The Color Line and the Assembly Line

The Color Line and the Assembly Line is a study of Ford Motor Company, a dominant force in the twentieth-century American economy. In 1927, for example, “Ford was the largest employer in the largest industry in the largest economy in the world” (p. 4). Elizabeth D. Esch focuses particularly on Ford's racial hiring practices in the interwar years, challenging long-standing claims about the company's willingness to hire black workers. Ford employed ten thousand African Americans by 1930, at a time when other auto firms hired very few black workers. This has helped many scholars view it favorably. Challenging the U.S.-centric view that Ford was a “paternalist” company that uplifted blacks, Esch instead argues that Ford was not more socially progressive than other automakers in Detroit (p. xii). Rather, Ford “helped to strengthen belief in the color line” (p. 5). Even at the massive Rouge plant in Detroit, Ford segregated black workers into the most dangerous and dirty jobs and treated them as little better than “colonized subjects” (pp. 5, 8). Some black workers referred to the Rouge factory as the “house of murder” (p. 19

Assembly line · Clothing · Color line · Economic history · Empire · Factory (object-oriented programming · Paternalism · Political science · Race (biology · Sociology · Engineering · Gender Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society

• French universalist disparities

  Open Access•Daniel N Maroun•French Cultural Studies•2024

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