War work · the factory gate, 1942–1963

1942 – 1963

Late 1942, mid-1943: War production broke the barrier the 1920s had built. Facing labor shortages, several Fort Wayne firms began to hire Black men in late 1942 and Black women by mid-1943, and renewed in-migration from the South — particularly from Alabama and Mississippi — carried the Black population to a wartime peak estimated at over six thousand by mid-1944. The first companies to hire African Americans in sizable numbers were the city's two largest factories, General Electric, which had hitherto barred them, and International Harvester — both firms whose manpower policies were set at out-of-town corporate headquarters. The record of who did not hire is as precise: companies in brewing, pump manufacture and precision tools — industries long associated with Fort Wayne — continued to bar Black workers, some into the early 1960s. The Studebaker Corporation, which opened a new plant in the city during the war, refused to employ Blacks other than as janitors and common laborers; Black complaints, at a moment of acute labor shortage, brought the federal Fair Employment Practices Committee in, and in mid-1944 the FEPC negotiated an agreement in which the company promised to mend its ways. The FEPC dealt with only one other serious discrimination complaint in Fort Wayne's defense industries — not because the others did not discriminate, Morgan notes, but because African Americans did not protest against them.

Inside the gate: The unions' record was divided against itself. UAW Local 57 had become, in 1940, the first industrial local in Fort Wayne to negotiate a contract with a nondiscrimination clause, and set up its own Fair Employment Practices Committee in 1944; the United Electrical Workers' Local 901 at General Electric developed, after GE began hiring Blacks in 1942, the best record of any Fort Wayne local in supporting African Americans over seniority rights — and was ousted at GE in 1949, in the Red Scare, by a rival union that sustained its racial policy, electing a Black vice-president and Black shop stewards in 1950–51. Against this stands the rest of Morgan's evidence: the Ku Klux Klan active at several plants from 1943 through 1945 (the Klan's Fort Wayne chapter is told in the Crime record); more than half the industrial-union council's affiliates openly maintaining discriminatory practices in the early 1950s; white workers forming unofficial committees to lobby against Black promotions. Peace brought the "last hired, first fired" mechanics: Black employees were bumped down as white veterans reclaimed jobs, and in the 1949 recession the Black jobless rate ran at twice the city's 11 percent. The occupational shape of the whole era is in Morgan's table: service work fell from 58.1 percent of Black employment in 1940 to 36.1 percent in 1960 as semiskilled operative work rose from 11.1 to 30.9 percent — real movement, from a base of exclusion, that still left the median Black family's income at 68 percent of the white figure in 1969, down from 71 percent twenty years before. Downtown, the department stores did not employ Black sales assistants until the late 1950s, for fear of alienating white customers; the Smiley Collection names the woman who broke the register line — Betty Cox Black, the first African American salesclerk to work a cash register at Hutner's Apparel.

Sources:

1. Iwan W. Morgan, "Latecomers to the Industrial City," IMH 95 (March 1999) — the 1942–43 hiring, the wartime peak, GE and Harvester, the barring industries, the Studebaker FEPC agreement, Local 57 and Local 901, the Klan at the plants, postwar bumping, the 1949 rates, the occupational table, the income figures, and the department stores.
2. Fort Wayne Urban League, "A Survey of the Racial Policies of Organized Labor in Fort Wayne, Indiana" (February 1953) — the survey Morgan's union account rests on, held at the Allen County Public Library.
3. Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center, Marsha Smiley Collection — Betty Cox Black (Hutner's Apparel); Patricia Ann Ballou, first African American female foreman at General Electric; Mallie Powell Jr. and Mary Frances Woodson Barksdale, Harvester management firsts.