The industrial color line · the foundry, the sewing class, and nineteen men at Bendix

1930 – 1970

The war opened the plants the way it had in 1917 — an inch: The Second Great Migration brought Black defense workers to South Bend in the 1940s as the first had in the 1910s, and the hiring wall they met is documented in numbers. Bendix Aviation, which employed some 7,000 people, had nineteen Black employees in November 1941 — the first six of them hired that year after J. Chester Allen's intervention and President Roosevelt's June 1941 order barring discrimination by defense contractors. At Studebaker the foundry remained the Black department. Black women were held below even that line: outside domestic work, the Commission found, meaningful employment was "nearly impossible" before the war, and the training gate was policed in person — Lucille Sneed remembered a WPA-era sewing instructor telling her class there was "no need to teach you how to use these machines because you're not going to get a job," teaching the white women who were then hired at Studebaker's and Singer's while the Black women were left untaught, until the women carried their complaint to Hering House, whose staff faced the instructor down and got them their lessons; Sneed kept her Studebaker job on the strength of them.

The war work that did open to Black women lay outside the city: South Bend women carpooled to the Kingsbury Ordnance Plant in LaPorte County — that county's plant, these women's commuting story — where Vera Lane, Margaret Morgan and others stuffed shells with gunpowder; Annette Brodie lost fingers in one of its explosions; and Morgan's judgment on the choice was recorded verbatim: "I would have rather stuffed gunpowder than clean houses for a living." The state's answers were paper ones: J. Chester Allen's Fair Employment Protection Act was defeated in the House, and the Fair Employment Practices Act Governor Gates signed in March 1945 was expressly "advisory," with no enforcement mechanism — while at the peace, in the Commission's words, Black war workers "had to surrender their high-paying industrial jobs to returning White veterans." Retail kept its own line longest: by William Morris's count laid before the city's Fair Employment Practices Commission, St. Joseph County in 1954 had not one Black sales representative; the first, Lucille Thomas, took the floor at the Newmode Hosiery Shop in 1957, to the visible shock of white customers — and drew Black shoppers to the store because she was there.

Kreamo Bakery for a time would not hire Black drivers. The unions' record, at the size the reachable record supports, is a pattern rather than a roster: the A.F.L. and C.I.O. formally pledged non-discriminatory employment in Allen's 1941 Indiana Plan; the Bendix sit-down of 1936 that made UAW Local 9 famous is told in the Businesses section; and the Human Rights Commission's later evidence found Black membership in South Bend unions running below the white rate on population through the twentieth century, with Black trades workers in the mid-1990s still complaining — on numbers the Commission found showed "a clear gap" — of denial at the interview stage of the building-trades apprenticeship programs. The firsts that broke the line in the plants and offices belong with the firsts entry below.

Sources:

1. City of South Bend, Final Report of the Reparatory Justice Commission (2026), Parts III and V and VIII — Bendix's nineteen Black employees of 7,000 in November 1941 and the first six hires; the Sneed sewing-class testimony (CRHC oral history); the Kingsbury carpools and the Lane, Brodie and Morgan accounts; the 1945 advisory act; the postwar surrender of jobs; Morris's 1954 count and Lucille Thomas, 1957; Kreamo Bakery; the Human Rights Commission's union-membership and apprenticeship findings.
2. Indiana History Blog, Allen series, Part 1 — the Allens' World War II employment work and the 1941 executive order's part in the Bendix hires.