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A large and historically important American car manufacturer. During World War II, the federal government took control of Ford factories and used them for war-related manufacturing purposes. Although Ford did not hire “Mexican or Black Workers” before this, the shortage of labor during World War II led it to change its policies, meaning that minority workers like Frank Stevenson could find stable, middle-class jobs at Ford factories in places like Richmond, CA. However, in an ironic twist of fate, after World War II, the very affordability and availability of cars like Ford’s made it comparatively more lucrative for Ford Motor to build larger factories in more remote areas, as opposed to in more cramped cities like Richmond. In California, Ford opened a new factory in Milpitas, where black people were not able to find housing. Although the United Auto Workers union defended African American Ford workers and allowed them to keep their jobs after the war, the factory’s relocation to Milpitas meant these workers had to commute from faraway Richmond to continue working. This series of events shows both how mid-20th-century manufacturing jobs gave many African Americans a middle-class wage for the first time, but also how discriminatory policies like government-sponsored, de jure residential segregation made it much harder for them to actually convert that wage into a middle-class life.
Ford Motor Quotes in The Color of Law
The The Color of Law quotes below are all either spoken by Ford Motor or refer to Ford Motor. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 8
Quotes
The Milpitas story illustrates the extraordinary creativity that government officials at all levels displayed when they were motivated to prevent the movement of African Americans into white neighborhoods. It wasn’t only the large-scale federal programs of public housing and mortgage finance that created de jure segregation. Hundreds, if not thousands of smaller acts of government contributed. They included petty actions like denial of access to public utilities; determining, once African Americans wanted to build, that their property was, after all, needed for parkland; or discovering that a road leading to African American homes was “private.” They included routing interstate highways to create racial boundaries or to shift the residential placement of African American families. And they included choosing school sites to force families to move to segregated neighborhoods if they wanted education for their children.
Taken in isolation, we can easily dismiss such devices as aberrations. But when we consider them as a whole, we can see that they were part of a national system by which state and local government supplemented federal efforts to maintain the status of African Americans as a lower caste, with housing segregation preserving the badges and incidents of slavery.
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Ford Motor Term Timeline in The Color of Law
The timeline below shows where the term Ford Motor appears in The Color of Law. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1: If San Francisco, Then Everywhere?
...he arrived in Richmond during World War II, Frank Stevenson quickly found work at a Ford Motor auto manufacturing plant that was temporarily under government control. Although Ford refused to hire...
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Car sales spiked in the 1950s, leading Ford to build a larger plant in Milpitas, which is an hour’s drive southwest from Richmond....
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Chapter 8: Local Tactics
...to reduce his commute time because the “FHA- and VA-insured subdivisions” sprouting up near the Ford Motor plant where he worked were only open to white people. A major developer of...
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...pro-integration religious Quaker organization called the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) sought to help black Ford workers find housing in all-white Milpitas. Since no existing neighborhood would accept African American people,...
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...a real estate agent—to hike the price of Agua Caliente's sewer access tenfold. In protest, Ford workers refused to buy the new houses, and the ASFC's builder and Bohannon both got...
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...a workaround to get mortgages for its buyers, it was too late. First, most white Ford workers had already found homes in segregated neighborhoods, so they did not go to Sunnyhills....
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Chapter 10: Suppressed Incomes
...to work. The UAW was initially resistant to letting African American people work at the Ford Motor plant in Richmond, for example, but eventually agreed to let them take progressively better-paying...
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In this chapter’s Part IX, Rothstein tells the story of Mahwah, New Jersey. Just as Ford moved from Richmond to Milpitas in California, it moved from a small site near New...
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