Job lockout
African Americans and Asian Americans
were also excluded from most of the better paid and desirable jobs.
Until World War II, even factory jobs were reserved for whites
while most people of color were stuck in menial positions.
Protests, court decisions, and
state and federal laws gradually pried open job
opportunities in the 1960s, but as that decade ended it was still
rare to find African Americans in white collar and
professional positions.
While working for the Urban League in
the late 1940s,
Vivian Caver was encouraged to become one of the first African American saleswomen in a downtown Seattle department store. Caver much later
worked in the
Seattle Human Rights Department, serving as the department’s chair from 1978 to
1981. (2
min.)