A. Philip Randolph organized the March on Washington Movement (MOWM) in 1941 to put pressure on President Franklin D. Roosevelt to ensure a greater role for Alrican Americans in the defense mobilization effort of World War II. Tired of an established pattern of conferences, negotiations, and official statements but no advances on civil rights, the MOWM aimed at forcing the administration to take action by organizing a protest march to be held in Washington, D. C. To head off the march, Roosevelt, on June 25, 1941, issued Executive Order 8802, which established the Fair Employment Practices Committee and prohibited discrimination by government and by defense contractors.
The MOWM grew out of continued economic discrimination facing African Americans. As the economy began to recover from the Great Depression in 1940 and 1941, blacks found themselves largely excluded from defense employment. For example, 56 St. Louis factories with government war contracts employed an average of three African Americans each, and a United States Employment Service poll showed that over 50 percent of defense industries questioned refused to hire blacks at all. African Americans were also excluded from federally organized training programs because it seemed a mistake to train people for jobs they would not receive. The few who did find jobs in defense industry were typically restricted to positions at the lowest levels, despite their qualifications. Nor did the armed forces provide much opportunity, for the U. S. Marines accepted no African Americans; the U. S. Navy let them enlist only as cooks and stewards; and the U. S. Army accepted them only in restricted numbers, typically in segregated noncombat units.
Randolph (head of the Brotherhood ol Sleeping Car Porters), Walter White (the secretary of the National Association lor the Advancement ol Colored People [NAACP]), and T. Arnold Hill of the National Urban League met with Roosevelt in September 1940 to discuss these issues and to petition the president for defense jobs and desegregation of the armed forces. When the resulting press release indicated that there would be no policy change and seemed wrongly to imply their endorsement of this outcome, the black leaders took further action. The NAACP announced a two-day Conference on the Negro in National Defense at Hampton Institute and began organization of a 23-state National Defense Day to be held on January 26, 1941, to protest discrimination in defense industry.
For his part, Randolph began to sow the seeds of the MOWM. He declared that “a pilgrimage of 10,000 Negroes would wake up and shock official Washington as it has never been shocked before.” The purpose of the march on Washington was to demand fair employment in defense jobs as well as desegregation and equality in the armed forces. Randolph’s early support came from local black community groups, because established civil rights organizations thought the march too militant, while the black press believed it an impossible task. Undeterred, Randolph raised his original call for 10,000 marchers to 100,000 and established the March on Washington Committee (MOWC) to organize and supervise the march. As Randolph envisioned it, the March on Washington would be an exclusively African-American event: “We shall not call upon our white friends to march with us. There are some things Negroes must do alone. . . . Let the Negro masses speak!”
In an effort to prevent the march, Roosevelt enlisted his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, and New York mayor Fio-RELLO La Guardia to discuss possible alternatives with Randolph, who refused to back down. Fearing the potential violence and political embarrassment that could occur if thousands of African Americans converged on Washington, Roosevelt invited Randolph and White back to the White House and offered a personal promise for better treatment of blacks if the march were called off. When Randolph demanded tangible action, FDR issued Executive Order 8802, which created the FEPC and forbade discriminatory employment practices by government and by defense contractors, but which did not apply to the armed forces. Randolph then agreed to call off the scheduled march, though he called it a postponement in order to retain leverage with the administration and avoid criticism from those who wanted no compromise.
Executive Order 8802 gave a measure of federal assistance in defense employment and contributed to a greater share of jobs for African Americans in the wartime economic boom. Although criticized by some more militant blacks for not going through with the march, Randolph continued with his objectives of nonviolent mass action protest and held a reorganization conference in Detroit in 1942. Following a poorly attended convention in Chicago in July 1943, the MOWM eventually disintegrated. But in addition to its success in bringing about Executive Order 8802 and the FEPC, the MOWM foreshadowed mass-action protest ideas and strategies used during the postwar Civil Rights movement.
Further reading: Herbert Garfinkel, When Negroes March: The March on Washington Movement in the Organizational Politics for FEPC (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1959); Paula F. Pfeffer, A. Philip Randolph, Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990).
—Ronald G. Simon
World History
