On June 25, 1941, Executive Order 8802 established the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), officially known as the President’s Committee on Fair Employment Practice, to investigate and take action against discrimination based on race, creed, color, or national origin in the government and defense industry. Created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt under pressure from A. Philip Randolph and the March on Washington Movement, the FEPC was the first federal agency established to address the civil rights of Alrican Americans since Reconstruction. The FEPC was also instituted to address employment bias against white ethnic groups, but the great majority of the FEPC’s caseload involved discrimination against blacks.
Throughout the Great Depression, black workers suffered from extremely high levels of unemployment due to the shattered economy and widespread discrimination in the labor market. The percentage of African-American workers in some industries was lower in 1940 than it had been in 1910. As mobilization for World War II began to pour billions of dollars into the economy and to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs, the overwhelming majority of black workers continued to be excluded from all but a small percentage of the lowest paid and most onerous work in defense industries. Additionally, segregation and the denial of skilled and leadership positions for African Americans persisted throughout the military. Randolph and other black leaders, including Walter White, the secretary of the National Association lor the Advancement ol Colored People (NAACP), had been unable to gain any tangible concessions on the protection of the rights of African Americans from Roosevelt. Finally, with an all-black march on Washington, D. C., scheduled for July 1, 1941, the president issued Executive Order 8802, forbidding discrimination in many areas of the federal government and in companies with war contracts with the federal government and the unions they worked with. The directive did not include the armed forces.
The FEPC was authorized to conduct mediation and advise the government on employment discrimination but had little enforcement power. The only punitive measure it wielded was to suggest the discontinuation of war labor contracts with companies it found had violated the Executive Order—a suggestion quite unlikely to be taken because of the wartime need for defense production. In mid-1942, the FEPC was placed under the authority of the War Manpower Commission, which proved reluctant to have the agency pursue complaints. A year later, upon the urging of civil rights leaders, Roosevelt established a new version of the FEPC in the Executive Office of the President, where it had more autonomy and authority.
Despite the variety of problems that plagued it during its five-year tenure, including insufficient funding, chronic understaffing, and the lack of real enforcement power, the FEPC was able to make some headway against employment bias as it urged unions to accept African Americans, pressured corporations in defense industries to change their hiring policies, helped to resolve dozens of race-related strikes when white workers refused to work with blacks, held national public hearings, and received thousands of complaints yearly. Additionally, even as difficulties in the arena of race and racial conllict continued to afflict the country, the FEPC and Executive Order 8802 contained great symbolic value as part of the struggle for civil rights.
The percentage of defense industry jobs filled by African Americans rose from 3 percent to 8 percent between 1942 and 1945, and the number of blacks employed by the federal government more than tripled. It is very difficult, however, to quantify the effectiveness of the committee as the heavy migration of blacks from the rural South to industrial centers and the tight labor market of wartime were also important factors in the increased employment and wage levels of African Americans. By one accounting, the FEPC successfully resolved only about one-third of the complaints it received, and only about one-fifth from the South.
By 1946, when the Fair Employment Practices Committee was dissolved because of opposition from Congress, several states had created their own agencies to monitor discrimination, but an attempt to establish a permanent federal FEPC was killed by conservative and southern legislators. It was only with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that many of the aims of the Fair Employment Practices Committee became national law.
Further reading: Merl E. Reed, Seedtime for the Modern Civil Rights Movement: The President's Committee on Fair Employment Practice, 1941-1946 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991); Louis Ruchames, Race, Jobs and Politics: The Story of FEPC (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953).
—Aimee Alice Pohl
World History
