Double V
There is a small but noisy minority “who want to see no evil and hear no evil, even though they know in their hearts that evil exists,” FDR said on Sunday, December 29, 1940. But the threat was nonetheless very real: “The plain facts are that the Nazis have proclaimed, time and again, that all other races are their inferiors and therefore subject to their orders.”
America could not afford to sit idle as the future of Europe hung in the balance. In a slow and firm voice, the president concluded, “We must be the great arsenal of democracy.” It was time for the nation “to meet the threat to our democratic faith.”
But the Second World War showed that America was at war not just with the Axis powers but with itself and that the very rhetoric used to describe Nazi Germany could just as easily apply to America, North as well as South, when it came to racial discrimination.
- Philip Randolph knew this. Born in Florida in 1889, Randolph entered the world at a time when Reconstruction haunted the white South like a terrible nightmare. In 1901, John B. Knox, the president of the Alabama constitutional convention, asked a simple question: “What is it that we want to do?” He answered, “to establish white supremacy in this State.”
Knox also made an astute observation: racial prejudice was just “as pronounced” in the North as it was in the South. Years later, his statement rang true: by mid-century, black Americans were denied employment in defense industries, many in the North. The arsenal of democracy, it seemed, meant that only white Americans could work to protect freedom at home and abroad.
The president of North American Aviation flatly said that “regardless of training, we will not employ Negroes in the North American plant,” while the Standard Steel Corporation resolved that, as they had “not had a Negro worker in twenty-five years,” they did “not plan to start now.” By June 1942, one publication wrote that 500,000 black workers “who should be utilized in war production are now idle because of the discriminatory hiring processes of war industries.”
Despite clear evidence of racism, black Americans—only ten percent of the population—made up sixteen percent of enlistments. Patriotism, duty, and honor were beyond skin color. Still, Jim Crowism defined the military just as it did civilian war production. Reflecting this, NAACP membership increased from 50,000 to 450,000 during the war.
By 1944, Otelia Cromwell could write, “There is a glaring inconsistency between American theory and practice,” adding that while the black soldier fought for freedom overseas, “certain conditions closely akin to the fundamental philosophy of the Nazi program” existed at home.
Randolph thus saw an opportunity to align American reality with American ideals. At the convention celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a black labor organization Randolph founded and led, a resolution was adopted urging the federal government “to see to it that no discrimination is practiced against American citizens” entering the military or defense industries “on account of race or color.”
Attending the convention, Eleanor Roosevelt—FDR’s de facto ambassador to black America—pledged to support any effort “to make this a better country, not for you alone but for all of us.” Early on, Randolph, aided by Eleanor, the NAACP’s Walter White, and Fiorello H. La Guardia, sought FDR’s support but to little avail. Getting the president’s serious attention would be a challenge. But Randolph would meet it.
On January 15, 1941, Randolph unveiled a bold plan: a march on Washington, D.C., to force the federal government’s hand. “Power and pressure are at the foundation of the march of social justice and freedom,” Randolph wrote in a statement. There could be no “national unity where one-tenth of the population are denied their basic rights.” Randolph called on 10,000 black citizens to fill the capital, demanding “the right to work and fight for our country.”
Even Eleanor thought it “a very grave mistake.” But it grabbed FDR, who met with Randolph on June 18. “I can’t do anything unless you call off this march of yours,” he said. “I’m sorry, Mr. President, the march cannot be called off,” Randolph replied, adding, with firm but sly exaggeration, that “one hundred thousand” planned to attend.
La Guardia urged both sides to reach an agreement then and there. And so they did. On June 27, FDR signed Executive Order 8802, prohibiting discrimination because of “race, creed, color, or national origin” in the defense sector and the federal government, to be overseen by a Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC).
Alabama’s Governor Frank Dixon wrote that the order intended to “break down the principle of segregation” in the South. “The Democratic Party in Alabama has as its motto ‘white supremacy,’” Dixon wrote, and the order was a step toward that motto’s demise. “The Negro race is an inferior race,” Mississippi’s James Eastland told the Senate in 1945; the FEPC was a strike at “the safeguards… erected to maintain the purity and racial integrity of the white race.”
By late 1942, Randolph’s activism, aided by countless others, came to be known as the “Double V” movement—a fight for victory over Hitlerism abroad and at home.
Men like Randolph led the way when no one else did, uniting power and pressure to confront America’s greatest lingering dilemma. “Freedom is never granted; it is won. Justice is never given; it is exacted,” Randolph had said in 1937. “Freedom and justice must be struggled for by the oppressed of all lands and races, and the struggle must be continuous, for freedom is never a final act.”
Many years later, in August 1963, Randolph stood with Martin Luther King, Jr., beneath the imposing shadow of Abraham Lincoln with the dream of a march for justice realized—by then an aged and embattled but by no means beaten fighter in the struggle that constantly rages on.