When I went to work for Lockheed-Georgia Company in September of 1952 I had no idea that this would end up being my life s work. With these words, Harry Hudson, the first African American supervisor at Lockheed Aircraft s Georgia facility, begins his account of a thirty-six-year career that spanned the postwar civil rights movement and the Cold War.

Hudson was not a civil rights activist, yet he knew he was helping to break down racial barriers that had long confined African Americans to lower-skilled, nonsupervisory jobs. His previously unpublished memoir is an inside account of both...