Welcome for black workers ends at gates of Marin shipyard
The previous Portals described the astonishingly rapid creation of Marinship, a World War II shipyard on the northern Sausalito waterfront. The entire 210acre facility was completed and began turning out ships less than 10 months after the government asked Bechtel Corp. to submit a proposal to build it. During Marinship’s threeplus years of existence, 75,000 workers produced 93 tankers and Liberty ships.
As with all the wartime naval shipyards, the workers who built these vitally important ships were an unprecedented mix of Americans. Men and women — black and white, Asian American and Latino — from across the country worked at Marinship as welders, electricians and
pipe fitters and in myriad other jobs.
As Charles Wollenberg notes in “Marinship at War: Shipbuilding and Social Change in Wartime Sausalito,” shipyard labor had previously been almost exclusively the domain of white men. But Uncle Sam’s allconsuming need for shipyard workers put an end to that.
By late 1942, recruiters for Marinship had fanned out across the country, concentrating on the South, Midwest and Southwest. Pay was a powerful lure. Journeymen laborers earned about $270 a month, a solid wage in those post-Depression days.
One dramatic change was the influx of thousands of women into the workforce. As Wollenberg notes, at the beginning of 1940, there were only 36 female shipyard production workers in the entire country. By 1943, there were 160,000.
At first, Marinship hired women in traditionally female jobs, like clerks and sandwich makers. But in 1942, the shipyard began hiring women as production workers.
The first was Dorothy Gimblett. One observer said that when Gimblett first appeared in her welder’s leathers, some workers laughed and whistled. But the mother of three “strode on and set the pace for thousands of women who followed.”
By November 1943, more than 4,000 women were employed at Marinship, nearly onefourth of the workforce. There were 1,201 female welders, 40% of all welders in the yard.
An equally dramatic change was the entrance of black workers. World War II shipyard jobs brought large numbers of African Americans to the Bay Area: From 1940 to 1945, the black population went from fewer than 20,000 to more than 60,000. An astonishing 70% of these newcomers worked in the shipyards. By the end of the war, 1 in 10 shipyard workers in the Bay Area was African American.
The first problem black workers faced was finding housing. Some moved into the new public housing project in Marin City, just northwest of Marinship, but its 1,500 family units and 1,000 dormitory spaces did not come close to accommodating all the shipyard workers who needed housing.
African Americans were forced to look in the private market, which was heavily segregated and often encumbered by racial covenants banning black residents. There was reportedly only one black family in all of Marin County before the war. Most black Marinship workers ended up living in one of San Francisco’s few racially mixed neighborhoods, the Western Addition, where housing was available because thousands of people of Japanese ancestry had just been forcibly removed to prison camps.
Black workers faced some racial animosity on the job, but generally were accepted. However, the chief shipyard union, the Boilermakers, refused to give African Americans fullfledged membership and tried to force them into segregated “auxiliaries” that did not enjoy full union privileges.
Rising to challenge this bigoted policy was an African American welder and professional singer named Joseph James. As the leader of the San Francisco Committee Against Segregation and Discrimination, James led protests and spearheaded a legal struggle that culminated in a decisive California Supreme Court ruling on Jan. 2, 1945. In the case of James vs. Marinship, the court ruled that the Boilermakers’ demand that blacks join auxiliaries was “discriminatory and unequal.” The decision forced the union to integrate all of its lodges.
By the time the ruling was issued, however, the shipyards were preparing to shut down and many workers, black and white, had lost their jobs. In a case of “last hired, first fired,” black workers lost their jobs in far greater numbers than their white counterparts. In 1944, Boilermakers Local 6, which covered Marinship and shipyards in San Francisco, had 36,000 members, including 3,000 African
Americans in segregated auxiliaries. In 1948, the union was fully integrated but had just 1,800 members, of whom only 150 were black.
For African American workers, the economic consequences of the closing of the shipyards were devastating. Wollenberg notes that during the war, 75% of African American heads of household in San Francisco were classified as skilled industrial workers, the vast majority of them in the shipyards. By 1948 only 25% were, and 15% of black men in the Bay Area were unemployed — three times the statewide rate for all workingage people. Discrimination, lack of training and geographic isolation prevented many from finding decent jobs.
Except for a few buildings, few signs of Marinship remain. Its most tangible reminder is Marin City, where the future was shaped by the grim fallout of the postwar period. It was once a lively, integrated community, but after the war white residents left and black people living there were unable to. By the 1990s it had become plagued by crime.
Marin City has seen some improvement in recent years, but it is still cut off from the affluent communities around it. In 2019 the state accused the SausalitoMarin City School District of deliberately creating a segregated school in Marin City. The resulting settlement was the first attempt to desegregate a school in California in 50 years.
If the settlement, or some other initiative, succeeds in raising the fortunes of Marin City, it may one day be a fitting monument to the place where men and women of all races once worked together to build ships that helped win World War II.