The 1943 Shipyard Riot

By nineteen forty-three, Mobile had become a war production city almost overnight. Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Company, which had fewer than a thousand workers before the war, was employing nearly thirty thousand. Liberty ships and destroyers were being built around the clock on Pinto Island. The shipyards across Mobile employed fifty thousand workers in total, and about seven thousand of them were Black men and women.

In the spring of nineteen forty-three, under pressure from a federal executive order requiring nondiscriminatory hiring in defense industries, the Alabama Dry Dock company reluctantly agreed to promote twelve Black workers to the position of welder, a job that had been reserved exclusively for white workers. They began reporting to work in May.

On the morning of May twenty-fifth, as additional Black welders reported for the day shift, violence erupted on the yard. An estimated four thousand white workers attacked Black employees. Others threw bricks at Black housing in the city. Governor Chauncey Sparks ordered the Alabama State Guard in and the riot was suppressed by midday.

The resolution negotiated in the aftermath was a compromise none of the parties fully wanted. Four separate shipways were designated where Black workers could hold every position except foreman. It was segregation with a concession built in: Black workers could now hold skilled jobs, within their assigned space.

The federal government's direct intervention, and the NAACP's sustained pressure over years, made that opening possible, however constrained. It is worth noting that the riot happened in a city building ships for a war being fought, in part, against regimes organized around racial hierarchy. That contradiction was visible to many of the people in that yard. No public account at the time said so plainly, but the documentary record makes it plain enough.