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On May 25, 1943, white workers rioted at Alabama Dry Dock after Fair Employment Practice Committee officials forced the company to promote 12 black workers to skilled positions. One of many hate strikes in World War II, this was an important moment in the struggle for Black workers to achieve some level of relative equality in the war and demonstrates the sharp limitations of white workers to accept that, even as the New Deal state provided them with unprecedented quality of work and benefits.
Two major decisions out of Washington shaped Mobile during World War II. The first was the federal decision to decentralize American military production. As the nation moved toward entering the war, industrial production was largely locked up in the Northeast and Great Lakes states. Workers of both races moved north by the millions in the years after World War I to take these jobs in states such as Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois. Other than the apparel industry and its escape from unionization, few of these industries invested in the South or the West at all. You could always just build another factory in Flint or Rockford or Canton and build on the existing infrastructure there. From the perspective of the federal government when it came to war production, this arrangement had several problems.
First, it was a national security risk. What if the Germans invaded on the east coast? Decentralizing production would make it much harder for an invading force to shut down American defense production. Second, the government wanted to pull regions out of poverty so people wouldn’t have to move. Big New Deal dam building programs–the Tennessee Valley Authority especially, but also various Works Progress Administration and Public Works Administration projects, sought to build up infrastructure in the West and South to allow for said industrial production to take place there. By the early 40s, much of that was built. Third, moving tons of jobs to Alabama or Washington or California was great patronage work for the Democratic Party, making local politicians very happy and tying local populations to FDR. All this meant that if you had a great but underdeveloped port such as Mobile, the government was going to come with a lot of jobs for local residents. Moreover, you didn’t need to move from rural Alabama or west Florida to Cleveland or Detroit. You could just go to Mobile.
The second major decision out of Washington came out of A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington movement. There were a lot of new jobs in defense and a desperate need for workers. But many white employers and most white workers did not want to see Black people in their workplaces. Meanwhile, the U.S. was gearing up to fight two racist powers. Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, decided to display America’s racism and hypocrisy by announcing a big march on Washington in 1941 to tell the world that the nation was as racist as Germany or Japan. This freaked out FDR and after Randolph would not back down, the president issued Executive Order 8802 that desegregated all companies getting defense contracts, which was basically all companies. The FEPC was created to enforce this. Progress was slow but real.
Of course, many employers and their workers resisted integration, but the government determined to go forward, if reluctantly. Continued pressure from Randolph and other civil rights leaders forced them to do so. That meant the South too. So in 1943, FEPC officials forced Alabama Dry Dock to hire Black workers in more than menial positions. Federal pressure already meant that of the company’s 50,000 workers, about 7,000 were Black. White workers hated this. The employer kept them in strictly segregated jobs–the hardest, dirtiest, lowest paying, most menial, even if this was expanded due to the needs of just getting workers. But positions of authority? No way. And even if employers were OK with this, they feared backlash from white workers, who largely cared a lot more about their racial identity than any sort of class identity.
So, finally. on May 24, 1943, twelve Black workers were hired as welders due to continued government pressure, as the NAACP and other organizations were complaining that companies were not following the law and targeted southern companies especially. These welders started working on the midnight shift. The company hoped to sneak this through. It did not work. White workers went ballistic. At daybreak, white workers started milling about, talking about how Black workers were talking to white women, all that usual bullshit. The tensions grew and white workers attacked their Black coworkers. They threw rocks at them, grabbed pieces of steel to beat them with, etc. Two were thrown off the docks into the Mobile River.
The company responded pretty quickly to this. Local military units quickly showed up to end the brawl. No one died, but about 50 people were injured. Ironically, the most grievously injured worker was a white who stepped into the defend a Black worker. Even in 1943 Mobile, not every white was a terrible racist and that’s always important to remember. Whites drove all Black workers from the site. The Black workers then went on strike, saying they would not return until the workplace was safe for them. Production shut down for a week before the National Guard ensured that such an incident would not happen again. But tensions remained strong through the war.
Years later, one of the soldiers involved in this, a man named Clyde Odom, remembered it for a PBS documentary: “I’m standing up there watching, and I never saw people so mad and agitated in my life. And they’d have sticks, like three-foot long, they would knock them down to their knees… I saw men and women, bleeding, blood running down their face. And they didn’t stand a chance coming down that gauntlet — men and women on each side, beating them with sticks. And a good many of the blacks went out and jumped off the piers and tried to swim the river. The Coast Guard was out there picking them up.”
After the war, Mobile went through something of a slump, as the postwar military-industrial complex skipped it by and large until the 1960s. So most of these workers, regardless of race, were laid off.
It’s important to highlight these incidents for a number of reasons. But one that matters to me is that I’ve received pushback before in talking about racism and the working class in World War II, with people saying that everyone just uses the Detroit Hate Strike as an example and it’s overrated since that’s the only one. The problem there is that there were lots of hate strikes–but people just haven’t heard of the other ones. So sometimes you need to hit people with a lot of evidence to make your point. Highlighting Mobile, like highlighting similar incidents from Butte to Cincinnati to Philadelphia, allows one to do that and force labor folks to take race seriously in their analysis.
This is the 564th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.
The post This Day in Labor History: May 25, 1943 appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.
