D-Day, one of America's proudest, if bloodiest, moments in World War II, was one of the most shameful days in Cincinnati's wartime history.
While tens of thousands of Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944, more than 15,000 workers at the Wright Aeronautical Corporation plant in Lockland walked off their plane-engine manufacturing jobs in a strike precipitated by management's decision to upgrade a handful of black workers in a nearly all-white department.
After a four-day strike ended by a work-or-be-fired ultimatum issued by the War Labor Board, the Wright employees finally returned to their jobs -- but not before being roundly denounced both locally and nationally as unpatriotic.
"You Wright strikers, what will you say to the fathers and mothers of those men who fall in France?" The Post thundered in a front-page editorial on D-Day. "Will you -- keep this un-American prejudice alive at the expense of American soldiers and sailors?"
Source: Cincinnati Post
