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Louise Thomas was tired. She had worked hard for no pay at the Commerce School in Detroit, learning riveting in a defense training class. She spent 120 hours in the classroom, sacrificing weeks of income for the chance at a wartime job, one that paid much more than the average job an African-American woman in Detroit could get at that time. She passed the riveting course with flying colors, and in 1942 she went to Ford's Willow Run bomber plant to secure employment as she had heard that the factory desperately needed female riveters. On two separate occasions she spent money on bus fare to get to the site, only to sit and wait in an employment office. Finally, two different personnel officers told her that they could not place her. When Thomas returned to the school to question her riveting instructor about the situation, she overheard him telling the other teachers that "the school was not for colored girls and they were not going to get any employment."1 She also heard him tell another black woman that if African American women had left jobs to take the riveting class, they had better return to them, as Detroit factories would never hire them. Thomas was not going to go back to her former job. She had trained for a war-defense position, and she was going to fight for the right to work at a skilled job for decent pay. Moreover, she was familiar with the fact that many women had already complained to the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) about Ford's hiring practices, but that the FEPC had failed to eliminate discrimination in the Willow Run plant. Thomas took her story to one of Detroit's major black newspapers in order to publicize the situation African-American working-class women faced in the city. She spoke for many black women when she stated