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

Abstract

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.