Learning
Module 3 – Activity Two
History
101 & History 103[1]
General
Information:
·
Assessment:
20 pts.
The activity:
This
activity includes two primary sources.
Each deals with some aspect of the “Double V” campaign by African
Americans during World War II.
The
first source is an article that A. Philip Randolph wrote for the Black Worker,
a publication read by the black community.
Randolph never used this article to make a speech. But as one who supported the “Double V”
campaign, he clearly stood by his comments and continued to lobby for an end of
discrimination of African Americans living in America.
The
second source is an explanation by Sybil Lewis of what it was like for a black
woman to work in the California defense industries. You will find that she liked learning new
skills and felt a pride at the money she earned, despite the fact that men were
paid more.
The
quiz will include questions from the Introduction and the two primary
sources. The Introduction is the first
reading in this activity.
Questions to
consider: A Philip Randolph
Questions to
consider: Sybil Lewis
Fighting on Two Fronts: World War II[2]
Historical Context of the March-on-Washington (1941)
On the eve of World War II, African
Americans stood ready to consolidate the gains they had made over the previous
decade and to press ahead for full equality.
As the United States mobilized for war, blacks were presented with
opportunities and new strategies for attaching racial injustice. The federal government’s need for social
harmony in the face of international conflict meant that Washington was more
likely than ever to acquiesce to black demands for change. The March-on-Washington Movement (MOWN). The
March-on-Washington Movement (MOWN) in 1941 demonstrated the effectiveness of a
new tactic—nonviolent direct action—and opened jobs in the nation's defense industries to backs for the first
time. When America finally entered the
war, most African Americans agreed with Robert Vann of Pittsburgh Courier that they should mount a “Double
V” campaign—fighting fascism abroad while continuing to struggle against Jim
Crow at home.
Having gained new opportunities to work in
defense industries, hundreds of thousands of African Americans migrated during
the war to port and industrial cities from Norfolk to Detroit to Oakland. But southern white streamed into the same
cities, bringing their racial attitudes with them. This led to frequent racial disturbances over
jobs, and housing in many urban centers during the war. In 1943, these tensions erupted into a full-scale
race riot in Detroit. Smaller riots
occurred in other cities
Black soldiers fared no better. The armed forces remained segregated during
the war. In addition, most black soldiers were trained at campus in the rural
South, increasing the likelihood of racial tensions and discriminatory
treatment, both on and off base.
The war spawned optimist and rising
militancy among blacks. In addition to
the success of the MOWN, the NAACP continued to challenge the color line,
winning a judicial victory in the 1944 against white primary elections in the
U.S. Supreme Court. NAACP membership
soared during the war, growing from 50,000 in 1940 to over 450,000 in 1946. Many of these new members were black soldiers.
A new civil rights organization, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), was
created in 1942. An interracial group,
it pioneered sit-ins and picketing and other innovative tactics, and
desegregated restaurants, movie theaters, and other public accommodations in a
few northern cities. When the ended in
1945, African Americans were ready for a full-scale assault on the walls of Jim
Crow, confident that it would finally succeed.
A Philip Randolph, The March-on-Washington
Movement
The March on Washington Movement, the
brainchild of black labor leader A. Philip Randolph (1899 – 1979), offered
African Americans an opportunity to challenge their exclusion from the defense
industries and segregation within the military.
Randolph, the founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, was a
well-respected activist for black rights.
In the following summons, published in the May 1941 issue of the Black Worker, he called for a mass march
on Washington by blacks to protest inequalities in the Nation’s defense effort
and to pressure FDR for change. Six days
before the scheduled march, FDR issued Executive Order 8802, which barred
racial discrimination in the defense industries and set up the Fair Employment
Practices Committee as an enforcement device.
Willing to accept the partial victory, Randolph canceled the march. But black leaders had learned the value of
the technique. They would imply it again
in another famous march on Washington twenty-two years later.[3]
Greetings:
We call upon you to fight for jobs in
National Defense. We call upon you to struggle for the integration of Negroes
in the armed forces, such as the Air Corps, Navy, Army and Marine Corps of the
Nation.
We call upon you to demonstrate for the abolition of Jim-Crowism in all
Government departments and defense employment.
Tis is an hour of crisis. It is a crisis of democracy. It is a crisis of minority groups.
It is a crisis for Negro Americans
What
is this crisis?
To American Negroes, it is the denial of
jobs in Government defense projects. It is racial discrimination in Government
departments. It is widespread Jim-Crowism
in the armed forces of the Nation.
While billions of the taxpayers’ money are
being spent on war weapons, Negro workers are finally being turned away from
the gates of factories, mines and mills—being flatly told, “NOTHING
DOING.” Some employers’ refuse to give
Negroes jobs when they are without “union cards,” and some unions refuse to
Negro workders union cards when they are “without jobs.”
·
What
shall we do?
·
What
a dilemma!
·
What
a runaround!
·
What
a disgrace!
·
What
a blow below “the belt”!
‘Though dark,
doubtful and discouraging, all is not last, all is not hopeless. ‘Though battered and bruised, we are not
beaten, broken, or bewildered.
Verily, the Negroes’ deepest
disappointments and direst defeats, their tragic trials and outrageous
oppressions in these dreadful days of destruction and disaster to democracy and
freedom, and the rights of minority peoples, and the dignity and independence
of the human spirit, is the Negroes’ greatest opportunity to rise to the
highest heights of struggle for freedom and justice in Government, in industry,
in labor unions, education, social service religion and culture.
With faith and the confidence of the Negro people
in their own power of self-liberation, Negroes can break down the barriers of
discrimination against employment in National Defense. Negroes can kill the deadly serpent of race
hatred in the Army, Navy, Air and Marine Corps, and smash through the blast the
Government, business and labor-union red tape to win the right to equal
opportunity in vocational training and re-training in defense employment.
Most important and vital of all, Negroes,
by the mobilization and coordination of their mass power, can cause PRESIDENT
ROOSEVELT TO ISSUE AN EXECTUIVE ORDER ABOLISHING DISCRMINATIONS IN ALL
GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENTS, ARMY, NAVY, AIR CORPS AND NATIONAL DEFENSE JOBS.
Of course, the task is not easy. In very truth, it is big, tremendous and
difficult.
·
It
will cost money.
·
It
will require sacrifice.
·
It
will tax the Negroes’ courage, determination and will to struggle.
·
But
we can, must and will triumph.
The Negroes’ stake in national defense is
big. It consists of jobs, thousands of jobs.
It may represent millions, yes, hundreds of millions of dollars in
wages. It consists of new industrial
opportunities and hope. It is worth
fighting for….
Negroes can build a mammoth machine of mass
action with a terrific and tremendous driving and striking power that can
shatter and crush the evil fortress of race prejudice and hate, if they will
only resolve to do so and never stop, until victory comes.
Dear fellow Negros Americans, be not
dismayed in these terrible times. You possess power, great power. Our problem is to harness and hitch it up for
action on the broadest, daring and most gigantic scale…..
But
what of national unity?
We believe in national unity which
recognizes equal opportunity of black and white citizens to jobs in national
defense and the armed forces, and in all other institutions and endeavors in
America. We condemn all dictatorships,
Fascist, Nazi and Communist. We are
loyal, patriotic Americans all…..
Today, we call upon President Roosevelt, a
great humanitarian and idealist, to follow in the footsteps of his noble and
illustrious predecessor and take the second decisive step in this world’s and
national emergency and free American Negro citizens of the stigma, humiliation
and insult of discrimination and Jim-Crowism in Government departments and
national defense.
Sybil Lewis, A Black Rosie the Riveter
The March-on-Washington Movement and the
needs of wartime production opened new economic opportunities for the African
Americans who flooded into the port and industrial cities of the North and West
during World War II. By the end of the
war, one of every twelve worker employed in the defense industries was
black. The war brought unprecedented
roles to black women, who had typically been confined to work in the home, the
fields, or in menial tasks. Some, who
had labored for less than $4 a week as domestic servants in the South, now
found themselves earning $48 a week as skilled workers in the aircraft plans
and shipyards of California. The following account by Sybil Lewis, a young
black woman who left Sapulpa, Oklahoma, for Los Angeles early in the war,
epitomizes this experience. She found well-paid and challenging work but still faced
discrimination because of her race and gender. In most cases, these jobs did
not last beyond the war. Like Lewis, however, many African American women were permanently
changed by their wartime experience; as one historian has observed, the “found
an empowered voice during the war” that allowed them “to break silence, to
challenge limits, and to change forever the terms of their lives.
When
I first arrived in Los Angeles, I began to look for a job. I decided I didn’t
want to do maid work anymore, so I got a job as a waitress in a small black
restaurant. I was making pretty good
money, more money than I had in Sapulpa, but I didn’t have the knack for
getting good tips. Then I saw an ad in
the newspaper offering to train women for defense work. I went to Lockheed Aircraft and applied. They said they’d call me, but I never to a
response, so I went back and applied again.
You had to be pretty persistent.
Finally they accepted me. They gave me a short training program and
taught me how to rivet. Then they put me
to work in the plan riveting small airplane parts, mainly gasoline tanks.
The
women worked in pairs. I was the
riveter, and this big strong white girl from a cotton farm in Arkansas worked
as the bucker. The riveter used a gun to
shoot rivets of metal to smooth out the rivets.
Bucking was harder that shooting rivets; it required more muscle. Riveting required more skill.
I
worked for a while as a riveter with this white girl, when the boss came around
one day and said, “We’ve decided to make some changes.” At this point he assigned her to do the
riveting and me to do the bucking. I
wanted to know why. He said, “Well, we
just interchange once in a while.” But I
was never given the riveting job back.
That was the first encounter I had with segregation in California, and
it didn’t sit too well with me. It brought back some of my experiences in Sapulpa—you’re
a Negro, so you do the hard work. I wasn’t
failing as a riveter—in fact, the other girl learned to rivet from me—but I
felt they gave me the job of bucker because I was black.
So
I applied to Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica and was hired as a riveter there. On that job I did not encounter the same
prejudice. As a matter of fact, the foreman was more congenial. But Maywood, where Lockheed was located, was
a very segregated city. Going into that
city, you were really going into forbidden territory. Santa Monica was not a segregated community.
I
worked in aircraft for a few years, and then in ’43 I saw an ad in the paper
for women trainees to learn arc welding.
The salary sounded good, from a dollar-twenty-five an hour. I wanted to learn that skill and I wanted to
make more money, so I answered the ad and they sent me to a short course at
welding school. After I passed the trainee course, they employed me in the
shipyards. That was a little different
than working in aircraft, because in the shipyard you found mostly men. There I ran into another kind of
discrimination: because I was a woman I was paid less than a man for doing the
same job.
I
was an arc welder, I’d passed both the army and navy tests, and I knew I could
do the job, but I found from talking with some of the men that they made more
money. You’d ask about this, but they’d
say, “Well, you don’t have the experience,” or “The men have to lift some heavy
pieces of steel and you don’t have to,” but I knew that I had to help lift
steel, too.
They
started everyone off at a dollar-twenty an hour. There were higher-paying jobs, though, like
chippers and crane operators, that were for men only. Once, the foreman told me I had to go on the
skids—the long docks along the hull. I
said, “That sounds pretty dangerous.
Will I make more than one-twenty an hour?” And he said, “No, one-twenty is the top pay
you’ll get.” But the men got more.
It
was interesting that although they didn’t pay women as well as men, the men
treated you differently if you wore slacks.
I noticed, for example, that when you’d get on the bus or the streetcar,
you stood all the way, more than the lady who would get on with a dress. I never could understand why men wouldn’t
give women in slacks a seat. At the
shipyards the language wasn’t the best.
Nobody respected you enough to learn up the way they spoke. It didn’t seem to bother the men that you
were a woman. During the war years men began to say, “you have a man’s job and
you’re getting paid almost the same, so we don’t have to give you a seat
anymore, or show you common courtesies that men show women.” All those little niceties were lost.
I
enjoyed working at the shipyard: it was
a unique job for a woman, and I liked the challenge. But it was a dangerous
job. The safety measures were very
poor. Many people were injured by
falling steel. Finally I was assigned to a very hazardous area and I asked to
be transferred into a safer area. I was
not granted that. They said, “you have
to work where they assign you at all times.”
I thought it was getting too dangerous, so I quit.
The
war years had a tremendous impact on women.
I know for myself it was the first time I had a chance to get out of the
kitchen and work in industry and make a few bucks. This was something I had never dreamed would
happen. In Sapulpa all the women had to
look forward to was keeping house and raising families. The war years offered new possibilities. You came out to California, put on your pants
and took your lunch pail to a man’s job.
In Oklahoma a woman’s place was in the home, and men went to work and
provided. This was the beginning of
women’s feeling that they could do something more. We trained to do this kind
of work because of the war, but there was no question that this was an interim
period. We were all told that when the
war was over we would not be need anymore.
[1] Created:
fall 2007; updated: 10/23/2011
[2] The source for the information in this activity comes from Sources of the African American Past, 2nd edition. Roy E. Finkenbine is the author.
[3]
A. Philip Randolph, “Call to Negro America ‘To March on Washington for Jobs and
Equal Participation in National Defense.’ Black worker 14 (May 1941)