Hugh Gordon of east Cobb, a retired Lockheed Martin human resources executive, played a leading role in the nation’s early affirmative action policy, something the native Southerner said he’s proud of.

As a young executive, Gordon, now 88, said he volunteered to lead Lockheed's efforts to hire more minorities in positions at the Marietta aeronautical plant beginning in the 1950s. In doing so, he paved the way for other corporations to follow and helped Lockheed continue to receive a steady flow of federal defense contracts that proved vital to its success.

In light of his unique role, Gordon donated to Kennesaw State University his personal collection of documents, letters, photos and other materials that chronicle the desegregation of Lockheed in the 1950s, '60s and '70s. It totals 18 feet of material dating back to 1951, when Gordon first began working for the company.

"It was my calling," Gordon said of his work. "Just like a minister, just like church, it was my calling. I can't explain it any better than that."

While much has been recorded of the integration of schools, buses, restaurants and public places, historians know little of how private workplaces in the South were integrated. Hence, the official Gordon, Kruse, Wentzel Collection was well-received when it was first donated by Gordon in May 2009. KSU recently completed categorizing much of it.

"It's an extremely significant collection, first of all, because it does tell this story from an angle that has not been fully explored, yet," said Tamara Livingston, director of KSU's Department of Archives, Special Collections and Records Management.

"This collection dovetails nicely with some other collections that we have. For example, the Cobb County NAACP papers. We just received the papers of (late Marietta Councilman) Mr. Hugh Grogan. We have photographs of the Bell Bomber Plant, a little bit earlier than Mr. Gordon's collection. All of these dovetail."

In the South, restrooms, cafeterias, water fountains and assembly lines were separated by race since Reconstruction. Many jobs were denied to blacks. Lockheed was no different. However, as early as the 1950s, the company began hiring more black employees, before the Kennedy and Johnson administrations acted in the 1960s with executive orders to mandate employers receiving federal funds to take affirmative action to integrate.

The company proactively recruited and trained 1,200 blacks for semi-skilled and skilled aircraft jobs, according to documents in the Gordon collection.

But, in March 1961, Lockheed was forced to speed up its integration efforts when it was awarded a billion-dollar contract for the C-141 StarLifter aircraft, said Dr. Tom Scott, a historian at KSU.

A few weeks earlier, President John F. Kennedy had issued Executive Order 10925, which outlawed racial discrimination by government agencies and contractors. The NAACP immediately filed complaints against Lockheed for its continued segregation at the Marietta plant, Scott said.

"The Lockheed Corporation entered into negotiations with Kennedy's newly created Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity; and on May 25, 1961, Lockheed signed the nation's first 'Plans for Progress,' a voluntary plan to integrate facilities and put affirmative action policies in place," Scott said.

Lockheed was the first company to sign. At the time, the affirmative action pact was called a milestone. It became a model for hundreds of other such pacts involving companies.

"To some degree, Lockheed assembly lines had already started desegregating. Shortly after the Plans for Progress was signed, Lockheed eliminated segregated bathrooms, water fountains and food services, and took steps to bring blacks into management positions and otherwise to promote diversity. Needless to say, there would be many bumps in the road as Lockheed made progress toward diversity, but this was the start."

Charles Ferguson had moved from Florida to attend Atlanta's Morris Brown College, a historically black college, for one year before settling in Marietta, and getting a groundskeeper job at Lockheed in the early 1950s.

In a 2007 KSU oral history interview, Fergunson said blacks were initially limited to groundskeeping and janitorial jobs at Lockheed. Ultimately, he worked his way up to an assembly line supervisor before retiring in the 1980s. But the plant's process of desegregation was something he keenly remembered decades later.

"You'd be surprised; I think that the most surprising thing to me was that for a long time there were many people who would not use the restrooms," said Fergunson.

"They were segregated, of course, according to sex, you know, all the females go to one and all the males go to one, but there were many white males that would not go into the integrated bathroom. They were nothing but urinals and the commodes and the washbasins, that was all that was in there, but they would not go. I don't know how they did it, they would hold their water or something, but they wouldn't use the restroom."

From his managerial desk, Gordon recalled relatively little hostility between blacks and white workers inside the plant; besides black workers occasionally having their toolboxes hidden or finding a dead rat inside them. But those were the exceptions, he said. Fights by anyone would almost guarantee termination, according to Gordon.

Raised in Norfolk, Va. during the Jim Crow era, Gordon seemingly was an unlikely candidate to assist blacks in the civil rights movement. After serving in the Army Air Corp in the Pacific Theater during World War II, he used the GI Bill to graduate with an industrial engineering degree from Virginia Tech. He and his wife, Jo Gordon, then moved to Atlanta, where he received a master's degree from Georgia Tech.

In 1951, Gordon first began working as a manufacturing technician at Lockheed. He worked his way up the management ladder and eventually retired from the company as director of personnel in 1988.

In the early portion of his career, Gordon was Lockheed's representative to local and national organizations and encouraged businesses to adopt voluntary affirmative action plans. In 1965, he was a founding member of the Atlanta Employers' Voluntary Merit Employment Association, which worked to improve the employment prospects for minority applicants in metro Atlanta. Eighty-seven companies joined within the first year.

Much of the donated collection at KSU documents Gordon's journey to integrate companies.

"I went around and made a lot of talks to organizations and chambers of commerce," Gordon said.

"I spent a lot of time on the road talking to business people through their organizations. Copies of all of those talks are in here," he said pointing to a stack of boxes containing his donation. "That's what I would tell them - times are changing."

At one time, Lockheed was Cobb County's largest employer and biggest corporate taxpayer. Today, the plant's thousands of employees are led by general manager and executive vice president Lee Rhyant, who is black.

"There was certainly plenty of racism, as Mr. Ferguson points out. But most moderate, objective people thought that preserving the C-141 contract and the employment opportunities it provided, was far more important than preserving a system of segregation that was clearly on its way out," Scott said.

"Having a national corporation with national contracts in Cobb County went a long way toward moving the area into the national mainstream