894 ★ CHAPTER 22 Fighting for the Four Freedoms: World War II
seats on railroad cars to accommodate Nazi prisoners of war. “Nothing so low-
ers Negro morale,” wrote the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, “as the frequent
preferential treatment of Axis prisoners of war in contrast with Army policy
toward American troops who happen to be Negro.”
When southern black veterans returned home and sought benefits through
the GI Bill, they encountered even more evidence of racial discrimination. On
the surface, the GI Bill contained no racial differentiation in offering benefits
like health care, college tuition assistance, job training, and loans to start a busi-
ness or purchase a farm. But local authorities who administered its provisions
allowed southern black veterans to use its education benefits only at segregated
colleges, limited their job training to unskilled work and low-wage service jobs,
and restricted loans for farm purchase to white veterans.
Birth of the Civil Rights Movement
In 1942, a public-opinion survey sponsored by the army’s Bureau of Intelli-
gence found that the vast majority of white Americans were “unaware that
there is any such thing as a ‘Negro problem’ ” and were convinced that blacks
were satisfied with their social and economic conditions. They would soon
discover their mistake.
The war years witnessed the birth of the modern civil rights movement.
Angered by the almost complete exclusion of African-Americans from jobs
in the rapidly expanding war industries (of 100,000 aircraft workers in 1940,
fewer than 300 were blacks), the black labor leader A. Philip Randolph in
July 1941 called for a March on Washington. His demands included access to
defense employment, an end to segregation, and a national antilynching law.
Randolph, who as founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters had long
battled racism among both employers and unions, hurled Roosevelt’s rhetoric
back at the president. Randolph declared racial discrimination “undemocratic,
un-American, and pro-Hitler.”
The prospect of thousands of angry blacks descending on Washington,
remarked one official, “scared the government half to death.” To persuade
Randolph to call off the march, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, which
banned discrimination in defense jobs and established a Fair Employment Prac-
tices Commission (FEPC) to monitor compliance. The black press hailed the
order as a new Emancipation Proclamation.
Essentially an investigative agency, the FEPC lacked enforcement pow-
ers. But its very existence marked a significant shift in public policy. Its hear-
ings exposed patterns of racial exclusion so ingrained that firms at first freely
admitted that their want ads asked for “colored” applicants for positions as por-
ters and janitors and “white” ones for skilled jobs, and that they allowed black
women to work only as laundresses and cooks. The first federal agency since