See Honoring the Rosies  

Also see A Victory Ship Comes Home

THEY STREAMED INTO the San Francisco Bay Area from the South, the Midwest, and other parts of the country - people from towns and farms, men too old or unfit for military service, women with children, entire families coming in cars, on buses, on trains - to work in the Kaiser shipyards, building Liberty and Victory Ships.

Margarite Drake, shipfitter, 1942, Richmond Shipyards  

The woman in overalls, wielding industrial tools, became an icon, popularized by the 1942 song "Rosie the Riveter." By the end of the war more than six million women had worked in shipyards, steel mills, foundries, and other industries and services on the homefront.
     After the war ended, many women returned to traditional roles as wives and mothers, but some wanted more in life. "I found I missed working and I never went back to housekeeping," said Lorie Amos, who had been the only woman on a seven-person crew at one of the Richmond shipyards. "I think it caused some friction between a lot of couples. The women had had their first taste of independence, and they realized that they could work, they could earn a living, they could make decisions."
      For African Americans, the shipyards provided the "biggest single opportunity for black workers to get into skilled work," according to historian Marilynn S. Johnson. That did not mean that minority people enjoyed equal opportunity, either in work or in government-provided housing. "Seeing them as well suited to arduous labor, shipyard employers concentrated black workers in the hull trades - hard, outdoor work," Johnson writes in her book, The Second Gold Rush (University of California Press, 1993), which chronicles the labor migration, its effects on the Bay Area, and its legacy. But when labor demands required, African-American workers, as well as women, were shifted to welding, burning, shipfitting, and a number of other semi-skilled trades.
      After the war's end, many of the immigrants remained in the San Francisco Bay Area, settling near the shipyards. The African American population more than doubled between 1940 and 1945. In Richmond, which had the greatest concentration of shipbuilding and the nation's largest wartime housing program, it rose from 1.1 percent of the total in 1940 to 13.4 percent in 1950.
      Women and minority workers were the first to lose their wartime jobs, and they found it harder than white men to secure new employment. Because federal policies permitted wartime housing to be segregated, and home loans were offered most readily to whites, the public housing built for the workers became the core of poverty-stricken black ghetto communities, which remain poor to this day.  

Launching the Robert E. Peary, built in less than five days  

In the 1950s, the City of Richmond demolished much of the wartime housing in the name of "slum clearance," evicting thousands of tenants. At that time, half of the city's population still lived in this worker housing, including 78 percent of the city's black population. Many whites managed to move to suburbs, but blacks who tried got a hostile response.
      Today a returning "Rosie" would not recognize the Richmond waterfront. Instead of shipyards and acres of wartime housing she would see pleasure boats docked in a marina and costly condominiums facing manicured lawns.
      Nevertheless, the shipyard experience "planted a seed for the future," Johnson writes. It laid a foundation for racial conflict but also for the civil rights movement and the women's movement. The "Second Gold Rush" also enriched the cultural diversity of the entire San Francisco Bay Area, and especially the East Bay. 

- Tony Shen