African-American Manhattan Project veteran Kattie Strickland honored
Good biscuits and perseverance were the topics of the evening at the Department of Energy’s “HerStory” women’s history celebration honoring Manhattan Project veteran Kattie Strickland.
During the Manhattan Project, Strickland left her four children with her mother in Alabama to follow her husband to Oak Ridge, despite Jim Crow laws that would prevent her from even living with him. The government would not allow their children on the reservation either.
Still, the city offered higher wages than she and her husband could find in Alabama, and she wanted to provide a better life for her family.
She divided her pay between her family back home and donations to the war effort.
At the celebration, three of Strickland’s children, 14 grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren watched as their grandmother, who died two years ago, spoke in a video interview played at the front of an auditorium in Y-12 National Security Complex’s New Hope Center.
Strickland described mopping the floors of the giant buildings at Clinton Engineer Works and the segregated facilities outside the plant. She said the food at the segregated cafeteria made her sick, so one day she asked some construction workers to make her some cooking pans out of scrap metal they were handling.
Strickland made biscuits in her hutment with one of the
pans, and they smelled so good they became a kind of currency in the segregated hutment villages. She gave them to guards in exchange for more time visiting her husband.
“I didn’t try to bribe them, they just smelled ’em,” she laughed on the video.
When the war was over, she was able to bring her kids to Oak Ridge to go to school.
“Things got better when we came up here,” said Dorothye Steele-Patterson, Strickland’s daughter. “Things were more modern, there were things like washing machines, which we’d never seen in Alabama.”
Both Steele-Patterson and her daughter, Valeria, were
dressed head to toe in purple, Strickland’s favorite color.
Steele-Patterson credits her own success and her children’s success to Strickland’s ingenuity. Her mother was a Renaissance woman: She was a gardener and a seamstress, and she crocheted, took pottery classes and made quilts for her family.
And Valeria added, she was a great cook, who continued to specialize in huge, buttery biscuits covered in cream sauce.
Valeria presented her grandmother’s famous biscuit pan to the Department of Energy to display as a cultural artifact throughout the month of April. She said her grandmother
used it until she died at age 99 to make toast for her breakfast each morning.
Steele-Patterson recalled her mother’s steady involvement in her children’s education after the war. She attended all of their basketball games and parent-teacher meetings and took them to picket for integration and equal rights in Oak Ridge.
Steele-Patterson graduated valedictorian of Scarboro High School the year before Oak Ridge desegregated, and became an integration liaison for the schools. Another of Strickland’s daughters was one of the first black students to attend Oak Ridge High School.