Staging Migrations toward an American West by Marta Effinger-Crichlow

Author:Marta Effinger-Crichlow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-60732-312-9
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Published: 2014-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

While school length varied for potential welders, it took Mitchell only “about six or seven days” to complete her training, after which she returned to Shipyard No. 3.

A poster of a rosy-cheeked and determined white female with rolled-up denim sleeves helped usher women into the defense industry. Carefully placed above her tied red bandanna is the bubbled pronouncement “We Can Do It!” Consequently, when Norman Rockwell’s painting of a youthful and red-headed Rosie the Riveter, with the American flag as her backdrop, appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post on May 29, 1943, this image took center stage in American popular culture.81 Noticeably absent from widely circulated US magazines, newspapers, and wartime propaganda films was the black female defense worker. Most valuable though are some of the sporadic editions of black western papers like the California Voice, which included rare photographs and stories of black women in the industry, as well as black publications like We Also Serve, The CRISIS, and Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life. These periodicals show black women serving in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps and working on the home front as riveters, assemblers, automatic screw machine operators, milling machine operators, drill press operators, and inspectors.82 In February 1945, Fortune magazine’s special West Coast wartime issue featured Dorothea Lange’s black and white photographs of black women in the California shipyards. Lange, who captured images of men and women of various racial and ethnic backgrounds in the defense industry, demonstrated to America that black women were not mere wartime spectators, nor did they passively stand by.83 Photographs such as these centralize black women’s daily performances. Showing black female welders in their heavy work uniforms of leather welding jackets, leather gloves, steel-toed shoes, overalls, and helmets, showcased their critical role in the war effort. All these images prove that black women’s performances mattered.

Figure 3.6. Alice Hilliard at church. Photo courtesy of Alice Hilliard.

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