Lockheed, Atlanta, and the Struggle for Racial Integration by Randall L. Patton (review)

After reading Randall L. Patton's account of Lockheed's thirty-year effort to desegregate its aircraft production facility in Marietta, Georgia, Lockheed executives must have thought, "No good deed goes unpunished." According to Patton, Lockheed was in the vanguard of Deep South firms in "promoting a more racially diversified workforce" during the 1950s (16). In the 1960s, it led "efforts to develop public-private partnerships to address equal employment opportunity" (16). And in the 1970s, Lockheed executives provided leadership to job-training programs for longtime unemployed Black workers. Yet it continually found itself in the crosshairs of the NAACP, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), its own Black workers, and Atlanta's Black officials, charged with employment discrimination. Patton provides enough evidence to argue that perhaps both Lockheed's executives and their critics have a point.

By recounting Lockheed's efforts to desegregate its workforce, Patton provides a new vantage point on the issue. Unlike most books on the subject, his study looks over the shoulder of business instead of the Black worker or the larger African American community. He draws on company records, legal proceedings, interviews, a diary left by one of the first Black hires at the plant, and papers left by the plant's personnel director to provide a detailed, extensive corporate history of engagement with equal employment opportunity. Patton finds that Lockheed's efforts in this regard were sincere, not mere window dressing.

Any assessment of Lockheed's racial record has to take into account "the southern tradition": the principles of segregation that white workers, line supervisors, the surrounding community, the local union, and local government officials expected it to uphold. And it has to take into account shifting business conditions, fluctuating employment levels, and changing markets that can divert executives from meeting their equal employment targets. It can be argued that given these constraints, Lockheed did as well as could be expected and certainly better than if its heart hadn't been in the right place.

As evidence, Patton cites promises made to the Urban League as early as the 1950s to hire and train Black workers. In the 1960s, Lockheed gradually made efforts to desegregate the shop floor, use mixed-race crews, and promote Black workers to supervisory positions. When President Kennedy's Executive Order requiring government contractors to take affirmative action toward equal employment raised the bar, Lockheed executives made a good faith effort to get over it. It provided in-house training for Black workers to upgrade because the Cobb County Board of Education refused to integrate its vocational education courses, it desegregated company-sponsored recreational activities, and within the business community it advocated affirmative action plans to increase minority hiring, promotion, and retention. Later, as the problem of minority employment was redefined as the problem of training the longtime unemployed, Lockheed Marietta executives were deeply involved in government–private sector partnerships to provide that training in Atlanta.

Yet for all Lockheed's good faith efforts, the results, Patton acknowledges, were meager. From 1955 to 1972, from pre– to peak affirmative action, the percentage of African American employees at Lockheed Marietta barely moved. The Lockheed Marietta workforce was 6.7 percent Black in 1955—before President Kennedy's 1961 Executive Order, before the 1964 Civil Rights Act, before the creation of the EEOC in 1968—and was just one-tenth of a percentage point higher two decades later after all these equal employment landmarks. The results are only a little more encouraging when one shifts the test to the percentage of Black workers employed in supervisory positions. This measure increased from .05 percent in 1955 to just 3 percent by 1972. These results bear an embarrassing resemblance to the meager progress of school integration in Atlanta from 1955 to 1972, which also saw local school board officials protest their good faith efforts amid mitigating circumstances. Lockheed executives were more sincere than those school officials, but the comparison is still unflattering...