Fair Employment Practice Committee. In June 1941, President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt reluctantly created the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC) to forestall a mass demonstration planned by the black labor leader A. Philip
Randolph to protest discrimination and segregation in defense industries. Executive Order 8802 authorized the FEPC to investigate job discrimination in war industries and federal agencies. Led by Lawrence Cramer and black
Chicago alderman Earl B. Dickerson, the committee and its interracial, interethnic staff, including appointees from business and labor, examined complaints of discrimination and held hearings. Howls of protest, particularly from southern politicians and editors, soon led Roosevelt to abolish the original committee.
The FEPC enjoyed strong support among blacks, liberals, religious groups, and labor unions, however, and in May 1943 Roosevelt created a new FEPC. The staff at the Washington headquarters, headed by the black law school dean George M. Johnson, oversaw thirteen regional offices. Significantly, the agency became the first in U.S. history to appoint blacks to policy‐making positions. Dealing with other agencies often cool and even hostile toward its goals, the FEPC exposed the subterfuges used by private and federal employers to deny war‐related jobs and upgrading to minorities. But the FEPC had little real power. By summer 1946 relentless congressional opposition led to its dismantling.
Many historians credit wartime labor shortages for decreasing job discrimination, not the parsimoniously funded FEPC. Others, however, cite the FEPC for establishing the principle that job bias constituted a denial of
civil rights. Blacks indeed used the FEPC in tight
labor markets to open up work opportunities, and in some regions the agency placed qualified minorities in skilled trades and professions ordinarily closed to them. In some ways a precursor of the postwar
civil rights movement, the FEPC's symbolic and long‐term significance seems unquestioned.
See also
African Americans;
Racism;
Segregation, Racial;
World War II: Domestic Effects.
Bibliography
James A. Neuchterlein , The Politics of Civil Rights: The FEPC, 1941–1946, Prologue X (1978): 171–91.
Merl E. Reed , Seedtime for the Modern Civil Rights Movement: The President's Committee on Fair Employment Practice, 1941–1946, 1991.
Merl E. Reed
