Though the NNC operated until 1947—when it finally succumbed to postwar anticommunism—the group never recovered from the political infighting that prompted Randolph’s departure. Despite the NNC’s short history, however, many scholars contend that it left an enduring legacy. Historian Thomas J. Sugrue asserts that the NNC’s antifascist campaigns established the blueprint for the kind of internationalism that would shape Cold War civil rights. The NNC’s success also, as historian Beth Bates has noted, pushed mainstream civil rights organizations such as the NAACP to the left. Some have likewise suggested then that the NNC set the stage for a more activist civil rights movement, as local chapters in cities such as Chicago and New York skillfully mobilized African Americans in grassroots campaigns.
While there is little doubt that the National Negro Congress’s left-wing politics distinguished it from the liberal middle-class NAACP and NUL, it is not clear that the NNC ushered in a new era in black activism. As mentioned, the NAACP had begun to consider a labor platform as early as 1933. More importantly, the labor program initiated by the NUL’s Workers’ Councils in 1934 overlapped the agenda begun by the NNC in 1936. Instead of transforming black politics, then, the NNC’s popularity is illustrative of the wide appeal of labor activism among African Americans during the 1930s and 1940s. The NNC may therefore represent the apotheosis of the industrial democratic slant of New Deal era civil rights activism.
Black Labor Activism and Antidiscrimination Policy
By the early 1940s, the left liberalism that had shaped New Deal—era civil rights activism had culminated in a national political campaign—A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement (MOWM). Several months after his resignation from the NNC, Randolph would use the protest tactics he had honed as a labor and civil rights activist to pressure President Roosevelt to redress pervasive workplace discrimination. By late 1940, the economic recovery precipitated by World War II had put a significant dent in white unemployment. African American unemployment, however, remained virtually unchanged. Racist hiring practices were largely to blame for the widening gulf between black and white workers. Indeed, a US Employment Services survey of defense contractors found that more than 50 percent of respondents refused to hire African Americans under any circumstances.39
In fall 1940, Randolph, NAACP executive secretary Walter White and NUL’s acting executive secretary, T. Arnold Hill, met with President Roosevelt to discuss the economic crisis afflicting black Americans. Randolph would make four demands of Roosevelt. He called upon Roosevelt to bar discrimination on the part of defense contractors, federal agencies and labor unions. He also demanded that the president desegregate the armed forces. Randolph ultimately threatened to march as many as 100,000 African Americans on Washington, DC, if he did not receive a satisfactory response. Concerned that the proposed march might incite a race riot on the eve of war, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 in June of 1941, barring discrimination in federal agencies and in defense employment. The Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), EO8802’s centerpiece, served as a compliance board.40
Randolph’s victory cannot be attributed to the efforts of one man alone. Indeed, Randolph’s proposed march functioned as a meaningful threat only because he and the BSCP leadership had created networks of organizers and sympathizers via the porters’ union and the NNC. The political infrastructure established by the BSCP enabled Randolph to turn a simple threat into a movement. Though Randolph called off the march shortly after Roosevelt issued EO8802, he maintained the MOWM through late 1943 both to adopt a posture of vigilance vis-à-vis Roosevelt and to stave off African American critics who believed Randolph had not gone far enough.41 The MOWM’s popularity faded in 1943, as middle-class black leaders withdrew their already qualified support following the Detroit race riot. The MOWM had nonetheless achieved all that it could by this point.
Black unemployment declined between 1942 and 1945; however, the FEPC’s contribution to this trend is unclear. Though EO8802 provided the nation’s courts—in cases such as James v. Marinship—a wedge with which to open employment to blacks and other racial/ethnic groups, the FEPC lacked the power to enforce its own antidiscrimination guidelines. Indeed, the committee’s efficacy hinged on employers’ and unions’ susceptibility to shame, as it relied principally on moral suasion and education to discourage workplace discrimination.
The FEPC was further hampered by President Roosevelt’s questionable commitment to its work, particularly during the FEPC’s first incarnation from 1941 to early 1943. Indeed, President Roosevelt greatly weakened the FEPC in 1942, when he transferred control over the committee from the Office of Price Management to the War Manpower Commission headed by Paul McNutt, an antagonist to the FEPC. In response to pressure from Randolph and other activists, President Roosevelt reorganized the FEPC again, in 1943, this time strengthening it, via Executive Order 9346.42 In light of the constraints on the FEPC’s work, the increases in black gainful employment over the course of World War II may have had more to do with wartime labor shortages than antidiscrimination policy. Still, as historian Paula Pfeffer argues, the FEPC and the threat of the march on Washington that spawned it would have a significant impact on the scope of black protest politics in decades to come.43
Studies of A. Philip Randolph and the BSCP have demonstrated strong continuities between the labor militancy shaping civil rights activism during the New Deal and World War II and the modern civil rights movement. Following the war, Randolph fought for integration of the armed forces, desegregation of public accommodations, voting rights legislation, and integration of craft unions. The breadth of civil rights issues with which Randolph was concerned was not simply a reflection of his own sense of social justice; it was also illustrative of the rightward drift in American politics.
McCarthyism and the related assault on organized labor had lessened the sway of working-class militancy over African American civil rights. Civil rights campaigns of the 1950s and early 1960s were thus less concerned with economic justice than social and political equality. Nevertheless, Randolph, a committed trade unionist, continued to press for economic fairness. Identifying lingering discrimination in skilled trades as an important source of black poverty, Randolph established the Negro American Labor Council (NALC) in 1959. The NALC failed to convince AFL leadership of the value of eliminating racial bars in skilled trades. Undeterred, Randolph and the NALC began organizing what would become the 1963 March on Washington.44
The 1963 “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” reflected many of the lessons Randolph learned from the March on Washington Movement of the 1940s. The march was convened by both labor and civil rights activists, including Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King Jr., the NAACP, the NUL, the NALC, the UAW, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The rally’s overarching aims reflected the lingering influence of New Deal industrial democracy. Organizers hoped to demonstrate a broad cross section of support for the Civil Rights Act of 1963 and a new permanent FEPC. They also demanded school desegregation, fair housing legislation, WPA-styled jobs programs for residents of America’s declining inner cities, an increase to the federal minimum wage and a full-employment economy.45
Like the MOWM, the 1963 March on Washington achieved many of its desired policy outcomes, albeit in much attenuated form. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations did not accede to demands for work relief for underemployed and unemployed African Americans; however, the Johnson administration would attempt to redress the problem of black indigence through the War on Poverty and related jobs training programs. President Johnson also worked with Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which would establish the legislative framework for affirmative action. Unlike the FEPC, the Civil Rights Act’s compliance board, the EEOC, would