While the War Department segregated black servicemen into their own fighting units in World War II, with separate African American blood banks for those who were injured, on the home front workers of various ethnic backgrounds at times experienced a considerable degree of integration, especially in factories and shipyards. Wartime needs created unprecedented employment opportunities for women as so many able-bodied men were taken out of the workforce and sent overseas by the military. Shipyards needed more laborers than ever before, which also meant job openings for blacks and other nonwhites who entered the state in droves seeking work. Not all war industries, however, were open to ethnic minorities. As beneficial as the new economic opportunities were for previously marginalized groups, the stresses of war at times exacerbated white racism, causing ugly confrontations.
Jobs for women, mainly whites, on the home front were plentiful, particularly in the shipyards and aircraft factories. Women accounted for 23.3 percent of the total workforce at Marinship. Their presence angered some male employees, who felt that men were being displaced. Female employee Vianne Cochran reported in 1942 that one man “coughed and spat a big gob on my cheek.” As she leaped at her tormenter, a security guard restrained her. Cochran then took her grievance to management with the result that the offending man was fired. Given the labor shortage, Marinship valued its female employees and took their concerns seriously. By late 1943 the company had more than 4,000 female employees; co-owner Kenneth Bechtel called them “first rate workers.” In addition to serving as cafeteria and clerical personnel, many held positions in the skilled trades, such as welding. While women received pay equal to men in various job categories, females were less likely to be promoted than their male counterparts. Most likely, latent male sexism in the workplace was responsible for this. Still, under workplace conditions that had improved since World War I but were far less than ideal, women contributed mightily on the home front. As one Marinship executive put it: “America’s wartime achievements in shipbuilding could not have been realized without women workers.”
Across San Francisco Bay in Richmond, women comprised more than 27 percent of Kaiser shipyard’s workforce. Most of them were married, and those who were parents took advantage of Kaiser’s childcare facilities. About 40 percent of Kaiser’s welders were female. The Rosie the Riveter Memorial, situated in Richmond, honors the women workers who contributed greatly to the wartime shipbuilding effort. Unions were less appreciative of female riveters, welders, and other workers who performed jobs customarily done by men. Because most shipyard unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor were conservative in their social policies, many of the most powerful unions would not admit women into their ranks.
Women fared as well, if not better, in southern California’s aircraft plants, where they were paid 60 cents an hour when the state’s minimum wage was 40 cents an hour. In 1943 women constituted 42.4 percent of aviation’s workforce in the region. Moreover, in comparison to males, females received comparable pay for comparable work. Generally smaller than men, women were able to weld and perform other tasks in tight places, making them particularly valuable employees in the aircraft industry. With increasing numbers of women working with men, aircraft plants became more sexualized. North American Aviation provided bands, dances, and date-counseling services. Lockheed contended with the problem of employees using its bomb shelters for lovemaking.
Like Anglo women, numerous non-Anglos of both sexes found jobs and encountered varying degrees of discrimination in wartime California. Circumstances mostly brightened for Chinese Americans. Many blacks secured work in the shipyards. Particularly embittering for African Americans was the prejudice directed at them while serving in the military. As Mexican nationals labored in the fields and on railroads, adolescent Mexican American males in East Los Angeles were targeted by U. S. servicemen on leave for bullying and beatings.
With China being an ally of the United States in World War II, Congress repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943. Consequently, employment opportunities outside of Chinatown opened for California’s population of Chinese ancestry. Many took jobs in the Bay Area shipyards. One defense worker at Mare Island, Maggie Gee, took flying lessons in Nevada and afterward piloted military supply transports throughout the country for the Army Air Corps.
Prospects of employment in the war industries spurred a mass migration of blacks out of the rural South and into the urban North and West. The black population in the Bay Area alone jumped from fewer than 20,000 in 1940 to more than 60,000 by 1945. Seventy percent of the workers in this group were employed in shipbuilding. At Marinship blacks and whites worked peacefully together, though blacks were not allowed membership in the “lily white” Brotherhood of Boilermakers union.
Half of the West Coast-bound black migrants settled in Los Angeles. The city’s African American population stood at 55,114 in 1940 and had more than doubled by 1944, reaching 118,888. Most working-age newcomers took jobs in the shipyards, with some 5,000 blacks employed by Calship. As in the Bay Area, major unions, such as the Boilermakers, denied them membership due to race but encouraged them to join “auxiliary locals,” which gave them no voting rights in union affairs and smaller insurance benefits than white workers. Affiliated with all-white major unions, auxiliary locals were clearly second-class organizations whose members paid dues and yet their treasuries were controlled by the officers of the major unions. African American Fred Jones, among others, objected to this subordinate status, noting: “We have been forced into a Jim Crow outfit [meaning inferior auxiliary locals].” When Jones initially applied for shipyard work and admittance in the union he listed himself as “Hindu.” Full union membership followed. Afterward, on telling labor officials that he was a “Negro,” they switched his membership to auxiliary status.
In aviation, unlike shipbuilding, employment opportunities for African Americans did not materialize in the war years due to race-based discrimination. Most aircraft plants refused to hire blacks and made no secret of it. A spokesperson for the firm
Consolidated-Vultee wrote to the Los Angeles Council of the Negro Congress in August 1940: “I regret to say that it is not the policy of this company to employ people other than that of the Caucasian race.” The following year the president of North American Aviation said: “Regardless of their training as aircraft workers we will not employ Negroes in the North American plant. It is against company policy”
An explosion of munitions in 1944 at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine, a weapons storage and transfer depot on the south shore of Suisun Bay north of San Francisco, laid bare racial tensions between blacks and whites in the military. The handling of ammunition was back-breaking, life-threatening work, and the navy assigned it almost exclusively to enlisted African American men. On the evening of July 17 a horrific explosion occurred at the depot, killing 320 servicemen, two-thirds of whom were blacks serving in a segregated unit. Another 233 of them were injured to varying degrees. On being told to return to their weapons-handling duties afterward, 50 members of the surviving unit refused to do so, citing the unsafe conditions. All were tried and convicted of mutiny, and sentenced to prison. Later, the navy admitted that “there can be no doubt that racial prejudice was responsible for the posting of African Americans” to the site of the disaster. Not until January of 1946, after the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) intervened, were 47 of the Port Chicago sailors released from prison and reassigned to ship duty. Two others were still in the hospital, and a third was detained for bad conduct while incarcerated.
While servicemen of Mexican descent were not segregated in the armed forces, where their valor was recognized, their adolescent civilian counterparts in Los Angeles found themselves increasingly at odds with law enforcement officers. Also, the press associated the young Latino males with delinquency. The Sleepy Lagoon murder trial, the round-up and arrest of Latino youths, followed by the Zoot Suit riots, exemplified the strains that war placed on Anglo-Hispanic racial relations on the home front.
On August 1, 1942, Jose Diaz had attended a party at a house near an East Los Angeles quarry called Sleepy Lagoon, often used by Hispanic youth for swimming. The next day he was found unconscious on a road near the house. He was taken to a nearby hospital, where he died. No direct evidence of murder was produced, nor were there any known witnesses to the mishap. A police investigation determined that the night before the body was found the alleged 38th Street Mexican American gang had crashed the party attended by Diaz and fighting had ensued. Later that month authorities indicted 23 members of that group, most of whom had jobs and were hard workers, for murder. In a courtroom presided over by a notoriously anti-Mexican judge, an all-white jury convicted 17 of the defendants of crimes ranging from assault to first-degree murder. Sheriff Department Lieutenant Ed Duran Ayres testified before the grand jury that Mexican Americans were given to blood lust and violence, traits inbred in them from their Aztec ancestors. He urged the imprisonment of all suspected Latino gangsters in the city, not just 38th Street gang members. Though the Second District Court of Appeals overturned the convictions on October 4, 1944, media depictions of Latino males remained negative.
Local Mexican American leaders challenged these negative depictions. Josefina Fierro de Bright, activist and president of El Congreso del Pueblo de Habla Espanola, with help from the city’s largest Spanish-language newspaper La Opinion, worked to mobilize and defend
Los Angeles’ Hispanic community. Their struggle would not end anytime soon. Though Mexican Americans distinguished themselves in combat overseas, in the wake of the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial the police, courts, and Hearst newspapers depicted young Angelinos of Mexican descent in East Los Angeles and elsewhere in the city as subversive and criminal. This was wartime, and public fears were easily heightened to hysteria by the media and officials.
Mass arrests of juvenile Latinos further strained racial relations in the City of Angels. The police in Los Angeles County kept a close watch on the pro-Axis Union Nacional Sinarquista, a group with a colony in Baja California and some 400 members in southern California, a reminder of the continuous interchanges between the two Californias. When, on August 10, 1942, police in the county rounded up and arrested more than 600 Mexican American male youths on flimsy charges, the Sinarquistas warned that Californians of Hispanic heritage might soon be imprisoned in concentration camps. To many Anglos, Angelinos of Mexican descent were linked with the America-bashing Sinarquistas, and therefore were disloyal. Besides, these young men were not in the military, which made them vulnerable to the charge of being unpatriotic draft dodgers.
The Anglo racism stirred by the publicized Sleepy Lagoon incident and evidenced in the mass arrests of Latino youths that same year spilled over into press accounts of the Zoot Suit riots the following year, 1943. Pachucos, as the defiant adolescent Mexican American males living in barrios were called, resented off-duty American servicemen making advances to young Latinas in the dance halls and bars of Los Angeles. Sexual competition for females heightened tensions at the same time that the long hair and stylized dress of the pachucos seemed a rebuke of the plainer, clean-cut military look. Pachuco attire included long coats with well-padded shoulders and wide lapels, pleated pants, raised shoes, a watch or keys attached to a long chain, and a wide-brimmed hat. So conspicuously and self-consciously clad, zoot suiters were easy targets for police and servicemen.
Beginning on June 3, 1943, white sailors, soldiers, and civilians began a six-day hunt through parts of Los Angeles looking for zoot suiters to harass. When they found them, fighting ensued. The outnumbered, hapless pachucos were often beaten, stripped of their clothes, and shorn of their hair. Fortunately, no one was killed and only one serious injury resulted from the rioting. These assaults ended only when the navy cancelled leave into the city. Whatever the explanation for these attacks, they left a residue of racial ill will in Los Angeles that lasted long after World War II ended, and gave birth to a growing consciousness of what came to be known by the 1960s as Chicano cultural identity.
The prejudice and mistreatment that some Anglos directed at African Americans and Mexican Americans were bad. Yet these were not the only minority ethnic groups who suffered at the hands of the Caucasian majority in wartime California.
World History
