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July 4 - July 18, 2018
a structure that often came close to resembling nineteenth-century conditions under slavery—
Now, such a plan might work in some sections of the United States but those of us who know the true situation know that it just will not work in the South. You cannot put the Negro and the white man on the same basis and get away with it.
the main object of this bill is, by human legislation, to overcome the great gift of God to the South.”
In this context, southern representatives feared that the New Deal rules for labor and work they had helped create would undermine the region’s traditional racial order. As a result, they shifted their votes from the pro-labor column to join with Republicans during and after the war to make it more difficult for workers to join unions and to limit their rights at the workplace.
Open shops undermine effective union organizing by eliminating the principal material incentives for joining a union.
The exclusion of supervisory employees was significant because foremen, front-line supervisors, served as an important vehicle by which upper management could control workers, particularly for employers attempting to avoid unionization.
all of the Democrats not from the South serving on the House and Senate committees that reported the bills signed minority reports which attacked the expanded exclusions on the ground that they were too broad and unjustly excluded workers who were engaged in more commercial than farming labor.37
This switch reflected one of the most significant political developments of the 1940s. In the Senate and the House, southern Democrats, now stalwart opponents, voted overwhelmingly with Republicans;
the bill provided that any custom or practice of not paying for certain time, even during the middle of the workday, would be sufficient to defeat portal suits.
most of the act went beyond the portal issue and cut into unrelated FLSA rights.
The amendments to the FLSA modified this provision to require that liquidated (double) damages would only be available if the evidence indicated that the employer had violated the law in bad faith, a provision that effectively promised to gut enforcement of minimum wages and maximum hours.
The larger the group of employees on whose behalf a suit can be brought, the greater the incentive to enforce the law, and to obey it in the first instance.
They now had good reason to fear that labor organizing might fuel civil rights activism.
workers among both races are beginning to realize that economic cooperation is not only possible, but desirable.”
the coalition that southern members had begun to fashion with Republicans on labor union issues in 1939 grew to almost unanimous solidarity during and especially just after the Second World War.
“If Taft-Hartley has been a problem to unions in organized industries,” one concluded, “it has been a disaster to those unions whose major organizing job is yet to be done.”
the cooperation offered by many states in enforcing minimum wages and maximum hours waned, especially in the South.
they opted to focus attention where their strength already was considerable.
trading off management prerogatives for generous, secure wage settlements indexed to inflation. In
than continue to fight for a more advanced national welfare state for all Americans, they concentrated on securing private pension and health insurance provisions for their members that would be financed mainly by employers.
First, the incipient civil rights impulse rarely tackled the economic conundrums of southern black society directly, focusing instead mainly on civic and political, rather than economic, inclusion.70 Second, the unions’ potential to alter the status of the majority of black working people profoundly failed to take hold.
In the mind of the southern legislator, by contrast, labor had become race.
the administration combined mass black participation in the armed services and access to formerly restricted officer positions and leadership roles with an unyielding commitment to racial segregation.
in August 1918, General Pershing’s headquarters had issued a request to French officers “not to commend too highly the black American troops in the presence of white Americans.”
“What point is there in fighting and perhaps dying to save democracy if there is no democracy to save?”
Since the less favorable treatment characteristic of southern states is less likely to lead to violent protest from powerful white groups, the Army has tended to follow southern rather than northern practices in dealing with racial segregation.”
The truth, Sir, are we nothing but slaves.
“We as a group of Negro soldiers, wish to be soldiers in the Army of the United States, not dogs at Jackson Air Base, nor in the State of Mississippi . . . We are treated like wild animals here, like we are unhuman.
Soldiers arriving at their destinations found themselves in towns and cities that might be openly hostile to their presence.”43
“Northern Negroes who vote a Democratic President in office put the South in the saddle. The South runs our Congress, Army and our Navy, and there is not very much left of the country after that.”
Embarrassingly, the Selective Service fell on blood percentages, using racial guidelines not unlike the country’s European enemy, Nazi Germany.
white ethnics—a grouping that signified the extension of American pluralism and tolerance.
Arguably, this educational initiative later had the ironic effect—certainly unintended by Senator Bilbo and his fellow southern members of Congress—of creating a mass literate public for the postwar civil rights movement.
the GI Bill did create a more middle-class society, but almost exclusively for whites.
Between 1945 and 1954, the United States added 13 million new homes to its housing stock.
As surely as the Homestead Act of 1862 filled the prairies of the Far West, the GI Bill created and filled the suburbs.”14
producing social change “so sweeping and yet so much a part of everyday life that young people cannot imagine the world in which their grandparents lived.”
“We have endeavored to assure a measure of states rights in the legislation wherein control of many of the features of the bill will still rest with individual states.”
The gap in educational attainment between blacks and whites widened rather than closed.
Charging the top rates allowed by the law, many of these private schools were flimsy operations that provided little or no actual training.
Most state departments of education were too understaffed to impose minimum standards
Because unemployment insurance was made available only to those who could demonstrate a willingness to take a suitable job, and because suitability was defined by the USES, many blacks were compelled to take work far beneath their skill level.
borrowers had to convince banks to lend.
Taken together, the effects of these public laws were devastating.
At no other time in American history have so much money and so many resources been put at the service of the generation completing education, entering the workforce, and forming families. Yet comparatively little of this largesse was available to black veterans.
White public opinion, accurately reflected in the preferences of many members of Congress, revealed that a majority of whites were not willing to authorize a comprehensive racially oriented attack upon poverty and disadvantage.
The burden of proof shifted from specific acts of discrimination to the justification of overall patterns of exclusion.
Company rules could count as discriminatory if they effectively excluded blacks or diminished their opportunity even if no such outcome was planned or anticipated.15
affirmative action has done more to advance fair treatment across racial lines than any other recent public policy.
there must be a clear and tight link connecting affirmative action’s remedies to specific historical harms based on race.
