Also known as “Don't Buy Where You Can't Work,” jobs campaigns drew on calls for the “Double-Duty-Dollar” (1925) and to “Spend Your Money Where You Can Work.” Black self-support would build independence and press white employers for fair hiring. Thus blacks initiated boycotts and pickets against businesses or industries refusing to hire them.

Job demands heightened with blacks’ urban migrations. Churches, schools, newspapers, and social and civic organizations endorsed and joined in nonviolent direct action to leverage black employment. Between 1929 and 1941, thirty-six cities, eleven of them southern, witnessed such protests. These foreshadowed the postwar civil rights movement.