Rosie the Riveter Memorial Park Set to Expand

[Omaha Steve]

My Mother worked on the Enola Gay at the Martin bomber plant. Our house is just us few miles from there. Marta and I also saw President Clinton there in Dec. of 2000.

http://blog.aflcio.org/2007/09/30/rosie-the-riveter-memorial-park-set-to-expand/

by Mike Hall, Sep 30, 2007

Even the most history-challenged among us have a passing knowledge of “Rosie the Riveter”—the symbol of the 6 million women of all backgrounds who became the manufacturing backbone of World War II America.

It was an era where most women didn’t work outside the home, let alone in male-dominated occupations, but that all changed as millions of men were called into the military. Rosie worked in airplane plants, tank factories, munitions plants, steel mills and shipyards.



Today in Richmond, Calif., there is a Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historic Park at the site of the Kaiser Shipyards, where unionized workers turned out a Liberty Ship every four days. Recently, John August, executive director of the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, had an opportunity to visit the park.

The story that this park memorializes and will tell, is the story of the Home Front; that is, the story of the civilian workers who built the material and machines that made the war effort possible.

The workplaces of the United States were transformed forever, as giant shipyards and other industrial complexes around the country employed women, African American and other people of color, in many cases for the first time….Unions were in the center of this social change, in some cases promoting integration, in other cases not; but through the unions, many barriers were broken long before Jackie Robinson played for the Dodgers or schools were integrated. It was, in many ways, the origin of the civil rights movement. Indeed, a movement that was directly tied to social and economic change coming from unionized workplaces.

While the park contains a memorial dedicated in 2000 and other displays, plans call for the park to also include Shipyard #3 (the remaining shipyard in Richmond), a Home Front Visitor and Education Center in the nearby Ford Assembly Building and other structures remaining from the period, including day care centers, war workers’ housing and the Kaiser Field Hospital.

On Saturday, Rosie supporters held a special dinner to launch a fund-raising drive to move the plans along, and August has urged unions to get involved in the project. For more information, visit http://www.rosietheriveter.org./.