During the 1950s, the Esso Standard Oil refinery’s gangly smokestacks and labyrinthine pipes brought the Gulf Coast’s oil boom home to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The physical difference between the gritty metallic refining plant and Esso’s gleaming cube-shaped office building marked the distance between its white- and blue-collar workers. Esso separated its black and white workers less obviously, but no less completely. The office building, like others on the Gulf Coast, housed whites only. Within the refinery, work was also highly segregated. As in many industrial plants, African Americans were hired into an unskilled labor pool at the refinery, where they remained throughout their tenure. In contrast, white workers were hired into and progressed up lines of increasingly skilled and better-paying jobs.

Job segregation like that practiced at Esso left African Americans vulnerable. The American economy boomed after World War II, buoyed by pent-up consumer demand and ambitious government spending on infrastructure and defense. But the war’s end flooded the labor market with demobilized soldiers, many of whom had greater seniority than recently hired black workers. Mechanization continued apace, turning the United States into a majority white-collar workforce and eliminating the low-skilled jobs into which African Americans were shunted. Even the most secure among African American workers, those with skills and unions, were knocked from their elite perch as federally funded highways facilitated deindustrialization of the northern urban centers in which they clustered and corporations sought cheaper labor and weaker unions down South.