The Great Exception by Cowie Jefferson

Author:Cowie, Jefferson.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2015-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

The politics of the racial status quo also began to crack during World War II. The President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, A. Philip Randolph, along with other civil rights leaders, proposed a wartime March on Washington to protest occupational discrimination and segregation. To check the proposed march, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which instituted a Fair Employment Practices Committee to ensure there “shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color or national origin.” It was a tepid response, but it forestalled a domestic racial standoff with what might have been tens of thousands of African American protesters in the midst of a foreign war to defeat the idea of racial supremacy. Roosevelt’s Executive Order kept the fragile and temporary balance of racial peace between, on the one hand, the recalcitrance of the white rank and file and the reluctance of the Democrats to politicize issues of racial equality directly, and, on the other, African Americans’ demands for inclusion in the new booming economy.

The planned March on Washington would eventually see the light of day, but not until over two decades later in 1963, when its most memorable legacy was Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of integration. The change is typically seen as the harbinger of the new rights-based liberalism away from the economics-based liberalism of the New Deal. Later, few would recall that the official title of the 1963 march was actually for “Jobs and Freedom.” While most commentators tend to draw a sharp line of distinction between labor of the 1930s and 1940s and the civil rights of the 1950s and 1960s, they are connected. As the March on Washington’s chronicler William P. Jones put it, “the civil rights movement was always closely linked to the social democratic politics of the New Deal.” Without the New Deal, the forward advance of civil rights in the postwar era would have had a more uphill, desperate struggle.31

During the war, the establishment of the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) proved problematic for the stability of the Democratic coalition even in the North. As these policies were implemented in Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, and other industrial centers, white workers, many in the United Auto Workers and other liberal unions, walked off the job rather than work with union “brothers” who were black. While segregation was often accepted as official practice within the AFL unions, the CIO was committed to racial equality. So pervasive were these actions, dubbed “hate strikes,” and so committed were the strikers, that the national UAW joined forces with the federal government to strip their own locals of labor law protections if they persisted. Not even the wartime patriotism of Northern white workers could overcome embedded racial attitudes, and most unions could do little to alter rank-and-file thinking.32

The fact that the FEPC and future forms of racial justice on the job worked on a separate track from labor relations proved deeply problematic. As Paul Frymer argues, “the

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