throughout the 1950s and would culminate in confrontations over equal pay and civil rights legislation in
the early 1960s, with lasting consequences for women and for the nation’s well-being.
Advances on the Civil Rights Front
Social justice feminists experienced more success on the civil rights front in the 1940s and 1950s than in
their campaigns for extending social welfare or women’s rights. As African Americans continued their
mass exodus from the South in the 1940s and 1950s, settling primarily in the industrial cities of the North
and Midwest, many exercised their voting rights for the first time and pulled the lever for Democrats. As
African American political power grew, so too did momentum for a federal legislative response to racial
violence and discrimination.
Politicians felt pressure as well from the rising swell of African American protest, individual and
collective, in communities across the country. In 1942, Maida Springer, Pauli Murray, and laundry worker
organizer and Amalgamated Clothing Workers official Dorothy Lowther Robinson led one of New York’s
first mass street protests against lynching and race segregation, a “silent parade” of five hundred marchers
down Seventh Avenue. The three women carried a huge cloth banner, JIM CROW HAS GOT TO GO.^24
Four years later, the Garment Workers released Springer to organize a Madison Square Garden rally on
behalf of replacing the defunct wartime fair employment agency with a permanent Fair Employment
Practices Commission (FEPC) to prevent racial and religious discrimination in employment. The event
drew seventeen thousand people.
The conservative minority in Congress, however, repeatedly shot down anti-lynching legislation and
other civil rights measures, including calls for a permanent FEPC, a proposal strongly backed by the
labor movement. Frustrated with Congress, civil rights activists turned to President Truman. Feeling
pressure from an increasingly militant civil rights movement and aware too of the Cold War context—how
U.S. aspirations to spread democracy abroad could be undercut by the nation’s own domestic record of
limited citizenship—Truman issued an executive order in 1946, establishing the President’s Committee on
Civil Rights. A year later, the committee’s report, To Secure These Rights, condemned the denial of first-
class citizenship to African Americans and other minorities and called for government action to ensure
“the elimination of segregation based on race, color, creed, or national origin, from American life.”^25
Truman endorsed the report and urged Congress to heed the committee’s call for equal opportunity, an end
to Jim Crow, anti-lynching laws, and abolition of poll taxes. Congress failed to respond. After A. Philip
Randolph’s coalition of unions and civil rights groups vowed once again to march on Washington,
however, Truman issued executive orders in July 1948 desegregating the federal workforce and the armed
services.
At the local level, some of the earliest and most successful struggles for civil rights occurred in
unionized workplaces, with left-leaning industrial unions, especially those with large numbers of minority
members, leading the way. These postwar assaults on the racial order of the workplace, campaigns that
involved dismantling racial hierarchies in women’s jobs as well as in men’s, are often overlooked in
histories of civil rights and women’s rights. In the Packinghouse Workers, for example, Addie Wyatt and
other black women formed a coalition with black men and other sympathetic workers, including whites as
well as Mexican Americans and other minorities, to mount a series of workplace actions in the 1940s and
1950s that changed race relations on the job and in the community.
Historically, the jobs processing the bacon, hot dogs, chicken, and hamburgers consumed by millions
of Americans were rigidly segregated by sex and race. The easier and cleaner jobs were reserved for