The Black Families Who Built Gary’s Middle Class

Ernest Mosley planned to stay three years.

Fresh out of high school in 1975, he walked three blocks from his East Chicago home to Inland Steel looking for work. He had hoped to become a carpenter or bricklayer. Instead, he found himself staring at one of the largest steel plants in America, looking for a way to help his mother raise six younger children.

The company told him they would be in touch. By the time he got home, the phone rang.

“They told me to come right back,” Mosley recalled. He started the next morning. Mosley was 18 years old.

Three years turned into 38. The steel mill helped him buy a home, support younger siblings, weather layoffs, and retire with a pension. It gave him something his family, like thousands of Black families who came north before them, had spent generations searching for: economic security.

Mosley’s story is also the story of Black Gary. 

For much of the 20th century, steel mills created one of the most reliable pathways into the Black middle class, allowing Southern migrants to build stable lives and helping create opportunities for the generations that followed. The jobs paid wages that allowed many workers to buy homes, raise families, and achieve a middle-class life without a college degree, helping reshape Black economic life throughout Northwest Indiana.

The work was dangerous, physically demanding, and, eventually, vulnerable to the layoffs and automation that reshaped the industry. 

But when the money was good, it was good.

“There were families that were telling their kids, ‘You can make more money in the mill than you’re ever going to make as a school teacher,’” said historian James B. Lane, professor emeritus at Indiana University Northwest.

If the mills offered young men like Mosley an unexpected ticket to wealth, they offered Black women of that same generation something even rarer: an independent foothold in the middle class.

 

An economic opportunity for women

 

Growing up in Gary, Stephanie Chinn never questioned whether her mother’s job mattered. Everybody knew it did.

The mills paid more than almost anything else available to Black workers. Children understood that a steelworker’s paycheck could change a household’s future.

“If you looked at the wages of what a basic entry-level steel person made, it was the highest of whatever everybody else was doing,” Chinn said.

Chinn’s recollection reflects the high wages steel workers earned at the time.

By 1984, as the steel industry was already shrinking, the average steel production worker still earned $11.87 an hour, according to a federal industry survey. Adjusted for inflation, that would equal more than $39 an hour today.

The wages helped explain why generations of Northwest Indiana families viewed mill jobs not simply as work, but as a pathway into the middle class.

Chinn’s mother, Doris Hare, understood this. After moving north from Columbus, Georgia, Hare spent three decades working in the steel industry. She started as a laborer, washed company vehicles, lit switch heaters, and later moved into a position removing sulfur from incoming iron ore. Her career spanned some of the very opportunities that had long been denied to Black workers and women. To Chinn, the job represented more than a paycheck.

“I thought my mom’s job was awesome,” she said. “You’re responsible for building bridges that people use all over the world.” Then she paused.

“And she was a woman too.”

For Black women of Hare’s generation, steel jobs represented something rare: health benefits and long-term stability. 

When Hare first got hired, her husband balked.

“You already got a job,” he told her.

“Doing what?” she asked.

“Taking care of me and my girls,” he said.

Hare laughed at the memory.

“Well, “ she told him, “now I have two.”

She brushed him off and took the job anyway.

For the next three decades, she pulled double shifts — one on the mill floor, one at home. 

The work helped the family buy a home in Miller, a lakefront neighborhood that remains Gary’s most affluent community and one where many Black families had not traditionally lived. 

But the prosperity came with tradeoffs. Steel work was physically demanding, often dangerous, and not always welcoming to Black workers or women.

Hare remembers encountering racism on the job. Early in her career, when part of her duties involved washing company vehicles, a white co-worker questioned why she was cleaning a Black worker’s car before a white worker’s car.

At the same time, she remembers supervisors who encouraged her advancement and co-workers who helped her navigate an industry slowly opening its doors to Black workers and women.

Hare’s experience reflected a broader reality for many Black workers in the mills.

As migration from the South accelerated, families arrived from Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas and Georgia seeking opportunities denied to them under Jim Crow.

Gary offered one. But initially the opportunity was not equally shared. 

 

Unequal duties

 

In Black Freedom Fighters in Steel, Ruth Needleman wrote that Black workers were often assigned to “the dirty, dead-end, and dangerous jobs” reserved for them inside the mills.

Yet even those positions frequently paid more than many of the alternatives available to Black workers at the time. 

Lane said that by 1970, steel jobs in Northwest Indiana had become synonymous with upward mobility. 

For Black workers, opportunities expanded further after a landmark 1974 consent decree challenged racial discrimination in hiring and promotions and opened additional opportunities for women. The changes addressed barriers that had existed for decades. 

As promotions became more accessible and wages remained strong, many Black families in Gary experienced a level of economic security that had been difficult to attain in previous generations.

“The 1970s was the time when Black people maybe had it more well off than before or since,” Lane said.

Mosley felt that prosperity almost immediately.

When he started at Inland Steel in 1975, he earned about $5 an hour ($31 when adjusted for inflation) — a hefty hourly wage for an 18-year-old still living at home. When his mother asked him to contribute to household expenses, Mosley soon realized she wasn’t asking for nearly enough.

 “I ain’t giving you enough money,” he told her. 

He opened a charge account at a local department store and gave the owner instructions: If his mother came in needing something, put it on his tab.

His generosity extended beyond his own household. 

Many of his friends attended Purdue University Calumet. Mosley often drove them to class and hung out in the cafeteria. 

Sometimes there would be a dozen or more people gathered around a table at lunch, and he’d buy for everyone.

“That’s what that job was able to get me to do,” he said. 

The contrast stayed with him. His friends were in college, preparing for careers they hoped would pay off later. Mosley, already working in the mill, had money in his pocket.

“If you told people you worked in the mill, some thought it was a dirty job,” he said. “But I was making more money than them.”

Those paychecks rippled through entire communities, buying homes, supporting churches, and funding local businesses. They helped create stable Black neighborhoods across Gary, East Chicago, and Northwest Indiana.

Workers even had a nickname for it: golden handcuffs.

The wages could be life-changing. The work could be life-altering.

 

A dangerous deal

 

Long before the mills became symbols of economic mobility, they were dangerous places to work. Before unions gained recognition, workers routinely spent 12-hour shifts on the job under grueling conditions. Lane put it more simply: “It was old age at 40.”

Even after conditions improved, danger remained part of the work. Karl Mosley, Ernest’s younger brother, spent three summers working at Inland Steel while attending college.

One summer, he worked around the coke ovens, where temperatures soared and workers wore specialized gear simply to withstand the heat. During one shift, he slipped near an open oven and nearly fell inside.

 “I caught myself just in time,” he recalled. “Thank God.”

The moment lasted only seconds. He never forgot it. For many workers, stories like that were part of the job.

They endured extreme heat, heavy machinery, and industrial chemicals. Dust regularly settled on homes and cars throughout Northwest Indiana. Lane said residents often viewed pollution as a sign that the mills were thriving.

“They used to say that when there was a whole lot of air pollution, that meant the mills were booming,” he said. 

 

Fortunes change

 

By the 1980s, the bargain that had sustained so many families was beginning to change.

Automation reduced the need for workers. Layoffs swept through mills across Northwest Indiana even as steel production remained strong.

According to the city of Gary’s Comprehensive Plan, employment at U.S. Steel’s Gary Works fell from more than 30,000 workers in 1970 to about 6,000 by 1990. The jobs that had helped build a Black middle class no longer existed.

“More steel is being made than ever before in the region,” Lane said. “But sadly it no longer employs a whole bunch of people.”

This shift hit Ernest Mosley hard. By 1985, he had purchased a home and was building a life in Gary. Then the layoffs arrived. He found himself surviving on $90 a week in unemployment benefits.

“It was the worst time of my life,” he said. One day, sitting with his wife, he told her she might need to take the children and move in with her mother.

Then an envelope arrived from Allstate. He assumed it was another bill.

Instead, it contained a $3,000 check — worth roughly $9,500 today — the result of an insurance overpayment he hadn’t expected.

Tears swelled in Mosley’s eyes as he recalled the moment. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “It was God.”

Not long afterward, Inland Steel called. They wanted him back.

“Come on back Monday,” he remembered hearing.

And he worked there for nearly three more decades. 

 

The mills’ legacy

 

Today, the mills still line the southern shore of Lake Michigan. Their blast furnaces remain part of the region’s skyline, and their economic influence remains significant. 

But the path they once offered has narrowed. 

“It isn’t automatic employment anymore,” Lane said. 

Lane recalls a candid remark from labor leader Ed Sadlowski decades ago.

“A lot of us are working in the mills so our kids and grandkids don’t have to,” he remembered. 

In many families, that wish came true. 

Sons and daughters of steelworkers became teachers, nurses, ministers, entrepreneurs, and professionals. 

Stephanie Chinn became a local speech therapist. Others left Northwest Indiana altogether, carrying opportunities created by steel paychecks into places their grandparents never imagined.

Doris Hare still lives in the house the mill helped buy. 

The shifts are over. The children are grown. The mortgage is paid. The house remains.