Free The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan

suitcase inside. Jane was still dating someone from back at UT in Knoxville, but couldn’t help but notice the polite young man. Up the stairs that handsome man went, where larger guest rooms had been crammed full of Army cots to accommodate Jane and others who were waiting for housing, waiting for training, waiting for the next dorm to be built. But waiting looked like it would be a real pleasure with interesting work, good pay, and a town full of mannerly young men at your beck and call.
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    When news of the big war factory in Tennessee spread as far south as Kattie’s home in Auburn, Alabama, it hadn’t arrived by word of mouth alone. Recruiters had set off throughout the rural south seeking laborers by the droves. J. A. Jones Construction, responsible for the construction of the gargantuan K-25 plant where Willie worked, hit Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi for as many workers as they could get their hands on, sometimes bending rules established by the War Manpower Commission (WMC)—one of several acronym-wielding labor bureaucracies that had been established to regulate the recruiting and distribution of the workforce throughout a country desperately in need of war workers. Complaints were filed, one by the WMC stating that a J. A. Jones recruiter, in an act of “labor piracy,” had pulled up to a United States Employment Service office in Mobile, Alabama, with a large truck and left with 40 black workers bound for jobs in Tennessee.
    In 1942, presidential Executive Order 8802 stated that “there shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color or national origin.” The Fair Employment Practices Committee had also been established to address discrimination in wartime industries. But that did not mean an end to segregation in a Jim Crow state likeTennessee. Though the government had the opportunity to establish the Reservation as a completely desegregated zone, it did not; black residents on the grounds of the Clinton Engineer Works would be primarily laborers, janitors, and domestics, and would live separately, no matter their education or background. This would prevent noted mathematician, physicist, and engineer J. Ernest Wilkins Jr., who was working at the Metallurgical Lab at the University of Chicago, from being transferred to Oak Ridge.
    In September 1944, Hungarian physicist Edward Teller wrote Harold Urey, director of war research at Columbia, of Wilkins’s abilities and the problem his race would present in a transfer to Site X.
Mr. Wilkins in Wigner’s group at the Metallurgical Laboratory has been doing, according to Wigner, excellent work. He is a colored man and since Wigner’s group is moving to “X” it is not possible for him to continue work with that group. I think that it might be a good idea to secure his services for our work.
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    Kattie, Willie, and Harvey entered CEW on the Kingston side, arriving from the southwest, and drove up to the gate. Harvey and Willie knew the drill now. Guards stopped the car and directed the trio up a short road to a processing building where Kattie could retrieve her official working papers. She returned to the gate, showed the guards, and—badge in hand—was now allowed full entrance onto the Reservation.
    Harvey and Willie took her next to the Camp Operations Office for the K-25 plant where, Kattie learned, she would begin working as part of the janitorial service. She had never glimpsed anything like K-25 in all her life. The building wasn’t even finished yet and it was already the biggest thing she had ever seen. The building was so long that she couldn’t even see where it ended, if it ended. And the construction workers milling around were still adding to it.
    Kattie’s new living assignment, on the other hand, was notably smaller: a 16-foot-by-16-foot “hutment,” a square plywood box of a structure that had a potbellied stove sitting right