white women. After the animal had been killed, cut into sections, and cleaned, white women trimmed the
meat and then weighed, packed, and wrapped it. Black women could be found in the offal department,
flushing worms and feces from animal intestines. As one white UPWA activist who worked on the line
slicing bacon explained to an interviewer in 1939: “I’m in Sliced Bacon. That’s supposed to be the
lightest, cleanest place to work. They wouldn’t take on a Negro girl if she was a college graduate.”^26
With the backing of the union’s white male leadership, women like Wyatt set out to change this state of
affairs. Their first goal was not moving women into men’s jobs but ending racial discrimination in female
hiring.
Gaining the support of black men was a necessity. Black men were responsible for the first step in the
meat production process: killing the animals. If they refused to do so, the plant shut down. In the late
1940s they did just that, bringing work to a halt in support of ending the racial segregation of “women’s
jobs.” Breakthroughs occurred first in Chicago at Swift’s after years of organizing by a multi-racial
women’s committee. Then other locals stepped up their anti-discrimination efforts. In Waterloo, Iowa,
when the Rath Company hired black women in the sliced bacon department for the first time, white
women threatened a walkout. Only when black men in the hog-kill department countered by refusing to
work did the company decide to retain its new hires. By 1954, in meatpacking plants across the country,
white and minority women now stood next to each other on the line, used the same rest rooms and locker
rooms, ate in the same cafeteria, and were entitled to the same union rights and benefits.
Blue-collar workers, like those in the Packinghouse Union, also fought racial segregation in the
community, integrating restaurants near the plant and forming community organizations to agitate for better
housing, credit, and other basic necessities. In the UAW, for example, African American Lillian Hatcher
and white southerner Caroline Davis, whose friendship deepened after their arrest for eating together in a
Jim Crow Detroit restaurant, sought similar kinds of reforms. As leaders of an influential multi-racial
group of men and women linked to the union’s Women’s Department and its Civil Rights Division, they
pressed the UAW to fight for the rights of all women to job security, promotional opportunities, and just
wages. They lobbied within the UAW for more attention to workplace discrimination against married
women, women of color, and mothers. They also partnered with civil rights organizations like the
National Council of Negro Women and urged the UAW to throw its considerable political and financial
weight behind the 1955 Montgomery bus boycotts and the other mass civil rights protests that would
follow.