Executive Order 8802

Executive Order 8802, signed by Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941, established the Fair Employment Practices Commission, a body authorized to investigate complaints of racial discrimination in companies under contract to supply war materials to the government. On the eve of the American entry into World War II, the U.S. government engaged in lofty rhetoric against racial supremacist regimes in Germany and Japan, but its own military remained racially segregated. Employers at defense plants, as everywhere, specified whether the advertised jobs were for white or “colored” men or women. African American labor activists sought to make the government narrow the gap between its principles and its practices. A. Philip Randolph, the head of the all-black union of Pullman Sleeping Car Porters, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) called for tens of thousands of blacks to march on Washington to protest racism. To head off the march, FDR agreed to issue Executive Order 8802.

The order created the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), which was designed to ensure that “there shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin.” If contractors did not want to abide by these federal regulations, they did not have bid on defense contracts. By 1942, however, nearly every medium and large sized company had become a federal contractor. The federal government now expanded its reach into tens of thousands of industrial workplaces through FEPC to ensure fair and equitable treatment of African Americans. In practice, the FEPC's powers were largely investigative, although the possibility remained that companies could lose lucrative defense contracts if they failed to abide by its decisions.

Randolph and other civil rights activists' frustrations with the FEPC had become so acute that, in 1943, he threatened another march on Washington. Blacks in the North had only recently begun to vote for the Democratic Party—reversing decades of preference for the Republicans—and thus Roosevelt had to respond to the threat of losing the support of northern states, such as Pennsylvania, where Republican political machines remained strong. Roosevelt responded by increasing the powers and staff of the FEPC via Executive Order 9346. Even when expanded and reorganized in 1943, the staff of the FEPC remained inadequate to police the vast number of factories and often relied on friendly organizations such [Page 263]as Congress of Industrial Organization unions, the Urban League, and NAACP to help identify problem areas. For instance, in Chicago, particularly in the stockyards where a powerful and radical union had recently organized, the FEPC helped black workers make progress. In East Alton in southern Illinois, on the other hand, the lack of liberal, radical, and civil rights organizations meant that the FEPC and black workers got nowhere.

As the military absorbed veteran industrial workers and the defense boom sharply expanded the demand for industrial workers, companies in the North and West increasingly relied on local white women, southern whites, and African American men to fill the gap. In the industrial North, most companies hired white women first, then black men—with black women being hired only as a last resort. For instance, in Homestead, Pennsylvania, U.S. Steel assured the community that it did not hire southern blacks until it had exhausted the supply of local labor. White women, often relatives of other workers and soldiers, had the advantage of being nearly universally considered temporary employees, unlike black men who were expected to accrue seniority and remain employed after war's end. Consequently, white women were often placed in jobs that maintained the prewar racial division of labor. Companies hired black workers as laborers on furnaces melting metal at over 2000º F, or on coke ovens where gases from coal were extracted for fuel and chemicals—another hot and extremely toxic job.

...