Betty Hardison and the American Dream

In 2009 Betty Hardison recorded her memories of the Richmond shipyards. What
she remembered warmly was the neighbours: "We remained good friends throughout
our lives, with lots of good memories, and watched children being added."

*Betty, her husband Don and their son outside their Atchison Village home in

1946. NPS, Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front NHP, RORI 3623.*

Her account is worth reading twice. Once for what it says about how wartime
work reshaped home life — and once for what it does not say, which is that
almost every step of the Hardisons' path ran through a federal programme that
excluded Black Americans by design.

Richmond became a boomtown

Federal shipbuilding money remade the East Bay. Workers moved west for defence
jobs — women, and African Americans leaving the South. With 55 war industries,
Richmond's population went from under 24,000 to over 100,000. Its Black
population went from 270 to 10,000.

Six million American women entered the workforce during the war. Many were
"Rosie the Riveters" in industrial jobs; many more did administrative work. At
the Kaiser Shipyards women were 27% of the workforce, and the yards built
747 ships.

Atchison Village

Betty and Don moved into a one-bedroom unit of a four-plex at 164 Collins
Street, in
Atchison Village —
government worker housing with winding streets, generous yards, a community
centre and a park.

Her description of daily life is rationing, packed lunches, mismatched cheap
furniture and weekends of laundry, and her tone is cheerful throughout. When
their victory garden failed the neighbours shared theirs. They joined a church
and a group of young couples called the Mariners, and ate a lot of tuna and
chicken casserole.

*Atchison Village, Collins Street, Richmond. Historic American Engineering
Record, Library of Congress.*

Having their own place made them unusual. Tens of thousands of arrivals
overwhelmed the city. People lived in tents, boats and cars, and in Betty's
words "many even slept in movie theaters." She mentions that spare rooms in
private homes were offered — which was the federal war guest programme,
leasing rooms from Richmond's white families to white workers.

Black migrants had to find housing through their own networks. Where that
failed, residential segregation pushed them onto unincorporated land near the
city dump, without running water, electricity or sanitation.

By 1943 the federal government had built 21,000 public housing units
holding 60% of Richmond's population — the largest federal housing
programme in the country. Most of it was barracks and single-sex dormitories.
Atchison Village, the well-designed one, admitted white workers only. Where
projects did admit African Americans, the Richmond Housing Authority assigned
them to separate buildings and forbade integrated activities.

The dream, and the subsidy under it

The Hardisons' first child arrived in late 1945. Betty ends her account in
triumph: "we remained in our Atchison Village apartment until 1948, when we
purchased our first home." A single-family suburban house in Richmond — the
postwar American dream, and in the Cold War that followed, the image of
democratic abundance itself.

Two facts sit alongside that:

• By 1950, almost 80% of Richmond's Black population lived in
  government-funded war housing built as temporary and scheduled for
  demolition. All-white developments like Atchison were designed as permanent
  from the start.
• The federal government approved bank loans for a new Richmond suburb,
  Rollingwood, on the stipulation that **none of its 700 homes be sold to
  African Americans.**

Richmond's suburbs were not unusual. They were what federally financed,
mass-produced white suburbia looked like across the country after the war.

Sources

Written from Nicole Martin's account for the National Park Service's *Home and
Homelands* exhibition, drawing on Betty Hardison's own 2009 recollection. A
work of the United States government in the public domain.