Black Monday: September 19, 1977
Near Youngstown, Ohio
On the morning of September nineteenth, nineteen seventy-seven, workers arriving at the Campbell Works of Youngstown Sheet and Tube found the gates locked and a notice posted. The mill was closing. Five thousand people lost their jobs that morning without warning.
The mill's history traced directly back to the city's industrial founding. Youngstown Sheet and Tube had been one of the valley's signature companies for generations. But in nineteen sixty-nine, a New Orleans-based shipping conglomerate named Lykes Corporation bought Youngstown Sheet and Tube in a leveraged acquisition. It had no particular expertise in steel. And it had no particular interest in reinvesting in aging open-hearth furnaces at a moment when foreign competitors were installing modern technology.
When the bill came due, Lykes closed the Campbell Works. The date has been called Black Monday ever since.
What came after was a cascade. Over the next five years, every major steel mill in the Mahoning Valley shut down. The arithmetic was devastating. About forty thousand manufacturing jobs disappeared from the local economy. With those jobs went four hundred satellite businesses. Personal income in the valley dropped by four hundred fourteen million dollars. School tax revenues collapsed by as much as seventy-five percent in some districts.
The closures announced a new American era. Youngstown was among the first major cities to experience what the country would come to call deindustrialization: the systematic withdrawal of manufacturing from communities that had built their entire existence around it. The phrase Rust Belt only came into wide use in the years that followed. Youngstown helped define what it meant.
For the people who lived it, the date is not an abstraction. It is the day the future that had seemed guaranteed stopped being true.
