Analysis: Executive Order 8802—Fair Employment Practice in Defense Industries
Executive Order 8802, issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on June 25, 1941, was a landmark federal policy aimed at prohibiting employment discrimination based on race, creed, color, or national origin in defense industries. This order emerged against the backdrop of increasing African American activism, particularly spearheaded by civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph, who pressured the government for change amidst systemic racial discrimination in wartime jobs. The order represented the first significant federal initiative supporting civil rights since Reconstruction and created a Committee on Fair Employment Practice to monitor compliance, although it lacked strong enforcement powers. While it did not achieve full military desegregation, Executive Order 8802 was pivotal in promoting economic opportunities for African Americans, facilitating their access to skilled industrial jobs during World War II. The order responded to the urgent call for justice and equality from civil rights advocates, marking a critical moment in the broader civil rights movement. It also highlighted the complex interplay of social and political factors that influenced Roosevelt’s administration. Overall, Executive Order 8802 served as both a reaction to civil rights activism and a catalyst for future efforts to combat racial discrimination in the United States.
Analysis: Executive Order 8802—Fair Employment Practice in Defense Industries
Date: June 25, 1941
Author: Franklin D. Roosevelt
Genre: executive order
Summary Overview
Issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on June 25, 1941—just days before a planned mass march on Washington, DC, to demand increased protections for African American civil rights—Executive Order 8802 instituted a revolutionary federal policy barring employment discrimination among companies engaged in the production of defense goods for the US federal government. The order also created a federal agency charged with ensuring the implementation of this policy. Representing the first major federal effort supporting civil rights since Reconstruction, the order supported efforts to achieve greater economic equality by providing African American workers fair access to the growing wartime industrial economy. Although it fell short of civil rights activists' hopes of fully integrating the US military, the order served as a milestone achievement in the civil rights movement, spurred a major internal migration, and encouraged the rise of more organized and widespread efforts to resist racial discrimination.
Defining Moment
In 1940 and 1941, the United States was increasing its involvement in World War II despite maintaining a position of official neutrality. The cash-and-carry and, later, lend-lease policies allowed US manufacturers to produce and sell war goods to the United Kingdom with relatively few limitations, and demand for weapons, ammunition, tanks, ships, and aircraft began to lift the US economy out of the lasting doldrums of the Great Depression. Factories added millions of jobs, and Americans rushed to urban industrial centers to train for these skilled positions.
African American workers, however, failed to share in the emerging economic boom. Numerous industrial companies around the country refused to hire black workers, and those that did often confined them to such poorly paid, unskilled jobs as janitors. Labor unions broadly denied African Americans membership. Inadequate schools in segregated areas meant that few black students attended high school or even achieved full literacy. The US military maintained a formal policy of segregation and generally accepted African American recruits only for support roles such as cooking or camp maintenance; some branches declined to accept black servicemen altogether. Combined with institutionalized discrimination, these policies left the vast majority of black families desperately poor and presented few prospects for improvement.
Chief among the civil rights activists fighting discriminatory policies was A. Philip Randolph, a labor organizer who was best known for successfully overcoming intense opposition to unionize black porters on the Pullman rail line into the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Randolph wished to gain the right for African Americans to serve their country in an integrated military, and for black workers to receive fair hiring and employment treatment in the growing defense sector. With the support of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Randolph and other civil rights activists began lobbying President Roosevelt for changes in federal policies. Roosevelt met resistance from military and business leaders, however, and before long had let the matter drop.
Frustrated, Randolph decided to organize a massive march on Washington to protest federal inaction in early July of 1941. He spent months mobilizing supporters, and the anticipated number of participants came to surpass Randolph's initial call for ten thousand African American marchers. The potential arrival of some one hundred thousand or more black protestors in the nation's capital alarmed the president. He persuaded Eleanor Roosevelt to meet with Randolph and ask him to call off the protest, but Randolph refused; he and the executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Walter White, affirmed the plan to march. President Roosevelt balked at the possible implications of such an event, worrying that protestors and bystanders could be hurt and that the march would tarnish the United States' reputation abroad. Although he refused to desegregate the military, Roosevelt agreed to issue an order barring discrimination in defense industries—and Randolph agreed to call off the march.
Author Biography
Franklin D. Roosevelt served as president of the United States from 1933 until his death in 1945. His tenure came during a time of widespread, institutionalized racial discrimination protected by laws in numerous states and supported by the US Supreme Court. In contrast, civil rights organizations and select influential leaders, including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, supported expanded civil rights.
Political and social forces, therefore, complicated Roosevelt's actions on the main civil rights issues of the day. The president declined to endorse efforts to pass federal antilynching legislation in the late 1930s, citing the certain political opposition he would receive from southern members of the US Congress on any initiatives he wished to pass afterward. At the same time, he invited African Americans to join his administration and developed an advisory board on racial affairs known as the “Black Cabinet.” Historians continue to debate Roosevelt's civil rights legacy.
Document Analysis
Executive Order 8802 clearly and definitively bars hiring and employment discrimination on the basis of “race, creed, color, or national origin” by employers in the defense industry manufacturing goods for the federal government and others associated with defense industry training and labor organization. Developed with the input and approval of Randolph, the order uses strong language to oppose discriminatory practices and, by extension, to support economic opportunity for African Americans.
The order begins by explaining two key causes for its issuance. First, it makes a moral claim that “the help and support of all groups” in the United States is necessary to uphold a democratic society. Second, it accurately asserts that workers have been denied jobs for which they were qualified because of their race, religion, or immigrant status. The order rejects both of these situations as being contrary to the national interests, thus linking integrationist practices with a successful national defense and with long-standing US democratic ideals. Furthermore, the order avers that supporting nondiscriminatory hiring and employment practices is a “duty of employers and labor organizations” rather than simply a privilege of selected workers.
Executive Order 8802 works to solve the problems of employment discrimination through two methods. One method bars the federal government from refusing entry on the basis of race to special worker training programs that funnel employees into the defense sector, a practice that had prevented black workers from gaining the skills needed to fill defense industry jobs. The second orders companies engaged in business with the federal government to establish an internal policy barring employment discrimination. The combination of these would theoretically give African American workers equal opportunity with white workers to seek and to find well-paid industrial jobs.
To oversee the provisions of the mandate, the order creates a special Committee on Fair Employment Practice (FEPC) under the authority of the White House. Roosevelt gave the committee little direct authority to enforce the order, but the committee was tasked with investigating complains of violations and with making recommendations to other federal bodies about ways to ensure that the order is fully carried out.
Glossary
effectuate: to bring about; effect
redress: to set right what was wrong; relief from wrong or injury
vocational: of, relating to, or noting instruction or guidance in an occupation or career
Bibliography and Additional Reading
Kennedy, David M. Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. Print.
Miller, Jason. “Executive Order 8802.” Encyclopedia of African American History. Ed. Paul Finkelman. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.
Pfeffer, Paula F. A. Philip Randolph, Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1996. Print.
Reed, Merl E. Seedtime for the Modern Civil Rights Movement: The President's Committee on Fair Employment Practice, 1941–1946. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1991. Print.