Firestone Memphis: A Local Example of 1950's Resistance to the Status-Quo

For my final research paper in my Civil Rights in Memphis class, I decided to look at segregation and employee discrimination based on race. A lot of what I found was in line with our Remembering Jim Crow book that we read in class. For my research, I looked at the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company that was brought to Memphis in 1937 and left in the 1980’s due to the changing tire industry. When Memphis was the city chosen for the Firestone plant in the 1930’s, city officials proclaimed it as a great hope for the future of Memphis. Headlines and articles in the Commercial Appeal and Memphis Press-Scimitar praised Firestone for bettering the city and surrounding community economically and with the cordial relationships seen among Firestone employees. While the media portrayed Firestone Memphis as a great example of racial harmony and as a community builder, oral interviews and grievances filed by African American workers at the plant presented a different history. In my paper, I went into further detail about racial discrimination seen in the plant, specifically the use of a “dual system of seniority” where black workers were only hired for designated “black jobs”, exclusively being jobs of lower pay and the worst working environments in the factory. This system kept the African American employees perpetually at the bottom and maintained the status-quo. The company interestingly argued after multiple grievances were filed, that they were just following the traditions set by the locality of Memphis and that segregation and discrimination were ok as long as everyone accepted it and it was not a secret system. The year of this case was 1956, 2 years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. This resistance of African American workers serves as a local groundswell and implementation of national legislation that was locally disregarded. Eventually, the group of around 30 African American employees at Firestone were able to secretly collecting money among themselves in order to eventually hire a lawyer to sue both the United Rubber Workers and the local and national Firestone Company for maintaining segregation in civil court. The suit filed in the chancery court of Shelby County charged the URW and the Company with conspiring to follow “practice, customs, and arrangements…to deprive them of their rights, job assignments, and employments, which their seniority entitled them to solely because of race and color.” The case was eventually settled out of court and oral interviews of workers note some changes in the Firestone plant beginning in 1957, yet these changes were few and met with great resistance.

This case is especially relevant to our class because of the area where Firestone Memphis was located. The abandoned building is still there at the location that is about a 5 minute drive from Rhodes. The neighborhood referred to as New Chicago surrounds the old Firestone Plant. Since the plant’s departure, the neighborhood, a predominantly African American community, has faced increased crime and poverty. In this case, Firestone served as a symbol of hope, yet within its own walls, practiced a system of segregation and discrimination against its African American workers. Local efforts like the one seen at Firestone often go unnoticed by the master narrative of the Civil Rights Movement.

A great book on this topic is Professor Michael Honey's Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, And The Freedom Struggle.