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13. Huck’s Men: The Black Workers at Hercules
- University Press of Mississippi
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Z 130 Z chapter 13 huCk’s Men The Black Workers at Hercules The sparkplug from Palmer’s Crossing: T. f. williams The black community of Palmer’s Crossing is just down the road from the heart of Hattiesburg. Go over the railroad tracks from the old airport and past the driveZin movie. Turn right just a block beyond the tracks onto Satchel Avenue, and you found at #509 the modest cottage of one of its most prominent residents, T. F. Williams. T. F. and his patient wife, Jessie, raised their family there in a closeZknit community of only twelve hundred. Born in 1918, T. F. was just three years old when his parents moved out from Hattiesburg. Palmers had just a hundred families then. T. F. and JesZ sie, sister of Peay plaintiff R. C. Jones, were married young and had just returned from celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary with their five children in Los Angeles, when I first came back to visit them in July 1989. In reminiscing with me, T. F. would often shout “Jessie,” and she would join us and straighten him out on a stray detail. T. F.’s father, Charlie Williams, was the lead man in a sawmill, a job usuZ ally reserved for whites. White and black jobs were separate and distinct when T. F. was coming along, just as he would initially encounter them at Hercules. Mr. Williams worked for the Dreyfus family that owned the Dixie Pine Products Company. T. F. was, in fact, named after old T. F. Dreyfus, and T. F. played and swam with some of the younger members of the DreyZ fus family as a boy. After going to work at the Hercules Powder Company in 1942, T. F. stayed there, apart from military service, close to thirtyZeight years, until his retirement in 1980. He saw Hercules become aware of the country’s changing racial mores: huck’s Men: The Black workers at hercules Z 131 Z The Hercules black employees had to go in the back to buy groceries then. I would go to the Hughes commissary instead. Huck Dunagin was a smart white guy who knew we had the votes to get him elected Chief Steward in the union. Hercules went and integrated themselves. They picked several of us black fellows and put us as rolling operators, go all over the plant to work, operate in each building. They showed the whites that we could get along. Blacks had always been discriminated against, but they did have seniorZ ity. Some had been there thirty or forty years. Whites had been given all the good jobs, but T. F. first worked at the boiler room, then operated an overhead electric crane. Finally, he became foreman of the mail room. T. F. himself had gone to work after spending much of the eleventh grade in a vocational shop where he shoed horses with horseshoes and fixed broken wagon wheels, among other things. His first job was at his father’s Dixie Pine plant, where he had run errands even before school was out. It was after the Dixie Pine plant blew up and burned in 1941 that T. F. went to work at Hercules at fortyZthree cents an hour. On August 23, 1944, he enlisted in the navy. By then, he was up to fiftyZfour cents an hour. I wanted to go to the aircraft plant up in Michigan, and they were down here recruiting us. They weren’t paying nothing at Hercules. I was ready to go. But I had to get a deferment, and they had to give me a leave, see, because it was a government plant. Well, the foreman tried to show me what I would lose if I were to go up there, already had a home and everything here. And he really was nice, and there was a lot in it. But I wanted to go. So when the foreman couldn’t talk me into staying, he told them in the office. And old man Cook, the super, jumped up and told me, work or fight. See, all they had to do was call the Board and turn you in if you left the plant without a deferment. He said, you work or fight, and I said, hell, I’ll fight; I ain’t no slave. I went down and volunteered for the navy. My wife like to have a fit. That happened on a Friday, and I got the first...