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 eventually be endowed with the authority to compel employers and universities to comply with its antidiscrimination guidelines. The greater powers granted the EEOC notwithstanding, its origins can be traced to the FEPC. While Southern congressional Democrats killed the FEPC in 1946, more than two dozen states created their own antidiscrimination commissions between World War II and the early 1960s. As historian Paul Moreno notes, these state boards—New York’s State Commission Against Discrimination (SCAD) in particular—would serve as the blueprint for the Civil Rights Act and the EEOC.46
The Wagner Act likewise helped lay the foundation on which antidiscrimination policy would be built. In fact, the phrase “affirmative action” first appeared in a provision in the Wagner Act that directed judges to impose financial penalties on employers who discriminated against union organizers. More to the point, antidiscrimination legislation, and the eventual implementation of affirmative action in the workplace, drew on precedent stemming from the Wagner Act.
As study after study has shown, few if any employers use quotas—which are prohibited by Title VII. Instead, employers hoping to avoid costly discrimination lawsuits established offices of equal employment to ensure compliance with antidiscrimination law. These new equal employment offices were modeled on the labor relations departments that union and nonunion firms had established in the wake of the Wagner Act. Moreover, many of the policies implemented by equal employment offices to ensure fair employment practices—including in-house grievance procedures, formal job descriptions, published guidelines for promotion and termination, salary classifications and open bidding—were already in use by labor relations departments partly because unions had demanded them. Finally, the National Labor Relations Act established a precedent, on which antidiscrimination policy would rely, for government intervention in the employer-employee relationship for the public good. Indeed, it is hard to imagine on what basis black civil rights leaders—who lobbied on behalf of a group that accounted for just 10 percent of the nation’s population—would have demanded a fair employment practices act in the 1960s if the Wagner Act had not already established a precedent, in the name of the public good, for abridging the right to freedom of contract.47
If the labor politics of the New Deal did not catalyze the activist spirit of the modern civil rights movement, they did impart direction and, by extension, momentum to the so-called African American liberation movement. The New Deal created a legal framework, shaped by popular discontent over a decade of economic crisis, that legitimated citizens’ demands on government for a more equitable and democratic society—a perspective that transcended both the labor movement and the Depression decade. Civil rights activists of the 1930s and 1940s, like most Americans of that period, embraced statist or what we might think of as social democratic curatives to the nation’s economic and social ills. The labor orientation of New Deal–era black civil rights activism faded as the conservative turn in American politics following World War II reined in labor militancy, most notably by way of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.
The rightward drift of American politics ushered in by the Cold War ultimately led many African American activists in the postwar period to identify race prejudice as a psychological defect rather than a symptom of class exploitation. Still, black leaders remained committed to the notion, rooted in New Deal industrial democracy, that the government’s proper role was to ensure “fairness” in civil society by providing some semblance of security to the citizenry. The New Deal was indeed, as Harvard Sitkoff asserted in 1978, a time for planting but not harvesting black civil rights. But for poor and working-class blacks, the harvest of Cold War–era civil rights politics was far less bountiful than it might have been had political and academic discourse on race and inequality remained rooted in political economy.
OSCAR HANDLIN AND THE CONSERVATIVE IMPLICATIONS OF POSTWAR ETHNIC IDENTITARIANISM
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