Race, Jobs, and the War: The FEPC in the Midwest, 1941-46

Abstract

This slim volume offers a modest defense of the work of the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC), the World War II federal agency charged with combating job discrimination in wartime industry. Despite its very real limitations, Andrew Edmund Kersten argues, the FEPC “influenced the course of civil rights reform” and became a “postwar model” for efforts to challenge employment discrimination. Established in 1941 by executive order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and often dismissed by historians as ineffectual, between 1941 and 1945 the FEPC processed twelve thousand complaints of black (and, on occasion, Jewish and Asian American) defense workers who encountered racism at the employment office, in the workplace, and in union shops. Kersten aims for a synthesis of what he calls the “old” civil rights history of federal action and the “new” historiography of local activism. The first part of the book briefly traces the troubled bureaucratic history of the FEPC as the agency struggled for a foothold in the wartime state and sought to enhance its almost nonexistent enforcement powers. But Race, Jobs, and the War also examines the agency's fruitful relationships with grassroots organizations in midwestern cities, including CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) unions, the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), the Urban League, and local fair employment councils. In particular, Kersten suggests that where local civil rights initiatives already had support, as in Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit, the FEPC secured a modicum of equal employment opportunity for African Americans. But in other sections of the Midwest, the agency had much less success. Faced with intransigent unions, indifferent employers, and hostile communities, especially in small cities in southern Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, the FEPC failed to enact even its limited agenda of opening war jobs to black workers.