Overview

In 1961, there were an estimated one thousand plus African Americans working at Mare Island Naval Shipyard (hereinafter also referred to as Mare Island or The Shipyard) in Vallejo, California, with the great majority of them being men. For decades, they had suffered under organized, systematic, and, sometimes, unconscious discriminatory working conditions in hiring, training, promotions, and equal pay opportunities. In many ways, the working conditions for those in the production shops were better than those found in the private sector for similar work, especially in the building trades. However, increasingly, for at least the three decades preceding 1960, there had been growing dissatisfaction with the status quo among a small but growing group of the African American workers, especially among those working in the skill trades. In 1961, a relatively small group of the African American workers, constituting less than 5% of its total number employed at Mare Island, led by Willie Long, decided to organize and file a complaint of discrimination with the Federal Government. Notwithstanding resistance and foot-dragging from the leadership in Washington, at Mare Island, and eventual internal strife within the group's leadership, that action helped to bring about slow but measurable long-term change at The Shipyard, as well as at other federal installations in the area and beyond.

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9781540310811

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Jake Sloan has spent most of his adult life working in the areas of civil rights, affirmative action and income inequality for Mrican Americans. After serving in the military, Mr. Sloan started his working career as a pipefitter, working mainly on the construction of nuclear submarines. After leaving that field of work, while attending college, for a number of years he worked mainly in the area of programs directed at equal access and equality in training and pay for African Americans in building trades of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area. Since 1985, Mr. Sloan has owned Davillier-Sloan, Inc., one of California's largest labor-management consulting firms, with a focus on the construction industry. Mr. Sloan holds an MA degree in history from San Francisco State University. The subject of his MA thesis was Blacks in Construction: A Case Study of Oakland, California, and the Oakland Public Schools Construction Program 1960-1978. Mr. Sloan is currently completing work that will lead to a PhD in Higher Education and Social Change at the Western Institute for Social Research in Berkeley, California.

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