How Black Shipyard Workers in Marin Helped Win World War II

The Marin Headlands, Sweeney Ridge, Treasure Island, Port Chicago, Moffett Field — these are just a few local spots with important World War II history. In fact, the Bay Area played a major role in the war effort in many ways, like housing and training troops in the Presidio before their deployment to the Pacific, caring for wounded soldiers at Letterman Hospital and building the ships used to transport food and war materials around the world.

Lise Ciolino discovered some local World War II history while exploring her new neighborhood in Sausalito. She visited an exhibit about Marinship, a huge shipyard on Sausalito’s bayfront that sprang up after the U.S. officially entered the war in 1941. Workers there built huge cargo ships, known as “liberty ships,” as well as tankers to carry fuel.

“I’m new to Sausalito,” Lise said, “and I wanted to know how the liberty ships produced in Sausalito affected the outcome of World War II.”

Liberty ships were massive cargo ships modeled after a British design commonly known as ocean ships. Marinship started out manufacturing these huge ships, but then switched to building the faster victory ships that succeeded them.

“Without the ships and supplies from North America and elsewhere to Europe, especially to the British, World War II would have been lost,” said Jan Keizer, a member of the Sausalito Historical Society.

By 1941, Europe had already been at war for several years. German U-boats were effective at sinking merchant vessels carrying food and supplies to Britain. Without the extra ships quickly manufactured at shipyards like Marinship and the Kaiser shipyards in Richmond, among others, U.S. allies would have starved, explained Keizer.

“We overwhelmed the enemy with volume of material,” he said. “That was the purpose of the ships.”

Marinship alone manufactured over 90 vessels in a few short years. At the peak of its production, workers were cranking out a massive new boat every 10 days. Not only were the shipyards crucial to winning the war, but they changed the culture and society of the Bay Area in other ways as well. Hundreds of thousands of Black Americans migrated to the Bay Area from the South, fleeing racism and looking for better-paying jobs. Their contribution to the war effort — along with the racist treatment they encountered when they got here — is often left out of stories about this time.

But a group of Marin teenagers has been working to document this important history — sometimes including stories of their own family members — through art. The Marinovators, led by hip-hop educator MC Jahi, wrote and produced an album called “A Way Out of No Way,” which highlights the contributions of Black workers at Marinship and celebrates local heroes like Joseph James, Rodessa Battle and Reverend Leon Samuels.

As Pendarvis Harshaw and Marisol Medina-Cadena from the KQED podcast Rightnowish put it:

“These unsung heroes helped the fight abroad by constructing wartime ships, and championing civil rights on the home front. Broadway singer turned shipyard welder Joseph James notably spearheaded a legal battle against the segregated union at Marinship that denied equal benefits to Black workers. His lawsuit challenged the racial discrimination, and made its way to the California Supreme Court, laying the foundation for other discrimination cases. And it’s a story that gets told on the album.”

Check out their episode featuring the young creators behind the album. They share what it meant to discover the stories of people left out of their history classes and the responsibility of being culture keepers, the folks keeping memory alive through art and virtual reality.