The party that became a riot couldn’t have seemed more innocent at the start. A street dance, organized by a Rochester community group called the Northeast Mothers Improvement Association, had been properly permitted. Money collected from the sale of barbecue sandwiches, hot dogs, and punch would go toward buying equipment for a neighborhood playground. Chaperones were present. Police were on hand, too, to help with the crowd and traffic control—but clearly they expected a tame affair; only two cops had been assigned to the Friday night event. By 8:30 p.m., when the dance began, about 200 people from the black part of town had assembled on Nassau Street between Joseph Avenue and Joiner. As night fell on July 24, 1964, the temperature was just shy of eighty degrees, the air was thick with humidity, and a light drizzle came down. But who could pass up the music? Sam Cooke had recently scored a hit with “Good Times” and the Drifters with “Under the Boardwalk.” The Dixie Cups crooned “Chapel of Love,” Stevie Wonder picked up the beat with “Hey Harmonica Man,” and the Temptations got into the groove with “I’ll Be in Trouble.” The real trouble, though, started about eleven o’clock.
That’s when one of the partygoers told a chaperone, “Some boy over there is causing a fuss.” The chaperone tried in vain to quiet down the young man, Randy Manigault, and then asked the police to step in. They did. Manigault didn’t succumb easily, however. “We walked up to this guy,” said Anthony Cerretto, one of the police officers, “and we didn’t even get a chance to ask him to leave. He started yelling and resisting and swinging. The next thing, we were all on the ground.” The cops finally handcuffed Manigault. But then something snapped. “This crowd that was dancing and enjoying itself turned on us,” Cerretto said. “They yelled for us to take off the cuffs and let the guy go.” The police radioed for backup, and with the help of a K-9 unit, they eventually hustled Manigault into a paddy wagon, arresting him for public intoxication. That didn’t bring much calm, however. If anything, the use of dogs—reminiscent of the way Birmingham public-safety commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor tried to restrain black protestors in Alabama the year before—only ratcheted up the tension. Rochester’s Seventh Ward was poised to explode.
As midnight approached, word raced through the throng, which now numbered about 500: purportedly, a police dog had bitten a little girl, and a cop had slapped a pregnant woman. The rumors were never substantiated, but it didn’t matter. Rocks, bottles, and bricks rained down. A mob overturned the police chief’s car and set it ablaze. Gangs of white men, some of them armed, rushed into the area, spoiling for a fight. By the early morning hours of July 25, the authorities tried to break up the crowd with tear gas grenades and high-pressure fire hoses. More than fifty people were hauled off to jail. The city manager invoked a state of emergency, and more than 1,500 National Guardsmen were called in to restore order. Yet the violence became more severe and spread before it finally subsided on the evening of Sunday, July 26. In the end, five people were killed: an elderly white man who was hit over the head with a lead pipe and then struck by a car and four others who perished when a surveillance helicopter crashed into a black home. Some 350 were injured, and 250 stores were looted or damaged. In all, 893 people were arrested—720 of them black.
America—which in the coming months, and into the next few years, would witness similar episodes in Philadelphia; the Watts section of Los Angeles; Detroit; Newark, New Jersey; Washington, DC; and elsewhere—had just experienced one of its first race riots of the 1960s. Rochester itself was in shock. “We’re so good to our Negroes,” said one white citizen. Mayor Frank Lamb said it was “unbelievable that such a thing could happen” in the city. But these views were not only self-serving; they were delusional.
Home to social reformer Frederick Douglass in the mid-1800s, Rochester became a magnet for African Americans in the twentieth century, one of many northern industrial cities that blacks flocked to during their six-decade-long Great Migration from the rural South. From 1950 to 1960, Rochester’s total population had declined slightly, from about 332,000 to 319,000. But its black population had risen appreciably over the same period, tripling to nearly 24,000. Those who’d come to Smugtown were hungry for a better life. What they encountered upon their arrival, however, was mainly disappointment. Mirroring trends found across the country, many blacks in Rochester were forced to live in substandard housing as whites fled the urban core. The city’s power structure remained almost exclusively white. And many blacks struggled to find decent jobs. Even though the unemployment rate in Rochester had fallen to about 2 percent in the summer of 1964, 14 percent of blacks were counted as without work. “The big Kodak dollar and the lawn sprinklers of the suburbs have seemed both tantalizingly near and hopelessly far to the inner-city man,” said an African American barber.
It’s not that no advances had been made over the years. Between 1940 and the mid-1950s, per capita income among blacks in the United States had tripled. By 1960, more than 16 percent of African Americans nationally held white-collar jobs, up from less than 10 percent in 1950. Hundreds of corporations signed on as members of Plans for Progress, the private-sector outgrowth of President Kennedy’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, and by 1963 these enterprises were hiring nearly ten times the number of blacks that they had at the start of the decade.
But such gains were trivial in the scheme of things. Overall, the Golden Age had left—and was continuing to leave—most black men and women far behind. “The affluence of America, the tremendous economic strides which the society has made in the last fifteen or twenty years have outstripped the strides which Negroes have made,” Kenneth B. Clark, the distinguished educator and social psychologist, asserted. By some measures, blacks’ financial position had actually worsened since the late fifties. “Negroes have not recovered from the 1958 recession,” said a 1964 study on equal opportunity. “First fired and last rehired is still, therefore, an unhappy but apt description of the Negro worker’s situation.” Only about 2 percent of black men in 1960 were managers—the most secure jobs—compared with nearly 12 percent of whites. Through the midsixties, newspapers ran ads that left no doubt about who stood where in the main of the American economy: “White Male Wanted.” If you were a person of color trying to escape such transparent racism, breaking out on your own wasn’t much of an option, either. Whites owned more than 97 percent of small businesses in the United States in the 1960s.
Often, there was a disconnect between a company’s supposed aims and its day-to-day practices. General Motors, for example, had an unambiguous antidiscrimination policy on the books by the 1960s. But African Americans were routinely consigned to the worst jobs—working in the foundries and as janitors—just as they had been since at least the 1940s, when large numbers of blacks began to enter the auto industry. “The fact that General Motors has expressed its antidiscrimination policy in writing,” the Michigan Civil Rights Commission found, “seems to have had little bearing… on the extent to which Negroes have been employed or promoted.” In the South, where GM was expanding (just like General Electric), the deep roots of racism exercised an especially strong influence on corporate behavior. “We agreed to abide by local custom and not hire Negroes for production work,” a GM factory manager in Atlanta acknowledged in the late fifties. “This is no time for social reforming… and we’re not about to try it.” John DeLorean said that when he was a top GM executive in the 1960s, “the corporation was still complaining that there were no hireable blacks,” and so he pressed the company to recruit African Americans to study at the General Motors Institute. In the forty-year history of the training academy, not one black had ever been admitted. “GM management went right through the roof,” DeLorean recounted. “I was told I was going to destroy the school’s standards.”
Most of the discrimination at GM, while pernicious, was hidden: individual managers turned blacks away at the plant gate. Some, though, was overt and particularly vile. The few blacks who were eventually enrolled at the General Motors Institute, for instance, were confronted by a student group—sponsored by a faculty member—calling itself the Stoner’s Society for the Preservation of White Supremacy. It handed out what it called a “nigger application for employment,” which asked people to name their “motha” and “fatha” if known, the number of children they had on welfare, and other such repugnant questions.
In May 1964, a couple of months before the riot in Rochester, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People organized protests against GM in forty-two cities, culminating in a mass rally outside GM’s Detroit headquarters. “Jim Crow must go! GM Crow must go!” demonstrators shouted. Said Herbert Hill, the NAACP’s labor secretary: “We will show GM that while it is a powerful corporation, it is not more powerful than the people. We will show them that it is not a sovereign unto itself.” As the company came under fire, executives fell back on their usual line, saying that they had all the right rules in place. After the NAACP contested hiring patterns at a Cadillac dealership in San Francisco, for example, GM issued a statement citing the company’s “nondiscriminatory employment policy.” But the numbers were the numbers: of the 258 people working at the dealer in 1964, only 9 were black—and all of them cleaned the building or waxed or lubricated the cars. None was a mechanic, salesman, or manager.
The United Auto Workers suffered from its own disparity between rhetoric and reality when it came to race. UAW president Walter Reuther had long championed tolerance and equality, and in August 1963 he stood at the Lincoln Memorial and addressed the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Although Reuther’s eloquence that day was easily overshadowed by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, his central message—framed in the context of Cold War politics—was quite compelling. “We can make our own freedom secure only as we make freedom universal so that all may share its blessings,” Reuther said. “We cannot successfully preach democracy in the world unless we first practice democracy at home. American democracy will lack the moral credentials and be both unequal to and unworthy of leading the forces of freedom against the forces of tyranny unless we take bold, affirmative, adequate steps to bridge the moral gap between America’s noble promises and its ugly practices in the field of civil rights.”
The same might well have been said of the UAW itself. The union had set up a fair employment practices department in 1944, but it had been slow to appoint blacks to senior positions, and decades later it still didn’t have an effective way to deter prejudice at the local level. “Union representatives show no interest in civil rights violations in the plant,” nine black workers at a GM factory in Flint, Michigan, told state investigators. They “are either reluctant to write grievances” or they “compromise with management in cases of racial discrimination.” In Detroit, UAW officials systematically kept blacks from entering apprenticeship programs where they might learn to compete for the best factory jobs, such as tool-and-die making. Such attitudes spoke not only to the pervasiveness of racism in America but to a growing fear by white workers that African Americans were a threat to their economic security. “The whites who dominated the auto union’s Skilled Trades Department used delay, obfuscation, and harassment of black applicants to defy UAW leaders’ frequent—but punchless—calls for reform,” the labor historian Robert Zieger has written.
At General Motors, the combination of intolerance from huge segments of the corporation and the union made it all but impossible for black workers to get ahead: out of more than 11,000 skilled positions at GM in the early sixties, African Americans held fewer than 100 of them. James Roche, who became GM’s chairman and chief executive in 1967, was personally invested in bringing more blacks into both blue- and white-collar positions. He also recruited the Rev. Leon Sullivan onto the GM board, making him one of the first African American directors at a major corporation. Nonetheless, when federal regulators cracked down on GM (along with the UAW) in 1973 for perpetrating job discrimination “on a national scale,” the automaker still faced 1,800 individual complaints.
Circumstances at General Electric—which would find itself charged in the same proceedings, along with the International Union of Electrical Workers—were similar in many respects to those at GM. The liberal-minded Gerard Swope had set forth an antidiscrimination policy at GE as early as 1935, and “Electric Charlie” Wilson had chaired President Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights in the late 1940s. In 1961, under Ralph Cordiner, GE became one of the first companies to pledge its support for the Kennedy administration’s Plans for Progress. And in 1964, President Johnson named Cordiner’s successor as CEO, Fred Borch, to his new national civil-rights committee. GE pointed proudly to these achievements and saluted diversity in those parts of the company where it existed, like at the jet-engine factory in Evendale, Ohio. There, according to GE, “Negro supervisors hold positions of responsibility in many areas of the plant, ranging as high as section manager.” Said one GE executive: “We have not been dragged grudgingly into trying to do what is right.”
In one publication, At Work in Industry Today, GE told the stories of fifty different African American employees: technician Eugenia Edmerson, personnel development specialist Judge Allen, mechanical engineer Ernest Bouey, secretary Georgia Davis, and scores more. “We are telling you about their jobs and their backgrounds to show you the kinds of jobs that capable Negro men and women can hold in General Electric and in industry,” the company said. “We are talking about today. As these words are written, each of these men and women is at work—designing, typing, drafting, repairing, managing, planning, selling, working standard machinery, or operating some of the most complex equipment the world has ever known.” GE distributed some 60,000 copies of the booklet to high-school guidance counselors and at career centers. Yet the unavoidable truth was that the men and women the company profiled were the great exception: in the early sixties, less than 1 percent of salaried employees, and less than 2.5 percent of GE’s overall workforce, were people of color.
At Coca-Cola, with its southern heritage, the topic of race was never far from the surface. At a birthday party for Harrison Jones in 1937, a Coke executive arranged to have a special tune sung for him by a chorus of white and black singers at Atlanta’s Brookhaven Country Club. “Continue this number with the singers until you see the guests approach their chairs,” the instructions to the orchestra leader read. “Then stop this number and go into the Coca-Cola theme song. The colored singers, of course, will not join in on this number.” Some lines couldn’t be crossed.
Yet it isn’t easy to gauge exactly where Robert Woodruff, The Boss, fell on the issue of racial equality. After a brutal murder and hanging at his Ichauway Plantation in the early thirties, Woodruff took a firm stand against lynching—an unusual position considering the time and place—earning him the approbation of the black workers on his farm. In the 1940s, Woodruff began donating money to support educational opportunities for blacks, and he eventually helped to raise tens of millions of dollars for the United Negro College Fund. In 1950, Woodruff was named to the board of the Tuskegee Institute, and in 1952 he brought a Who’s Who of American industry to the South for a tour of black colleges. Among the visitors were Winthrop Aldrich, the chairman of Chase National Bank; John D. Rockefeller III; Robert Wilson, the chairman of Standard Oil; Pittsburgh banker Richard K. Mellon; and Harvey Firestone Jr., the chairman of Firestone Tire & Rubber. Benjamin Mays, the president of Morehouse College, called the visit “the most significant event in Negro education and interracial good will since the War Between the States.”
Yet as late as 1960, Woodruff let slip his own bigotry, telling a colleague that he favored “appropriate civil-rights laws” that would protect “the right of a chimpanzee to vote.” He also didn’t shy away from backing for governor, and later for the US Senate, Herman Talmadge—known as “Klan-loving Hummon,” who ran on a platform that “God advocates segregation.” As Woodruff toasted the candidate at one campaign dinner, Talmadge political operative Roy Harris told reporters: “The niggers are a little disgusted. They thought they were going to get equality, and now they have found out they are not.”
As for business, Coke had spent years all but ignoring the black community, a choice that allowed Pepsi to take a big lead in catering to African American consumers. Woodruff ultimately reversed course, recognizing that he was losing ground to his rival as well as the immense profits to be made from an underserved market. In 1951, the company began to advertise in black weekly newspapers by featuring star athletes—Jackie Robinson, Jesse Owens, the Harlem Globetrotters, and others—along with the slogan, “There’s nothing like a Coke.” Recruiting and promoting black workers, though, was a whole other matter. Corporate headquarters did not hire many African Americans while Woodruff was alive, and hardly any of those who were brought into the company climbed beyond entry-level jobs.
Through much of Coca-Cola’s far-flung bottler network, the racism was just as bad or even worse, inciting a series of boycotts by African American organizations during the 1950s and ’60s. While going after bottlers in New York; Omaha, Nebraska; Champaign, Illinois; Atlanta; Chicago; and elsewhere, they leveled two basic complaints: either blacks weren’t being hired at Coke bottling operations, or when they were, the jobs they landed were unfailingly “manual or menial,” in the words of a group led by Ralph Abernathy, who had helped to cofound the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King Jr. After King won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, Woodruff would pave the way for him to come to Atlanta for a dinner in his honor, all but ordering the city’s white business establishment to attend. Woodruff had begun to worry that if Atlanta were seen by the world as a racist stronghold, it would be bad for business. “Coca-Cola cannot operate from a city that is reviled,” he said, as he directed the mayor, William Hartsfield, to integrate schools and lunch counters in the early sixties. But even that wasn’t sufficient to satisfy King, who in the last speech of his life, just hours before being assassinated, would call on blacks to “go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola” and products from several other companies “because they haven’t been fair in their hiring policies.”
And then there was Eastman Kodak.
A few weeks before the riot in Rochester, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. At the ceremony in the East Room of the White House marking the new law, Martin Luther King Jr. sat next to George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO.
“We believe that all men are created equal,” Johnson said that day. “Yet many are denied equal treatment. We believe that all men have certain unalienable rights. Yet many do not enjoy those rights. We believe that all men are entitled to the blessings of liberty. Yet millions are deprived of those blessings—not because of their own failures, but because of the color of their skin. The reasons are deeply embedded in history and tradition and the nature of man. We can understand—without rancor or hatred—how this all happened. But it cannot continue. Our Constitution, the foundation of our Republic, forbids it. The principles of our freedom forbid it. Morality forbids it. And the law I will sign tonight forbids it.”
If only it were so simple. Although the Civil Rights Act prohibited discrimination in public places, provided for the integration of schools and other public facilities, and made bias in the workplace illegal (while establishing the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission), the conduct at companies such as General Motors, General Electric, and Coca-Cola highlighted how hard it was to bring about a true cultural transformation. Institutional inequity would not ebb instantaneously.
At the same time, blacks’ sense of resentment swelled, stoked in part by the passage of a measure intended, as President Johnson put it, “to close the springs of racial poison.” Kenneth Clark, the first black to earn a doctorate in psychology from Columbia University, laid it out like this: “The frustration of the Northern Negro was intensified by the alleged victory.… There were celebrations on the mall before the Lincoln Memorial. Then, when the Negro looked at his situation, he saw that he was still in housing unfit for human habitation; he was still bitten by rats. The schools to which he was required to send his children were criminally inferior. The tremendous civil-rights progress meant nothing in terms of major observable change in his predicament as a prisoner of the ghettos.” Legislative triumphs notwithstanding, Michael Harrington’s “other America” stubbornly persisted.
To Clark—whose earlier research had helped lay the groundwork for the Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark decision to desegregate schools in Brown v. Board of Education—the long-term solution to the plight of blacks lay not with government taking the lead. Despite all the entrenched racism in corporate America, he looked to the private sector as the answer, imploring executives to offer blacks ample on-the-job training, as well as push municipal officials to clean up their cities. “Business should accept this challenge,” Clark said, “not for humanitarian reasons, nor for moral or ethical reasons, as is usually stated, but for the kinds of reasons that make sense to business. In eliminating slums and ghettos, business will… bring more than one-tenth of the American population into a constructive and profitable role in the economy. In taking present tax-consumers and turning them into tax-producers and contributors to the GNP, business will vitalize and strengthen the economy. Individuals who are now excluded as producers, who are now excluded as distributors, can be made active in the economy and thus provide strength and stability and underpin the dollar.”
Over time, although many blacks would continue to suffer from employment discrimination, corporations would in fact open up their hiring and promotional practices to an unprecedented degree. “The decade following the Civil Rights Act would see a concerted effort on the part of the nation’s employers to integrate their workplaces,” the historian Jennifer Delton has written. By and large, however, these steps were not taken voluntarily, the way Clark had hoped. As Delton has pointed out, “it took the social crisis of the late 1960s—the urban riots, the militant racialism—together with the widespread use of boycotts, an activist EEOC, and court-sanctioned affirmative action” to prompt most employers to move in a positive direction, while “grassroots pressure on the part of black workers and their allies” was also crucial.
In Rochester, it was the black clergy (and their liberal white peers) who brought this grassroots pressure to bear. The ministers felt, in the wake of the rioting, that it was time to start a new dialogue between the black community and the rest of the city. At first, they tried to entice Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference to launch a campaign in Rochester. But after that bid faltered, they opted for a more provocative response, inviting in the Industrial Areas Foundation, headed by Saul Alinsky.
Born in 1909 to Russian Jewish immigrants in the slums of Chicago, Alinsky studied archeology and then criminology in college. Although he had a bookish look, he was drawn to the rough-and-tumble of the streets, and in the course of his studies persuaded Al Capone’s men to let him hang out and watch what it was really like to be a mobster—great fodder for the stories that the foul-mouthed, charming, egotistical, truth-stretching Alinsky would delight in telling for decades to come. For a while after school, Alinsky worked with the state of Illinois on juvenile-justice issues. In the late 1930s, as part of his work on a delinquency-prevention program, he allied himself with labor organizers, working for the CIO under John L. Lewis, as they tried to unionize Chicago’s meatpacking companies. Alinsky’s vision steadily grew broader, and his approach in the neighborhood around the slaughterhouses, an area known as the Back of the Yards, became the template for his life’s work.
“What I wanted to try to do was apply the organizing techniques I’d mastered with the CIO to the worst slums and ghettos, so that the most oppressed and exploited elements in the country could take control of their own communities and their own destinies,” Alinsky said. “Up till then, specific factories and industries had been organized for social change, but never entire communities. This was the field I wanted to make my own—community organization for community power and for radical goals.” Alinsky’s tactics were creative and aggressive: rent strikes against slumlords, boycotts against exploitive businesses, sit-downs against the machine politicians at city hall. “Finally,” Alinsky said, “the concessions began trickling in—reduced rents, public housing, more and better municipal services, school improvements, more equitable mortgages and bank loans, fairer food prices.”
Alinsky, who characterized his M.O. as “rubbing raw the sores of discontent,” was a polarizing figure from the start (and he’d continue to cast a shadow long after his death in 1972: the Industrial Areas Foundation trained Barack Obama in community organizing during the mid-1980s, and Hillary Clinton wrote her undergraduate thesis at Wellesley College on Alinsky’s mobilizing methods). After Alinsky’s victory in the Back of the Yards, Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson praised him, saying his objectives “most faithfully reflect our ideals of brotherhood, tolerance, charity, and the dignity of the individual.” The Chicago Tribune editorial board, however, had a far less generous opinion of Alinsky. “Rubbing raw the sores of discontent may be jolly good fun for him,” it declared, “but we are unable to regard it as a contribution to social betterment.” As for Alinsky himself, he couldn’t have cared less what anybody thought, one way or the other. “My critics are right when they call me an outside agitator,” he said. “When a community, any kind of community, is hopeless and helpless, it requires somebody from outside to come in and stir things up. That’s my job—to unsettle them, to make them start asking questions, to teach them to stop talking and start acting, because the fat cats in charge never hear with their ears, only through their rears.”
Over time, Alinsky expanded his work—with mixed results—to other areas, including Kansas City, Missouri; Detroit; Buffalo; New York City; the barrios of California; and the Woodlawn district in Chicago. By the time he visited Rochester in early 1965 to consider the invitation of the clergy there, his reputation for rabble-rousing had divided the city’s residents. Rochester could “do without hiring an overpriced Chicago ‘organizer’ who is noted for… staging class and race incidents that cause trouble and solve nothing,” a full-page ad in the Times-Union warned. Alinsky, who accepted the ministers’ assignment (and the $100,000, two-year contract that went with it), did absolutely nothing to ingratiate himself to his critics. The more they panicked in his presence, the more he tried to amp up their anxiety. The more they asked him to act with decorum, the ruder he became. “Rochester, probably more than any northern city, reeks of antiquated paternalism,” Alinsky said shortly after his arrival in early 1965. “It is like a southern plantation transported to the North. Negro conditions in Rochester are an insult to the whole idea of the American way of life. I have seen in Rochester people who are sick to death of being treated like chattel, who find themselves regarded as a necessary evil.”
By June, an Alinsky-directed organization in Rochester had jelled. FIGHT (which stood for Freedom, Integration, God, Honor, Today) had a long list of stipulations: black representation on city boards, serious efforts at urban renewal, an end to labor-union discrimination, and “direct negotiation” with Rochester’s biggest employers to place more African Americans in good jobs. FIGHT first cut a deal with Xerox, which promised to hire fifteen unemployed young blacks. The number was tiny, but Xerox vowed to do more once the pilot program was finished, and the agreement itself was enough of a milestone that by the fall of 1966, FIGHT felt ready to take on the real corporate power in town: Kodak.
Much like GM and GE, Kodak had a fair-employment policy in place by the 1960s and had laid out its own Plan for Progress, which included a commitment to “hold discussions with the employment interviewers in the various divisions to remind them” that “such things as race, creed, color, or national origin” are neither to “help nor hinder in getting a job at Kodak.” Yet for blacks trying to work and move up at the company, these assurances didn’t mesh with their own experiences. Some of this was a consequence of blacks being poorly educated, especially those who had relocated to Rochester from the rural South. In the company’s eyes, they simply weren’t qualified. “We don’t grow many peanuts in Eastman Kodak,” Monroe Dill, Kodak’s industrial relations director, said in 1963, adding that the company would start to recruit more from all-black colleges so as to not keep “discriminating by omission.” But there was also plenty of discrimination by commission, as individual Kodak managers used their discretion to hire whomever they liked and cast off whomever they didn’t. “They would say it blatant, like, ‘We don’t have any colored jobs,’” recalled Clarence Ingram, who served as general manager of the Rochester Business Opportunities Corporation, an entity formed after the ’64 riots to support minority businesses. “They would tell you that.” Apparently, they told a lot of blacks that. In 1964, only about 600 African Americans worked for Kodak in Rochester, less than 2 percent of the 33,000 employees based there.
Determined to remedy this was FIGHT, which was led by Franklin Delano Roosevelt Florence, the thirty-one-year-old pastor of the Reynolds Street Church of Christ, a stocky, hard-charging, charismatic man, who called Malcolm X a friend. On September 2, 1966, a delegation of sixteen from FIGHT walked into Kodak’s executive suite. Florence, sporting a Black Power button in his lapel, said he wanted to see “the top man.” Before he knew it, the minister and his retinue were sitting in front of three top men: Kodak chairman Albert Chapman, president William Vaughn, and executive vice president Louis Eilers. Florence told them about the harshness of life in Rochester’s black ghetto and said he wanted Kodak to start a training program for people who normally wouldn’t be recruited into the company. Florence braced himself, expecting Kodak to resist. But Vaughn listened carefully and then asked Florence to submit a more specific proposal. Two weeks later, he did. Calling FIGHT “the only mass based organization of poor people and near poor people in the Rochester area,” Florence requested that Kodak train 500 to 600 men and women over eighteen months. FIGHT also wanted direct involvement in the process; the group would “recruit and counsel trainees and offer advice, consultation, and assistance.”
To Kodak, the proposal was a complete dud. For one thing, the company was loath to commit to a set number of hires, dismissing the target of 500 to 600 as “an arbitrary demand.” “Jobs aren’t something you turn out on a machine,” Vaughn said. He also didn’t want FIGHT to recruit Kodak employees, viewing that as an incursion into management’s territory—much the way the company had always looked disapprovingly at the prospect of a union butting into business operations. “Florence wanted to… tell us what people to hire,” Vaughn grumbled. The two sides held a couple more meetings, but Vaughn and the other most senior Kodak executives stopped attending, a not-so-subtle undermining of Florence’s status. As the weeks passed, “it became perfectly clear that there was no basis for working with them,” said Kenneth Howard of Kodak’s industrial-relations staff.
On October 22, Kodak announced that it would bring in a consulting group, the Board of Fundamental Education, to train a hundred disadvantaged people in basic skills. Forty of them already worked at Kodak. Fuming, Florence showed up at the company with forty-five unemployed blacks and insisted they be made part of the program. When Kodak refused, saying that all the participants had been selected, Florence labeled the whole thing “a fraud” and “a trick.” “We can’t understand for our lives how a company with their creative ability can… create these Instamatic cameras, but can’t create Instamatic jobs,” he said. Alinsky weighed in, as well. “People talk about General Motors and they talk about this and they talk about that, but you’ve got yourself one of the most pompous and arrogant and richest corporations with one of the crummiest employment policies as far as the race issue goes.”
With Kodak and FIGHT at a standoff—and the company taking the brunt of a lot of bad publicity—Vaughn decided to shake things up. The move came at the behest of John Mulder, a Kodak assistant vice president, who had been active in civil-rights issues and whose wife was a member of a support group called Friends of FIGHT. Mulder, who worked at Kodak Park, suggested that a new delegation be appointed to talk with FIGHT, this time led by managers who were on the front lines of hiring and training. Vaughn agreed and put Mulder in charge of the Kodak team. On December 19, the company and FIGHT met at the Downtowner Motor Inn, and by the next day, they reached a deal. Over a twenty-four-month period, Kodak would recruit 600 people—“the bulk of which would be hard-core unemployed (unattached, uninvolved with traditional institutions)”—so long as there were no “unforeseen economic changes.” FIGHT, for its part, accepted that it wouldn’t be the sole referral agency for job candidates. Florence questioned whether Mulder could sign the agreement, but he assured the minister that he could; Vaughn had given him the authorization to do so, he said.
Florence immediately hailed Kodak for its “vision.” Mulder’s bosses, though, had an altogether different reaction when they heard that he had signed a pact promising 600 jobs. “The hell he has!” said Eilers, who the following week was scheduled to take over the company presidency, with Vaughn becoming chairman. By December 22, Kodak had formally repudiated the agreement, saying Mulder never had the authority to sign. “We could not agree to a program… which would extend so far into the future,” Vaughn said. “Obviously, our employment needs depend on the kinds of jobs available at a particular time.” One report indicated that the company also “detected the faint odor” of an organized-labor contract in the FIGHT accord.
Mulder asked if he could relay the news to FIGHT personally. He showed up at a party, where Florence and his wife were celebrating her birthday. The moment Florence saw Mulder’s face, he knew. “They’ve broken the agreement,” Florence said quietly. As the FIGHT leader read Kodak’s official statement, “the whole thing Brother Malcolm told me about white folks hit me again,” Florence later commented. “He said never trust them unless you have the power to make them deliver.” The next day, Florence led a rally of 150 ministers, priests, rabbis, nuns, and laypeople at his church. “We are disgusted and angry,” he told the congregation. “Kodak’s word is no good. Kodak’s signature is no good.” The company took out two-page newspaper ad saying that it “sincerely regrets any misunderstanding.” But it was already too late; the distrust on both sides had thickened and hardened.
By late February—after another six weeks of news conferences full of charges and countercharges; on-again, off-again negotiations; and notice by Kodak of a new job training initiative for 150 unskilled individuals that Florence denounced as “a sham and a disgrace”—the company told FIGHT that it was done talking once and for all. “We believe that there have been enough meetings about meetings,” Kodak said. Florence wasted no time in sending back a menacing reply: “Please be advised that the Negro poor of Rochester and the poor throughout the country from Harlem to Watts are not satisfied with your ‘see no evil’ and ‘hear no evil’ attitude. Institutional racism as exemplified at Kodak is amoral and un-Christian. The cold of February will give way to the warm of spring and eventually the long hot summer. What happens in Rochester in the summer of ’67 is at the doorstep of Eastman Kodak.”
Saul Alinsky mostly watched the deepening stalemate between Kodak and FIGHT from the sidelines (though, ever the wise guy, he couldn’t resist throwing out the occasional one-liner: “The only contribution the Eastman Kodak Company has ever made to race relations is the invention of color film”). By the time things had reached their breaking point, however, he was already plotting his next maneuver. Before summer even arrived, Alinsky would squeeze Kodak harder than ever.
As discriminatory as corporate America was to blacks through the fifties and sixties, women found themselves every bit as marginalized. “Two things make this business great—one is the product Coca-Cola, and the other is men,” Lee Talley, the president of the beverage maker told a group of company executives in 1957. “We have the product but we shall need more and more good men. Men of character and intelligence. Men who are industrious and hardworking. Men of spirit and ambition. Men of dedication.” Women, evidently, need not apply. At Kodak, the language deployed was every bit as masculine. “Many young men have a bright future in the skilled trades at Kodak,” the company proclaimed on the cover of one promotional piece. “Are you one of them?” The back of the same brochure stated, “Kodak is an equal opportunity employer,” the irony apparently lost on everyone. It’s not that major corporations didn’t hire women. But their numbers were relatively small, making up less than 20 percent of the workforce at many companies, and the jobs made available to them were sharply limited, with barely any women in management. “Can you tell me why,” one frustrated female office worker at General Motors asked in 1956, “none of the corporation’s plants have women supervisors?”
Such sexism was bound up in common conventions that had endured for generations. Even the most progressive employers—such as General Electric’s Gerard Swope—easily fell prey to them. Like many companies in the 1920s, GE asked women to resign if they got married, and it made certain benefits, such as life insurance, available only to men. Each year, all department heads at GE were required to submit to Swope a PYM List so the company could identify up-and-coming talent. PYM stood for “Promising Young Men.” “Our theory was that women did not recognize the responsibilities of life,” Swope said. Once they were wed, he added, the company was certain that they “would leave us.” Such an attitude both reflected and reinforced prevailing norms about gender: from the late nineteenth century until the 1920s, married women working outside the home were stigmatized; many jobs were dirty and dangerous, and society frowned on the “fairer sex” filling them. Among women in the early part of the twentieth century, the world of work was left mainly to the young and single.
By the early 1930s, with Swope himself now expressing doubts about the “man-run company” he had built, change was afoot. Office work—a type of employment considered “respectable” for females—was suddenly in high demand, and for the first time a big pool of women graduating from high school became typists, file clerks, and secretaries. (The writer G. K. Chesterton wryly observed that “ten thousand women marched through the streets… saying: ‘We will not be dictated to,’ and then went off to become stenographers.”) By the 1940s, most companies ended the practice of firing women who got married. And the advent of part-time jobs also drew more women into the workplace.
Then came the war. After Pearl Harbor, women “entered ‘men’s jobs’ in basic industry on a massive scale,” the historian Ruth Milkman has written, proving that “they were fully capable of performing such work.” The fraction of women working in autos went from less than 6 percent in 1940 to nearly 25 percent in 1944; in the electrical industry, the proportion of women workers jumped from about a third to almost half. Big increases were also seen in rubber, chemicals, and iron and steel. “Women keep piling up evidence that they can do, and do well, a multitude of jobs,” the American Management Association reported. One General Motors executive said that, compared with men, women in the factories had shown themselves to be “more precise,” “more dexterous,” “more conscientious,” “less likely to loaf on the job,” and “often more loyal to the company.” Louis Male, longtime manager of the Schenectady Works at General Electric, became convinced that “women generally were better employees on highly repetitive jobs” because “monotony didn’t seem to bother them like it did the men.”
But while Rosie the Riveter continues to loom large as an American icon—“All the day long / Whether rain or shine / She’s a part of the assembly line,” went the 1943 song—Rosie was in reality an ephemeral figure. As soon as the war ended (and in many cases even earlier, as defense contracts were winding down), women were drummed out of the workplace. Some left willingly, content to give up their jobs for men returning from combat. But most women in manufacturing wanted to stay—four out of five, according to surveys—and so employers resorted to numerous tricks to dislodge them: firing them for minor violations that men could get away with; moving them to the midnight shift; assigning them to new jobs and then objecting when they didn’t immediately demonstrate enough expertise; and disregarding seniority rules. By 1946, women accounted for fewer than 10 percent of all autoworkers; in electrical manufacturing, their total dipped below 40 percent.
That the ranks of the Rosies shrank this way wasn’t merely a matter of companies pushing them out; society was also pulling them in—straight into their kitchens and bedrooms. Among those propounding this position was psychiatrist Marynia Farnham, coauthor of Modern Woman: The Lost Sex. “Catastrophic social forces have propelled American women away from femininity and into careers at terrific cost to themselves and society,” she said (somehow seemingly immune to such costs herself). “Abandoning their feminine role has made women unhappy because it has made them frustrated. It has made children unhappy because they do not have maternal love. And it has made their husbands unhappy because they do not have real women as partners. Instead, their wives have become their rivals.” For the most part, the public agreed. A 1946 Fortune magazine poll found that fewer than 22 percent of males and 29 percent of females thought that women “should have an equal chance with men” for any job.
Some came to conclude that commerce, as much as culture, was behind the effort to keep women hemmed in. Among them was Betty Friedan, who would write in her pioneering 1963 book The Feminine Mystique: “I am sure the heads of General Foods, and General Electric, and General Motors, and Macy’s and Gimbel’s and the assorted directors of all the companies that make detergents and electric mixers, and red stoves with rounded corners, and synthetic furs, and waxes, and hair coloring, and patterns for home sewing and home carpentry, and lotions for detergent hands, and bleaches to keep the towels pure white, never sat down around a mahogany conference table in a boardroom on Madison Avenue or Wall Street and voted on a motion: ‘Gentlemen, I move in the interests of all, that we begin a concerted $50 billion campaign to stop this dangerous movement of American women out of the home.’” Nonetheless, while Friedan rejected such conspiracy theories, she did believe that “somehow, somewhere, someone must have figured out women will buy more things if they are kept in the underused, nameless-yearning, energy-to-get-rid-of state of being housewives.”
In spite of the obstacles, ever more women joined the labor force through the 1950s and ’60s, owing to a variety of factors: rapid growth in part-time work; the passage of antidiscrimination laws, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964; and the introduction of the birth-control pill, which allowed women to delay having children and focus instead on their careers.
The first factor—the surge in temp jobs—had the muscle of industry behind it. Temp agencies had gotten their start in the late 1940s, and in the 1950s they kicked into full expansion mode, backed by millions of dollars in advertising and other promotions. By 1961, more than half of US companies had used their services, and by ’63 about 1,000 temp firms operated across the country, employing some 400,000 workers.
With names such as Western Girl Service, Workman Girl Service, American Girl Service, White Collar Girl Service, Right Girls, and Kelly Girl Service, these firms masterfully positioned themselves in a way that would mollify a society still ambivalent about married women (especially white, middle-class married women) being employed outside the house. Temp jobs, they claimed, gave women a much-needed sense of self-fulfillment and adventure without destroying the sanctity of the family. They could look forward, in effect, to leading “a double life,” said a 1965 ad from Manpower, the industry leader, whose “Girl in the White Gloves” became a ubiquitous image. Or as sociologist Erin Hatton has written: “Rosie was working only until her soldier came home from the war; Kelly was working only until her kids came home from school.”
Yet temp work had plenty of pitfalls. Manpower, Kelly Girl, and the other agencies circumvented many of the standards and regulations protecting full-time workers—such as health benefits, unemployment insurance, and equal-rights laws—while they also avoided being organized by unions. In the decades ahead, these subpar conditions would wind up affecting far more than just female temps, as “contingent work” would become increasingly common throughout the American economy.
In the meantime, all those women entering the labor force constituted a steady wave that would, by the 1970s, lead to a total makeover of American society. “The radical consequences of incremental change” is the way historian Alice Kessler-Harris has described it. But it would also prove a very bumpy ride, as companies shortchanged women on pay, relegated them to particular jobs stereotyped as female, and subjected them to all manner of harassment.
General Electric was typical. On the factory floor in the 1950s and into the ’60s, GE explicitly offered two wage rates—a higher one for “men’s jobs” and a lower one for “women’s jobs.” At the company’s Fort Wayne, Indiana, plant, for instance, female group leaders, who had been trained for eight to ten months, earned about $2.35 an hour—6 cents less than a male motor assembler whose job required just six weeks of training. GE also used double seniority lists so that, during downturns, men with short stints of service were kept on while women with ten or fifteen years at the company were laid off. The Electrical Workers—which, like other unions, including the United Auto Workers, fought much harder for women than it did for blacks—succeeded in eliminating some of these practices over time. Still, many things remained the same straight through the sixties, with female factory workers at GE put into the lowest-paying jobs; regularly passed over for better positions, like drill-press operator and material handler; and shut out of company courses where they could learn new skills, such as reading blueprints.
Some women at GE held higher-level jobs—but they were few and far between, and advancement was painfully slow. Consider Adelaide Oppenheim. When she looked for a job at GE in the spring of 1941, having graduated from the State University of New York with a master’s degree in education, there was a separate hiring process for female applicants. The person in charge, an unwavering conventionalist named Mary Holmes, “only thought that women were capable of doing secretarial work,” Oppenheim recalled—and she wasn’t interested. So Oppenheim navigated her way past Holmes and directly into the accounting department, only to be told, “Well, we don’t hire any women here.” She began to argue with the manager, saying that war was imminent and GE better start hiring women as a kind of insurance policy. Insistent (and just this side of impertinent), she got the job. It came, though, with a warning: if the emergency petered out and war didn’t come, Oppenheim would be fired. Three months later, many of GE’s best men were departing for the military, and Oppenheim was suddenly put in charge of unbilled inventory for the whole company.
It was a bad match. Oppenheim didn’t hesitate to voice her ideas for how to better organize the work of the department, and her boss didn’t appreciate her outspokenness. “I was reprimanded… for making all these suggestions,” she said. By March 1942, she was ordered to find work elsewhere within GE. “They said, ‘We’re reorganizing our group, and we’re not going to have any women, and you’d better look for a job.’” When Oppenheim questioned why this was happening, her boss left little doubt that the decision was final. “Oh, we’ll give you a very good recommendation because you’re very aggressive and very ambitious and very intelligent,” he said. “But we don’t want you in the department. Ta-ta.”
Oppenheim got bounced back to Holmes, the woman in charge of female hiring at GE, who again tried to shove her into the secretarial pool. As before, Oppenheim refused, and she talked her way into a technical job, doing calculations in a company laboratory. This time, she fit right in. “I was just one of the guys, you know,” she said. “At noontime, when some of the other women would be sitting eating their lunch and so on, I’d take a sandwich and go down the line and poke around in the shops, watching the guys with the machines.… I would just talk to everybody, and I kept asking questions.” She filled a notebook with every detail she heard. And the more she learned, the more her confidence grew.
Eventually, Oppenheim received advanced training in engineering and went to work on the Manhattan Project. “At the end of the war, they told us, ‘Gee, thanks a lot, you wonderful women. You did wonderful things. Now go home.’ But I didn’t go.” Instead, in the late 1940s, Oppenheim became head of a new twenty-five-person planning and program-management department—a breakthrough at the time. “Although it’s not our policy to give any kind of supervisory position to women,” Oppenheim was told, “we’re going to let you try it.” She did well. Yet it would take many more years, all the way until 1962, before Oppenheim was officially designated a manager—one of only six women inside GE to then hold such a title. The climb for women in most big companies was similarly arduous. Looking across the corporate arena at the time, a Harvard Business Review report on women in management found that “there is scarcely anything to study.”
Women in major technical roles were just as rare. A 1959 ad by GE in the Cincinnati Post showed four “girl engineers,” as the company called them, working at its aircraft-engine plant in Evendale, Ohio. “We’re mighty pleased to have them and only wish there were more than four,” the ad said. The piddling numbers at GE were no anomaly: in 1960, women accounted for just 6 percent of doctors, 3 percent of lawyers, and less than 1 percent of engineers in the United States. “The problem for a girl in this business,” said Loren Ingraham, one of those at Evendale, “is that people are afraid there will be a problem.”
Locked out of white-collar professions, most women at GE were shoehorned into what would come to be called the “pink-collar ghetto” of clerical work. Steering them in this direction, and then leaving them trapped there, was par for the course in corporate America, where the first question that women—even college graduates—were typically asked during a job interview was, “How well do you type?”
Yet companies seemed to care about the sartorial as much as the secretarial. In one 1950s guidebook, GE laid out this advice: “As a business girl you will want to maintain a certain professional appearance. You will want to look as if you belong in the office and not at a cocktail party or on a date. Most business gals find that the most suitable clothes for the office are tailored dresses—skirts worn with blouses, jersey tops, or sweaters—pretty suits. It’s wise to avoid such things as too sheer blouses, too tight sweaters and too much jewelry. However, just because you are a business girl, you will not be expected to wear dark colors only. Every gal should select colors that are flattering to her own skin tones, eyes, and hair.”
The company advised women not only on what to wear but on how to walk. “It is not necessary to rush when you walk,” the guidebook said, “but you don’t want to drag yourself around either. A person who has a brisk walk, which says she’s going someplace and has something to do, usually does get somewhere. If you have trouble with your posture and find that you get tired often, there are many good foundation garments on the market that will help you to achieve better posture and keep you from being fatigued. They will help you to look better in your clothes, too.” No detail was overlooked: GE’s counsel extended to selecting lipstick, powder, and rouge; applying nail polish; choosing the right hairstyle (“Loose flowing hair… has a tendency to muss easily”); and encouraging the use of “body deodorants and mouth antiseptics.”
The guidebook also informed its readers how essential it was to eat right and get enough sleep. It discussed the need for women in the office to display “an even temperament,” while reminding them to be “cheerful,” “open-minded,” “reliable,” “thoughtful,” and “discreet.” It urged them to show “initiative” and “resourcefulness” and “cultivate tactfulness and courtesy.” And it asked what GE asked of every employee, whether male or female: “We hope that you will be loyal,” the guidebook said, “not only to your boss but to General Electric, too.”
But it was a woman’s looks that seemed to carry inordinate weight. “This winsome lass is Carol Goff, a clerk-typist in shipping,” GE’s distribution transformer department in Oakland, California, announced in the “Who’s New” section of its internal newsletter in late 1961. “Another pretty lil’ gal, Joyce A. Tate, is our new mail girl.” GE ogled its professionals in the same way. When Betty Lou Bailey, one of the four female engineers from Evendale, visited GE’s Everett, Massachusetts, factory to check on some production parts, the company newsletter noted what a fuss she stirred up. “Not even a visitor from Mars could have attracted more attention than Betty Lou Bailey,” it said. “Not that the visitor had any of the characteristics of a Martian—in fact, with her blue-eyed, blonde-haired attractiveness she would have been an eye-catcher anywhere.”
By the 1970s, with the women’s liberation movement in full flower, GE toned down the language. It also took steps to ensure that job postings and upgrades were blind with regard to race or gender. This “really opened up the door for both men and women,” said Helen Quirini, who took a job doing piece work at GE’s Schenectady, New York, plant in 1941 and spent decades fighting for the equal treatment of female employees and minorities.
But the company still isolated women in other ways. In 1971, a pregnant GE factory worker named Martha Gilbert challenged the company’s disability policy, under which she was advised to take three months off without pay before giving birth and then mandated to take six weeks of unpaid leave after her child arrived. This was standard practice for US companies, which held that women shouldn’t receive a benefit—namely, paid leave—that men didn’t get. Gilbert, who was soon joined in a lawsuit against GE by six other employees, countered that if a man were injured off the job, he would receive disability pay; a pregnant woman, they said, should be entitled to the same thing. The case, which evolved into a class action for the 100,000 women working at GE at the time, was watched with great anticipation throughout corporate America. In 1976, it reached the Supreme Court, where GE won.
Two years later, President Carter signed into law the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which overrode the Supreme Court’s decision. The measure required that if an employer offered disability pay to men, it had to do the same for women “on the basis of pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions.” For GE, though, the passage of the law was moot; the company had already overhauled its policy. Specifically, GE did away with compulsory maternity leave, allowing a woman and her doctor to decide whether she should take a break. The company also began awarding partial pay to women beginning six weeks before they gave birth and continuing for six weeks after. “We saw that the mindset of our workforce had changed and certainly we have to change as a company to attract the most talented people,” a GE spokesman said.
It was a remarkable admission for a corporation that just a few years earlier, when it wasn’t battling women in the courtroom, was engaged in even more invidious behavior: acting as if they didn’t exist. With its advertising tagline from the early 1970s, GE had casually erased half the planet’s population. “Men Helping Man,” it said.
As the winter of 1967 melted into spring, Saul Alinsky mulled ways to break the logjam between FIGHT and Eastman Kodak. He thought about organizing a national boycott of the company’s products but quickly concluded that such a campaign wouldn’t get very far. “You couldn’t ask the country to stop taking pictures,” he said. Having heard that Queen Elizabeth owned Kodak stock, Alinsky and the other FIGHT leaders batted around the idea of picketing Buckingham Palace. But this plan, too, was dropped. Ultimately, Alinsky seized on an even wilder notion: FIGHT would march straight into the lion’s den of capitalism—the company’s annual meeting, set for April 25 in Flemington, New Jersey.
The concept was pretty simple at first: FIGHT would buy some Kodak stock, giving it access to the shareholders’ meeting for purposes of “harassment and publicity,” Alinsky explained. But Alinsky soon realized that if he and Franklin Florence could induce other owners of Kodak stock to assign their proxies to FIGHT, they could put even more heat on the company. And so they began contacting church organizations that held Kodak shares in their investment funds. Alinsky wasn’t trying to wage a battle for control of the board. He wasn’t even attempting to elect a director or two who would represent FIGHT’s interests inside Kodak. But by amassing enough shares to potentially threaten the board’s agenda, Alinsky felt he could acquire “the razor to cut through the golden curtain that protected the so-called private sector from facing its public responsibilities.”
In the weeks leading up to the annual meeting, Kodak executives became nervous. If nothing else, if FIGHT pulled in enough proxies, it might be able to grab the government’s attention and prompt congressional hearings or even a Justice Department investigation into the company’s hiring practices. Meanwhile, Alinsky would go on to endorse the use of this stratagem far beyond Kodak. It was a means to impose “social and political pressure against the megacorporations” and “a vehicle for exposing their hypocrisy and deceit,” he said. It is “also an invaluable means of gaining middle-class participation in radical causes.… Proxy participation on a large scale could ultimately mean the democratization of corporate America.”
Even with Alinsky’s cunning, FIGHT didn’t wind up controlling very many Kodak shares—just 40,000 out of more than 80 million outstanding. Yet that didn’t stop Florence from barging into Flemington like he owned the place. Outside Hunterdon Central High School, where Kodak’s annual meeting was about to begin, some 600 FIGHT supporters milled about. Most had been bused in, and many held signs: “Kodak is negative.” “Kodak is out of focus.” “Kodak Snaps the Shutter on the Negro.” Inside, about forty people in the FIGHT camp sat alongside Florence and Alinsky. At one o’clock, Kodak chairman William Vaughn began the meeting. Immediately, Florence jumped to his feet. “Mr. Chairman, Mr. Chairman,” the minister shouted. Vaughn called him out of order, but Florence would have none of it. “I’ll be heard as long as I’m on the floor!” he said. Florence then said he would give Vaughn one hour—until two o’clock—to honor the agreement that Kodak assistant vice president John Mulder had made with FIGHT the previous December to hire 600 “hard-core unemployed.” Some among the 1,000 shareholders in attendance booed while others yelled, “Throw him out!” But nobody needed to. Florence and his entourage then left the high-school auditorium.
At two o’clock, they returned. “Point of order! Point of order!” Florence repeated over and over, demanding the microphone. Vaughn asked him to wait for his turn to speak, which only roused the FIGHT sympathizers. “White arrogance!” one cried. After a few minutes, Florence was recognized. “Just a yes or no if you are going to honor the agreement,” he said, pointing his finger straight at Vaughn. The chairman paused and then replied in a firm voice: “No, sir, no we are not.” With that, Florence and the others with FIGHT got up and started to leave the meeting once again. Shareholders screamed, “Get out of here!” while some in Florence’s party lobbed slights at Vaughn on their way out the door: “Coward!” “Liar!”
From that point, FIGHT became even more confrontational. “This is war,” said Florence, “and I state it again—war.” He raised his requirement from 600 to 2,000 jobs. He intimated that FIGHT might picket the home of Kodak’s beloved founder, George Eastman, or hound the company’s president, Louis Eilers. “Everywhere he goes, we go,” Florence said. Or perhaps, he suggested, FIGHT would stage an “eat-in” at the Eastman School of Music, downing beans “while our white brothers pass by in their silks and satins.” Finally, Florence announced that a candlelight pilgrimage to Kodak headquarters would be held on July 24, the anniversary of the Rochester riots—a move so inflammatory that it caught even Alinsky by surprise.
By June, however, FIGHT had started to lose support among the churches, and the group became weary. It was time to settle. Alinsky called in a mediator: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the former assistant secretary of labor and future US senator, who was then the director of the Joint Center for Urban Studies at MIT and Harvard. “We won’t hold Kodak to a contract,” Alinsky told Moynihan. “But we want something.” What it got was a statement from Kodak acknowledging that the company “recognizes that FIGHT, as a broad-based community organization, speaks on behalf of the basic needs and aspirations of the Negro poor in the Rochester area.” Kodak also agreed to work with FIGHT to send job interviewers into inner-city neighborhoods. Importantly, however, Kodak hadn’t actually agreed to employ anyone. Yet that didn’t stop Franklin Florence, who was set to step down as FIGHT’s president, from claiming otherwise. “We have a deal for jobs!” he told the FIGHT faithful at the organization’s annual convention. In any event, he added, the biggest thing was that Rochester’s African Americans had earned the respect of one of the nation’s largest corporations. “Black men today,” Florence said, “can walk taller in this community.”
Whether because of FIGHT’s tenacity or its own sense of what was right, Kodak did provide new employment for blacks. In December 1967, the company said it would “combat poverty in Rochester” by assisting in the formation of small businesses in the city’s slums. And in January 1968, it expanded on the idea by establishing the Rochester Business Opportunities Corporation “to promote and encourage independent business enterprises in and for the inner-city.” Kodak, for instance, was able to get a black-owned plastic mold shop off the ground by granting it a $150,000 contract. It also funded Teens on Patrol, an initiative in which young minorities were paid to help supervise playgrounds, recreation centers, and swimming pools.
Within Kodak itself, the company developed intensive training programs for those lacking in education and skills, a system that other companies (including Coca-Cola, Ford, McDonnell-Douglas, and Mobil) would later follow as part of a federally subsidized effort known as the National Alliance of Businessmen. And in April 1967, shortly before its annual meeting, Kodak had helped to start a program called Rochester Jobs Inc. through which local industries would hire 1,500 poor minorities over the next year and a half. Though Florence scoffed at the plan, Kodak’s share was estimated to be 600 jobs—exactly the amount that FIGHT had been calling for. “I believe we at Kodak are trying to do what we should do,” said William Vaughn.
By 1968, 2,000 blacks worked for Kodak in Rochester. This was more than triple the number at the time of the riots. Looked at another way, it was only about 4 percent of the company’s total local employment.
The headway achieved by African Americans at Kodak was emblematic of that made by blacks and other minorities across corporate America: it wasn’t as if they hadn’t gotten anywhere, but there was still a terribly long way to go.
Measures of occupational segregation by race, for example, would fall dramatically between 1960 and 1970, but they would in no way disappear. In 1967, full-time African American workers made, on average, 35 percent less than their white counterparts. By the end of the 1970s, that differential would narrow—but still stand at 27 percent. The proportion of African Americans in white-collar jobs soared by 80 percent from 1960 to 1970, but blacks still held a miniscule fraction of managerial positions. And unemployment among blacks would remain stuck at twice the rate experienced by whites. The “quest for ‘Freedom Now,’” Ebony magazine said of the “decade of struggle” following passage of the Civil Rights Act, “has produced mixed results.”
The same was true for women. More and more entered the workforce, especially those who were married, with females taking two-thirds of all new jobs created in the 1960s. But women would continue to be paid considerably less than men (about sixty cents on the dollar), and even the most ambitious would find that they could get only so far in their careers before hitting a “glass ceiling”—a term that would enter the American lexicon in the late seventies. “Women’s rising labor force participation… has not resulted in women getting a chance at the higher paying and more powerful jobs,” Rosabeth Moss Kanter wrote in her 1977 study, Men and Women of the Corporation. “The title of William H. Whyte’s… bestseller, The Organization Man, did not reflect an unwitting failure to use a better generic term for all of humanity. There were then and still are so few women in management that ‘the organization man’ meant exactly what it said.”
Women and people of color had finally been admitted to the party that was the nation’s postwar economic boom. But they were put at the worst table. And by the time they’d been let in, the bash was about to come to an end.