In the Shipyards of San Francisco

In the spring of 1943, the United States was at work.

It had been sixteen months since Japan’s attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor drew the country into conflicts in Europe and Asia, but the troops now stationed in those far-away places were only part of the massive war effort. As often as possible, the US Office of War Information (OWI)—a controversial American propaganda agency charged with increasing domestic support for the distant fight—filled the pages of the country’s newspapers with reminders that the work of quartermasters, firefighters, and even telephone operators on the home front provided essential support for those on the front lines.

“Skilled women help build SS George Washington Carver” reads one such dispatch from the Office of War Information in May 1943. The photos, which are available today in archives shared via JSTOR by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York Public Library), show an all-women team of burners, welders, and scalers at work on the cargo ship in the Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond, California. To modern eyes, raised on the idea of Rosie the Riveter, it’s not a surprise to see images of 1940s-era women in hard hats and safety goggles amid the massive steel structure. Less familiar—to the public in 1943 and in history books today—is the sight of Black women doing the hard and necessary work of the war.

When these particular photos were taken, nearly 1,000 Black women, alongside more than 5,000 Black men, were employed in Kaiser’s shipyards on San Francisco Bay, a direct result of government directives which erased some racial and gender employment barriers out of pure practicality. The shipyards needed laborers, and the promise of good jobs drew tens of thousands—many of them Black workers from the South and East—to places like Richmond. (By the end of the war, Richmond, once a city of 24,000, would surpass 100,000 people.) The OWI wanted Black communities across the country to see the war as an opportunity. To that end, the agency commissioned photos of Black workers, often taken by Black photographers, for newspapers in places like Detroit, Kansas City, and St. Louis.

In Richmond, the man behind the camera was Emmanuel F. Joseph. Joseph, better known as E. F., was born on the island of St. Lucia in the eastern Caribbean and moved to the Bay Area in 1924, where he became the first professional Black photographer in the region.

“From the 1920s through the 1950s, it would have been hard to find a [B]lack home in the Bay Area that did not display at least one of his photographs,” wrote the late artist and gallerist Joe Louis Moore. Joseph’s photographs were notable for portraying “the African American image as a resident and participant rather than an outsider looking in,” Moore wrote.

This visual perspective was ideal for the OWI. The portraits Joseph took for the agency captured the dignity of the women at work on SS George Washington Carver, exactly what the propaganda agency wanted to show. There was no room in its mission for the larger story of the experience of the Black laborers or for the nuanced images of life in Black communities that make up most of Joseph’s catalogue. Beyond the edges of these photographs, the shipyard workers encountered sexism, racism and classism, writes Deborah Hirshfield in the International History Review.  And then the government “washed their hands of the new workers at the end of it.”

The “skilled women” presented by the OWI were not nameless. Typewritten captions pasted onto prints retained by the agency identify many of them: There’s Anna Bland, a burner; welders Alivia Scott, Hattie Carpenter, and Flossie Burns; and Eastine Cowner, a waitress-turned-scaler. Sadly, though, these women didn’t leave much of a historical trail; they fade in official records through typos and marriage name changes, obscuring who they were before they became the face of Black women in the war and hiding what they would do in peacetime when employment opportunities for women dwindled.

But in another collection of photos taken as SS George Washington Carver was rushed to completion, E. F. Johnson documented the work of some Black shipfitters, among them Earva and Tyrus Smith. The brothers, then in their mid-twenties, had moved from their home in central Louisiana to work in the shipyards. For Earva, that decision seems to have provided the very opportunity that the OWI’s glossy propaganda images promised. Earva had only completed fifth grade before he was forced to leave school to help support his family in the Depression. After his time in the Richmond shipyards, he moved to Fresno, where he parlayed his experience into a construction career, building houses as the city boomed and, alongside his wife, Olevia, whom he met in Richmond, raised fifteen children.

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