The Fight for Fair Training: Fair Employment, Defense Worker Training, and the African American Civil Rights Movement in the South, 1940–1945

Abstract

The Fight for Fair Training:Fair Employment, Defense Worker Training, and the African American Civil Rights Movement in the South, 1940–1945 Bryant Etheridge (bio) If Thurgood Marshall took offense at being counseled on litigation strategy by someone who lacked legal training, he chose not to show it. John L. LeFlore, the secretary of the Mobile, Alabama, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was urging him to make better use of the Supreme Court's recent decision in Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938). It was 1941, and LeFlore was deeply involved in the wartime civil rights struggles of Black Alabamians, especially their fight to gain employment in the state's booming industries. The Gaines ruling, he advised Marshall, constituted a vital doctrinal resource in the fight for fair employment. Marshall informed LeFlore that the NAACP's legal staff, in response to similar requests from most of the organization's branches, was already developing a test case that addressed LeFlore's concerns. At the upcoming annual conference in Houston, Texas, NAACP members from around the country would coordinate legal strategy. LeFlore, Marshall suggested, could contribute to that effort by representing the NAACP branches of Alabama at the June 1941 conference.1 [End Page 501] As LeFlore fought racism in wartime Mobile, he had no higher priority than winning access to good jobs for Black residents. The struggle to overcome white opposition to equal employment opportunity in the city's shipyards occupied him and other local activists for the rest of the war. While employment as unskilled laborers was often open to African Americans, semiskilled or skilled work was not. As a result, moving up the occupational ladder was a civil rights imperative in Mobile, as it was throughout the United States, during World War II. The assault on the Jim Crow racial division of labor was foremost on LeFlore's mind when he contacted Marshall.2 LeFlore proposed to make the Gaines case, a lawsuit that was part of the NAACP's campaign against segregation, central to attacking racialized economic inequality. The case involved an African American plaintiff, Lloyd Gaines, who had applied to the law school at the University of Missouri. The all-white university rejected Gaines's application. Missouri instead offered to pay Gaines's tuition at an out-of-state law school, a workaround that many southern states used to avoid complying with even the separate-but-equal stipulation of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Gaines declined that arrangement, and the NAACP's legal team filed suit. In 1938, the Supreme Court ruled that Missouri's tuition reimbursement program was unconstitutional. The ruling left the state with two options for graduate law education: to open a law school for Black students or to admit Black students to the existing institution. Although the decision stopped well short of ending segregation in higher education, it was an important milestone on the long road to Brown v. Board of Education (1954). With the Gaines lawsuit, NAACP lawyers aimed, in part, to make segregation too expensive to sustain. The cost of creating separate-but-equal programs in every area of graduate and professional study, they wagered, would prove too heavy a burden for southern states to bear.3 The faith LeFlore showed in the Gaines ruling as a solution to the problem of fair employment in Mobile's shipyards appears misplaced. The categorical distinction between the NAACP's legal campaign against segregated education, on one hand, and the concurrent but separate fight for economic justice, on the other, underpins our basic conceptualization of the civil rights movement in the 1940s. If alleviating [End Page 502] economic inequality was LeFlore's objective, his propounding the utility of Gaines seems to amount to a non sequitur. Perhaps LeFlore was confused. Perhaps, in offering guidance on constitutional law to an NAACP attorney, he had gotten in over his head and misconstrued the Court's ruling in Gaines. Or maybe LeFlore just screwed up and cited the wrong case. If LeFlore misunderstood the Gaines decision, he was not alone. He informed Marshall that in Mobile, Black residents stood broadly in support of using Gaines as a...