At 97, Susan King still recalls how she came from her family’s home in Virginia’s Lancaster County to work as a riveter, making parts for aircraft at a factory in Baltimore during World War II.
Unlike the mostly White women known for their wartime efforts and dubbed “Rosie the Riveters,” King and roughly 600,000 African American women who worked at offices, shipyards and factories building parts for planes, weapons and ships never got as much recognition, many historians say.
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King’s story and others with similar experiences were part of a recently produced documentary called “Invisible Warriors — African American Women in World War II” by Gregory Cooke, a historian and retired writing instructor at Drexel University in Philadelphia. D.C.'s Martin Luther King Jr. Library held an in-person viewing of Cooke’s film in December and honored some of the women who were featured in it, as well as others, for their wartime efforts.
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“Oftentimes, people don’t consider Black women as part of World War II,” King said. “The focus is always on the men of the war. We get lost in the shuffle.” Cooke’s film, she said, “did a remarkable job showing how we helped in the home front in building ships, planes and bullets, and gave our time.”
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Cooke said he started working on the film in 2009 after becoming interested in the role African Americans played in World War II — especially the jobs Black women held.
“African Americans, and women in particular, have been left out of the true accounting of World War II history,” Cooke said. The war, he said, “has always been framed and romanticized as a White male experience and that’s not historically accurate. Were it not for these women, the White men would not have had planes, bullets and tanks.”
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Frank McDougald watched the film with his mom, Hilda, 101, who left her family’s home in Mansura, La., where her father was a sharecropper, and came to D.C. to process payroll for soldiers. She lives in the Capitol View neighborhood of Southeast and was among the women honored at the MLK library event.
Her son said the film gave him a renewed appreciation for the work his mom and other Black women had done during the wartime effort.
“It portrayed what Black women contributed and the kind of discrimination they confronted,” he said.
Growing up, he said, his parents never talked about the contributions his mom and thousands of others made during World War II.
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“My mom came here to work,” Frank McDougald said. “She never talked about being a Rosie.”
In the film, King discussed learning about a Baltimore plant that was training women to be riveters and enrolled in a class with a friend. She got a job for one year putting together small parts for planes.
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Her pay was about $58 a week, she said. After her work during the war, she went on to college and later got her master’s degree at Morgan State University. She spent 32 years as a teacher and counselor in Baltimore.
Another woman in the film, Ruth Wilson, 99, of Philadelphia, said the film brought back memories of how she left home in New Jersey and went to work a shipyard. She later worked nearly 30 years at a coat factory.
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“I thought it was fantastic,” Wilson said of the film. “Nobody had ever done that before that I knew of, so I thought it was really nice to let people know what part Black women played in World War II.”
Cooke said he found the women in the film by reaching out to senior care facilities, colleagues and friends.
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In the film, he details how many of the women had worked jobs as sharecropper farmers, taking care of kids, or as cooks and cleaners before the war, but because of the labor shortage, had come to factories, shipyards and offices for better pay.
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“It was only because of a labor shortage of men who had previously had these jobs that women could even get these jobs,” Cooke said.
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He said he wanted to focus on the roles Black women had played in the wartime effort because they had been “so marginalized that often they had no idea of what a big role they’d played.”
The most well-known image of women’s efforts in World War II, he said, is the poster that became symbolic of women working in factories and shipyards. In it, a White woman dubbed “Rosie the Riveter,” a bandanna around her head, flexes her muscles.
Of the seven women in his film, Cooke said six didn’t have a sense of what a significant role they had in the wartime effort. “To them, it was just a good job,” he said.
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The film also depicts how women were treated differently at jobs in which the federal government had rules prohibiting discrimination based on race, but once they left those jobs, they dealt with segregated bathrooms, restaurants and water fountains outside of work.
Cooke reached out to the Embassy of the Netherlands in the District, which helped in funding and other support, because he said the embassy has done projects focused on the role of Black people in helping to liberate the Netherlands in 1945.
André Haspels, the Dutch ambassador to the U.S., said his embassy wanted to recognize the “sacrifices in the U.S. not only in sending troops, but also by people who stayed behind.”
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“The African American Rosies played an important role in World War II because not only did they have to fight racism but they also had to fight sexism,” Haspels said. “It was a double handicap they had to overcome.”
Cooke said he’s gotten a range of reactions to his film, from pride, joy and laughter, to anger. He said, he thinks Black women who served as Rosies will “look at it as part of their legacy.”