WWII Boom and postwar integration

Upon the United States’ entry into WWII, the political, economic, and social landscape of the East Bay was radically transformed. Some of these transformations were systemic and long-lasting, such as the demographic shifts that brought racial diversity to East Bay communities. Others were somewhat ephemeral-- relics of a war, come and gone, where the creation of unprecedented opportunities for women and minorities were forged more out of sheer necessity than ambitious investment in social progress and progressive public policy. During WWII and its postwar era, the East Bay’s political struggles over race, labor, city planning, and civil rights served as a microcosm of broader national contention over these same issues. With acknowledgement of the inextricable ties between robust federal engagement and state laws in the mid-20th century, I investigate the WWII labor boom in the East Bay, the experiences of the African American and female workers who constituted a significant portion of that “boom,” and the struggles that each group faced in postwar integration. Specifically, I focus on federal and state housing policies that impacted people of color between the 1930s-1960s.

The Wartime Boom

At the heart of the East Bay's military industrial complex, shipbuilding efforts required an able, plentiful, and vigorous workforce. In 1941, upon the United States' departure from its isolationist foreign policy and commitment to wartime neutrality, defense mobilization began as the US made aid/arms commitments to Britain through the lend lease program. A year later, when the US entered the war and the majority of white men (preferred labor force) were overseas, industrialists like Henry Kaiser recognized the need for an innovative recruitment strategy that would draw available workers-- including women and minorities-- to the West Coast. Kaiser, in consultation with the War Manpower Commission, launched a nationwide recruitment campaign that promised high wages and the development of marketable skills to workers who took trains from southern and midwestern states (predominantly Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas) to settle in the East Bay to work on Kaiser shipyards. Due to high worker turnover and the need for a growing labor force every year, workers were also heavily recruited by “spotters” situated all across California to encourage labor migration to Richmond, and through propaganda fact sheets provided by Kaiser and distributed around the country. The East Bay became the highest cargo ship producer on the West Coast.

Labor: African Americans During War

Compared to the Jim Crow South, black migrants who traveled to East Bay shipyards as part of the Great Migration faced freedoms and wages greater than what they had ever experienced back home. Employment prospects for black workers were highest in shipbuilding (as opposed to companies Standard Oil, which employed only the bare minimum number of black workers required by the government). For the increased relative standard of living, black workers overwhelmingly (80%) planned to remain in the East Bay upon the war's conclusion. But for these workers, even in the West, the opportunity to work wartime national defense jobs was only a recent political gain.

In June 1941, following mounting pressure from civil rights organizers A. Philip Randolph and C.L. Dellums of Oakland (who threatened to organize a March on Washington against discriminatory hiring processes that shut black workers out of wartime government defense jobs), President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 which declared the following:

"I hereby reaffirm the policy of the United States that there shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin."

By prohibiting employment discrimination in government and defense jobs, the order served as a catalyst for African American integration within wartime industry. This, however, this was still just a step in the right direction: it created a Fair Employment Practice Committee (tasked with implementing the law and defending workers) that was relatively toothless until strengthened by Executive Order 9346, and unions-- specifically, the largest shipyard union International Brotherhood of Boilermakers-- still heavily discriminated against African American membership, relegating black workers to auxiliaries such as A-26 in Oakland and A-36 in Richmond. These auxiliaries prevented black workers from advancement or representation within union leadership. Union discrimination was challenged-- and won-- in 1945 with James v. Marinship, a case in which the California Supreme Court ruled that unions had to employ blacks and whites under the same conditions. However, by 1945, war mobilization was essentially over and the plaintiffs did not benefit from the ruling.

Following the war, African Americans faced high unemployment: in Richmond, they experienced 4x the rate of the average worker.

Labor: Women During War

While propaganda at the time tended to suggest that national and East Bay Rosies were middle class, suburban housewives inspired to join the workforce out of abundant patriotic duty or desire to protect their "Charlies," as old Riveter jingles suggested, this was not the case. In actuality, most women in the workforce during the war-- two-thirds-- had been working prior to the new, higher-wage opportunities offered in wartime defense. Many were working class, single mothers with children to support. Women would come to make up as much as 30% of the Kaiser shipyard workforce later in the war.

While polls indicate that between 1943 and 1945, around 75 percent of women in the defense-related workforce desired to remain in postwar jobs that would utilize their newfound trade skills, they also recognized the challenges that came with such ambition. In an interview with Richmond shipyard welder Gladys Belcher, she relayed her underlying doubts about women's prospects for postwar labor integration:

“I knew that the job [during the war] would terminate when the war was over and that’s why I worked my shift and then went to welding school.”

Despite seeking a job in welding after the war, Belcher -- like many women-- had to downgrade in both wages and job prestige by resorting to service or domestic work (in Belcher’s case, a restaurant). Women were discriminated against by private employers in the defense industry who refused to hire women once men were back in the workforce, Belcher said.

The Oakland Homes Registration Office, under oversight by the National Housing Agency, worked to facilitate creative solutions to the housing crisis such as converting large homes into small apartments suitable for 2-3 families. Other solutions included encouraging residents in East Bay communities, especially blue collar homes along the waterfront, to rent part of their homes to migrants as part of the war guest program. Indicated by a large bold-printed advertisement in a 1942 Oakland Tribune, ads stated:

"Your help is needed today! With shipyards employing thousands of men and still more men needed badly. With other war industries working to full capacity and still more implements of war needed, housing facilities are naturally taxed almost beyond stretching point. Yet there are thousands of homes that can adopt the spirit of we will move over and rent that spare room, fix up the attic, make the basement livable, and other ways to house a war worker."

Relentless appeals to patriotism-- as a 1942 Tribune article captured in its encouragement of residents to do “your patriotic part in the nation’s battle against the Axis” -- further put pressure on homeowners to provide housing for workers. Still, many workers had no choice but to live on the street surrounded by sewage and garbage, find shelter in buildings or trailer camps, or find temporary housing in white subdivisions or the 30,000 public housing units built by the government along East Bay flatlands.

Nonetheless, while wartime housing accommodations were always intended to be temporary, long-term housing in the postwar period would soon be a frontier of its own riddled with both explicit and covert forms of discrimination against minorities, political contention between voters and their representatives as well as an abundance of partisan politics, and a mixed legacy of legal “solutions” that aspired to write equality into law, yet failed to be adequately implemented in real-life city planning and community development practices.

Housing Timeline: Critical Legislation of the Postwar Era (1930s-1960s)

• National Housing Act 1934: As part of the New Deal, this federal law created the Federal Housing Administration and Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation to help increase housing standards, provide federal loans, and make mortgages more affordable for low income citizens. While incredibly successful for white Americans, according to Robert Leighninger, “…by the late 1950s less than 2 percent of housing built after the war with the help of FHA insurance was sold to minorities, and only 1 percent was built in minority subdivisions.” In essence, while New Deal housing programs brought many white post-war families opportunity for social and economic mobility, that opportunity was race-based and the federal government’s appraisal maps set a foundation for redlining on top of decades-old racial covenants (tacitly embraced by real estate companies even when deemed unenforceable in the U.S. Supreme Court case Shelley v. Kraemer) and exclusionary zoning.

Redlining as defined by the dictionary: a discriminatory practice in which banks, insurance companies, etc., refuse or limit loans, mortgages, insurance within specific geographic areas (“D” zones).

These areas were coded as follows:

Green (A): First Grade; favorable (i.e. businessmen)

Blue (B): Second Grade; good (i.e. white collar families)

Yellow (C): Third Grade; declining (i.e. working class)

Red (D): Detrimental; (i.e. foreign-born, low class white people, minorities)

• Unruh Civil Rights Act of 1959: California law that prohibits businesses (ie, supposed to apply to real estate companies) from discriminating against citizens based on “sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sexual orientation, citizenship, primary language, or immigration status.”

• California Fair Employment and Housing Act (1959): California statute that prohibited employment discrimination by employers of 5 or more people (thus, labor unions), and established the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) as an outlet for citizens to report instances of discrimination and pursue investigations and prosecutions if applicable.

• Rumford Act (1963): California law pushed by Berkeley's state assemblyman, William Rumford. The statute prohibited discrimination by realtors and the owners of housing accommodations built with public assistance. In the law, property owners are forbidden from inquiry regarding the racial status of prospective buyers or tenants, are forbidden from publishing or advertising a racial preference for future buyers or tenants, and cannot retaliate against any person who has filed a complaint about violations of this Act. The Act did not apply to charitable, religious, or non-profit organizations, and was still limited in scope, mostly applicable to apartment complexes.

• Prop 14 (1964): Californians voted 2:1 to approve Prop 14, which declared the Rumford Fair Housing Act of 1963 void. This vote was later deemed by the California Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court to be unconstitutional (thus restoring the Rumford Act).

• Fair Housing Act 1968 -- prohibited discrimination in the sale, rental and financing of private dwellings based on race, religion, or national origin (later amended to include sex, disabled, and those with children) and commitment to “integration and balanced living patterns.” Redlining and racial covenants are determined illegal. As it turns out, however, the FHA would still only be selectively enforced and the “integration” aspect of it largely neglected in the decades to follow. In an April 2018 Op-Ed to the New York Times, Walter Mondale (co-author of FHA while a senator from MN) spoke to this effect:

The act has survived long enough to witness a curious debate over its intent. Some scholars have suggested that its functions can be divided into “anti-discrimination” and “integration,” with the two goals working at cross purposes. At times, critics suggest the law’s integration aims should be sidelined in favor of colorblind enforcement measures that stamp out racial discrimination but do not serve the larger purpose of defeating systemic segregation. To the law’s drafters, these ideas were not in conflict. The law was informed by the history of segregation, in which individual discrimination was a manifestation of a wider societal rift.

Sources

Bay Area Census, 1940s-1960s. MTC-ABAG Library. www.bayareacensus.ca.gov.

Collins, William J. “Race, Roosevelt, and Wartime Production: Fair Employment in World War II Labor Markets.” The American Economic Review, vol. 91, no. 1, 2001.

Field, Connie, Lola Weixel, Margaret Wright, Lyn Childs, Gladys Belcher, Wanita Allen, Cathy Zheutlin, Bonnie Friedman, Robert Handley, Emiko Omori, and Lucy M. Phenix. The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, 2000.

*Johnson, Marilynn. “The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II.” Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993.

Madrigal, Alexis. The Racist Housing Policy That Made Your Neighborhood. The Atlantic, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-racist-housing-policy-that-made-your-neighborhood/371439/

Mondale, Walter. The Civil Rights Law We Ignored. The New York Times, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/10/opinion/walter-mondale-fair-housing-act.html

"Our City." Oakland Junior Chamber of Commerce Urban Renewal, 1954. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLtFNqUB1ok

"Saving the Bay - The Greatest Shipbuilding Center in the World." Uploaded by KQED, 11 August 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhCiGY75wVw.

*Moore, Shirley. “To Place Our Deeds: The African American Community in Richmond, California,” 1910–1963. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001.

*Self, Robert. “American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland.” Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

T-Races: Regional Redlining Online Maps. http://salt.umd.edu/T-RACES/

Wolfinger, Raymond E., and Fred I. Greenstein. “The Repeal of Fair Housing in California: An Analysis of Referendum Voting.” The American Political Science Review, vol. 62, no. 3, 196

Grant, R.S. “Homes Registration Office Acts to Meet Housing Need,” Oakland Tribune, 1942.

* = excellent and incredibly thorough books that examine war and postwar issues in the East Bay

Legal Text

Executive Order 8802: https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/history/35th/thelaw/eo-8802.html

James v. Marinship: https://scocal.stanford.edu/opinion/james-v-marinship-corp-29267

National Housing Act 1934: https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/historical/martin/54_01_19340627.pdf

Shelley v. Kraemer: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/334/1/case.html

Unruh Civil Rights Act 1959: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=CIV&sectionNum=51

California Fair Employment and Housing Act of 1959: https://www.dfeh.ca.gov/legal-records-and-reports/laws-and-regulations/

Rumford Act 1963 (present law, as amended): http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=200320040ACR53

Fair Housing Act of 1968 (Civil Rights Act): https://legcounsel.house.gov/Comps/civil68.pdf

Campus Experts

Kenneth Rosen - Professor of real estate and urban economics at the Haas School of Business

Gray Brechin - Expert on the New Deal's impact on California, founder of California's Living New Deal Project

Karen Chapple - Professor of City and Regional Planning, expert in labor markets, neighborhood change, gentrification, economic development, poverty

Daniel Chatman - Associate Professor of City & Regional Planning, expert on transportation, immigration, housing