What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [121]
“Oh, you must be,” her friend said, “because they don’t hire any colored folks here.”
Betty became self-conscious and panicky, and she realized that the only other African-American people working in the office were employed in the canteen or as janitors. Not long after, the lieutenant in charge of the food section asked the woman who worked next to Betty to come to the front of the office to speak with him. “She kept nodding her head and was very animated. Her face got redder and redder,” Betty said. “When she came back to her desk, I asked, ‘What was that?’ She didn’t want to answer. ‘Was that about me?’ ”
The embarrassed woman admitted to Betty that the officer wanted to know if she knew that Betty was “colored.” “He thought I should know because I’ve been spending a lot of time with you,” she said. Betty leaped up from her desk and strode to the lieutenant’s desk. “Who told you that I was not colored?” she said. “Don’t worry, Betty, I’ve spoken with your supervisor and your friend,” he said. “It’s okay, your work is fine. Everyone’s willing to work with you.”
“But are they willing to work under me?” Betty asked. “What happens when I get an upgrade?” The lieutenant assured her that she would get paid accordingly. Betty turned around, picked up her things, and walked out. She was shocked to be treated as a second-class citizen and she was not going to tolerate it. “That’s when I fired the government.”
That evening Betty received a telegram from Mel with the cryptic message: “It didn’t work out.” After dropping out of college to enlist, he had left home three days earlier for Seattle and his induction into the navy. When he returned home to Oakland, he told Betty how he had been segregated with other young black men and told he was being shipped to Michigan for training in the Messmen’s Corps. Mel had wanted to fight for his country, and he refused to accept being told that the only job for which he was fit was working in a kitchen. The navy gave him a psychological exam, issued him a check for forty-five dollars, and mustered him out of the service with an honorable discharge. “And for this, he’d left college!” Betty said.
After leaving her air force office job, Betty went to work in Richmond, which had become the center of the wartime shipyard business, spearheaded by contractor Henry Kaiser. Overnight, everything about the East Bay changed. Nowhere was that more true than in Richmond. Until then, it had been a sleepy town of twenty-four thousand residents, almost all white. The exceptions were a handful of Japanese greenhouse owners, who would soon be sent to internment camps, a few original Mexican families, and 270 African-Americans. Her experience was hardly the stuff of Norman Rockwell’s iconic can-do, sleeves-rolled-up woman riveter. Chronic labor shortages in the Bay Area had helped white women, the so-called “Rosies” (actually Wendy Welders in Richmond), get skilled jobs in the shipyards. But blacks, mostly recruited by Kaiser from the Deep South, who eventually made up nearly 20 percent of a shipyard workforce that rapidly swelled to 100,000, faced blatant discrimination.
Once again, she was hired to do filing. This time it was for the Boilermakers Union, Auxiliary 36. Black women did not get a chance to work industrial jobs in the shipyard until the final months of the war. Black shipyard workers were classified as “trainees” and relegated to powerless Jim Crow union auxiliaries, including the one where