A Matter of Black Lives - 1941
Early in 1941, the Great Depression, which once seemed as if it would last forever, was at last over. World War Two raged in Europe. Although technically remaining neutral, America was supplying mega-tons of military equipment to Great Britain in her lonely fight against the Axis. The demand for war production was fertilizing a blossoming economy. Although it took a war to turn the trick, factories and business offices were hiring millions of workers.
White workers, that is. The vast majority of Afro-Americans remained marooned in permanent unemployment. They were barred from defense plants and Federal employment rolls. Labor unions banned black people from membership. The rather cautious black organizations — the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Urban League — had become so mired in trying to get an anti-lynching bill through Congress and to combat racist terrorism against blacks to do much else.
Since neither the unions nor the corporations would act, A. Philip Randolph, leader of the only black union in America, and Walter White, president of the NAACP, met in the White House with President Roosevelt and administration officials in late 1940. They tried to make a case that only a presidential executive order would open doors for blacks. It went over like a lead balloon. FDR and the administration dismissed their entreaty as bothersome — the President had too many other issues to think about, like building American defenses.
Far from discouraged, Randolph started walking up and down Amsterdam Avenue in Harlem. “I had a program of going down the avenue,” he recalled, “going into all the stores on that avenue — the barber shops, the saloons, the poolrooms — and saying to the men, ‘Are you satisfied with the jobs you’ve got?’ They said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Do you want more jobs? Are you willing to march to Washington for them?’ And the response would be ‘Yes! We’ll go anywhere!’” He concluded that the President would act only if met with protest. He began planning a march on Washington, setting the date for July 1,1941.
“Such a pilgrimage of 10,000 Negroes would wake up and shock official Washington as it as never been shocked before,” Randolph said.“ Why? The answer is clear. Nobody expects 10,000 Negroes to get together and march anywhere for anything at any time . . . In common parlance, they are supposed to be just scared and unorganizable. Is this true? I contend it is not.”
Randolph was once described as “a tall, courtly black man with Shakespearean diction and the stare of an eagle.” His confidence and the power in his eyes told the world that nothing would or could daunt him. No wonder that Woodrow Wilson, our racist president, called him “the most dangerous man in America.” Beginning as a soapbox orator in Harlem, his first important campaign — to secure recognition for the first black labor union in America, the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters — embroiled him in a tumultuous and lengthy battle with the nation’s most powerful sleeping-coach company. In 1937 its president finally announced, “Gentlemen, the Pullman Company is ready to sign.”
The son of a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Philip Randolph grew up in a home in northern Florida that introduced him to Shakespeare and Dickens as well as to black heroes such as L’Ouverture, Crispus Attucks, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner and Frederick Douglass. One dangerous night, his dad left the house with a pistol to prevent a mob form lynching a man in the local jail, while his mother stayed home with a loaded shotgun on her lap.
In 1913 he married Lucille Green, a graduate of Howard University. “For our honeymoon,” she recalled years later, “we took an open streetcar to South Ferry and back.” Only her death in 1963 parted the witty, dynamic wife and the solemn husband.
At the time of their marriage white racists were disenfranchising black people to render them totally powerless by means of Jim Crow laws and other stratagems. Lynchings and beatings of blacks increased yearly. President Wilson’s administration was reducing the number of Federal jobs allotted by custom to blacks, and was imposing segregation in government buildings in Washington. Even in the North, anti-black riots broke out at times. In this dangerous atmosphere Randolph began working out fundraising, the logistics of the march and how to protect the protesters from violence.
The plan attracted little encouragement. The FDR administration stonewalled for months, raising fears of riots and harm to defense preparations. The white press ignored the story. The African-American press belittled the idea. Established black organizations worried that protests would lead to a white backlash, doing more harm than good. They favored lawyerly discussions, not unpredictable mass rallies: delegations, not marches; conferences, not demonstrations, negotiations, not protests, requests, not demands or agitation. Officially they took no part in recruiting marchers.
But behind the scenes, Randolph received secret support and important involvement at the local level. Joint committees of the Urban League and the NAACP masked their efforts to give Randolph the organizational base he needed. As Roy Wilkins, who later succeeded White as head of the organization, recalled: “Many of our (NAACP) chapters met at nine o’clock, and at ten-thirty they would change over and become a March on Washington chapter.” Black organizations also contributed financially to the March on Washington Committee.
President Roosevelt did everything possible to get the Randolph to back down. He called on white labor leaders to talk Randolph out of it. He asked New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, a friend of Randolph, to cajole him out of it. FDR asked his wife, Eleanor, in good standing with black leaders, to help. But no entreaties worked. Now that Philip Randolph had the protest march as his trump card he could not be deterred. He insisted on a second session with the administration, and the President had only two options — to face the union leader or face a street demonstration in Washington that could become ugly. Roosevelt agreed to a June 18 meeting.
On that date the union leader and his black entourage confronted FDR, whose administrative officials included William Knudsen, his defense production Czar, who had refused even to meet with March delegates, and Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who had been outraged by an earlier meeting with March leaders. Excerpts of the conversation include these:
Randolph: Mr. President, time is running on. You are quite busy, I know. But what we want to talk with you about is the problem of jobs for Negroes in defense industries. Our people are being turned away at factory gates because they are colored. They can’t live with this thing. Now, what are you going to do about it?
FDR: Well, Phil, what do you want me to do?
Randolph: Mr. President, we want you to do something that will enable Negro workers to get work in these plants.
FDR: Why, I surely want them to work, too. I’ll call up the heads of the various defense plants and have them see to it that Negroes are given the same opportunity to work in defense plants as any other citizen in the country.
Randolph: We want you to do more than that. We want something concrete, something tangible, definite, positive, and affirmative . . . Mr. President, we want you to issue an executive order making it mandatory that Negroes be permitted to work in these plants.
FDR: Well Phil, you know I can’t do that. If I issue an executive order for you, then there’ll be no end to other groups coming in here and asking me to issue executive orders for them, too. In any event, I couldn’t do anything unless you called off this march of yours.
Randolph: I’m sorry, Mr. President, the march cannot be called off.
FDR: How many people do you plan to bring?
Randolph: One hundred thousand, Mr. President.
FDR: Walter, how many people will really march?
Walter White: One hundred thousand, Mr. President.
La Guardia: Gentleman, it is clear that Mr. Randolph is not going to call off the march, and I suggest we all begin to seek a formula.
The President left and discussion continued with a smaller group to no avail.
Several days later, Randolph was in New York, organizing the March, when he got a call to come to the office of Mayor La Guardia. FDR had signed Executive Order 8802 which stipulated that contractors and corporations involved in defense production could not discriminate in hiring and created a Fair Employment Practices Committee to enforce the order. With that victory in his grasp, Randolph agreed to call off the March, less than a week before its July 1 date.
Despite lackluster enforcement, thousands of defense jobs were opened to blacks, and the order set a precedent that several state governments followed.
Were Randolph and White bluffing? Of course. To up the ante, he and White had raised the bid from ten thousand marchers to a hundred thousand. Even in our age of social media such a project would require much dexterity plus tons of money. In 1941, with limited resources and without credit cards, moving a hundred thousand black demonstrators — many of them penniless — to Washington, finding housing for them, providing march monitors and first aid squads — would have been overwhelming. And no historical precedent existed to stir marchers to shake off the servitude of terrorism and Jim Crow. Nothing like Randolph’s bold move had happened since the Emancipation Proclamation. If Randolph and White were bluffing, the bluff worked. Although he is little remembered in history textbooks, Mr. A. Philip Randolph inspired the civil rights movement that changed America.
Ailing but still erect, he paraded in the first column of the March on Washington in 1963, when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the main address to a quarter of a million people. Randolph also spoke briefly. His right-hand man, Bayard Rustin, was chief strategist for the march. The addresses took place at the Lincoln Memorial where Randolph planned to end his march 23 years earlier. His only regret: his wife, who had died earlier that year, did not live to take part in it.
Warren Sloat is a writer who has had a long & distinguished career reporting for several New Jersey papers. Sloat, who is working on a book about World War Two, is also the author A Battle of for the Soul of New York and 1929: America Before the Crash.
