Recently I went on a tour
of the wonderful new "Rosie
the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historical Park" in
Richmond, California. This place is great! "We are trying
to gather up America's memories of the war effort on the home
front and save them all here for future generations to have access
to," said a park ranger as we drove around the National
Park Service's newest creation. Sure, this park is different
from Yellowstone or Yosemite, but I found it to be as interesting,
crucial to the history of America and important to preserve as
any other national treasure.
One of the memories carved into the cement
walkway of a monument dedicated to the Rosies read, "I'm
83 years old now. I would appreciate if you would check and
find out that I was truly there
and did my part to the end, and add my name to the women who
did their parts also."
The park covers a big chunk of the city
of Richmond itself. First we drove past the one-fourth-mile
long Ford assembly plant
where Rosie-the Riveters churned out tank and Jeep parts for
the Pacific Theater. Then we drove over to the dry-docks where
thousands of ship parts had been put together like jigsaw puzzle
pieces. "It took very little time to assemble a ship back
then," said Ranger Betty. "The record was set when
they assembled one complete ship in just four days and 18 hours.
We built 447 ships here." She herself had been part of the
original Richmond female workforce back in the 1940s.
We also drove by the USS Red Oak Victory,
one of the many ships that had been assembled in the Richmond
shipyard. It was now
being restored. "And they have a museum on board and a pancake
breakfast once a month to raise funds for the restoration." Wow.
But are these pancakes genuine original-recipe Home Front pancakes?
Or just made from a mix....
We then drove past childcare centers, health clinics, worker
cafeterias, warehouses, homes and schools -- a whole city that
had been built up around the Richmond shipyard. I looked at all
the stuff that we drove by. It was like looking at a living museum.
And I was impressed and awed. But two things really brought the
whole war effort experience home to me and made it more real.
First, one ranger asked me what I myself
remembered about World War II. Me? But I had been only a child....
And then the sight
of all this home front memorabilia suddenly caused all these
old memories to come flooding back to me and I started babbling. "I
remember our victory garden and all the families who lived near
the Coronado naval base in the 1940s and my mother and sister
and I were part of this wonderful community of women whose husbands
were stationed in the Pacific and my mother got a letter every
day from my father telling us about Occupied Japan and how he
was the first American some Japanese had ever seen and they thought
he would have horns and we read his letters and we all thought
how wonderful and heroic he was and then he came home and he
was MEAN -- and ran our family like we were swabbies on the Bounty
and...." And I never got over the memory of my father's
nightmares and post-traumatic stress.
Today's military families probably experience
the same thing that I did as a child -- you get all those wonderful
phone calls
from Iraq and you think your daddy is gonna come home and Make
It All Better but when he actually does come back, he's got so
many post-traumatic stress issues that he can hardly tie his
own shoe laces and look for a job let alone be the "Ideal
Father".
Second, Ranger Betty told me something that
made me stop in my tracks. "During the war, thousands of African-Americans
were encouraged to come to Richmond -- and they came here with
high expectations, hoping to find the democracy that was forbidden
to them back in Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana and Oklahoma." But
unfortunately, segregation was also imported up from the south. "I
believe that the great civil rights movement of the 1960s began
here in the Richmond, Mare Island and Hunters Point shipyards
and in Port Chicago."
But it was still the best of times for American "Negroes".
But then the party suddenly stopped. "Henry J. Kaiser was
a concrete and steel manufacturer. He was an industrialist, not
a social worker. And when the war ended, that was that." And
in the course of a week, the salaries and services that had made
the Richmond Black community blossom and feel secure totally
disappeared. Gone. Zero. Zip. Nothing.
Suddenly, approximately 80,000 African-Americans had no houses,
no jobs, no childcare, no healthcare, no income and no backup.
And they were stranded in Richmond, thousands of miles away from
their roots. The instant disappearance of every single one of
their safety nets was a crushing blow to the Black Rosies of
Richmond and their families -- one from which the people of today's
Richmond, three or four generations later, are still struggling
to recover from.
Here we were, driving through the living history of the Richmond
shipyard -- then and now. The factories and the monuments and
the houses and the dreams from the historical period -- closely
woven into the fabric of the desperation and slums of these Black
Rosies' descendants -- forming a direct line from back in the
day.
And someone else just pointed out to me that the same stagnation
that had been suddenly thrust upon the city of Richmond in the
weeks after World War II ended was also inflicted upon the Hunters
Point shipyard area in San Francisco and around the Mare Island
shipyards in Vallejo. And these places to this day are also still
struggling with the dehabiltating results.
PS: Here's an e-mail I just received from
Ranger Betty, self-described as "the oldest park ranger on the planet".
I had written her asking if she would correct any errors in
the draft of this
essay. Here's her reply:
Great, Jane! Other than the fact that the
Ford Assembly Plant is not one-half but one-quarter mile long,
the rest is pretty
solid. That "four days to assemble and launch a ship" is
not quite right, though. Most took longer than that. The record
was one ship that was completed in 4 days and 18 hours, I believe,
but that was more the exception than the rule.
What Henry J. Kaiser accomplished overall,
was the construction of 447 ships in just over four years.
He was (as you correctly
state) not a social reformer, but an industrialist with the mission
to build ships faster than the enemy could sink them. This he
did. The implications for the nation's social systems was accidental,
but nonetheless powerfully effective in changing patterns of
social behavior. What was set in motion by bringing "the
South" to this area with all of its prejudices and racial
bigotry accelerated social change to warp speed and brought on
the next 20 years of tumultuous social change as whites and blacks
were forced to confront the contradictions to democracy in a
climate of economic and social upheaval created by the home front
dynamics. I'm so glad you came along, Jane. This is such a great
story (stories), and we have a chance (through the creation of
this national park) to encourage today's folks to go back and
re-examine the times and learn from them. This can be "good" regression;
to begin to replace the negative regression we're now seeing
that is so disturbing. The rolling back of Affirmative Action
and the recent Supreme Court decisions on Brown vs. Board of
Education suggests the need to do just that.
Click
here to view Ranger Betty's video on the role of African-Americans
in the Richmond-area war effort - It's called "Lost Conversations".
BlackCommentator.com Columnist Jane Stillwater
is a freelance writer, civil rights and peace activist living
in Berkeley, California. Click
here to contact Ms. Stillwater. |