D. Russell, the local Victory Committee organized 5 African American-owned markets into the Victory Markets Cooperative. The cooperative functioned throughout the war years, helping to solidify African American support behind both the war effort and the fight for equality at home. African American solidarity against hiring discrimination also received strong support from the community’s 2 leading African American newspapers, the California Eagle and the Los Angeles Sentinel. Discrimination against African Americans in Los Angeles also received national attention from Fortune magazine. Its March 1943 issue accused Los Angeles defense plants of “almost universal prejudice against Negroes” with “little concealment about the anti-Negro policy.” In June 1941, there were exactly 4 Negro production workers in the aircraft industry in southern California. The African American solidarity forged by Russell and other leaders soon became evident on the streets. In July 1942, a local official of the United States Employment Service tried to justify discriminatory hiring practices by claiming that African American women were not interested in working in defense production and were better suited for employment as domestic servants and cooks. The statement awakened long-smoldering resentment among African Americans over their inability to find jobs despite the region’s massive shortage of war workers. The Negro Victory Committee encouraged African American women to flood the agency with job applications, organized a protest march, and finally forced federal officials from the War Manpower Commission to enter into negotiations over the job issue. A joint statement followed, announcing that discrimination would no longer be tolerated in the defense industry. Fortunately for African Americans and other minorities, Los Angeles began to suffer acute labor shortages in 1942. The aircraft industry, for example, had nearly 20,000 workers who either enlisted in or were drafted into the military by August 1942. Further, industrial expansion in the Los Angeles area between 1940 and mid-1943 created 550,000 new jobs. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the movement of African Americans and Mexican Americans into California’s urban areas reversed patterns of interaction across ethnic boundaries. African Americans benefited from the general labor shortage. Within a year after Pearl Harbor, thousands of African Americans had found jobs in aircraft factories, shipyards, and other war plants. At the height of employment in war industries, more than 15,000 African Americans worked in Bay Area shipyards. According to the War Manpower Commission, by February 1943, Douglas Aircraft had 2,200 African American employees, North American employed 2,500, and Lockheed-Vega employed 1,700. 2 other aircraft manufacturers, Vultee and Consolidated, employed another 800 African-American workers. Among shipbuilders, California Shipbuilding (Calship) reported 1,200 African American employees; Western Pipe and Steel, 400; Bethlehem, 300; Consolidated, 300; Los Angeles Drydock, 200; and Haagson, a 150. In 1945, 1 African-American leader estimated that 85 percent of African-American workers in Los Angeles were employed in war industries, primarily aircraft and ship production. Mexican Americans also filled thousands of openings in war industries. By 1944, 10 to 15 percent of Lockheed’s employees were Mexican-American; the California Shipbuilding Corporation alone employed nearly 1,300 Mexican Americans. These numbers do not prove that any African Americans or Mexican Americans discussed their experiences during coffee breaks and recognized similarities among them. In fact, many employers tried to segregate African Americans into all-African American crews. They do, however, suggest that the potential for communication across ethnic boundaries in the workplace increased during the war. If the labor shortage brought together African Americans and Mexican Americans on the production line, it also attracted tens of thousands of African Americans and Mexican Americans to California. This population growth may have divided people. San Francisco’s African American population grew from under 5,000 in 1940 to 32,000 in 1945. The number of African Americans living in Oakland grew from 8,000 in 1940 to nearly 22,000 in 1944. In Richmond, the African American population grew from 270 in 1940 to more than 5,000 in 1944. However, it is intriguing to note that African American women generally could obtain aircraft jobs more easily than African American men. It was largely because both employers and white male workers regarded women of any race as temporary workers who would leave their jobs once the war was over. Employers considered African American women less of a threat to the prevailing racial hierarchy in the workplace than African American men. However, in actuality, only a small number of African American women were assigned to production jobs in aircraft factories, mainly because many white women had an aversion to working with African American women. White women particularly disliked sharing washing facilities and restrooms with them. As a result, even when African American women were hired by aircraft plants, most worked in segregated teams or as janitors and sweepers. Outside the 2 departments described above, almost all aircraft jobs were closed to women before 1941. As in other industries, most aircraft manufacturers did not seriously consider hiring large numbers of women either to replace men or to staff new plants. They simply believed that aircraft jobs were “men’s” work, requiring specialized skills and experience. They assumed that since women were physically different from men and had considerable physical weakness, they were not suitable for most of the jobs. In fact, however, despite such misgivings, 486,073 women were working for the aircraft industry by the end of 1943. A conventional explanation attributes this to the massive drain of young men into the armed services, as well as the industry’s physical expansion, which forced all aircraft manufacturers to explore new sources of labor. Lockheed Women’s Counselor Susan K. Laughlin neé Swisher (June 2, 1910 – September 7, 2013), tasked with helping the company integrate women into the workplace, recalled, “I was there when the first Negro was hired at Lockheed. We didn’t know what to expect. And we got it! A lot of people objected. And I said, ‘Well, that person has had the same physical examination that you had, and he has a right to the same restroom.’ Some workers requested to be assigned to a different restroom. I said, ‘No way, why should they be?’ One of the counselors suggested that we speak to Negroes and whites separately, explaining how to get along with each other and the counselor’s role. My feeling was that this talk should be given to all the groups of workers, not separating African Americans and whites. It wasn’t necessary. The only concern that I had was at first when the Negroes came in, because we had to assimilate them. But going down there, after that, I don’t recall a problem. We just didn’t accept the problem. And once you met it immediately without any problem, they pretty well accepted it, like when the women came in. She discouraged racism and segregation by telling employees, ‘it’s a question of whether you want to work here or not, but if you do want to, those are the conditions.’” At Laughlin’s directions, Lockheed made changes to the women’s bathrooms and provided cosmetics and better-fitting safety gear. By July 1943, 3,000 African Americans were working on engine construction at Lockheed’s Burbank plant. Company Industrial Relations Director R. Randall Irwin (June 3, 1902 – July 29, 1980) reported to the Dayton Forum on July 23, “It can now be said that Negroes have rapidly taken their places as full-fledged producers of Lockheed and Vega warplanes, which are going forth to fight for the freedom of all nations and races everywhere.” African American women Cleo Glover (???? – ????) and Elizabeth Vernando (???? – ????) set a speed record at Lockheed-Vega in May 1944, driving a 104 1/8-inch (3 millimeter) rivets in 2 minutes into PV-1 Ventura bomb bay doors. Having no experience as riveters just 1 year earlier, they were hailed as the fastest in the plant in a timed test. But African American magazine Opportunity Magazine, profiling the 2 women, chose a light-skinned “pinup girl” secretary for its cover. Glover and Vernando were shown in a small photo of the 2 at work. Because African Americans had been forcibly segregated by racial covenants into approximately 5 percent of the city’s residential area, newly arriving African Americans had great difficulty in finding housing within the established African American communities of Central Avenue, West Jefferson, and Watts. Many of the migrants had to live instead in the city’s “Little Tokyo” section, which had been emptied because of the internment of Japanese Americans. Renamed by locals “Bronzeville,” this section became the worst of Los Angeles’s wartime housing. Deputy City Mayor Orville Caldwell (February 8, 1896 – September 24, 1967) was so appalled at the conditions there that he testified to federal investigators that if they visited the area, as he had, “You will see life as human is expected to endure it.” A member of the Los Angeles Women’s War Chest Committee echoed Caldwell’s sentiments: the conditions in Bronzeville “almost require the help of missionaries.” As it became increasingly clear that the war would be won by the United States and its allies, the emphasis on women workers decreased. Lockheed’s internal newspaper, the Star, increasingly switched from profiling women workers to featuring “cheesecake” shots of female employees. Most female aircraft workers faced massive layoffs as soon as the Allied victory was assured, more than 1 year before August 1945. Although a survey taken in late 1943 by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce showed that 51 percent of women aircraft workers in Los Angeles County indicated a desire to stay on with their present employers, only 14 percent of them actually retained their jobs in June 1946. As a result, in the aircraft industry in Los Angeles, the percentage of women rapidly decreased from a high of over 40 percent in the fall of 1943 to less than 18 percent in 1946 and 11.9 percent in 1948. Except for sporadic protests by female unionists against the postwar policy of firing women, most women placidly accepted the lay-offs, believing that once the war was over, their proper place was in the home. The prevailing ideology of demobilization, propagated by the government, the mass media, and management, stressed the resurgence of domesticity, making some women even look forward to returning home. A female employee at Vultee recalled that she had not felt any disappointment when she was asked to leave her job, because “there were too many things that I wanted to do with my family.” Photographed by Alfred T. Palmer (March 17, 1906 – January 31, 1993). A native of California, Alfred T. Palmer traveled the world during the 1920s and 1930s as a photographer for shipping lines. In 1940, he was selected to lead the photo department of the Office for Emergency Management. In 1941, he moved to the Office of War Information. After the war, Palmer was a staff photographer at “National Geographic.” He later produced films for the United States Maritime Commission, the State Department, corporations, and humanitarian groups. Palmer visited the 1st Armored Division before it left for overseas and took dozens of color and black and white photographs. | |
| Image Filename | wwii1621.jpg |
| Image Size | 592.95 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 2341 x 2933 |
| Photographer | Alfred T. Palmer |
| Photographer Title | Department of Labor |
| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | February 1, 1943 |
| Location | Burbank |
| City | Los Angeles |
| State or Province | California |
| Country | United States |
| Archive | National Archives and Records Administration |
| Record Number | NWDNS-86-WWT-3-67 |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
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