A. Philip Randolph: “Call to Negro America to March on Washington”

Context

The Great Depression, which began in 1929, marked the end of an era of prosperity in the United States. Throughout the 1930s, the nation’s income dropped by half. At the height of the depression, an estimated 25 percent of the total labor force was unemployed, but among black Americans the figure was as high as 50 percent, especially in urban areas. For most of the decade, it was nearly impossible for black Americans to find work. In the South, where many African Americans had been able to scratch out a living as sharecroppers, the price of cotton dropped from eighteen cents a pound in the late 1920s to six cents a pound in 1933, forcing many sharecroppers off their land. Making matters worse was the introduction of mechanical cotton pickers, which replaced a significant segment of black labor. As displaced black agricultural workers took refuge in cities, they met with hostility from the white labor force and labor unions, both of which saw the influx of blacks as a threat to whatever few job opportunities existed.

African Americans were initially skeptical of President Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” a package of legislation designed to provide relief for suffering Americans by putting them to work in an assortment of federal agencies. Various provisions in these laws and the agencies they created continued a pattern of discrimination against African Americans, leading many to refer to Roosevelt’s New Deal as a “raw deal.” Over the course of the decade, though, some progress was made. By 1939 African Americans were beginning to benefit from New Deal programs, and their income from public sector employment was almost as large as their income in the private sector. Helping to spur this modest growth in black income was the union movement. For years, the American Federation of Labor had supported discriminatory practices in the labor unions that were part of the federation. But in 1935 the Congress of Industrial Organizations was formed with the goal, in part, of organizing black as well as white workers. With the help of such organizations as the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Congress of Industrial Organizations organized new unions, including the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee, the United Automobile Workers, and the Steel Workers Organizing Committee. In the face of competition from the Congress of Industrial Organizations, in 1935 the American Federation of Labor granted a charter to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the union A. Philip Randolph had founded a decade earlier. In 1937 the union finally signed an agreement with the Pullman Company, which operated the railway coaches on which black porters and maids worked.

Black workers and civil rights organizations took additional steps to improve the plight of African American workers. In 1933, for example, the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People were instrumental in forming the Joint Committee on National Recovery. The organization’s goal was to bring inequities in New Deal programs to the public’s attention. The committee also spearheaded “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns to boycott businesses that served black communities but refused to hire black workers in any but menial jobs. In New York City, pressure from the Citizens League for Fair Play forced the local chamber of commerce and other citywide organizations to promote the hiring of blacks in higher paying retail jobs. Meanwhile, in the rural South, black workers were joining such organizations as the Socialist Southern Tenant Farmers Union and the Communist Alabama Sharecroppers Union. In Birmingham, Alabama, black workers were drawn to the League of Struggle for Negro Rights.

Efforts were also made on the political front. Historically, African Americans had supported the Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln and emancipation. Throughout the 1930s, though, black political affiliation began to shift as the Democratic Roosevelt administration appointed dozens of blacks to New Deal agencies, forming what came to be called Roosevelt’s Black Cabinet. Among these politically powerful African Americans were Mary McLeod Bethune, the founder of Bethune-Cookman College, and Howard University professor Ralph Bunche. In 1936 hundreds of civil rights leaders came together to form the National Negro Congress, electing Randolph as the organization’s first president. The goal of the congress was to unite some six hundred fraternal, civil rights, and church organizations under a single umbrella to improve the economic and social position of African Americans.

Despite some progress, the position of unemployed African American workers in the late 1930s remained dire. As the nation was emerging from the depression, white workers were able to return to full-time employment, but black workers continued to rely on relief programs and public sector jobs, primarily in construction and infrastructure building. However, war clouds were gathering over the horizon. On September 1, 1939, World War II began in Europe when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. In 1940, Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and Norway fell to the Nazis. In preparation for the possibility of war, the United States instituted a peacetime draft, and under the Lend-Lease program, begun in 1941, the U.S. government began sending military supplies to England, China, Russia, and Brazil.

As the nation mobilized for the possibility of war, the unemployment rate fell below 10 percent for the first time since 1932. Industrial output was up, as exemplified by an increase in production in the shipbuilding industry: From 1930 to 1936, U.S. shipbuilders had produced only seventy-one ships; however, in 1936 a New Deal agency called the U.S. Maritime Commission was formed to revive the shipbuilding industry—with great success, as 106 new ships were built from 1938 to 1940, and in 1941 nearly as many more were produced. African Americans, however, were getting only a handful of the new jobs being created. Accordingly, on January 15, 1941, Randolph issued a press release in which he called on African Americans to protest this inequity by marching on Washington. His March on Washington Movement had previously announced its goals, among them:

We demand, in the interest of national unity, the abrogation of every law which makes a distinction in treatment between citizens based on religion, creed, color, or national origin. This means an end to Jim Crow in education, in housing, in transportation and in every other social, economic, and political privilege. Especially, we demand, in the capital of the nation, an end to all segregation in public places and in public institutions.

The date of the proposed march was to be July 1, 1941. The Roosevelt administration, alarmed by the prospect of tens of thousands of protesters descending on the nation’s capital, tried to dissuade Randolph from this course of action and call off the march. Randolph, however, remained steadfast, and in May of that year he redoubled his efforts with his “Call to Negro America to March on Washington for Jobs and Equal Participation in National Defense,” published in the journal Black Worker.