“They said that we were different, but where? Show me the difference…Our hearts beat the same way.”
The Georgetown to which Grant returned was no more receptive to the presence of an African American woman in a white man’s workforce than it was before she moved to New York. “The racism made me crazy,” she recalls. Needing money to support her two children, she looked for a job but found none offering a high enough salary, save for work at Georgetown Steel. She applied, but found the hiring process to be little more than a battle of wills 
Listen to Susan Grant talk about her experiences getting hired. Eventually she was hired and became the first woman to work on the factory floor. “I thought that I had died and went to Hell,” Grant says of her first day on the job. “He took me to the hottest part of the mill.” 
Watch clips of the Georgetown Steel mill (0:28) The work was backbreaking, but Grant persevered. “Twenty-eight years, four months I worked there,” she recalls. In that time, other workers very gradually warmed to Grant’s presence in the mill. “Little by little, just like I said about racism…It got better because now all the guys know me. And they’ll see me and they’ll say, ‘Ms. Sue, we miss you,’ and ‘You were the best crane operator we’ve ever had.’ I really got to know the guys really well. White and black, I don’t draw that line at all.”
But during the course of her career Grant found that for a long time she remained the only woman at Georgetown Steel, despite hearing from others who had submitted applications. She credits her perseverance with her hiring, but understands that it was only her circumstances at the time—living with her mother and with no job—that allowed her the time to sit in the office day after day. So she notified the federal government of the mill’s unfair hiring practices. “If I see this door is closed, I want to know why is it closed, and why is it closed to me? Why shouldn’t we open it wide to let in everybody?”
“People ask me all the time if I think it’s getting better,” says Grant. “I think it’s better, but I think I’m impatient. When I don’t think something should have been that way in the first place, then better isn’t enough. I think it should magically just be.”