After reading Randall L. Patton's account of Lockheed's thirty-year effort to desegregate its aircraft production facility in Marietta, Georgia, Lockheed executives must have thought, “No good deed goes unpunished.” According to Patton, Lockheed was in the vanguard of Deep South firms in “promoting a more racially diversified workforce” during the 1950s (16). In the 1960s, it led “efforts to develop public-private partnerships to address equal employment opportunity” (16). And in the 1970s, Lockheed executives provided leadership to job-training programs for longtime unemployed Black workers. Yet it continually found itself in the crosshairs of the NAACP, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), its own Black workers, and Atlanta's Black officials, charged with employment discrimination. Patton provides enough evidence to argue that perhaps both Lockheed's executives and their critics have a point.
By recounting Lockheed's efforts to desegregate its workforce, Patton provides a new vantage point on the issue. Unlike most books...
