African American Women and the Railroads

Wartime production during the First World War required an enormous labor force. African American women made significance gains in employment during this time. Along with the garment industry and munitions factories, African American women found the best wages when working for the railroads.[5]

In an interview with Helen Ross, an African American freight house worker for the Santa Fe railroad in 1918, Ross describes why she chose to work with the railroads:

“All the colored women like this work and want to keep it. We are making more money at this than any work we can get, and we do not have to work as hard as at housework which requires us to be on duty from six o’clock in the morning until nine or ten at night, with might little time off and at very poor wages....What the colored women need is an opportunity to make money. As it is, they have to take what employment they can get, live in old tumbled down houses or resort to street walking, and I think a woman ought to think more of her blood than to do that. What occupation is open to us where we can make really good wages? We are not employed as clerks, we cannot all be school teachers, and so we cannot see any use in working our parents to death to get educated. Of course we should like easier work than this if it were opened to us, but this pays well and is no harder than other work open to us. With three dollars a day, we can buy bonds..., we can dress decently, and not be tempted to find our living on the streets..."[6]

Women were systematically replaced by returning soldiers as the war ended, however. The Great Depression of 1929 further frustrated attempts to join the workforce as massive layoffs and company shutdowns made employment more competitive. Railroad employment was down 44 percent by 1933.[7]

The Second World War saw an even greater strain on the industrial workforce—in just one year, 7,200 men left Southern Pacific to join the military effort. Once again, women were called upon to lend their labor to the war effort. By 1943, the number of women in the railroad industry climbed beyond 100,000, accounting for roughly 7.5 percent of all railroad employees.[8] Approximately one third of them were African American women.[9] However, in the years between the First and Second World Wars, African Americans did not see any major advancements in racial equality.

Executive Order 8802 had prohibited discrimination based on race in the national defense industry, but discrimination still occurred. African American women still found themselves in the same unskilled and unseen positions, working as car cleaners, sweepers, and elevator operators. They had little to no opportunity to work in clerical or mechanical positions.

The largest employer of African Americans at the time was the Pennsylvania Railroad, which employed approximately 17,951 African Americans in 1943. One in every four African Americans working at the Pennsylvania Railroad was a woman, the majority of whom worked as coach cleaners and shop laborers.[10] A few African American women worked in more unique positions, such as freight truckers and pipefitters.

While white women were trained to work in skilled positions, African American women were given manual position. African American women were more often seen along the tracks, working as section “men.” In Detroit, an African American women was hired as a helper to a New York Central passenger-car generator mechanic—by far an exception to the norm.[11] Some African American women worked in skilled trade labor by rivet catching in the railroad car repairs shops. Rebecca Smith described her dangerous experience as a rivet catcher in the Second World War explaining that she had to “catch those red-hot rivets in a cup…Your nerves had to be awful good.” [12]