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  • Working for Equality: The Narrative of Harry Hudson ed. by Randall L. Patton
  • W. Marvin Dulaney
Working for Equality: The Narrative of Harry Hudson. Edited by Randall L. Patton. ( Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 2015. Pp. xx, 217. $44.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4800-1.)

Harry L. Hudson was one of the first African Americans employed at the Lockheed-Georgia aircraft plant in Marietta, Georgia, in 1952. His memoir of his thirty-six years with Lockheed traces his employment in the aircraft industry and his eventual promotion to become one of the buyers for the company. Hudson tells a very interesting story, and his firsthand account of the problems and issues that he faced as one of the company's first African American employees, as well as one of its first African American supervisors and buyers, provides a personal and historical perspective on how African Americans integrated the nation's industrial labor force.

Hudson's memoir takes us back to a time when American companies discriminated against African American workers without apology. Both white management and white labor believed that African American workers were capable of performing only unskilled and menial jobs, lacking the aptitude for technical jobs such as the construction of airplanes. Indeed, when Lockheed negotiated building an aircraft plant in Georgia, the NAACP and the Atlanta Urban League lobbied the company's management to obtain jobs for African Americans above semiskilled and general labor. Their efforts resulted in an experiment of hiring and training an all-black crew at Lockheed. The crew of which Hudson was a part was trained separately and assigned to a segregated area in the plant to appease the racism of white workers.

Hudson and the other members of his crew succeeded in learning to build airplanes just like white workers and proved that with training African American workers could achieve or exceed the same level of success and quality of production in the industry as white workers. Although they faced continuous acts of racism and discrimination from both white supervisors and workers, they endured, and their success opened the doors at Lockheed to more African American workers. Nevertheless, even after five years, Lockheed-Georgia employed only 1,350 African Americans, concentrated in two departments, in a labor force of 17,350. Hudson also became one of Lockheed's first African American floor supervisors and matériel buyers. Despite his success through hard work, training, and pushing back against supervisors who would block his progress, however, he maintained that he never received the promotions that he deserved because of the ever-present racism that influenced his supervisors' evaluations.

Despite the importance of Hudson's memoir, it has some flaws. Too much of it reflects his attention to details, his love of his work in building airplanes, and his personality. If a reader is not familiar with the various aircraft built by Lockheed for the United States Air Force, Hudson's constant reference to the components and the construction of these planes will be overwhelming. This is [End Page 741] not a good book for a layman or a nonmilitary historian. Hudson uses an extraordinary amount of jargon, metaphors, and quaint sayings from his upbringing and experiences that will prove difficult for the average reader.

Overall, Hudson has provided historians interested in the history of labor relations a valuable resource. His firsthand account about the integration of the Lockheed-Georgia plant is filled with great stories of his encounters with management, other workers, unions, the U.S. military, and the various suppliers for the aircraft industry. The memoir will also appeal to military historians who have an interest in Lockheed's role in the military-industrial complex that developed after World War II. But the average reader will find the book very tedious to read because of the way Hudson has chosen to present his role in the aircraft industry.

W. Marvin Dulaney
University of Texas at Arlington
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