Wendell King left a lasting legacy at GE
Phenom from Union sparked a dramatic walkout 100 years ago
Editor’s note: During Black History Month, the Times Union is sharing stories from its archive highlighting significant people, places and events that are part of the Capital Region’s Black cultural heritage. This story was first published July 2, 2017.
Two months after the United States entered World War I, a 20-year-old college student started working as a machinist in Building 23 at General Electric Co.'s sprawling industrial campus in Schenectady.
His name was Wendell King, and by all accounts he was a whiz kid, having started one of the area's first amateur radio stations from his North Troy home when he was just 12 years old.
While a student at Lansingburgh High School, King would dazzle local businessmen at Rotary luncheons with demonstrations of wireless radio technology, which was cutting edge at the time.
And in the fall of 1916, King enrolled at Union College in Schenectady, which had one of the nation's premier electrical engineering departments. The following June, King was one of about two dozen Union students chosen to work for the summer across town at GE'S Schenectady Works, the sprawling campus of factories, offices and labs that was a hub of innovation and manufacturing inspired by Thomas Edison himself.
King was assigned to a machine shop in Building 23 at the Schenectady Works, where his job was to operate a drill press. Although King was in
school to become an engineer, the experience would have been invaluable to understand how the parts that GE'S engineers designed were made while providing him extra money to pay for school.
Because King was Black, his presence didn't sit well with the white workers in the building, unionized machinists, many of them European immigrants who had been hearing rumors that GE was planning to bring in Black workers from the South to compete for their jobs.
The machinists stewed over King's presence and demanded a meeting with GE brass, eventually giving plant manager George Emmons a written "ultimatum" that they would stage a strike if King remained. Emmons did nothing.
And so, on the morning of June 18, 1917, a Monday, machinists from Building 23 and other buildings at the Schenectady Works — 2,500 in total — staged a dramatic walkout that threatened to cripple GE'S production of military equipment just as the U.S. was entering World War I.
The strike remains one of the most important civil rights and labor flash points in modern local history.