A People's History of the Second World War Resistance Versus Empire by Donny Gluckstein

Author:Donny Gluckstein [Gluckstein, Donny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The clash between the two wars emerged in several areas of society. On one side corporate America profited as never before. There was burgeoning growth in defence industries which saw profits rise 250 per cent and prices by 45 per cent above pre-war levels. However, wages were frozen at 15 per cent above the 1941 level.89 Discrimination against African American employment in defence was staggering. Despite labour shortages, in 1941 over half of new defence jobs were formally closed to blacks, while 90 per cent of those who did find work were in low paid service or unskilled employment. For whites the equivalent figure was just 5 per cent.90

In January of that year A. Philip Randolph, the socialist leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Union, declared blacks would ‘exact their rights in National Defense employment and the armed forces of the country’.91 His ‘March On Washington

Movement’ (MOWM) has been described as ‘African America’s first large-scale demonstration aimed at federal officials’;92 ‘one of the most promising [black movements] in all American history’; and the ‘first large black organization in which trade unionists played the leading role’.93

Randolph himself argued that: ‘The whole National Defense set-up reeks and stinks with race prejudice, hatred and discrimination ...’ Promises had been made but: ‘it all ends there. Nothing is actually done to stop discrimination ...’ So blacks should not politely beg, but act: ‘Power and pressure do not reside in the few, the intelligentsia, they lie in and flow from the masses. .... On to Washington ... Let them swarm from every hamlet, village and town ... Let them come in automobiles, buses, trains, trucks and on foot. Let them come though the winds blow... .’94 Soon the original prediction of 10,000 marchers grew to 100,000.

In reply Roosevelt accused the organisers of aiding the Axis:

Today’s threat to our national security is not a matter of military weapons alone ... The method is simple. It is first, a dissemination of discord. A group – not too large – a group that may be sectional or racial or political – is encouraged to exploit its prejudices through false slogans and emotional appeals ... As a result of these techniques, armament programs may be dangerously delayed. Singleness of national purpose may be undermined ... .95

Nevertheless, Roosevelt shifted. He set up a Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC) to ‘investigate complaints’ of discrimination and ‘redress grievances,’ and the march was cancelled. The FEPC was lauded as ‘the most important effort in the history of this country to eliminate discrimination in employment,’96 but the omens were worrying. Mark Ethridge, appointed the Committee’s chair, found there was no power, ‘not even in all the mechanized armies of the earth, Allied and Axis – which could now force the Southern white people to the abandonment of the principle of social segregation ... .’97 A disillusioned Randolph realised the FEPC was facing a situation that was ‘of the same cloth as Hitler’s Nazism, Mussolini’s fascism and Hirohito’s militaryism’.98 Once the threat of a march had disappeared Roosevelt moved to emasculate the FEPC, and Ethridge resigned in disgust.

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