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Friend,
The wail of the sirens seemed to go on forever. Playing with friends outside her elementary school on a mild February day in 1971, 9-year-old Melissa Jackson wished the piercing noise would stop. She could not have imagined that the sound of firetrucks speeding toward the munitions plant where her mother worked would punctuate her nightmares for the rest of her life.
The little girl could not have known when her mother dropped her off the morning of Feb. 3, before heading to the Thiokol Chemical Corp. factory to make flares for soldiers fighting in Vietnam, that it would be the last time she would see her alive. She would not know until much later the details of how her mother died, hit in the back of the head as she tried to flee one of the worst industrial disasters in United States history.
Jackson’s mother was killed along with her cousin and 27 other employees of the factory, predominantly Black women, after a flame in a small building, according to court records, triggered a massive explosion. The blast blew pieces of the building almost a mile away, left more than 50 other people injured and shattered a community.
The sleepy, coastal town of Woodbine, Georgia, would be changed forever, as hearses were drawn into service to transport victims to nearby hospitals, some already dead, others wracked with pain from missing limbs, serious burns and other injuries that would affect them the rest of their lives.
Just a girl that day, giggling with friends and thinking the world was open and bright, Jackson could not have known what now, 51 years later, she understands all too well: The Thiokol explosion would become another chapter of history searing to Black Americans but unknown to the nation at large. It would not be included in history books. It would not be studied by scholars. It would not be taught to schoolchildren or explored by archivists, even in the town where the explosion occurred. Like so much that has shaped the lives of Black Americans, the history of the Thiokol disaster would quiet to a whisper, even as those sirens still wail through Jackson’s sleep.
“There is no scholarship on this,” Jackson said. “There is no historical memory or understanding of this. For me, the memory of the whole day is still very vivid and very painful and very clear. But outside of those few of us who remember, it’s like it has been erased.”
Today, Jackson is the graduate program coordinator of the joint Florida A&M University-Florida State University College of Engineering. Like many children of the explosion survivors, and the survivors themselves, she sees the history of the Thiokol plant and of the disaster through the lens of systemic racism that made a shoddily maintained munitions factory paying workers less than $18 a day (less than roughly $130 when adjusted for inflation) the best option for people who should have had opportunities for better.
“Here were Black women in a small Southern town on an assembly line making weapons for the war that young men, many of them Black young men, were fighting,” Jackson said. “They should be looked on as heroes, because in actuality that’s what they were.”
Last fall, the Southern Poverty Law Center stepped in to help a small, local organization in Woodbine, the Thiokol Memorial Project, bring the tragedy back into the light. It granted the project $50,000 – more than it has received at any one time since it was founded in 2015. The grant was one of five awarded by the SPLC to support the work of museums, monuments and cultural centers devoted to Black history.
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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