Fair Employment Practices Committee Research Articles

The March on Washington Movement, the Fair Employment Practices Committee, and the Long Quest for Racial Justice

Abstract In the summer of 1941, the March on Washington Movement (MOWM), led by the civil rights and labor leader A. Philip Randolph, planned to march tens of thousands of African Americans on Washington, DC, to pressure President Franklin Roosevelt to abolish discrimination in the federal government and defense industries. After intensive negotiations, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, banning those forms of discrimination and creating a federal agency to oversee this work: the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC). Randolph and his allies use of pioneering pressure tactics coincided with a critical period of institutionalization of the modern presidency, ultimately resulting in executive action that significantly advanced civil rights and economic opportunity for Black Americans. Many scholars, focusing only on civil rights activists’ fraught relationship with Roosevelt and the Southern Democrats’ stubborn defense of Jim Crow in Congress and the states, have seen the highly contentious battles over the authority and policies of the FEPC as constituting a major defeat for MOWM’s state-centered civil rights strategy. Yet Randolph and his allies continued to believe that the most practical path to reform ran through the executive branch. In this article, we draw a contrast between the actions first taken by President Roosevelt with his wavering commitment to the FEPC and the stronger and more definitive actions taken by President Truman to desegregate the military and civil service, which broke open public-sector employment for African Americans. Beyond strategic considerations, the New Deal expansion of jobs in the national service and military made the modern executive an essential target of Randolph’s campaign to join the battles for civil rights with economic freedoms. Randolph’s decision to focus on employment in the rapidly expanding defense industries, federal workforce, and military thus marked a critical episode in the fight for the economic rights of Black Americans.

Alonso S. Perales: Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights by Cynthia Orozco

Reviewed by: Alonso S. Perales: Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights by Cynthia Orozco Katherine Bynum Alonso S. Perales: Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights. By Cynthia Orozco. (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2022. Pp. 537. Notes, selected bibliography.) Scholarship on the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) has generally focused on the organization’s assault on school desegregation cases and the landmark Hernandez v. Texas Supreme Court decision in 1954. Chicana/o historians have either ignored or denigrated the work of Alonso S. Perales, who was not only the founder of LULAC, but also a lawyer, public intellectual, Pan-American ideologue, and a United States diplomat. Cynthia Orozco’s biography of Perales argues that the Mexican American civil rights activist was one of the most important figures [End Page 409] in Texas throughout the twentieth century. By embracing “Mexican Americanism” as early as the 1920s—well before Mexicanas/os began using the term—“the Mexican-American male middle class of the 1920s of which Perales was a major leader” was “the first truly bilingual, bicultural sector . . . which consciously asserted citizenship and membership in the United States” (xxxi). The book builds on the author’s previous publication No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed (University of Texas Press, 2009), in which she argues that LULAC was more diverse than the assimilationist, conservative, and anti-immigrant tropes long associated with it. Being born in 1898 to poor Mexican immigrants in South Texas—an area rife with anti-Mexican racism—did not prevent Perales from ascending the socioeconomic ladder throughout his life. He worked hard, entered the middle class through his education and profession as a lawyer, and always kept Mexican Americans, regardless of class, at the forefront of his civil rights organizing. Orozco credits Perales with keeping LULAC alive throughout the Great Depression and managing to help working-class Mexican Americans benefit from defense industry jobs with the Fair Employment Practices Committee. He also later prevented braceros from Mexico from working in small towns in South Texas because of widespread racism. Perales built relationships with other Mexican American political leaders, notably Henry B. González and Albert Peña from San Antonio and United States Senator Dennis Chávez from New Mexico. Orozco argues that Perales embraced candidates who worked to uplift La Raza (the people). She also details the numerous political positions in which he served at city, state, national, and international levels. Although the book is well researched, Orozco is overly apologetic for many of Perales’s shortcomings. He was a proud supporter of ultraconservative politicians like Representative Martin Dies (founder of the House Un-American Activities Committee) and Governor Allan Shivers, both of whom disguised their bigotry against Black and Mexican residents in the name of anti-communism. Perales was an ardent anti-Communist and only supported the San Antonio Pecan Shellers Strike in 1937 once its Communist leadership stepped away from the movement. Racism prevented him from supporting unionization or working in solidarity with Black activists. Furthermore, Orozco ignores the fact that Perales was a light-skinned Mexican American, and although he may have embraced La Raza, he ascended into the middle-class because of his privileged connection to whiteness, not just because of his ability to work hard for an education. Orozco criticizes Perales for his emphasis on homosocial spaces that separated Mexican women into LULAC auxiliary chapters, but the author had previously detailed this thoroughly in No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed. Her chapter on his time as a United States diplomat to several Latin American countries is where she is most critical in this volume. [End Page 410] Orozco reveals that he often followed orders and never spoke out in favor of democratic movements in Latin America, more than likely because they involved leftist politics. Altogether, the biography reveals that Alonso Perales dedicated his life to a limited civil rights cause, often at the expense of others. Katherine Bynum Arizona State University Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America

Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America

Communists and Community: Activism in Detroit's Labor Movement, 1941–1956

Communists and Community: Activism in Detroit's Labor Movement, 1941–1956

Authors’ Response

Authors’ Response

Taft-Hartley and the Contradictions of Republican Anti-unionism

Taft-Hartley and the Contradictions of Republican Anti-unionism

Employment Mobility and the Belated Emergence of the Black Middle Class

As the Covid-19 pandemic takes its disproportionate toll on African Americans, the historical perspective in this working paper provides insight into the socioeconomic conditions under which President-elect Joe Biden’s campaign promise to “build back better” might actually begin to deliver the equal employment opportunity that was promised by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Far from becoming the Great Society that President Lyndon Johnson promised, the United States has devolved into a greedy society in which economic inequality has run rampant, leaving most African Americans behind. In this installment of our “Fifty Years After” project, we sketch a long-term historical perspective on the Black employment experience from the last decades of the nineteenth century into the 1970s. We follow the transition from the cotton economy of the post-slavery South to the migration that accelerated during World War I as large numbers of Blacks sought employment in mass-production industries in Northern cities such as Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Chicago. For the interwar decades, we focus in particular on the Black employment experience in the Detroit automobile industry. During World War II, especially under pressure from President Roosevelt’s Fair Employment Practices Committee, Blacks experienced tangible upward employment mobility, only to see much of it disappear with demobilization. In the 1960s and into the 1970s, however, supported by the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Blacks made significant advances in employment opportunity, especially by moving up the blue-collar occupational hierarchy into semiskilled and skilled unionized jobs. These employment gains for Blacks occurred within a specific historical context that included a) strong demand for blue-collar and clerical labor in the U.S. mass-production industries, which still dominated in global competition; b) the unquestioned employment norm within major U.S. business corporations of a career with one company, supported at the blue-collar level by mass-production unions that had become accepted institutions in the U.S. business system; c) the upward intergenerational mobility of white households from blue-collar employment requiring no more than a high-school education to white-collar employment requiring a higher education, creating space for Blacks to fill the blue-collar void; and d) a relative absence of an influx of immigrants as labor-market competition to Black employment. As we will document in the remaining papers in this series, from the 1980s these conditions changed dramatically, resulting in erosion of the blue-collar gains that Blacks had achieved in the 1960s and 1970s as the Great Society promise of equal employment opportunity for all Americans disappeared.

Forging Rivals: Race, Class, Law, and the Collapse of Postwar Liberalism by Reuel Schiller

<i>Forging Rivals: Race, Class, Law, and the Collapse of Postwar Liberalism</i> by Reuel Schiller

Fighting for Hemispheric Solidarity: The National Catholic Welfare Conference and the Quest to Secure Mexican American Employment Rights During World War II

During World War II representatives of the National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC) pursued an end to employment discrimination as part of its larger effort to instill a moral economy. The NCWC, acting as the representative body of U.S. Catholic bishops, served as the public voice of U.S. Catholics and an agent of the Church's public interests. By protecting the employment and economic rights of racial minorities, Catholic leaders believed that they could ameliorate racial inequality and bring about a new economic order. Prominent Catholics served as administrators in several wartime agencies, including the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC), a federal agency that worked to address racial inequality in light of the wartime crisis. President Roosevelt's appointment of Monsignor Francis Haas (1889–1953) as FEPC chairman in 1943, offered a link to the work of the NCWC and provided an opportunity for Mexican American leaders such as Carlos E. Castaneda and Alonso Perales to make use of their identities as Catholics and Mexican Americans to advance wartime projects. Together, clergy and Mexican American lay leaders formed a cooperative network to end employment discrimination and advance civil rights.

Working in the Black Man's Shadow: Mary Church Terrell and Anna Arnold Hedgeman's Fight Against Jim Crow

Working in the Black Man's Shadow:Mary Church Terrell and Anna Arnold Hedgeman's Fight Against Jim Crow Julie de Chantal (bio) Joan Quigley. Just Another Southern Town: Mary Church Terrell and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Nation's Capital. New York: Oxford University Press. 2016. 358 pp. Selected bibliography, notes on sources, notes, and index. $29.99. Jennifer Scanlon. Until There Is Justice: The Life of Anna Arnold Hedgeman. New York: Oxford University Press. 2016. 262 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, notes, and index. $34.95. In 2016, Joan Quigley and Jennifer Scanlon published biographies of civil rights activist Mary Church Terrell and Anna Arnold Hedgeman, respectively, with Oxford University Press. These monographs are not a first foray into the genre for either author. In 2009, Scanlon, Interim Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at Bowdoin College, published Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown, the first biography of the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. That same year, lawyer, journalist, and recipient of the J. Anthony Lukas Works-in-Progress Award, Joan Quigley, published The Day the Earth Caved In: An American Mining Tragedy, telling of the events surrounding the coal mine fire in Centralia, Pennsylvania. Both authors remain true to their respective styles for their current publications; Scanlon digs deep into Hedgeman's life to understand her trajectory and achievements, and Quigley uses Terrell as a point of entry to examine the struggle for desegregation in the nation's capital. Practitioners of African American women's history, in particular, have used biographies to fill in the gaps where often primary sources were lacking. These personal stories serve as an entry point into the complex history of activists who faced the double burden of being both black and women. While Mary Church Terrell has been the subject of several biographies and studies in the past, Anna Arnold Hedgeman remained an elusive figure of the civil rights narrative, and for cause. As Scanlon astutely points out in Until There Is Justice, Hedgeman's contributions to the Civil Rights Movements were obscured by [End Page 491] the achievements of her male counterparts—A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King Jr., among others. Scanlon's important monograph is long overdue and fills in the gap left by the absence of Hedgeman in the literature. Through the lives of their subjects, each of these books increases our understanding of black women's activism from both a local and a transnational perspective, and each challenges the ways in which we include them in the Civil Rights Movement's narrative. Until There Is Justice follows Hedgeman from her youth in Minnesota to her first experience as an educator in rural Mississippi and on through her work for the YWCA, her political activism in the nation's capital, and her work with the women's movement. Throughout the monograph, Scanlon grapples with a question long considered but often avoided in the field: how did black women confront gender discrimination within the Civil Rights Movement? Furthermore, she examines how Hedgeman's several identities—as religious practitioner, political activist, civil rights leader, social worker, policymaker, educator, and wife—informed her leadership and helped her develop such a broad social justice agenda. We learn in Scanlon's book that Hedgeman played a critical role in the long Civil Rights Movement. She was instrumental in the creation of the Fair Employment Practices Commission, organized the March for Jobs and Justice, and coordinated efforts for the March on Washington. A proponent of Social Christianity, her work also extended to the National Council of Churches and to the General Commission on Religion and Race. She organized the African American vote during her time as a Democratic Party strategist for the 1948 election, and she joined the Health and Human Services Department after World War II. In the 1960s, she came together with other civil rights and women's rights leaders to form the National Organization for Women (NOW). While much of Hedgeman's work met with success, often new challenges brought with them a small amount of frustration and disappointment. As a black leader, she was tasked to do more with fewer resources...

On the Passing of Governor George M. Leader, 1918–2013

On the Passing of Governor George M. Leader, 1918–2013

"Be Patient and Satisfied with Their Progress Thus Far": Senator Robert A. Taft's Opposition to a Permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission, 1944-1950

"Be Patient and Satisfied with Their Progress Thus Far": Senator Robert A. Taft's Opposition to a Permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission, 1944-1950

Promises of the Past

Promises of the Past Kathleen Mapes (bio) Emilio Zamora . Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas: Mexican Workers and Job Politics during World War II. Foreword by Juan Gomez-Quinones . College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2009. xvi + 318 pp. Illustrations, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $60.00 (cloth); $27.95 (paper). In April 2010, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed into law a bill that not only made it legal but required law enforcement officials to question and detain all persons suspected of being in the country illegally. This signing ceremony set off a firestorm that had been brewing ever since the Arizona Legislature passed the legislation weeks before. Critics from across the country and around the world, including President Obama and the Mexican Foreign Ministry, have questioned the fairness of the new law, while supporters claim the federal government has failed to fulfill its role in defending the nation's borders, thereby making it necessary for the state of Arizona to assume responsibility. Critics rightly point out that the law seems to open the door to racial profiling and harassment of those suspected of being in the United States illegally. Emilio Zamora's book, Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas: Mexican Workers and Job Politics during World War II, might not seem to have much to tell us about the current state of affairs in Arizona. However, this rich and compelling account of a very different era, one in which it seemed that rights might be on the rise rather than on the decline, provides an important historical perspective by which we can more critically understand our own era. Zamora begins his book by promising to explore "employment discrimination, social inequality, the Mexican cause for equal rights in the United States, and the role that the government played in reinforcing and ameliorating the socially marginalized position that Mexicans filled in the urban and rural settings of Texas" (p. 1). Based on extensive archival sources and building on the works of other scholars as well as his own previous scholarship, Zamora provides an in-depth analysis of the experiences of Mexicans on the Texas home front that transcends traditional historical boundaries. Zamora meticulously explains how the ability of Mexicans to share in the fruits of the wartime economy and gain civil rights depended on the actions and relations among a number of different actors, including ordinary workers, the state agencies [End Page 500] of the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), the United States Employment Service (USES), the U.S. State Department, Mexican officials both in Mexico City and in consular offices throughout Texas, and various civil rights organizations, including, most importantly, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). By detailing the associations, alliances, ties, and antagonism between and among the aforementioned groups and institutions, Zamora provides a fascinating and important account of whether or not the promise of the wartime era—a promise of equality and egalitarianism—would ring true for Mexicans who had long experienced discrimination. During World War II, Texas was transformed by the wartime economy from what Zamora describes as an "industrially underdeveloped state"' to a "modernizing regional economy" (p. 24). The state witnessed the rise and expansion of the petrochemical industry, shipyards, an aircraft industry, and military bases. At the same time, agriculture, the traditional base of the economy, expanded greatly. There was also a corresponding rise in job opportunities and pay rates for those who could take advantage of the invigorated wartime economy. While Zamora notes that Mexicans did make some occupational gains in terms of place of employment (from rural to urban and from agriculture to industry) as well as pay rates, he argues that Anglos, and sometimes even African Americans, made even more substantial progress during the war years. In other words, although opportunities expanded during the war, Mexicans failed to see their proportionate share of that opportunity. Even Mexicans fortunate enough to land positions in the burgeoning wartime industrial economy faced innumerable barriers to upward mobility, much less equal treatment. In most cases, Mexicans could only find employment in the lowest and most segregated sectors of the wartime industries. When Mexicans and Anglos performed the same jobs, the former...

The African American Experience during World War II (review)

Reviewed by: The African American Experience during World War II Kevin Allen Leonard (bio) The African American Experience during World War II. By Neil A. Wynn. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010. Pp. xix, 163. $34.95) Since the publication of Neil A. Wynn's path-breaking study, The Afro-American and the Second World War in 1973, dozens of other historians have examined the impact of the war on African Americans. In this new book, Wynn masterfully synthesizes this literature, noting the continuities between African Americans' prewar experiences and their wartime and postwar experiences and pointing out the numerous ways in which the war changed the lives of African Americans. Wynn briefly traces African American service in the U.S. military prior to World War II, noting that black soldiers received numerous commendations despite the fact that they were frequently relegated to service or support roles. He observes that rioting in the 1910s and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s reminded African Americans that the Great War had not fundamentally changed the racial order in the United States. In the 1920s and 1930s, many African [End Page 130] Americans joined organizations such as Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association and the Communist Party with the goal of ending racial discrimination and violence. Most of the book focuses on the events of the 1940s. Wynn points out that African American leaders failed to persuade President Franklin D. Roosevelt to end segregation in the armed forces, but A. Philip Randolph's March on Washington Movement convinced Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802. This order banned racial discrimination by military contractors and established the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC). Wynn concedes that the FEPC did not have the power to end discrimination completely, but he insists that its establishment was a significant precursor of later changes in federal policy. The military remained segregated throughout the war, but African American soldiers and African American organizations persistently protested both segregation and the mistreatment of African American soldiers. The wartime labor shortage offered African Americans unprecedented economic opportunities. The need of manufacturers for workers eventually overrode their racial prejudices. The promise of good jobs lured hundreds of thousands of African Americans to northern and western cities, where they encountered persistent housing discrimination. The tensions surrounding housing led in part to rioting in Detroit in 1943. Wynn notes that the war inspired many African Americans to take action to end discrimination. Pauli Murray, for example, staged sit-ins at Washington, D.C., restaurants in 1943 and 1944, and activists affiliated with the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation organized the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1942. Wynn concludes by focusing on the immediate postwar years. He indicates that many African American veterans took advantage of the G.I. Bill of Rights, although Lizabeth Cohen demonstrates in A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in America (2003) that discrimination seriously limited the benefits that African American veterans derived from this legislation. Many veterans [End Page 131] encountered violence when they returned to the South. More than twenty-five African Americans were killed in racially motivated incidents between 1945 and 1947. Wynn defends Truman's record on civil rights, pointing out that he supported a permanent FEPC and appointed a committee to study civil rights. In addition to a thorough and concise synthetic narrative, this book contains a chronology of significant events in African American history from 1938 until 1948, forty pages of documents, and a seven-page annotated bibliography. The documents include excerpts from the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph, William H. Hastie, and Walter White. The brevity of this narrative and the chronology and documents should make this book ideal for assignment in courses in African American history when a paperback edition is published. Kevin Allen Leonard Kevin Allen Leonard teaches history at Western Washington University in Billingham, Washington. He is the author of The Battle for Los Angeles: Racial Ideology and World War II (2006) and is currently engaged in research on African Americans and the environment in post-World War II Southern California. Copyright © 2011 Kentucky Historical Society

Keith M. Finley . Delaying the Dream: Southern Senators and the Fight against Civil Rights, 1938–1965 . (Making the Modern South.) Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press . 2008 . Pp. 340. $40.00.

This book explores the role that the United States Senate's southern Democratic caucus played in obstructing the achievement of substantive civil rights reform. Keith M. Finley examines all of the rhetorical dimensions of the many arguments marshaled by southern senators against legislation to enact a federal anti-lynching statute, repeal poll taxes, create a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), end segregation in the South, and protect black voting rights. In this detailed assessment of political rhetoric and the legislative process, Finley finds both diversity within southern white opposition to racial change and continuity in how southern senators tried to slow its momentum. His study broadens our perspective on the civil rights movement, reminding us of the importance of national political events and, ironically, the national democratic process that empowered the southern caucus's program of “strategic delay.” Developed primarily by Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, “strategic delay” relied on manipulating Senate rules covering filibustering and cloture to thwart the progress of civil rights legislation from the late 1930s until the mid-1960s. By the 1930s, black voting power outside of the Deep South spurred the realization among members of the southern caucus that civil rights advocates were not going to stop pushing for change no matter how many battles they lost. Continued success in stymieing their program depended upon crafting a lasting coalition across regional and party lines. To attract northern Democrats and conservative Republicans, most southern senators moderated their most venomous racial rhetoric, replacing it with a bevy of legal, constitutional, political, and, upon occasion, even religious arguments. Under Senator Russell's tutelage, the southern caucus also recognized the political utility of compromise. Concessions on smaller, less significant reforms, such as the Soldier Voting Act of 1942, diminished the appearance of knee-jerk obstructionism, earning the goodwill of non-southern senators and making strident opposition to other civil rights legislation more palatable to their colleagues. Softening their racial rhetoric and employing constitutional and political arguments were combined with a masterful manipulation of Senate rules and seniority to become the heart of “strategic delay.” The southern caucus thus hoped to slow the movement for racial reform until it expired from a lack of momentum.

Delaying the Dream: Southern Senators and the Fight Against Civil Rights, 1938-1965 (review)

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 230 the black past. Many whites, Dwyer and Alderman demonstrate, do not believe King has any relevance to them, and they fear that living on a street named after him will stigmatize their business or residence. Black activists have fought, often unsuccessfully, to have major thoroughfares that cut across black and white neighborhoods renamed for King, but they have found that it can be hard to get public approval to commemorate the black past outside black neighborhoods. Although the authors shy away from a strong argument about whether civil rights memorials offer a hopeful story of racial progress or highlight instead continuity and the continued segregation of American public memory, the book leans towards the more pessimistic reading. If, as Dwyer and Alderman suggest, “today’s efforts to remember the Movement can be thought of as yet another campaign to achieve racial equity” (p. 6), then the nation still has a long way to go. RENEE ROMANO Oberlin College Delaying the Dream: Southern Senators and the Fight Against Civil Rights, 1938–1965. By Keith M. Finley. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. 340 pp. $40.00. ISBN 978-0-8071-2245-3. Journalist William White entitled his book on the 1950s Senate Citadel (New York, 1956). Southern senators ruled White’s Citadel, and Keith Finley conceptualizes the Senate as the final stronghold from which southerners defended white supremacy against growing demands for change. Others have examined the enactment of civil rights legislation during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. Robert Mann in The Walls of Jericho (New York, 1997) traced the interactions of Johnson, Richard Russell, and Hubert Humphrey in the civil rights revolution. In Delaying the Dream, Finley examines some of the same events as Mann but from the perspective of senators who spent a generation trying to protect the southern way of life from efforts to extend constitutional protections to African Americans. Beginning with the senators’ defeat of antilynching legislation in the 1930s until passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, there were no more stalwart supporters of Jim Crow in Washington than these men. Senators’ letters to constituents outlining their beliefs and assessments of prospects for success in blocking proposed civil rights initiatives augment excerpts from the floor debate. From these sources the author identifies not only the rationales for maintaining the status quo but also changes in strategy as southerners shifted from defeating liberal initia- J U L Y 2 0 1 0 231 tives, to grudging acceptance of legislation after extracting most of its teeth, to the final, unavailing eighty-five-day filibuster against Johnson’s 1964 law. Beginning in 1946, Russell led the southern caucus as public opinion and the remainder of the Senate gradually mobilized against racial discrimination. Russell and North Carolina’s Sam Ervin raised constitutional questions that for years resonated with enough senators to thwart reformers. Those who offered constitutional arguments for rejecting civil rights initiatives struggled to keep their less sophisticated colleagues in line. Theodore Bilbo from Mississippi, Allen Ellender from Louisiana, and Strom Thurmond from South Carolina frequently turned to racial stereotyping that alienated the allies needed by the South. As became clear in the course of defeating efforts to make permanent the Fair Employment Practices Commission, “when race found expression on the Senate floor, southerners lost support” (p. 93). Alabama’s Lister Hill and John Sparkman, who had relatively moderate records on other issues , have minor roles in Finley’s presentation. Southern senators acted as delegates articulating the concerns of their region, which has earned them criticism from such historians as Anthony Badger (New Deal/New South, Fayetteville, Ark., 2007) for failing to lead their constituents toward acceptance of what most ultimately recognized as inevitable. Most of the senators, however, did less to inflame regional passions than the region’s most visible state and local politicians. Such governors as George Wallace and Arkansas’s Orval Faubus could urge noncompliance with federal law and get rewarded with additional terms. Southern senators who thought strategically could not demagogue on civil rights—as pleasing as that might have been for voters back home— because...

World War II and Mexican American Civil Rights ed. by Richard Griswold del Castillo (review)

maintains a comfortable pace in relating the techniques that Arthur Hill used in solving cases and apprehending felons. Law on the Last Frontier is a refreshing look at one man’s career in the fabled Texas Ranger service, carried out in a rugged, sparsely populated area of the state during a time that is often overlooked by historians. Lantana, Texas Stephen L. Moore World War II and Mexican American Civil Rights. Edited by Richard Griswold del Castillo. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. Pp. 256. Illustrations, appendices , notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 978-0-29271-738-1. $55.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-29271-739-8. $24.95, paper.) The Mexican American struggle for civil rights predates World War II, but when hundreds of thousands of men left their segregated barrios, enlisted in the military, and went to war for the United States, they profoundly impacted the movement for Mexican American civil rights. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of other Mexican American men and women took jobs in war industries or in other factory work, where they worked alongside whites, earned equal pay, and supported the massive American war effort. Trying to create unity during the crisis , foster patriotism, and garner support for the war, the U.S. government suddenly discovered Mexican Americans as an ethnic minority that had specific needs and, most importantly, the government believed addressing those needs was in the wider national interest, at least for the moment. Mexican Americans became important to the nation at the same time that their political awareness was increasing. Through service and sacrifice in a war they were told was fought to defend freedom and democracy, many Mexican Americans, especially veterans, believed that they had demonstrated their loyalty, proven their patriotism, and earned their right to be treated as equals. They were no longer willing to tolerate second-class citizenship. Richard Griswold del Castillo documents these developments in poignant sections on Mexican American GIs, on how the war affected Mexican American women, and on how those experiences fed an evolving political consciousness. Mexican Americans had already been demanding equal educational rights for their children, but during and after the war they exhibited new energy in their demands for equal access to public places and proper representation on juries, while more people, especially veterans, felt emboldened to challenge discrimination personally and through organizations fighting for fairness and inclusion. This rising awareness found political expression through the creation of new civil rights groups like the American GI Forum, and the renewed dynamism of older established groups like the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). Overcoming entrenched prejudice, though, was an uphill battle. Richard Steele cites a 1942 poll of white Americans conducted by George Gallup in which 12 percent felt Mexicans were as good as Americans, while 59 percent felt they were inferior. No other nationality scored that low, including others whom Americans showed prej346 Southwestern Historical Quarterly January *jan 09 11/26/08 12:00 PM Page 346 udice towards, like the Chinese whose immigration to the U.S. had been selectively excluded, and the Japanese, with whom the country was at war. The authors show that the growing government concern expressed for Mexican Americans, though important in the long run, was mainly pragmatic during the war. There were two main elements to the government’s position. The first was the maintenance of the “Good Neighbor” policy, which sought friendly relations with Latin American countries, especially Mexico, and so the treatment of Mexican Americans earned greater scrutiny. The second was the desire to maintain a compact between labor and capital to limit labor shortages and work stoppages in order to keep factories running and war material rolling off assembly lines. That brought in the well-intentioned Fair Employment Practices Committee, which attempted to end workplace discrimination. Civil rights gains though, have had to come from direct challenges to discriminatory laws and practices from Mexican Americans themselves. This well-written, very readable book addresses important themes and develops them in a way that will appeal to a broad audience while providing a solid grounding in the established literature and insight from primary research. The book is enhanced by a collection of well-considered appendices...

The FEPC and the legacy of the labor-based Civil Rights Movement of the 1940s

The Labor Movement and the Civil Rights Movement are often seen as two distinct movements for social justice. During the Second World War, however, this was not the case, as many activists and leaders argued that civil rights advances would enhance the egalitarian premise of the Labor Movement and as increased opportunities in employment seemed the best way to advance civil rights. These two movements came together to fight for the perpetuation of the wartime Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC), which had been initially spurred on by the great labor leader A. Philip Randolph. During and after the war, when Northern business interests and Southern segregationists threatened the existence of the FEPC, the cause for civil rights and economic justice led to the formation of a dynamic coalition of civil rights liberals, including advocates from religious, labor, civic and civil rights organizations. This article explores the contentious relationships within the coalition and how the fight for a permanent federal FEPC led to the creation of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, which became a crucial voice during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and which is today the largest umbrella organization fighting for the cause of civil rights.

Working for Democracy: Working-Class African-American Women, Citizenship, and Civil Rights in Detroit, 1940-1954

Louise Thomas was tired. She had worked hard for no pay at Commerce School in Detroit, learning riveting in a defense training class. She spent 120 hours in classroom, sacrificing weeks of income for chance at a wartime job, one that paid much more than average job an African-American woman in Detroit could get at that time. She passed riveting course with flying colors, and in 1942 she went to Ford's Willow Run bomber plant to secure employment as she had heard that factory desperately needed female riveters. On two separate occasions she spent money on bus fare to get to site, only to sit and wait in an employment office. Finally, two different personnel officers told her that they could not place her. When Thomas returned to school to question her riveting instructor about situation, she overheard him telling other teachers that the school was not for colored girls and they were not going to get any employment.1 She also heard him tell another black woman that if African American women had left jobs to take riveting class, they had better return to them, as Detroit factories would never hire them. Thomas was not going to go back to her former job. She had trained for a war-defense position, and she was going to fight for right to work at a skilled job for decent pay. Moreover, she was familiar with fact that many women had already complained to Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) about Ford's hiring practices, but that FEPC had failed to eliminate discrimination in Willow Run plant. Thomas took her story to one of Detroit's major black newspapers in order to publicize situation African-American working-class women faced in city. She spoke for many black women when she stated:

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

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.