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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IV. Economics - 19. The War Boom—and Thereafter - 2. A Closer View - 3. Government Policy in Regard to the Negro in War Production
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414 An American Dilemma
The ^^original” aircraft plants, on the other hand, present a much less
encouraging picture. To be sure, several of them have opened their doors
to the Negro worker largely because of the activities of the President’s
Committee on Fair Employment Practice.® Yet shortly before mid- 1942
only about 5,000 Negroes, constituting between i or 2 per cent of the
total, were employed in airplane production.^® Since this figure includes
those employed by automobile factories which had gone into airplane
manufacturing, the net gain for the Negro seems to be rather insignificant.
3. Government Policy in Regard to the Negro in War
Production
The failure to let the Negro participate fully in war production has
not gone unnoticed. Obviously it has embittered the Negroes, and being
better organized than ever before, they have known how to protest. Both
Negro and white groups have been giving great publicity to the matter.
There have been a large number of reports on the subject in the daily press,
in both the South and the North, as well as articles in national magazines,
and pamphlets.^® Leading personalities like Wendell Willkie, Pearl Buck,
and Eleanor Roosevelt have dealt with the problem repeatedly. This pub-
licity, of course, never reached such proportions that the man in the street
came to know about what the barring of Negroes from defense jobs really
meant ^
but the better informed part of the public has some notion about it.
Ever since the defense boom got under way, during the summer of
1940, various attempts to straighten out the problem have been made by
the government.^® Most of these measures, as we have seen, were rather
ineffectual. Some of them were just gestures. Under the circumstances,
they could not possibly appease the Negro leadership. In January, 1941,
A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Por-
ters, started organizing his famous ^^March-on-Washington Movement.^^*^
The President, for reasons of internal and external policy, did not want
any such protest march and talked to Randolph in June, 1941, in order
to prevent it. Randolph, however, failed to come around until the Presi-
dent agreed to sign an Executive Order ^Vith teeth in it” abolishing dis-
crimination in defense industries as well as in the federal government
itself. An agreement to this effect was finally reached, but only a few days
before the date of the march, Randolph, thus, got what he wanted, and
the march was called off.^^
The Executive Order 8802 of June 25, 1941, starts with a general
statement to the effect that there shall be no discrimination in the employ-
ment of workers in defense industries or in government because of “race,
creed, color, or national origin.” There is a clause to this effect in all
* See Section 3 of this chapter.
^ See Chapter 39, Section la.
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