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Synopses
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Background
Prof. Denton L.
Watson
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Synopsis
Volume III: 1946-1954
Following the death
of the war-time Fair Employment Practice Committee in June 1946,
Clarence Mitchell joined the staff of the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People as labor secretary, working out of
its Washington Bureau. The FEPC symbolized the unprecedented
mobilization of African American political and organizational
strength into a concerted struggle for the fulfillment of America’s
founding promise of equality, which was the modern civil rights
movement. The defining feature of the movement was the unrelenting
demand for presidential leadership, which began with this wartime
social and political mobilization. Mitchell’s NAACP reports show how
he consolidated and expanded the FEPC’s mission by incorporating
the agency’s contributions into the political phases of the
Association’s work in Washington as the twin flank to its legal
program that was being developed under the leadership of Charles
Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall.
Recognizing the political and
financial strengths of labor unions as well as the enormous
potential they held for opening up job opportunities for African
Americans, Mitchell launched his NAACP mission by establishing a
close alliance with organized labor even while relentlessly fighting
the rampant discrimination they were practicing. The unsuccessful
efforts to block passage of the anti-labor 1947 National
Labor-Management Relations Act (Taft-Hartley Act), and later to
repeal or modify it, symbolized this alliance.
In 1947 President Truman,
building on President Roosevelt’s example, confirmed the signal
importance of executive leadership by declaring at the 38th Annual
NAACP Conference in Washington that: “. . . we can no longer afford
the luxury of a leisurely attack upon prejudice and discrimination.
There is much that state and local governments can do in providing
positive safeguards for civil rights. But we cannot, any longer,
await the growth of a will to action in the slowest state or the
most backward community. Our national government must show the way.
That year, at
Mitchell’s request, the Atomic Energy Commission established a
nondiscriminatory policy in its facilities. In 1947 and again in
1949 he cracked bans by the U.S. Weather Bureau to the employment of
African American meteorological aides and by the U.S. Public Health
Service to the employment of African American engineers.
Thanks to the filibuster,
Congress did not pass any civil rights bill in this period.
Nevertheless, the NAACP preserved the FEPC idea by getting President
Truman in 1947 to issue Executive Order 9980 forbidding
discrimination because of race, creed, color, or national origin in
the federal service and creating the Fair Employment Board to
administer the order. On December 3, 1951, Truman issued Executive
Order 10308, creating the Committee on Government Contract
Compliance to supervise the enforcement of non-discrimination
clauses in federal contracts. Mitchell next got President Eisenhower
in 1953 to issue EO 10479, creating the Committee on Government
Contracts as another step to continue and strengthen Truman’s FEP
initiatives.
Mitchell helped to lead the
successful fight to include domestic and agricultural workers under
the Social Security Act and to increase the minimum wage. In 1951 he
led the successful struggle for passage of an amendment to the
Railway Labor Act that barred both unions and railroads from
dismissing workers who refused to join Jim Crow locals. The first
cases settled successfully were against the Baltimore and Ohio
Railroad in Baltimore and the Brotherhood of Railway Clerks, and the
Washington Terminal and the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen.
An important part
of the NAACP Washington Bureau’s activities included opposing
hostile legislation. This Mitchell did in 1948 when he blocked
passage of an attempt (S.J. Res. 191) to create segregated colleges
and universities in the South to defeat the NAACP’s school
desegregation program. In 1950 and again in 1951 his opposition
caused the defeats of amendments in the Senate and House to require
the armed services to give enlistees and draftees the choice of
serving in segregated or non-segregated units and to establish
segregation in Veterans Administration hospitals. In at least five
sessions of Congress he helped save the public housing program from
complete emasculation. He further successfully opposed a proposal by
Sen. Burnet R. Maybank that would have given Senate approval to
segregated housing. He similarly led the struggle in Congress to
establish the policy of prohibiting federal assistance to any form
of segregated housing, whether public, private, or created under
urban renewal.
Mitchell contended
that racial segregation in schools on military posts was a policy
question, not a legal one. Prior to the Supreme Court’s decision in
Brown v. Board of Education, therefore, he got the secretary
of Defense to issue an order ending segregation in schools on all
military posts. Similarly, the Veterans Administration ended
segregation in its hospitals and in all domiciliary facilities,
including Soldiers’ Homes.
In 1954, President
Eisenhower ended segregation in the Army, thus completing the
program that Truman had begun. By declaring in Brown that
segregation was discrimination, and thus unconstitutional, the
Supreme Court affirmed the foundation of the modern civil rights
movement, which had begun in 1941 with the creation of the FEPC and
President Roosevelt’s program to end discrimination in the defense
industry.
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Randolph with Eleanor Roosevelt