2.1 Bureaucratic Reorganization, the Southern Railroads, and the Civil Rights Groups’ Administrative Strategy

Among the most significant challenges for civil rights groups were frequent reorganizations of executive agencies charged with wartime mobilization. These changes, reflecting resistance to the newly forged alliance between the modern presidency and civil rights organizations, sorely tested Roosevelt’s support for fair employment. As a result, civil rights advocates and their labor union allies developed strategies to pressure Roosevelt, who needed constant prodding to support the mission of the FEPC. In particular, the importance of this pressure in the wake of executive reorganizations is clear from the agency’s efforts to investigate and address discrimination by the southern railroad industry.

The agency went through its first major bureaucratic reorganization during the early months of 1942. Civil rights groups had celebrated the original administrative structure that Roosevelt’s executive order created, which established the FEPC as an independent body that reported directly to the president. They were greatly alarmed, therefore, by the president’s administrative maneuver in May 1942, which placed the FEPC under the War Manpower Commission (WMC) and brought it under the direct supervision of Chairman Paul McNutt.Footnote ⁵⁵ Civil rights leaders were apprehensive that placing the FEPC in the WMC created a conflict of interest: The Manpower Commission, charged with accelerating production, they feared, would be very unlikely to take action against employers. The MOWM, NAACP, and NUL strongly opposed this reorganization, expressing fear that it minimized their direct access to the president as well as the committee’s autonomy and effectiveness.Footnote ⁵⁶ It was no accident, they charged, that this reorganization took place after the FEPC scheduled hearings in Birmingham, Alabama, starting in June to investigate whether Black workers were being hired into jobs commensurate with their skill level. No sooner had its field office opened there than stories appeared claiming that Roosevelt’s ultimate plan was to establish “social equality.” As labor and civil rights advocates recognized, this was the same propaganda long deployed to keep unions out of the South.Footnote ⁵⁷

Roosevelt’s administrative reorganization, civil rights activists charged, appeared to undermine the FEPC in the face of Southern resistance. As Walter White wrote to the president in August, “following as it does the bitter opposition of reactionary Southern politicians to the Birmingham and proposed El Paso [Texas] hearings indicates that the principle of Executive Order 8802 is in danger of being surrendered to Southern political considerations.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Roosevelt’s sensitivity to the demands of the Southern Democrats also did not bode well for congressional authorization of the FEPC. Earl Dickerson, one of the FEPC’s two Black members who frequently advocated for more forceful (sometimes radical) tactics, made this point in protesting the agency’s move to the WMC.Footnote ⁵⁹ In a letter to Lester Granger of the NUL in October 1942, Dickerson echoed White’s concern that the reorganization would mean the end of the “vigorous prosecution” of those who violated the executive order. While Dickerson had hoped that the FEPC would become permanent, he feared that could not happen if it were “to be under the supervision of the Manpower Commission throughout the period of duration.”Footnote ⁶⁰

While the MOWM leaders did not give up the hope of attaining a permanent agency with legislative authority, Southern Democrats seized on the party’s considerable losses in the 1942 election to try to permanently dismantle the FEPC.Footnote ⁶¹ Their opposition centered on the FEPC’s investigation of southern railroads, which it had begun in early 1942 and set initial hearings for the winter of 1942. In January 1943, McNutt pressured FEPC’s Executive Director Lawrence Cramer to cancel the hearings. Cramer, acting on the wishes of the full committee, refused to do so.Footnote ⁶² Nevertheless, McNutt, acting with President Roosevelt’s approval, announced on January 11, 1943, that the railroad hearings would be postponed indefinitely. McNutt claimed that the railroad case was out of the FEPC’s scope of authority and that the agency needed more time to gather evidence. However, he was relatively vague about his reasoning and grounds for these claims. This was a major blow to the civil rights organizations, which had spent thousands of dollars and months of careful preparation for the FEPC hearings.Footnote ⁶³

McNutt’s announcement caused a massive outcry from members of the committee, civil rights groups, and organized labor, especially the CIO. In their view, postponing the case indefinitely was tantamount to outright cancellation. The entire legal team that had been secured to aid the FEPC on the railroad case resigned in protest. Charles Houston, who had been part of the railroad case legal team in addition to serving as a prominent NAACP lawyer, was among those who resigned, claiming:

Houston argued that the cancellation confirmed civil rights leaders’ fears that Roosevelt’s reorganization order revealed his wavering commitment to the FEPC’s autonomy and activities. Other representatives of civil rights organizations penned many articles arguing that the cancellation portended the end of Roosevelt’s nascent civil rights program.Footnote ⁶⁵ Randolph, on behalf of the MOWM, proclaimed that calling off the hearings indicated “that FEPC is useless and that it can no longer be looked to for help.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Civil rights organizations connected the postponement with their inability to affect national-level policy, a concern reflected in internal debates among civil rights groups on tactics and strategy. Two issues loomed large in these debates: the value of aligning with white liberal groups and, more specifically, the consequences of forming ties with the labor movement. In an internal NAACP memo from Walter White to Roy Wilkins, White listed the cancellation of the railroad hearings, among other significant policy defeats, as evidence that civil rights groups must assume the responsibility to lead the fight for economic opportunity. As Randolph argued in his statement on the MOWM’s program, Black Americans were “the only people who are the victims of Jim Crow, and it is they who must take the initiative and assume the responsibility to abolish it.”Footnote ⁶⁷ It was this concern that had led Randolph and many members of the MOWM to restrict their organization’s membership to African Americans.Footnote ⁶⁸

However, Wilkins and many Black columnists believed that Randolph’s all-Black-membership rule went too far. They warned that this rule risked “racial isolation” by refusing membership to their white allies.Footnote ⁶⁹ Yet Roosevelt’s relegation of the FEPC to McNutt’s superintendence showed that there was some truth to Randolph’s admonition that “white liberals and labor may sympathize with the Negro’s fight against Jim Crow, but they are not going to lead the fight.” Despite their differences, these groups did form a united front in rallying to the FEPC’s defense. At the “Save the FEPC” Conference in Washington, DC, in February 1943, roughly 150 delegates—representing forty-two organizations, including civil rights groups, labor unions, religious organizations, and socialists—convened in the nation’s capital to protest what they perceived as a fatal weakening of the FEPC and to argue for its mandate to be reaffirmed and expanded.Footnote ⁷⁰ Labor unions, particularly leaders of the CIO, were among the most ardent defenders of the FEPC during this time.Footnote ⁷¹

Some of these groups also participated in a similarly revealing meeting in February 1943, called by McNutt and Attorney General Francis Biddle: the Conference on Scope and Powers of Committee on Fair Employment Practice.Footnote ⁷² The meeting was an opportunity for groups with a stake in the operations of the FEPC to share their thoughts about how to resurrect its administrative authority. The major issues considered were the independent status of the FEPC, the necessity of holding public hearings that could impose sanctions, the question of payment for committee members, trade union practices, rescheduling of the railroad hearings, and the need for a permanent FEPC.

The conference concluded with a lackluster pronouncement by Fowler Harper, an administrator with the WMC. To give the appearance of broad support from those gathered, Harper pleaded with attendees of the meeting not to issue individual statements on the proceedings or future of the FEPC. When he was pressed by Walter White, Harper also denied that the Roosevelt administration had reached any backdoor agreements on the future of the FEPC. White insisted that the FEPC had clearly been the victim of backdoor appeals, expressing civil rights leaders’ lack of faith that conversations behind closed doors, without a meaningful resolution of its supporters’ grievances, would buttress the FEPC.

Despite the skepticism of many racial justice organizations and the tepid administrative commitments made at the conference, President Roosevelt once again succumbed to activists’ pressure politics and recommitted his support for fair employment. Following the meetings, the president called McNutt to the White House in late February 1943, and he informed the WMC director of his intention to restore the FEPC’s administrative status and directed him to reschedule the railroad hearings. The president also indicated what he believed to be the most important weakness of the committee: the part-time and voluntary status of the committee members.Footnote ⁷³

Civil rights groups continued to organize events and send letters to Roosevelt and McNutt over the following month as the committee’s reorganization was taking shape.Footnote ⁷⁴ In May and June 1943, the president released a new Executive Order 9346 that restored the FEPC’s independent status and placed it in the Office for Emergency Management, the catchall agency for coordinating war efforts in the White House. However, the agency was not granted additional sanctions beyond conducting hearings, and the order included the same vague reference to “appropriate steps.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Also troublesome was Roosevelt’s appointment of new leadership and members to the FEPC who seemed to signal the weakening, not the strengthening, of civil rights groups’ influence over the agency. The appointments of Father Francis Haas as FEPC chairman and Malcolm Ross as executive secretary garnered skepticism from civil rights groups. While Walter White and Lester Granger had expressed reservations about the first FEPC chairman, the Southern liberal Mark Ethridge, they ultimately formed relatively favorable impressions of him.Footnote ⁷⁶ Civil rights groups had been even more enthusiastic about the second chairman, Malcolm MacLean.Footnote ⁷⁷ Both Ethridge and MacLean included civil rights leaders in the committee meetings, despite their not being on the official committee rosters.Footnote ⁷⁸

All of this shifted quite dramatically when Haas and Ross came on board. Despite Earl Dickerson’s request to remain on the committee, which was supported by the NUL and the MOWM, the civil rights advocates’ primary champion was not reappointed.Footnote ⁷⁹ Dickerson had served as interim chair for many months after MacLean stepped down and had been intimately involved with pursuing union investigations, frequently clashing with other committee members. Milton Webster of the BSCP was reappointed to the FEPC. However, his relationship with the committee, especially its leadership, became increasingly strained during this period. The NAACP, NUL, and BSCP petitioned Haas and Ross to add representatives from civil rights organizations, but Chairman Haas relayed that committee members had been appointed on a “strictly labor-management basis.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Haas’s appointments meant that the committee would be limited to representatives of industry and organized labor, with fewer members from racial and social justice organizations.

The exclusion of Dickerson and representatives from civil rights organizations had significant consequences. Haas did seek to convene the NAACP, BSCP, and NUL for a meeting on the “Present and Future Work of the FEPC” in June and August 1943, but there is no record of whether such a meeting ever took place.Footnote ⁸¹ The shift to committee membership along “labor-management lines” also reflected the eclipsing of a left-labor commitment by a corporatist model of industrial relations, where a tripartite coalition of government, labor, and industry jointly agreed to conditions for economic growth and stability. Unions were becoming increasingly resistant to government control, determined to establish the autonomy of labor–management relations. As Randolph warned, this shift appeared to confirm that Black leaders could not expect labor to be a steadfast ally, let alone lead the fight against Jim Crow.Footnote ⁸²

The resolution of the southern railroad case, which by this point had become the agency’s most prominent initiative, further exposed the pressure points in the civil rights–labor alliance. After months of delays and postponements, the FEPC hearings on the Southern railroad industry took place in September 1943. As civil rights advocates had alleged, these hearings revealed that many railway companies and one major railway union were in violation of Executive Order 9346.Footnote ⁸³ While some companies and unions worked with the FEPC to change hiring and promotional practices, fourteen of the railroad carriers publicly declared that they had no intention of complying with the FEPC’s ruling.Footnote ⁸⁴ Roosevelt’s comptroller general, Lindsay Warren, a North Carolina native, assured his Southern brethren that the FEPC’s antidiscrimination orders were merely advisory.Footnote ⁸⁵ Under pressure from the ever-vigilant civil rights advocates, Roosevelt supported the efforts of the MOWM protests to save “this prop to democracy in action.”Footnote ⁸⁶ In November 1943, Roosevelt overruled Warren, affirming strongly that the antidiscrimination language of the executive order was “mandatory.” Several civil rights activists, including MOWM’s major leaders, expressed their “deep gratitude” to Roosevelt in a public letter.Footnote ⁸⁷

The president’s renewed support for the FEPC’s mission illustrated how a government agency made possible a constructive—if contentious—collaboration between the White House and civil rights activists. At many junctures, Roosevelt, facing significant resistance from the Southern ramparts of Jim Crow, required relentless pressure from civil rights advocates to reaffirm his commitment to the agency. With the backing of the White House, the second FEPC established regional offices in sixteen cities, substantially increasing the staff’s ability to investigate and resolve complaints of discrimination. Although the second committee still held hearings for especially resistant employers, cases in California, Cincinnati, Chicago, and New York were handled effectively through negotiation and persuasion. Yet the reconstituted FEPC demonstrated its mettle in a Philadelphia transit case that erupted in August 1944. When white workers went on strike following the FEPC’s order to employ Black trolley operators, the agency appealed to its ultimate recourse to power: President Roosevelt. Living up to his admonition that the FEPC’s rulings were mandatory, Roosevelt ordered the Army to take over the transit system. Threatened with the loss of their jobs and a reconsideration of their draft status, white workers returned to work almost immediately—and the transit authority complied with the FEPC’s mandate.Footnote ⁸⁸

Ever fearful of rupturing the Democratic Party’s North–South alliance, Roosevelt did not show the same fortitude in the FEPC’s most important initiative against Jim Crow. Rather than allowing the FEPC to take direct action against the railroad industry, he opted to hand the case over to a new quasi-administrative and judicial agency. The president convened the Stacy Committee, headed by Judge Walter Stacy from North Carolina, to resolve the “impasse” between the FEPC’s findings of discrimination and the refusal of carriers and unions to comply.Footnote ⁸⁹ Roosevelt called on the FEPC to make recommendations to the Stacy Committee, but Malcolm Ross, the FEPC’s executive secretary, failed to go through appropriate committee channels in doing so, a move that upset Webster of the BSCP, as well as the representatives of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and CIO.Footnote ⁹⁰ The Stacy Committee met with the railroad carriers and brotherhoods in early 1944 and released a report in May of that year. The meetings were quite different from those held by the FEPC—they were not publicized, and they were uncontroversial. Perhaps most critically, no Black railroad workers were called to testify.Footnote ⁹¹ The FEPC continued to try to raise the issue of inaction by the Stacy Committee throughout 1944, but no decisive action was ever taken.Footnote ⁹²

Ultimately, it was not presidential action that provided the most concrete solution to the plight of the Black railroad workers. Instead, it came through the courts. Charles Houston of the NAACP, who had assisted in preparation for both the FEPC’s Boilermakers case and the railroad case, had also been working since the early 1930s to challenge racially discriminatory workplace practices as violations of Black workers’ Fifth Amendment due process rights. Up until a major reversal in late 1944 by the Supreme Court, lower courts refused to hear these cases, claiming that union seniority rights were “contractual, not federal” in nature. The Court distinguished wrongful acts committed by railway unions and railroads from injuries under federal law.Footnote ⁹³

Randolph and BSCP were instrumental in getting the judiciary to act—most notably launching the Provisional Committee to Organize Colored Locomotive Firemen, representing workers who were singled out during the FEPC railroad hearings as needing relief from the industry’s discriminatory practices. Using BSCP funds, the committee began suing the lily-white Brotherhood of Locomotive Fireman and Enginemen for damages. This legal work was linked to grassroots efforts led by Randolph, who had organized the Citizen’s Committee to Save Colored Locomotive Firemen’s Jobs to solicit contributions, gain publicity, and increase pressure. He was able to persuade Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia of New York to serve as chair and Eleanor Roosevelt as honorary chair. With this support on the ground, the FEPC’s backing, and the NAACP’s able representation before the bench, Randolph’s provisional committee began to win legal cases against southern carriers and white unions.Footnote ⁹⁴ These legal victories paved the way for a more decisive victory against southern railroads.

In December 1944, the Supreme Court reversed decisions in the lower courts in two decisive cases that challenged white bargaining units under the Railway Labor Act (RLA).Footnote ⁹⁵ The Supreme Court ruled that the RLA imposed on unions the duty to “protect equally the interests of the members of the craft as the Constitution imposes on a legislature to give equal protection to the interests of those for whom it legislates.”Footnote ⁹⁶ The Steele and Tunstall cases vindicated the directives which the FEPC issued to the Southeastern railroads and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen;Footnote ⁹⁷ however, they came at a steep price for labor unions. In particular, the Steele decision set a damaging precedent for unions fighting for collective bargaining rights in the courts and became “a prolific source of litigation in cases having nothing to do with race discrimination.”Footnote ⁹⁸ The schism between collective bargaining and civil rights posed a major challenge to Randolph’s belief that civil rights for Black Americans without meaningful economic opportunity fell well short of full citizenship and social justice. Randolph never gave up his conviction that race and class were inextricably connected and would continue to work within and alongside the labor movement. But some of the tensions between unions and civil rights activists would persist and continued to push Randolph and his political allies to focus on discriminatory practices in the federal government amid the growing importance of civil service jobs and federal contracts to Black Americans’ economic rights. Inevitably, this required civil rights organizations to keep pressure on the White House and bureaucratic agencies—in the face of fierce resistance from the Southern Democrats, who still held considerable sway over their party, even as its core support shifted to the North and West.

The battles over the southern railroad case in the FEPC underscore an important reality of that political moment—conservatives and opponents of the New Deal program were waging war over the newly empowered modern presidency. They sought both to challenge signature administrative initiatives, like the railroad case, and to apply consistent pressure on Roosevelt to reorganize and restrict the agency’s discretion and power. But civil rights activists were not deterred by the Southern Democrats’ resistance. They continued to push Roosevelt to deploy the levers of the modern executive that circumvented segregationists’ influence in Congress and the states. In the face of powerful headwinds, Randolph and the MOWM once again employed mass pressure and worked through the civil rights advocates on the FEPC to demand that Roosevelt recommit himself to the agency and its work. Consequently, the FEPC retained the power to keep the southern railroad case alive, made great progress against discriminatory employment practices in the North and West, and, as we discuss in the next section, began to free the civil service from the reign of Jim Crow that had prevailed since the Wilson administration.

2.2 Discrimination in the Federal Government

While the vast majority of the FEPC’s work was focused on the private sector and only involved the federal government as an intermediary in negotiations among industry, labor, and Black workers, the agency also established a framework for investigating discrimination within the federal government itself, which would be further expanded under President Truman. Because it did not directly intrude on private companies’ labor practices, this area of the FEPC’s work generated much less opposition from conservative Republicans and Southern Democrats. Randolph and other civil rights leaders recognized the importance of federal government jobs and refused to call off the March on Washington until Roosevelt agreed to include discriminatory practices in the department and agencies in Executive Order 8802. In fact, according to Randolph, the federal government was the “worst offender” of discriminatory employment practices.Footnote ⁹⁹ Like the expanding war industries, the federal workforce grew significantly in the early 1940s, from roughly one million employees in 1940 to nearly three million by 1943.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ A 1943 FEPC report—and the actions civil rights organizations took in response to it—not only helped to increase the number of Black workers on the federal payroll but also laid significant groundwork for future administrative battles civil rights activists fought to desegregate the civil service as well as the military under Truman.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The FEPC’s role in facilitating antidiscrimination practices in the federal government in the 1940s is often overshadowed by the more prominent and public-facing work in the private sector. But this was a critical period in establishing the federal government as an equal opportunity employer. As Eric Yellin has argued, after the Civil War the federal government served as a “laboratory” for expanding and experimenting with approaches to civil rights.Footnote ¹⁰² That possibility was curtailed for decades by the enduring legacy of Woodrow Wilson’s extension of Jim Crow into the federal service. According to Yellin, “the federal government remained a model for managerial white supremacy”—and was not seriously challenged—until Randolph and his political allies pressured Roosevelt and Truman to redress the color line that segregated the “nation’s service.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Further, Desmond King has argued that rather than working to eliminate segregation and discrimination, particularly in employment policy, the federal government largely tolerated and worked to reproduce racial exclusion.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

A reversal of Wilson’s racial regime in the federal government would not take place until the 1960s. But civil rights activism and mass mobilization against forced discrimination in the federal service had a critical beginning with Randolph and the MOWM in the 1940s. Significant industrial changes underscore the importance of this period, creating new opportunities and opening up employment possibilities for Black workers. Economists like William Collins have pointed to the “magnitude of change in the 1940s as the turning point in African American economic history.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ On the other hand, Katz, Stern, and Fader argue that racial pay disparities, particularly between Black and white men, actually widened significantly starting in the early 1940s as a result of the transition of many Black laborers out of agricultural and domestic jobs. Those industries had employed the vast majority of African Americans prior to the Great Northern Migration, but after the 1940s, many moved into a more limited pool of industrial jobs, which severely constricted their opportunities in the private sector.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Given these changes, Randolph’s decision to focus on employment in the rapidly expanding defense industries and federal workforce was unsurprising and marked an important episode in the fight for the economic rights of Black Americans.

A major contribution of the FEPC in this struggle, which is often overlooked, was the agency’s pioneering work in tracking and collecting raw data about discrimination in federal employment. In September 1941, just a few months after signing Executive Order 8802, President Roosevelt issued a directive to the heads of federal agencies and independent establishments in the federal government. He instructed agencies to conduct a “thorough examination of their personnel policies and practices to the end that they may be able to assure me that in the Federal Service the doors of employment are open to all loyal and qualified workers regardless of creed, race, or national origin.” He also instructed agencies to make specific modifications to the Civil Service Rules and Regulations to counteract discrimination in hiring, for example, by removing any reference to race or color on federal employment applications.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

This information was collected and reviewed by the FEPC under the supervision of Elmer W. Henderson.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Henderson was the field director for the FEPC’s Region VI in Chicago but also served as acting chief of the Government Section of the FEPC. In this role, he authored the FEPC’s 1943 “Report on Employment of Negroes in the Federal Government,” which included an assessment of the status of African American employment in the federal government.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In addition, Henderson was a public spokesperson for the FEPC’s government work, publishing articles in the Monthly Labor Review and the NUL’s publication Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life. Footnote ¹¹⁰

The 1943 report on African American employment in the federal government served as the first effort to track and record Black employment among federal agencies. This centralized information produced by a federal agency provided civil rights advocates with an important tool. In testimony before Congress on the Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Act, civil rights groups frequently tried to make the case that Black Americans were being systematically barred from employment. However, they had no documentation to support their claims. The FEPC’s work, especially concerning federal employment, was a valuable resource to be deployed in future legislative and political battles.

The report documented some notable changes in Black federal employment. First, Executive Order 8802, the subsequent directive from President Roosevelt, and the expansion of the workforce to accommodate the war effort had all helped to increase the number of Black workers on the federal payroll. In November 1942, out of thirty-eight agencies and over 141,000 employees, 9 percent were African American. But by July 1943, in forty-four agencies representing almost two million employees, 12.5 percent of federal workers were African American. Some of the increase in recorded Black employees was due to the fact that the first collection effort in November 1942 did not include reports from the War and Navy Departments, which accounted for roughly one million workers.Footnote ¹¹¹ Henderson also noted that some agencies had a long track record of employing Black workers, specifically the Post Office, the Bureau of Printing and Engraving, and the Census Bureau.Footnote ¹¹² These increases in Black employment were undoubtedly the result of multiple factors, including the expansion of the data collection project and the general growth of the federal workforce as a result of the war in the early 1940s. However, while the federal workforce had expanded by two and a half times by the end of 1942, there had been a fourfold increase in African American employment.Footnote ¹¹³ This suggests that concrete gains were the result of the FEPC’s work.

But the report and Henderson’s public discussion of the FEPC’s progress in reducing discrimination in federal employment also point to some of the challenges in federal desegregation efforts. The federal workforce at this time comprised departmental staff (who worked in Washington, DC, agencies and made up about 10 percent of the federal workforce) and field staff (who worked outside of the capital and made up 90 percent of the federal workforce). As of July 1943, 18 percent of departmental staff were African American compared to 11 percent of field staff. This was an improvement over the 5 percent African American field staff that was reported in November 1942.Footnote ¹¹⁴ A major conclusion of the report was that “discriminatory employment practices are more prevalent in the field rather than in departmental services.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ The delineations among field and departmental positions were, in part, the result of Wilson’s resegregation of the federal government. Unsurprisingly, racial resegregation did not create a “separate but equal” national service, as Wilson claimed. As Yellin has effectively shown, the positions available to Black federal workers were lower-skilled and lower-paying jobs.Footnote ¹¹⁶

The legacy of Wilson’s invidious civil rights practices continued into the 1940s. The FEPC report indicated that increases in the overall number of African Americans employed by the federal government were primarily concentrated in low-skilled, custodial jobs.Footnote ¹¹⁷ There was some progress reported among higher-skilled occupations. In 1938, roughly 10 percent of those in clerical, administrative, and fiscal positions were Black; by 1942, this number had risen to 48 percent. These were semiskilled jobs and paid better than the custodial positions. Still, the report indicated very little change among higher supervisory and administrative leadership posts. And once again, there were differences between departmental and field staff: “an outstanding fact which should be noted is that in departmental service, an increasing number of Negroes are being employed in clerical and administrative positions, while in field service the majority are still in the custodial classifications.”Footnote ¹¹⁸

In addition to documentation of the federal workforce, Henderson also indicated that the FEPC had been involved in pressing for early changes in the Civil Service Rules and Regulations. In an article written in Opportunity, the NUL’s journal, Henderson reported that several recommendations of the FEPC had been implemented, including eliminating references to race or color from government applications and abolishing a limit on the number of applicants, both of which, Henderson argued, placed Black applicants at a disadvantage.Footnote ¹¹⁹

There is very little additional documentation of these changes and Henderson’s work on behalf of the FEPC. It is not clear that Henderson and the Government Section of the FEPC were active beyond the reports produced in 1943, and scholars have paid very little attention to this segment of the FEPC’s work. But given the rapid expansion of the federal workforce during this time and the valuable resource that categorial data provided civil rights activists, the FEPC’s information gathering on the employment of African Americans was a significant contribution. While most scholars have viewed the FEPC as an ephemeral and disappointing experiment in civil rights reform, this aspect of the agency’s work documenting the status of discrimination in employment in the federal government makes clear that it helped to forge an important collaboration between the modern executive and civil rights activists. Moreover, the formation and activities of the FEPC embodied the view of Randolph and his collaborators that the long struggle for civil rights had to include desegregation of the federal workplace. Civil rights advocates would pursue this vision with more vigor and with more support from the White House during the Truman administration.

3.1 The Fight to Desegregate the United States Military

To spearhead the fight against Jim Crow in the national civil and armed forces, Randolph created a new organization in November 1947—the Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service and Training. He was particularly agitated when a draft law bereft of any civil rights protections was enacted in early 1948.Footnote ¹²⁷ Randolph and Grant Reynolds, the prominent New York Republican appointed co-chair of the new Civil Rights Committee, requested a meeting with Truman in January, hoping to persuade him that the success of his foreign policy, consumed by the Cold War, “required the elimination of, rather than the extension of, segregation and discrimination in military training and armed forces.” At first, the White House refused to set up the meeting, a rebuff that Randolph claimed showed that Truman knew the civil rights leader would ask him to take action he was not prepared to take: issue an executive order abolishing segregation in the military.Footnote ¹²⁸

Randolph and Reynolds were finally received at the White House on March 22, but only after David Niles, Truman’s liaison with minority groups, assured the president that “the head of the Negro Pullman Porters” was “an important” leader of the civil rights movement, not a “left-winger,” and one who had taken “pretty conservative positions” on the Cold War.Footnote ¹²⁹ Like Roosevelt, Truman and his advisors wanted to avoid the perception that the president could be pressured by social activists. Niles suggested the meeting be postponed until after the Truman’s February 2nd message to Congress, in which there “would be some mention of Jim Crow in the military, and these people will not be able to say that the message is the result of their visit.”Footnote ¹³⁰ In fact, Truman’s otherwise strong defense of civil rights said nothing about desegregating the military, thus ensuring a contentious Oval Office session with Randolph and Reynolds.

During this meeting, the president learned that Randolph’s “conservative” anticommunism was joined to a fierce determination to force the country to live up to the ideals it presumed to support in its all-consuming struggle with the Soviet Union. Randolph told the president how he had learned in a recent trip around the country “that black Americans today are in no mood to shoulder a gun again in defense of this country so long as they are not full-fledged citizens of the country and recognized in the armed services.” Insisting that his call for civil disobedience was not an idle threat, Randolph emphasized that his observations of unrest in African American communities “was a definite statement … on the mood of the Negroes throughout the nation with respect to the manner in which they were treated in the armed forces. They are insisting upon total abolition of discrimination in the armed services.” Truman took offense to Randolph’s demands, resenting the pressure to move further and more quickly on civil rights than he believed was politically prudent.Footnote ¹³¹

When Randolph’s personal appeals to Truman to remedy the deficiency of the draft law with an executive order failed to persuade the president, he and other civil rights activists maintained a steady drumbeat of criticism, determined to force Truman to live up to the principle stated in his Civil Rights Committee’s report that the elimination of the Jim Crow military was a fundamental right that must be fulfilled. “Prejudice in any area is an ugly, undemocratic phenomenon,” the report read. “In the armed services, where all men run the risk of death, it is particularly repugnant.”Footnote ¹³² The campaign to desegregate the military resembled the fight to end discrimination in the defense industry. However, in challenging the Jim Crow military, Randolph prescribed a more militant strategy: civil disobedience. Appearing before a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on March 31, Randolph threatened to organize a mass demonstration of civil disobedience by mobilizing young African Americans to resist the draft. Although Randolph made his statement before Congress, his real target was the White House and the African American community. Realizing the publicity potential of a public hearing conducted before the principal congressional military oversight committee, he alerted the widely read columnist Drew Pearson that he would raise the specter of a mass civil disobedience campaign. For effect, Randolph, who was inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s tactics, told the startled Senators that the failure to address the injustices of the Jim Crow military would result in a “mass civil disobedience movement along the lines of the magnificent struggle of the people of India against British imperialism.”Footnote ¹³³

When the White House continued to resist Randolph’s demands—attempting instead, unsuccessfully, to recruit more moderate civil rights leaders to cooperate in a reform effort within the framework of the segregated military—Randolph organized the League for Non-Violent Civil Disobedience in late June and planned protest marches in major northern cities.Footnote ¹³⁴ Despite the obvious connection between the threatened March on Washington and the campaign against Jim Crow in the military, therefore, Randolph’s conception of civil disobedience marked a significant development in his position on civil rights protest—one that would have a profound influence on the evolution of civil rights activism in the 1950s and 1960s. Randolph continued to stress the theme that underlay the MOWM: American democracy was a “hollow mockery and belies the principles for which it is supposed to stand … if it will not insure equality of opportunity, freedom and justice to its citizens black and white.” However, his postwar protest placed equal emphasis on the need for African Americans to engage in nonviolent resistance to Jim Crow laws and practices—on the notion “that freedom is born of a struggle which strikes at oppression rather than at oppressors.”Footnote ¹³⁵

To pressure Truman to make desegregation of the U.S. military a central theme of the 1948 campaign, Randolph also led a march in front of the White House, carrying a sign that read, “If we must die for our country let us die as free men—not as Jim Crow slaves.” Demonstrators distributed buttons inscribed, “Don’t join a Jim Crow Army.” Randolph followed up this protest with a picket line in front of the 1948 Democratic National Convention, which met in mid-July, where he carried a new sign that read, “Prison is better than Jim Crow.” Not all civil rights activists agreed with Randolph’s civil disobedience campaign, but his appeal resonated with many Black Americans, especially those of draft age. The NAACP’s Walter White, who took a less militant stance than Randolph in the MOWM’s confrontation with Roosevelt, did not counsel civil disobedience but instead insisted that African Americans “must willingly share the burdens as well as the benefits of citizenship.” Yet, reprising the mediating role he played in forming a partnership with Randolph in the campaign against discrimination under the FEPC, White voiced a clear warning to the president that “Mr. Randolph’s blunt threat to lead a non-violent campaign of civil disobedience … points up in dramatic fashion the necessity for the United States to muster courage enough to face and solve this problem.” Importantly, although the NAACP did not “advise” young men to follow Randolph, it did announce it would give legal aid to those who did.Footnote ¹³⁶ A poll showed that 71 percent of Black college students were sympathetic to Randolph’s plan; moreover, on the eve of a special session of Congress, over thirty draft resisters were arrested.Footnote ¹³⁷

Randolph’s League for Non-Violent Civil Disobedience also received support from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Even as he had insisted that Black activists must be the leaders of direct civil rights action, Randolph recognized the importance of collaborating with his liberal allies. The benefit of forging a variegated movement became clear in the battle to end Jim Crow in the armed forces. Civil rights activists were supported inside the gates of power by the crusading efforts of Minneapolis mayor Hubert Humphrey and Andrew Biemiller, a former Wisconsin Congressman, who, with the support of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action, won a much stronger civil rights plank at the convention than the president, facing the threat of a Dixiecrat rebellion, had proposed.Footnote ¹³⁸

While Truman resented both the civil disobedience that Randolph prescribed and the contentious platform fight, he felt that the civil rights activists’ credible threat to boycott the Jim Crow military required a response. In forming the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, he had gone on record expressing sympathy for the cause they fought for, especially as he learned of discrimination and brutal acts of mob violence against veteran Black soldiers in Southern and border states. Soon after the Democratic convention, Truman issued two executive orders in the service of civil rights. One directly responded to the demands of Randolph, decreeing that “there should be equality of treatment and opportunity in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin.” Truman’s other executive order built on the work started by Roosevelt and the FEPC to uproot discriminatory federal employment. It forbade racial and ethnic discrimination in the federal civil service and established the Fair Employment Board to monitor hiring.Footnote ¹³⁹ Neither order explicitly condemned racial segregation; however, Truman established enforcement procedures that made progress on both fronts, especially in ending Jim Crow practices in the military.

Although the struggle to reconstruct the armed forces continued for decades, Truman’s executive order was a critical step in making the military among the most integrated institutions of American society, thus contributing extensively to economic gains and social mobility for African Americans.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Contrary to the unsteady enforcement of the FEPC, the implementation of the executive order calling for the desegregation of the armed forces was resolute. Headed by former Solicitor General Charles Fahy, the Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity for the Armed Services (the “Fahy Committee”) achieved impressive results. As civil rights activists pushed so hard for, during the creation and early development of the FEPC, the Fahy Committee reported directly to Truman, who gave it steadfast support. He appointed what appeared to Randolph to be a “strong body” of five whites and two Blacks, who had a clear mandate to desegregate all branches of the armed services.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Southern Democrats in Congress, not to mention the miliary, resisted the White House’s program to desegregate the armed services, especially when it intruded directly on life below the Mason-Dixon line. In fact, white public opinion was overwhelmingly opposed to military integration.Footnote ¹⁴² Nevertheless, the president’s control over defense and the distinctive hierarchical structure of the military insulated the Fahy Committee from the sort of political pressures that constantly threatened the FEPC.

Progress came swiftly in the Air Force and Navy. By January 31, 1950, for example, 1,301 Air Force units had been integrated, leaving only fifty-nine predominantly Black units, as compared with 106 Black units and only 167 mixed units when the policy began.Footnote ¹⁴³ The Navy was equally cooperative with the Fahy Committee. Besides integrating its units, the Navy made substantial progress placing Black seaman in higher positions. At the close of World War II, almost 95 percent of Blacks in this branch of the service were in the Stewards Branch, relegated to serving meals to officers. By 1950, that percentage was reduced to 54 percent, with the rest assigned to more attractive positions throughout the general service, from radiomen to gunners, airplane pilots, mechanics, and bookkeepers.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Central to the success of the Navy’s desegregation plan was the vast expansion of its recruitment program, carried out at the behest of the Fahy Committee. The committee concluded that the Navy’s initial unsuccessful efforts to expand opportunities for African Americans was a result of its failure to overcome their belief that it was a “white man’s service in which the Negro was welcome as a messman.” In response, the new edition of its public relations pamphlet, Life in the Peacetime Navy, contained pictures of Black and whites working together. Moreover, the Navy enlisted the Urban League to help it attract more African Americans into the ROTC.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

The Army, with the largest percentage of Black personnel, was less cooperative. “The Army is not out to make social reform,” General Omar Bradley, the newly appointed chief of staff, insisted. Bradley was particularly adamant that his service should maintain its 10 percent quota on Black enlistments, a racial limitation targeted only at African Americans, to prevent, Army brass insisted, “excessive numbers of Negroes in the Army.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ When Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson appeared to compromise in the face of the Army’s recalcitrance, civil rights advocates, who had generally exhibited patience with the Fahy Committee as it struggled to get the Army’s cooperation, aroused a storm of protest.

Randolph and other leaders sent urgent telegrams to the White House, while their allies in the Americans for Democratic Action publicly denounced Secretary Johnson’s “sellout on Jim Crow in the army.” The Amsterdam News, a Black newspaper, viewed the Army’s resistance as an “insult” to fifteen million Black Americans and “insubordination” to the president.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ When the secretary spoke in New York City to the local Lawyers’ Association, reporting on successful efforts to unify the different services of the armed forces, Randolph’s Committee Against Jim Crow in the Military Services and Training picketed outside, denouncing Johnson for his failure to end segregation in the Army. The demonstration was widely publicized by the Chicago Defender, the most prominent Black newspaper, which drew attention to the story with a banner above-the-fold headline.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

Under the pressure of civil rights organizations and the intrepid efforts of the Fahy Committee, the Army eventually agreed to a plan of integration, which included ending the 10 percent quota. The outbreak of the Korean War put additional pressure on the Army brass to implement the integration order. In August of 1953, as the war ended, the Army reported that it was 90 percent integrated, with only ninety-six Black units remaining. A year later, the Army reported that all units were integrated, except for a few small detachments that were still undergoing reform. In part, the Army’s resistance was weakened by the success of the integration of the Air Force and Navy, which stripped it of its defense that desegregation would hurt service morale and arouse racial tension that would weaken national security. Indeed, Army commanders of Korean troops found that integrating units increased the fighting effectiveness of their divisions. No less important, however, was the work of Black activists, who kept unrelenting pressure on the secretary of defense and Army officers to comply with President Truman’s executive order.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

Notably, as Randolph hoped, the desegregation of the military began to spill over to other areas of contestation. For example, the Army’s efforts to end Jim Crow in the military included progress to desegregate schools in the South for the children of military personnel. Progress was slow, but civil rights activists were pleasantly surprised when the elementary school at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, opened in the fall of 1951 on an integrated basis and included a Black member of the faculty. “This army post has the distinction of operating the South’s first unsegregated elementary schools,” rejoiced the Chicago Defender. “What’s more it’s working out beautifully with no incidents!” Southern Democrats, unhappy with the integration of schools at Fort Bragg and three other Army schools, managed to get a bill through Congress requiring the commissioner of education to operate military schools in conformance with the laws of the state in which the federal property was located. The bill moved rapidly through Congress, without any organized resistance; remarkably, liberals in the Senate permitted its passage with a simple voice vote. Yet the buck stopped with Truman and the president’s veto message, echoing the Chicago Defender’s report on the success of the integrated school at Fort Bragg, argued that the bill “would constitute a backward step in the efforts of the federal government to extend equal rights and opportunities to all our people.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Truman’s veto anticipated the amicus curiae brief his administration would submit in the Brown desegregation case.

Although Truman might have indulged in hyperbole in celebrating the integration of the armed forces as “the greatest thing that ever happened in America,” it was a remarkable achievement. As the historian Paula Pfeffer wrote, “ironically, from the most segregated institution in the nation, the integrated military became the realm wherein Afro-Americans enjoyed the greatest equality in America.”Footnote ¹⁵¹ Dismantling Jim Crow in the military, Randolph stressed, was a critical step in bestowing full citizenship on Black Americans; moreover, it served his commitment to join civil rights and economic opportunity. By 1965, research showed, for all four branches, the military had become a major avenue of career mobility for many Black men, evidenced by the overrepresentation of African Americans at the noncommissioned officer (NCO) levels. Notably, Black soldiers were approximately twice as likely as white servicemen to reenlist. Indeed, about half of all Black servicemen chose to remain in the armed forces for at least a second term. As sociologist Charles Moskos, Jr., wrote, “Such an outcome would reflect not only the ‘pull’ of the appeals offered by a racially egalitarian institution, but also the ‘push’ generated by the plight of the Negro in the American economy.” Indeed, Black soldiers found the Army to be much more racially egalitarian than civilian life. Not surprisingly, this was especially true of Black servicemen from the South, where 93 percent saw the military as more racially just; however, even a great majority of Black soldiers from the North (75 percent) saw the desegregated military as more egalitarian than their home region. In less than two decades, Moskos concludes, the military had “leapt into the forefront of racial equality.”Footnote ¹⁵²

3.2 Fighting Jim Crow in the National Service

Truman’s Executive Order 9980, which pledged to achieve the same results in the civil service, was less successful. The Fair Employment Board (FEB) faced greater obstacles than the Fahy Committee confronted. Whereas the Fahy Committee negotiated with three services, which commanded disciplined and hierarchical organizations, the FEB had to scrutinize all the departments and agencies in the sprawling New Deal bureaucracy. Moreover, the Fahy Committee enjoyed a more direct relationship with the White House, which greatly abetted its work. Its members were appointed by the president and reported directly to him, which insured the continual involvement of the White House in its most difficult negotiations, most notably the fraught interactions with the Army. In contrast, the Civil Service Commission appointed and oversaw the FEB’s work, which meant that the White House only received reports from the board after they had cleared the commission.

Nevertheless, the Truman administration exercised more control over the national service than it did over the private sector; consequently, the FEB, with cooperation from various agencies, established machinery that made some progress on loosening the grip of Jim Crow on national service and set precedents for reforms that subsequent administrations took up. In December 1951, the FEB reported that 488 complaints had been filed in twenty-seven agencies that employed 97 percent of the total personnel in the federal service. In nearly 60 percent of these cases, no discrimination was found to exist. Still, the board heard sixty-two appeal cases and found discrimination in thirteen. The board and the fair employment program continued into the Eisenhower administration: by July 30, 1954, formal complaints reached 865, 12 percent of which required corrective action.Footnote ¹⁵³

In addition, the FEB’s work was amplified by several agencies that made diligent efforts to comply with the order; others responded when civil rights groups applied pressure. A good case in point is the Post Office Department, which employed a large number of Black workers. When the NAACP demanded a Senate investigation of discriminatory practices in southern postal facilities in early 1948, an investigator subsequently found several cases where eligible Black employees were denied appointment and promotion. The FEB responded quickly, issuing a directive to correct the situation. After holding its own hearings, the board also ordered Post Offices in New Orleans, San Antonio, and Memphis to employ Black workers as clerks. Other agencies, with substantial Black personnel, such as the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, were more resistant to the FEB’s entreaties. However, there was steady progress in one of the civil rights activists’ most prized targets of opportunity: the Department of State.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

Since the start of the Cold War, the State Department had been very concerned about the charges of discrimination, especially in underdeveloped and neutral countries that were viewed as the front lines in the struggle to contain Communism. In early 1951, Randolph and White led a delegation of civil rights leaders to meet with Truman; they made several “requests,” with a point of emphasis on Black appointments to policymaking decisions at home and to diplomatic posts abroad. With the cooperation of Secretary Dean Acheson and Director of Personnel Haywood Martin, civil rights activists achieved noteworthy results. A progress report from March 1953 indicated that nearly sixty Blacks were employed in prestigious positions in the foreign service, with seventeen serving in posts that had not previously been available to African Americans. Moreover, the department had at least fifteen Blacks in high-ranking positions in the Washington office. Recognizing the fruits of the civil rights activists’ campaign to desegregate one of the most prestigious federal departments, Randolph wrote to Acheson thanking him and his staff for their “splendid attitude” and “cooperative efforts” in increasing Black Americans’ job opportunities in the foreign service.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

Such progress, as important as it was, did not satisfy Randolph. Despite the significant advances made in the integration of the military and federal service, civil rights activists emphasized that Black Americans continued to face discrimination in employment, most egregiously, in jobs funded by federal defense contracts. Randolph wrote an open letter to the president, insisting that Truman take more forceful action to support equal rights in the workplace. In particular, Randolph told the president that Black Americans would feel “let down” if permanent FEPC legislation was not enacted and that such a feeling could have an impact on future elections. “It is well-nigh axiomatic,” he wrote, that “the instinct to live in human beings regardless of race or color … is so strong that they will fight for the right to work in order to live.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶

The contract system gave the White House some leverage over the private sector; however, as the rise and fall of the FEPC indicated, the private sector, even when subsidized by the federal government, proved more recalcitrant than government departments and agencies. To Randolph’s dismay, the FEPC legislation was thwarted, as civil rights employment legislation would be until the 1960s, by a coalition of conservative Democrats and Republicans. The Fahy Committee and FEB appointments did not divert the National Council for a Permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee from its efforts to pressure Congress for authorizing legislation. Randolph’s group allied with the NAACP’s National Emergency Civil Rights Mobilization organization, formed in November 1949 to push for a broader civil rights program, including antilynching and anti-poll-tax legislation. As previously noted, some tension existed between the groups about which causes should take priority and what strategies should be employed. However, Randolph’s stature and coordinating skills kept the focus on the fight for FEPC legislation, helping to organize a national gathering in Washington of four thousand delegates who staged an impressive three-day lobbying campaign. Truman met with the delegates and promised he was working hard to move legislation through Congress. But the legislation became a victim of the filibuster, leading to the formation of another new civil rights organization—the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights—animated by the slogan, “Abolish Rule 22 in’52.”

After once again being thwarted by Southern Democrats, Truman made no further effort to secure legislation; however, Randolph, White, and other civil rights activists kept after the president, hoping they could use the leverage of the Korean War to get Truman to issue an executive order like Roosevelt’s 8802.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Truman demurred for a time, not wanting to detract from “unity” in the Cold War and the Korean conflict. However, after suffering relentless pressure from civil rights and labor activists throughout the spring and summer of 1951, accusing the president, as The Crisis complained in a stinging editorial, of “turning his back on previous pledges,” Truman finally acted in December.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ He issued Executive Order 10308, which created the Committee on Government Contract Compliance (CGCC), “to examine and study the rules, procedures and practices of compliance procedures of the contracting agencies of government as they relate to … prohibiting discrimination … in order to determine in what respects such rules, procedures and practices may be strengthened and improved.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Because of the legislation sponsored by Georgia Senator Russell that constrained the president’s authority to pursue job reforms through executive action and led to the demise of the FEPC, the CGCC’s powers were limited to recommendations, leaving enforcement authority to contracting agencies led by federal officials who were not especially enthusiastic about the executive order. Consequently, its powers did not parallel those of the FEPC but of the less effective FEB.

Moreover, the CGCC only had the authority to deal with government contractors, lacking the FEPC’s power to examine discrimination in transportation, labor unions, and other economic activities. Still, noting how the Truman administration had made progress against the Jim Crow national service, civil rights activists expressed some hope for CGCC, especially with the appointment of Dwight R. G. Palmer, a well-respected member of the Fahy Committee, as its chair. As the influential Black newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, editorialized, even though this was a compromised victory—“a half-loaf … was far better than nothing at all”—a beach head had been established that could be used to secure further advances in civil rights and economic opportunity for Black Americans.Footnote ¹⁶⁰

However, the CGCC, mindful of the strong backlash against the FEPC and the lame-duck status of the Truman administration, was not as active as either the Fahy Committee or FEB. Since it held few hearings and did little outreach to workers, it received only 318 complaints, and only forty were received by the government contracting agencies. The CGCC’s primary focus was on the future, presenting twenty-two recommendations for action to the Eisenhower administration. The Eisenhower administration did little to ramp up contract compliance; nevertheless, Truman’s creation of the CGCC and the actions of civil rights activists made it impossible for subsequent administrations to ignore fair employment.Footnote ¹⁶¹ As the prominent columnist for the Chicago Defender, Ethel Payne, wrote in summarizing a detailed report on the Eisenhower administration’s halting foray into discriminatory practices in businesses with federal contracts, “Beaten and battered and unwanted as it is in some quarters, Fair Employment is the anathema which remains with all of us.”Footnote ¹⁶²

In August 1953, Eisenhower created the President’s Committee on Government Contracts, headed by Vice President Richard Nixon, which the Kennedy administration replaced with the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, overseen with vigor by Vice President Lyndon Johnson. Abetted by the persistent pressure of a cresting civil rights movement, the government’s responsibility to address discrimination in the growing private-sector industries dependent on government contracts eventually became a permanent responsibility of the White House. Although strongly resisted by conservative Republicans and Southern Democrats and never codified in legislation, White House fair employment directives—a hard-won achievement of the uneasy partnership between presidents and advocates for racial justice—set the foundation for affirmative action policies that became an enduring feature of civil rights policy by the 1970s.Footnote ¹⁶³