(H)our History Lesson: Life and Work for African Americans on the Home front in Tri-Cities, Washington

Photo 2: “Worker repairing an inner tube at Hanford Site, ca. 1943-1945. He was one of many African American workers to migrate to the Tri-City area to work in the wartime industries.

U.S. Department of Energy, Creator: U.S. War Department

About this Lesson

This lesson is part of a series teaching about the World War II home front, with Tri-Cities, Washington as an American World War II Heritage City. Kennewick, Richland, and Pasco, Washington, comprise the “Tri-Cities.” The lesson contains photographs, one background reading, and two primary source interviews to contribute to learners’ understandings of the contributions of African Americans in the Tri-Cities and the wrongful discrimination against those that lived and worked there. Many moved to the area for employment connected to the maintenance and operations of the facilities that contributed to the Manhattan Project at the Hanford Site. The Manhattan Project led to the creation and use of the atomic bomb in World War II.

Objectives:

1. Describe why African Americans would move to the Tri-Cities, and the lifestyle and activities of those living there.

2. Identify examples of segregation and discrimination faced by African American Hanford Site workers and Tri-Cities residents.

3. Explain how African Americans contributed to the Manhattan Project, specifically at the Hanford site.

Materials for Students:

1. Photos 1-5 (can be displayed digitally)

2. Readings 1-3 (one secondary, two primary)

3. Recommended: Map of the Tri-Cities region to plot locations, specifically the three cities of Richland, Kennewick, and Pasco, and their location relative to the Hanford site. For this lesson, more detailed maps of Pasco may also be helpful.

Getting Started: Essential Question

How did African American workers contribute to the Manhattan Project at the Hanford site? What barriers did they face while living in the Tri-Cities?

By the numbers:

• Approximately 443,000 Black Americans moved to Washington, Oregon, and California to work in the defense industries.

• About 15,000 Black Americans moved to the Tri-Cities area between 1943-1945.

• 50,000 workers were at Hanford. Just over 5,000 were African American.

Quotation to consider:

(Interviewer): “And tell us again why most blacks lived in east Pasco.”

Interviewee Virginia Crippen: "Because they didn’t have no other choice. They lived in tents, cardboard houses, made the siding out of cardboard, the top canvas. The best they could do, because there was no place to live and it was work out at Hanford.” -From the Hanford History Project’s interview with Virginia Crippen

Reading to Connect

Teacher tip: You may choose to divide students into groups to read the two interviews (Reading 2 or Reading 3). Student can then report back to a partner or the whole class with notes. 

Reading 1: African Americans’ Work and Living Experiences in the Tri-Cities

Written by Sarah Nestor Lane 

Teacher Tip: Topics you may want to explain further to students include Executive Order 8802, and “Red lining.” “Red lining” is a discriminatory practice where services are withheld from residents of certain neighborhoods with significant numbers of racial and ethnic minorities. 

In 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802. The order prohibited discrimination in defense industry hiring based on “race, creed, color, or national origin.” The DuPont Company built and operated the Hanford Engineer Works. DuPont was under contract with the federal government. DuPont hired African Americans, as required by the Executive Order. The Hanford Site operated the first nuclear production reactors that produced plutonium. This led to the development and use of the atomic bomb “Fat Man.” The United States dropped the bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945. It resulted in the loss of thousands of Japanese lives. 

African American Workers at the Hanford Site 

African American migrants moved from Southern states to work in the defense industry. Many had expected less discrimination in Washington than the South. However, even in Tri-Cities, Washington, ‘Jim Crow’ laws and segregation were present like they were in the South. These laws enforced segregation and aimed to strip African Americans of their rights.  

The Manhattan Engineer District (MED) at the Hanford Site limited African American employment. The district made sure African American employees did not go over 10-20% of the workforce. African American men were in positions such as construction workers, laborers, and janitors. The MED limited African American women mostly to domestic positions such as maids, waitresses, and cooks. All-Black crews worked under white supervisors. African American jobs were lower paid and labeled as temporary. This situation affected housing and financial opportunities. In a later interview with the Tri-Cities Herald, waitress Lula Mae Little, who worked at the mess hall, called the site the “Mississippi of the North.”*  

Segregated housing at the Hanford site included barracks and a trailer camp. Those not living at the site often lived in the segregated city of Pasco. Of the nine mess halls at Hanford, only one was open to African Americans. Other segregated places were buses, restaurants, stores, barber shops, and social events. One example of a popular African American recreational activity was baseball. The Hanford Eagles was an all-African American baseball team. 

Discrimination and Segregation in the Tri-Cities 

African American workers were not allowed to live in Richland or Kennewick. The government formed Richland for permanent workers in skilled positions, like scientists. DuPont and the MED labeled African American workers as temporary. African Americans had limited to no opportunities to be hired for skilled positions. The Green Bridge in Kennewick supported the segregation of African Americans from Pasco. Less than ten African Americans worked in Kennewick, and all in unskilled positions. 

Marion Barton, who would become the first Black woman to be a Pasco city council member, grew up in East Pasco. She recalled in an interview, “I know my mom would ramble on sometimes, but my mom would say you couldn’t even get arrested in Kennewick; like, they wouldn’t even put you in jail if you were Black.” Barton remembered her mother telling her about when police restrained an African American man at a Kennewick lamppost  on a busy street. He was a Hanford worker who was arrested for riding in a car with two white men. He was not permitted in the white jail in Kennewick. Kennewick officers called officers from Pasco to pick him up. 

East Pasco 

Black residents in the Tri-Cities lived in Pasco, east of 4th Avenue. Residents went to their side of Pasco by the Lewis Street Underpass. East Pasco had few community services.  Living conditions were not as good as those in Richland or Kennewick. There were discriminatory red-lining practices. These included a lack of access to services like insurance loans or mortgages.  

African Americans developed churches, shops, restaurants, and more. The Morning Star Baptist Church is an example of a church built by the growing Black American population in Pasco. The community also created Kurtzman Park in the 1950s. The African American community in East Pasco was a source of pride for many. Few of the original buildings in East Pasco remain, but celebrations of African American history and culture continue. For example, the state’s longest running Juneteenth celebration happens yearly in Pasco. 

*Source: “African Americans and the Manhattan Project”; Ruffin, Taylor, and Mack (2018), Freedom’s Racial Frontier 

**Source: Interview with Marion Keith Barton · Hanford History Project 

Reading 2: Joe Williams, Hanford Site worker, Interview

Joe Williams’ Interview is a part of the Hanford History project’s African American Community Cultural and Educational Society collection. 

Vanis Daniels (Interviewer): . . .How long did you work at Hanford? 

Joe Williams (Interviewee): Three-and-a-half years. 

Daniels: Okay. Now, did you have any idea what you were working on? Did they give you any information about what you were doing? Did they say anything to you as to whether you should talk about what you were doing or anything like that? 

Williams: You couldn’t talk about nothing you was doing. With nobody. 

Daniels: And, did you know what—have any idea what you were building or what you was contributing to, or anything? 

Williams: Nope. Because you go in one cell; if you was in Cell 45, you wouldn’t know what they was doing in Cell 18–now, you stuck with 45. And that’s where I was stuck, on Cell 45. 

Leonard Moore (Interviewer 2): And Cell 45, it was a work room? 

Williams: No, that down in the ground, 45 feet deep. 

Moore: Oh, it was an area. 

Williams: Uh-huh. Where you had the rubberizing. Rubberizing, spark-proofing and all like that. No crew worked—they worked in once place. It wasn’t the way you work here and work there. I was assigned out as being a chief rubberizer, spark-proof, stop any leaks that ever started. That’s what we were transferred all the way from back east here for that. Weren’t but eight peoples in the United States had that trade and I was dumb enough to be one out the eight. 

Moore: Let’s talk about the barracks. 

Daniels: Okay. In living in the barracks, were you and your wife able to live together? 

Williams: Nope. 

Daniels: Would you tell us a little bit about how you guys lived out in the barracks? 

Williams: She lived in the women barracks and I lived in the men barracks. And they had wired fences up like penitentiary around all the women barracks. And the only way you could get in there—you had to get—you could visit–and they had a big rec-room and that’s far as you could get. You didn’t know what room she slept in, or didn’t know nothing. You could go in the rec-room, that’s far as you could go. But she could come to the men’s barracks, down there, and go all the way through it. But a man couldn’t go in the women’s barrack without going through the police, or the guard, or whatever he was. . ..  

Daniels: Okay. Now, If, when you—after, in other words, since you couldn’t talk about what you did, and you didn’t know what the project was about, when did you learn that you were working on the Manhattan Project or that you were helping the war effort by the job that you were doing? 

Williams: After they started testing it. We didn’t know what we was doing. We was just doing, in one cell. Men worked in 45 cells, and I don’t know nothing but for the one. You don’t work—don’t nobody work in each other’s cells. About five different craftsman worked in the cells. . . .  

Daniels: Make sure you tell us about the red line. In other words, once you got past 1st Street or 4th Street, or wherever it was, nobody would loan you any money. Where they red-lined east Pasco. 

Williams: Oh yeah. Okay, I see. 

Daniels: Mr. Williams, could you tell us a little bit about the living conditions and the availability of funds for black people or being able to better yourself in Pasco? 

Williams: The banks had a boundary. Nobody on the east side of 4th Street would they lend. Nobody, to nobody. On the east side of 4th Street. . . . 

Daniels: And were you able to go in restaurants, and sit down and have a meal? Or was it segregated? How did you do for getting haircuts, et cetera, et cetera? 

Williams: Well, it wasn’t any place, legally, for haircuts. And we had one colored guy run a café there, that’s the only one you could go in. I forget the name of it. And no place for cleaning or laundry; you had to settle to Walla Walla, Washington. 

Reading 3:  Aubrey Johnson Interview

Aubrey Johnson’s Interview is a part of the Hanford History project’s African American Community Cultural and Educational Society collection. 

Aubrey Johnson (Interviewee): For east Pasco it was just like a family. My mom would say, son, you be at home before the sun go down. I mean, be in this yard. And she could yell and I could hear her for like three or four blocks away, and then I would head home. All my friends and stuff that I basically went to school with, all of us black kids—because they were doing busing—once we got off the bus, we all walked home together, we played together, we threw rocks, we rolled tires. 

It was a lot of fun growing up out there, I hated to see it when Urban Renewal came. Because what it did, it removed the black people from the little shacks, they call them, the little homes they had to the projects. And then we lost everything that we had, because all of that was gone. It was just kind of a bad situation. It was supposed to be in the name of interests, the self-help co-op. . . .  

We had no representation. When they got ready to open that corridor to Big Pasco, they wanted to grab A Street—not A Street, Oregon Street. That’s a throughway from the freeway all the way to the river. Well, black people owned all that property from the railroad over. When I was growing up, we always heard that railroad property is worth no money, okay? So when this redevelopment come in, it wasn’t redevelopment; it was reclaim. They came in and the city—you had to sell it. They gave you nothing for it. . . .  

Franklin (Interviewer): It took a while for east Pasco to get the sewer connections and things. That was one of the major complaints that the black community had in east Pasco with the city was the lack of water. 

Johnson: Right, the lack of water, the lack of sewage before they put it down on our street. There was Elm Street, which was one of the major throughways through there now, and then our street and the next street over. Some people had a cesspool. Unfortunately, we didn’t. We had to dig our own waterline and they dug it and it came from the Methodist Church down to our house so we could have water. Like I said, it was just a faucet and you go and turn it on, it was cold water and then you boil your water. I can remember being a kid where I had to take a bath in a tin tub. And they would boil water and pour it in the tub and then run some cold water and put it in there for you to cool it off. . . .  

Franklin: Yeah. So I wanted to ask—since your mom, for a small time, worked out at Hanford, and your stepfather worked at Hanford, I wanted to ask, what was your reaction, or what do you know about your parents’ reaction to learning that they had kind of worked at a site that was crucial to the development of nuclear weapons? 

Johnson: That was something that was never discussed. Matter of fact, I don’t know whether they even really realized what Hanford was doing, when they were doing plutonium and all of that—because I had heard that they had built the mechanism for the atomic bomb and all this different kind of stuff—that they really realized what they were doing when they were working there. Because I heard just recently when they came and that a lot of guys, black people were doing the cement work and stuff for these reactors and all of that, and they was going down there and digging holes and doing different stuff and they wasn’t told what detriment that that was having on their body. 

And, hey, later in 30 or 40 years you’re going to have cancer. They wasn’t told that, even though the government knew it. But it was like, hey, we got to get this work done, we got to have somebody down here to do it. So, who are we going to get to do it? And that’s just the way that it was. I don’t think that it was something that was discussed; it was just a job. You didn’t really realize what you were doing. 

One of the things that really upset me with this Hanford thing is, because I know of a lot of people, black people that ended up with cancer. Man, it took them forever to get any money out of that, when the Caucasian people had been getting paid all the time. And you go to the doctor and then you’d send all your research papers and stuff back, and then they’d say, well, you need this, or you don’t quite have all that together. And it was years, and years, and years, because there was no awareness there. There was no person that was really reaching out from Hanford to make you aware of the moneys and the stuff that they had out there for you to receive. . . . 

Franklin: What do you think is the most important legacy of the Hanford Site? 

Johnson: It brought a lot of work here to the area, it opened up the doors so that pretty much anybody could get a type of job. Even though you started off at the bottom as being a custodian, and kind of like, if you stayed there long enough you might be able to work your way up to a management part of it. . . . 

Photo 5: The Hanford Eagles baseball team, September 21, 1944. Baseball was one of several recreational activities the growing African American community participated in when they moved to the Tri-City area.

U.S. Department of Energy.

Student Activities

Teacher Tip: If you split students into groups for Readings 2 and 3, you may adjust what questions students answer for each reading.

Questions for Readings 1 and 2, Photos 1 - 3

1. What required the inclusion of African Americans as workers in the defense industry?
2. Why did so many African Americans choose to move from the South?
3. Describe the work and opportunities for African Americans at the Hanford Site and in Tri-Cities.
4. How did African Americans develop East Pasco? Why is this significant?
   

Questions for Reading 3, Photos 3 & 4

1. How does Johnson’s description of losing areas of East Pasco (post-War) to developers connect to Reading 1’s description of East Pasco and its significance?
2. What challenges to working at the Hanford Site does Johnson describe?
3. Reread the last question and response. How would you describe the legacy of the Hanford Site? (Consider how your response may change when considering the multiple perspectives of those impacted by the atomic bomb.)

Answer the Essential Question:

Use evidence from the primary and secondary sources:
How did African American workers contribute to the Manhattan Project at the Hanford site, and what barriers did they face while living in the Tri-Cities?

Additional Resources

“African Americans and the Manhattan Project”; Ruffin, Taylor, and Mack, Freedom’s Racial Frontier

African Americans and the Manhattan Project - Nuclear Museum

African Americans and Life in a Secret City_Photographs of African Americans at Hanford.pdf (aip.org)

How Jim Crow policies shaped the Tri-Cities - Northwest Public Broadcasting (nwpb.org)

“Jim Crow in the Tri-Cities, 1943-1950" by Robert Bauman (2005), The Pacific Northwest Quarterly by the University of Washington, 96(3), pp. 124-131

Mapping Tri-Cities Race and Segregation (washington.edu)

Series: Curiosity Kit: African American Baseball (nps.gov)

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This lesson was written and researched by Sarah Nestor Lane, an educator with the Cultural Resource Office of Education and Interpretation. This is a program of the National Park Service, funded by a cooperative agreement with the National Council of Public History.