Lockheed, Atlanta, and the Struggle for Racial Integration

By Randall L. Patton

Lockheed has been one of American’s largest corporations and most important defense contractors from World War II to the present day (since 1995 as part of Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company). During the postwar era, its executives enacted complicated business responses to black demands for equality. Based on the papers of a personnel executive, the memoir of an African American employee, interviews, and company publications, this narrative history offers a unique inside perspective on the evolution of equal employment and affirmative action policies at Lockheed Aircraft’s massive Georgia plant from the early 1950s through the early 1980s.

Randall L. Patton provides a rare, perhaps unique, account of African American struggle and management response, set within the context of the regional and national struggles for civil rights. The book describes the complex interplay of black protest, federal policy, and management action in a crucial space in the national economy and within the South, contributing to business history, policy history, labor history, and civil rights history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9780820355153

Randall L. Patton

RANDALL L. PATTON is a professor of history at Kennesaw State University. He is coauthor, with David B. Parker, of Carpet Capital: The Rise of a New South Industry, author of Shaw Industries: A History, and editor of Working for Equality: The Narrative of Harry Hudson (all Georgia).

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CHAPTER 1

Economic Necessity and Governmental Pressures

LOCKHEED AND EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY BEFORE GEORGIA

In 1998, Walter Boyne, a former director of the National Air and Space Museum, published a detailed company-sponsored history of Lockheed. Boyne’s narrative briefly addressed the company’s experience with desegregation in Georgia, strongly implying that all events occurred after 1961. Boyne mentioned not at all the desegregation of the firm’s California facilities during World War II or the company’s experience with the Training within Industry program. The bulk of the book, as expected, focused on Lockheed’s development of new aircraft and overall financial performance. But Beyond the Horizons offered just hints of top management’s thinking on race and the Georgia division. Boyne had access to all unclassified company records and materials, though he did not cite specific sources or include notes. Boyne’s description of management’s policy on segregation in Marietta included a characterization of chair Robert Gross’s instructions to Dan Haughton: marching orders to see that the company complied with new federal laws promoting integration. But no laws existed until 1964, so Boyne may have been referring to executive orders. According to Boyne, Haughton passed on the instructions to project engineer W. A. Dick Pulver and his crew, who brought desegregation about indirectly and with subtlety. Boyne made no reference to the C-141 contract dispute or the Plan for Progress signed by Robert Gross’s brother and business partner, Courtlandt Gross, in May 1961, instead observing that White and Colored signs disappeared quietly from restrooms and drinking fountains, with paper cups appearing at water fountains. Cafeterias closed, replaced by food carts. This approach worked, he contended, not immediately, but over time. Black employment gradually increased, and black supervisors became increasingly common. While change did take time, the company’s efforts were sustained . . . and successful.¹ Moreover, Boyne made no mention of the pre-1961 history of desegregation at either Lockheed’s California facilities or its Georgia division.

Lockheed Martin’s 2013 corporate history, Innovation with Purpose, offered scarcely more details, focusing on the 1961 C-141 contract crisis and the emergence of Plans for Progress. The more recent history acknowledged— barely—early World War II efforts to desegregate the aircraft industry, noting that, Before World War II, only five Lockheed employees were women. By June 1943, that number had exploded to nearly 35,000. Women and African Americans did their part to defend the country and proved their worth in the workplace. Left unstated was the fact that prior to Executive Order 8802, neither Lockheed’s California workforce nor those of other aircraft manufacturers in most of the nation had any African Americans. The 2013 volume also made no mention of any of Lockheed’s pre-1961 desegregation efforts in Georgia.²

Lockheed’s corporate histories principally told the story of the firm’s contributions to aviation and national defense and its financial ups and downs. But Lockheed played a central role in desegregating the U.S. aircraft industry and American manufacturing in general. The company and its management personnel actively shaped and reshaped the business community’s response to the civil rights movement and its demand for expanded employment opportunities for African Americans. From the firm’s experiences with FDR’S Fair Employment Practices Committee during World War II through its decision to reopen a mothballed facility in the heart of segregated Dixie in the early 1950s to its participation in the quasi-voluntary Plans for Progress initiative in the 1960s, the company was an early desegregation leader among major U.S. corporations. Lockheed-Georgia almost certainly led firms in the Deep South in promoting a more racially diversified workforce during the 1950s and 1960s, though that leadership unquestionably had its limitations. During and after the 1960s, Lockheed personnel stood at the heart of efforts to develop public-private partnerships to address equal employment opportunity. The company actively promoted the idea that corporations had a responsibility to address social problems and that social responsibility could be combined with efficiency in business operations. During the 1970s, Lockheed’s representatives to regional and national employment organizations pulled back from support for programs they deemed counterproductive to promoting private-sector growth and autonomy and played a role in reshaping the business community’s response to state intervention in the economy.

Lockheed Martin is the current corporate identity of a pair of pioneer firms in American aviation. Allan and Malcolm Loughead, innovative mechanics with a passion for the newfound technology of flight, founded the Alco Hydro-Aeroplane Company in 1912, at about the same time that Glenn L. Martin founded his eponymous company. The Loughead brothers’ firm went through several incarnations, with the brothers eventually settling on Lockheed—a phonetic spelling of the family name—for the firm in 1926. Lockheed Aircraft remained the company’s moniker until 1995, when it merged with Martin to form Lockheed Martin.

The Loughead brothers had some success during the World War I years but struggled financially until their firm developed the Vega in 1927, just six months after Charles Lindbergh’s historic transatlantic flight demonstrated the viability of long-distance air travel. The Lockheed Vega, a six-passenger plane designed without the familiar struts that helped support wings on early aircraft, hit the market at the same time as the Lindbergh-induced flight boom. Lindbergh himself flew the Vega in a series of flights crafted to test potential commercial airline routes, and sales took off. The Vega quickly became a cultural icon. In 1932, when Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, she piloted a bright red Vega 5B; the previous year, Wiley Post had flown his modified Vega 5c around the world. Both planes are familiar sights today at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.³

The emerging popularity of aviation generally and the success of the Vega specifically made Lockheed, with a growing cash income and little accumulated debt, a takeover target. In 1929, a group of Detroit automobile industry executives and investors approached Allan Loughead’s investors with a deal they could not refuse, purchasing the firm out from under its founder. Lockheed’s assets and brands were merged into the Detroit Aircraft Corporation, something like a General Motors of the air. The timing was, however, not auspicious. The October 1929 stock market crash and the ensuing Great Depression sank Detroit Aircraft, and Lockheed’s assets went on the bankruptcy auction block in early 1932.⁴

Robert Gross led the group of investors who purchased Lockheed’s assets and went on to serve as the CEO of a reorganized Lockheed Aircraft from 1934 to 1956, presiding over the company’s expansion into Georgia. Gross could not fly a plane and had no technical background in aviation. He came to the emerging industry from the investment side. Gross graduated from Harvard in 1919 and began his business career as a runner for an investment banking firm. He developed an interest in the profit potential of aircraft manufacturing and specialized in aviation-related investments. Gross had an eye for talent and skill, which led him to hire engineers Hal Hibbard and Kelly Johnson, who helped develop the Lockheed Electra, an all-metal, twin-engine transport plane, in 1934.⁵ For the remainder of the twentieth century, transport aircraft provided Lockheed with its bread and butter.

The new plane helped secure the company’s future, but high development costs left the company with a $500,000 loss in 1934. Gross negotiated a $200,000 loan from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a government-sponsored nonprofit geared toward helping keep firms afloat during the Great Depression. Though Lockheed established a larger civilian market presence than many other aircraft manufacturers in the 1930s, Gross’s company benefited early from federal subsidies.⁶

While Gross welcomed government support via the loan, he viewed other New Deal policies pursued by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the federal government with considerable anxiety. The passage of prolabor legislation such as the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) in 1935 made it easier to organize workers. The mainstream American labor movement also fractured into two branches. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) and its member unions, including the International Association of Machinists (IAM), represented the more conservative wing of the labor movement, devoted to founder Samuel Gompers’s vision of pure and simple unionism that pursued a higher material standard of living for (mostly skilled) workers. The insurgent Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), made up of unions that had broken away from the AFL as well as new industrial unions such as the United Automobile Workers, symbolized a new emphasis on organizing across craft lines to promote industrial and social democracy.

Business leaders opposed unionization of any kind, but after 1935, many came to accept the inevitability of union organization under the New Deal legal-political framework. Forced to this conclusion, some business leaders chose to negotiate with AFL unions as a way of avoiding organization by the CIO. Business leaders were joined by many civil rights organizations in their skepticism about the Wagner Act and its protections for labor unions. Trade unions had long been bastions of racial privilege in the United States. The two most important and influential organizations representing African American interests—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League— strongly opposed passage of the act. Civil rights leaders feared that the new law would empower unions strong enough to negotiate contracts that excluded black workers from employment, training, and advancement opportunities. W. E. B. Du Bois, writing in the NAACP’S influential magazine, The Crisis, declared that the AFL was not a labor movement. Rather, he argued, it is a monopoly of skilled laborers, who joined the capitalists in exploiting the masses of labor whenever and wherever they can.⁷

The entire aircraft industry faced a vigorous union organizing effort in early 1937, with Gross deftly playing the two major federations against one another. Historian Wayne Biddle observes that Gross recognized the AFL-affiliated IAM before the more radical CIO-affiliated United Automobile Workers could gain a foothold among Lockheed workers. Gross insisted that most Lockheed workers did not really want any union, but the workers recognized that they needed some sort of organization with which to combat this infectious spread of radicalism that is sweeping the country. In addition, Lockheed granted a 6 percent wage increase and time and a half for overtime, giving the firm the highest pay rates in the industry. Gross’s efforts were rewarded with relative labor peace for the remainder of 1937 while most of his California competitors faced intermittent strikes during prolonged organizing campaigns.⁸

The Atlanta-born IAM was among the most conservative of AFL unions and was particularly infamous among civil rights activists as a defender of white supremacy. Until the mid-1940s, the machinists’ union’s initiation ritual required new members to declare, I will never propose for membership in this association any other than a competent white candidate. Joseph Abel argues that IAM locals sometimes diverged from the seemingly strict requirement for racial separation. In Texas’s aircraft manufacturing industry during World War II, for example, local union leaders found that pursuing grievances of black workers along with those of whites helped solidify the union’s position against intransigent management. By the end of the war, nearly half the delegates to the IAM convention supported elimination of the all-white provision from the ritual. For all that, however, gains by black workers in Texas during the war proved transitory as demobilization cut deeply into the ranks of aircraft workers.⁹

Even as new industries such as aircraft manufacturing emerged in the 1920s and 1930s, entrenched attitudes, regional business patterns, and racially segmented labor markets limited opportunity for African American workers throughout the nation and especially in the South. The burgeoning demands of the war era began improving the prospects and bottom lines of aircraft manufacturers as early as 1936. Congress began to change some of its contracting requirements and boosted payments to manufacturers to guarantee production. More importantly, according to Jacob Vander Meulen, in 1938, warplane exports soared, providing a profitable safety valve for the industry. For example, Lockheed signed a $25 million contract to provide two hundred Hudson MK1S (a modified version of the Super Electra), to the British government in 1938. Such contracts led to rapid growth of production and the labor force. Lockheed employed only 334 people in 1934, but by the end of 1938, the company’s workforce had topped 3,000. Full U.S. rearmament and then entry into the war led to even further growth for Lockheed and the industry. The Hudson contract and, more important, the development of the P-38 for the U.S. Army Air Corps, put Lockheed into a frenzy of activity. Employment ballooned to 17,000 by the end of 1940 and peaked at 91,000 in 1943.¹⁰

As Lockheed’s labor needs mushroomed, R. Randall Irwin, the company’s first director of industrial relations, managed efforts to hire qualified workers. A Lockheed company publication referred to Irwin as a one-man industrial relations, public relations, and publicity staff. Irwin had joined Gross and corporate secretary Cyril Chappellet on Lockheed’s management team as publicity director in 1933. The following year, Irwin proposed publication of a newsletter, the Lockheed Star, which became a key component of company efforts to build a sense of community among its workers.¹¹

Irwin’s legacy at Lockheed included much more than publicity. Beginning with the company’s 1938 growth spurt, Irwin assumed responsibility for the pioneering training efforts. After signing the British government contract, the company intensified its recruitment and hiring of engineers and skilled workers. The demand associated with the international tensions of the late 1930s and the attendant military buildups in the United States, Britain, and elsewhere offered rich potential markets for Lockheed and the relatively new aircraft industry, but not enough experienced aircraft engineers and workers existed. Irwin led Lockheed’s initiatives to address the personnel problem.

Lockheed’s drive to find or train qualified personnel received a boost from the federal government. In 1937, as the world drifted toward war, Congress passed the Fitzgerald Act to encourage the revival of apprenticeships as a path to skilled employment. A 1940 congressional research report argued that the move toward mechanization and mass production in the early twentieth century had made skilled workers a smaller proportion of the workforce, and employers preferred hiring skilled workers away from competitors over investing in training programs. Trade unions had also played a role in the decline of apprenticeships, limiting access to the trade and thus propping up wages (though the author of the report labeled this the least important of the three main causes of the decline). By the mid-1930s, many industry and government officials had recognized the narrowing of the paths toward skilled work even as significant numbers of skilled laborers remained necessary not only in older industries but also in newer industries such as aircraft manufacturing that renewed and reshaped the demand for skilled workers. Machines and their tenders could not build airplanes. The Fitzgerald Act, along with amendments to the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938), allowed the secretary of labor wide discretion in waiving wage and hour regulations to promote and encourage apprenticeships. The aircraft industry was singled out for particular attention in a confidential report for President Roosevelt that called for upgrading the quality and quantity of skilled mechanics in the interest of "national