A Different Day Read online

  Although lack of resources and opposition from business leaders and conservative politicians hindered the FEPC's work, the government's ostensible commitment to equality encouraged black people to assert their rights and made them more likely to protest discrimination. In February 1944 two thousand African Americans employed at the Delta Shipbuilding Company in New Orleans went on strike after some of the plant's white guards harassed and assaulted several black workers. The walkout lasted for a day and a half while FEPC staff members tried to negotiate a settlement to the dispute. The company's managers eventually agreed to fire those responsible for the attacks and to hold weekly meetings on racial issues with supervisors and superintendents in an attempt to avoid further conflict. An FEPC report on the incident noted that in this time of national crisis, it was becoming more difficult for white people “to terrorize and keep the Negro in his place, for his cooperative effort in the production of ships is vitally needed.”25

  Often, black Louisianans’ petitions to the FEPC's office in New Orleans reflected a new sense of empowerment. Their letters expressed both indignation at the abuses they suffered and the belief that the government should and could do something about them. Laundry worker Lena Mae Gordon reported from Camp Claiborne in Rapides Parish that her supervisor had said that she would rather resign than recommend a black woman for a raise. Gordon stated, “I want to know why we don't get a raise? . . . I am willing to work on any defense job but I want to be treated justly. They say we are ignorant but this is not so. . . . I am an american born Negro and willing to do any thing to help my country but I WANT JUSTICE.” Some letters slyly manipulated official concerns about maintaining black people's support for the war. For example, when clerical worker Edith Pierce wrote to complain of an “atmosphere of under-cover hostility” toward her and the other African American employees at the Port of Embarkation in New Orleans, she ended by saying, “This letter is written with the expectation that something might be done toward improving the morale of one who would enjoy all the privileges of American Citizenship in full.”26

  Being asked to contribute to the defense of democracy overseas while suffering decidedly undemocratic treatment in the United States naturally sharpened black Americans’ resentment of injustice. Such feelings were especially intense among those who were drafted or chose to serve in the armed forces. As newspapers, government reports, and civil rights activists pointed out repeatedly, the treatment of black military personnel by their commanding officers and white civilians was a national disgrace. African Americans served in segregated units and were often assigned to unskilled work regardless of their qualifications. Dining and recreational facilities provided for black servicemen and women were invariably inferior to those of their white counterparts. Discipline was stricter on their side of the Jim Crow line, with African Americans routinely suffering harassment and sometimes violence at the hands of white military police and local law enforcement officers.27

  Conditions for black personnel stationed in Louisiana were abysmal. African Americans at Camp Polk reported that the white civilians who ran the canteen refused to sell food to black people and stated, “Colored soldiers at this camp are treated like dogs.” Black technicians assigned to Camp Clai-borne spent most of their time performing menial tasks far below their skill level. Edgar Holt complained, “After spending months in school being trained to do specific jobs we land in labor battallions while our skills go to waste. Our assignments are permanent K.P., supply and other details.” George Grant considered the treatment of African Americans at the camp to be “on a par with the worst conditions thru the south since eighteen sixty-five.” White officers called them “niggers,” their pay checks often arrived late, and they frequently suffered rough treatment by military police who resembled “nothing so much as a deputized Dixie mob.” A resident of Camp Livingston expressed similar sentiments. In meting out punishment to black servicemen, he stated, white officers were “just like a lynch mob with a neggro to hang.”28

  Many African Americans did not suffer such treatment quietly. A group of WACs stationed at Camp Claiborne made their resentment known to their commander, who complained that the women seemed “dissatisfied with their assignments and treatment,” that “most of them had a bad attitude,” and that “they are race conscious and feel that they were being discriminated against.”29 Black servicemen and women petitioned federal agencies and civil rights organizations protesting discrimination and highlighting the contradictions between the government's war propaganda and its practice. Writing to the War Department about her experiences with white bus drivers in Alexandria who repeatedly refused to let her ride even though she “had on the same government uniform that the white soldiers wear,” Dorothy Bray asked, “Why? Why are we here, I am sure none of us asked to be born but since we are born, don't we have the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, even when the color of our skin is dark?” A black man stationed at an army air base near Baton Rouge made a similar argument. “Owing to the fact that we are Negro soldiers of the American Army and fighting for the same cause as the White Soldiers,” he wrote, “we expect and feel that we should have just treatment due an American Citizen and an American Soldier, who has sworn to protect and defend this country from such practices as are exercised in this particular camp.”30

  Both soldiers and civilians in Louisiana also engaged in direct action against injustice. Immediately after arriving at a train station in Sabine Parish, black sergeant Nelson Peery spat on the “White” and “Colored” signs that designated the separate waiting areas, and another member of his division knocked them down with his rifle butt. Segregated seating arrangements on public transportation provided one of the most frequent areas of contestation in Louisiana and other parts of the South. White bus drivers and riders were stunned to discover that African American servicemen and women believed that their uniforms gave them the right to sit anywhere they liked.31 Altercations between white Louisianans and black military personnel became so frequent that the commanding officer at one camp issued a special memorandum reminding African Americans of their second-class status. “The Louisiana law prescribes that white people riding conveyances shall take seats from the front of conveyance toward the rear and colored people from rear of conveyance toward the front,” the order stated. “This law also applies to Military Personnel. . . . In the event that operator of public conveyance request[s] Military Personnel to move toward the front or the rear they will occupy seats assigned to them by the operator without argument.”32

  The presence of black soldiers and defense workers from other parts of the country created opportunities for local black people to engage in their own subterfuges against the social order. An officer stationed at Harding Field near Baton Rouge told Edgar Schuler, “Sometimes you get a case like this: a boy who claimed he was from New York, after he had got into some difficulty, turned out to be from the South. They say they aren't used to conditions as they find them in the South.” Some African Americans engaged unapologetically in blatant acts of defiance. “They think they're as good as we are right now,” one white Louisianan complained. “Some of em don't even move off the banquette (sidewalk) to let you pass, or on the side even.” Other white people cited the “high and mighty ways displayed by previously apparently docile colored girls and women” as a constant source of annoyance. Dozens of similar comments and quotations filled Schuler's weekly reports, indicating that many black people were no longer willing to conform to their expected roles. By April 1943 law enforcement officials in all but one Louisiana parish had reported having some kind of trouble with “uppity” African Americans.33

  White people deeply resented the loss of servility that seemed to be infecting the state's black inhabitants. But it was not so much disrespectful behavior as the disappearance of their cheap labor supply that upset them the most. Many of the concerns they expressed about the impact of the war on black people centered on the economic gains that African Americans had made and
their unwillingness to perform menial tasks now that alternatives were available. “This terrible war has made some big changes with us, and our mode of life will be even more changed before it is ended,” a resident of Tangipahoa Parish fretted. “The negroes just won't do domestic work—so we are still without a cook, or servant of any kind.” Analyzing the sources of increasing tension between white and black people in the state, Edgar Schuler noted that a major factor was the “improved economic status of Negroes . . . and resentment by whites at scarcity of domestic help.” Most people recognized that even when the fighting was over, African Americans would not willingly return to the positions they had occupied before the war. The entire southern social order was being contested, and white people knew it. According to Schuler, local authorities avoided discussing or drawing people's attention to these matters, but there was “a great deal of private talk consisting of rumors, stories, gossip, threats, and boastings—all or largely from the point of view that ‘we'll teach the damn’ nigger to keep in his place.’”34

  Throughout the war, white Louisianans made plain their unwillingness to tolerate attempts by African Americans to gain equality. During the initial phases of defense preparation, state and local officials made only token efforts to train black people for industrial jobs. Federal investigator John Beecher reported in March 1942 that Louisiana had a thriving defense training program that offered participants the chance to acquire, at public expense, the skills that would eventually enable them to obtain well-paid work in the region's new shipbuilding and munitions plants. However, he noted, “From this program of free public instruction Negroes have been excluded almost completely, and solely by reason of their race.” Educators responsible for the programs said that they would gladly include African Americans but their local defense councils refused to provide the necessary funds; state and local officials argued that it was a waste of taxpayers’ money to train black people for defense jobs because companies refused to hire them; and employers claimed that they were willing to hire black workers but feared strikes and other negative reactions by their white employees.35 The arguments went around in a seemingly unbreakable circle, using the results of racist practices to justify perpetuating those same practices.

  The efforts of the FEPC went a small way toward increasing black employment in defense industries, but African Americans did not gain access to these jobs in large numbers until the pool of white labor was exhausted. In the spring of 1942, two years after the defense program was established, black people represented only 2.5 percent of Americans employed in war production. By November 1944 the proportion had risen to 8.5 percent, with 1.25 million black workers finding jobs in defense industries. In Louisiana, the number of African Americans employed in all manufacturing occupations rose from 28,909 to 37,995 between 1940 and 1950.36

  As some company owners had predicted, white workers did not easily accept the influx of African Americans into new positions perceived to be far above their rightful status. After one WPA administrator arranged employment for ten young black men at a small shipbuilding plant in St. Mary Parish, he learned that “white workers in the yard were bitterly hostile to the idea and were threatening to massacre the Negroes if they were put to work.” Rather than risk their lives, the well-meaning official “whisked his charges unhurt but still unemployed back whence they had come.” In July 1945 workers at the Todd-Johnson shipyard in Algiers went on strike after a black man was hired as a boilermaker's helper. Despite their desperate need for his skills, the company's owners fired the man and reassured white employees that they would not employ African Americans in any positions other than unskilled labor.37

  National defense training program, Southern University, Baton Rouge, 1941. Defense training offered the chance to learn new skills and gain jobs in defense industries that sprang up throughout the state during World War II. RG 208-NP-2-R, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

  Even when the entry of black people into formerly all-white workplaces was achieved peacefully, this did not imply acceptance of their right to equality. Complaints to the FEPC testify to the discrimination, harassment, and threats to their physical well-being that some African Americans faced every day on the job. Edith Pierce's official job title at the Port of Embarkation in New Orleans was “Junior Clerk Typist,” but the amount of typing or other clerical tasks she received was “negligible.” Instead, her supervisors assigned her to “messenger work and errands throughout the area of the Port.” When Joseph Provost asked his foreman about obtaining a position as a tow-motor or tractor operator at the port, he was told that black people could not be employed in those jobs. Provost appealed to the officer in charge of his section, who agreed to allow several black workers to take the tests required for operating the machinery. In response, white operators recruited some white men from outside the port to learn the job and try out the same day. Subsequently, five of the new arrivals and none of the African Americans were hired. One of the white men later told Provost that they had decided to resign “rather than to have Negroes holding the same job as they and getting the same pay with them.”38

  While industrial workers sought to exclude African Americans from their terrain, plantation owners attempted to prevent black people from leaving theirs. In 1942 farmers and extension agents in the rural parishes complained of “serious and numerous” labor shortages during the harvest season because of the alternatives to cotton picking and cane cutting that were available.39 As the demand for industrial workers increased, large numbers of black people abandoned rural areas for the army or defense jobs, and the money they sent home to their families enabled others to withdraw from the labor market as well.40 For these reasons, white people in the plantation parishes resented the federal government's efforts to ensure equal opportunities for black people at least as much as those who lived in urban areas. In September 1942 the chairman of the Pointe Coupee Parish Civilian Defense Council complained to Governor Sam Jones that “from the very beginning of our preparedness move certain organized minorities have seized the opportunity to advance their causes, through unheard of wage rate increases and working conditions.” He enclosed a resolution from the parish defense council suggesting that “the government in its struggle for existence should be less solicitous about the social gains made during recent years by a few groups, and exert its unhampered resources to the winning of the war.”41

  The same month, representatives of the nation's major agricultural organizations met in Washington, D.C., to devise a coordinated plan of attack against government intervention in the economy and new protections for the rights of workers. Leaders of the AFBF, the Grange, the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives, and the National Cooperative Milk Producers’ Federation discussed ways to defend the “business interests of farmers” from assaults by the Roosevelt “dictatorship.” According to one source, “The general tone of the discussion was . . . that it is necessary for business men and ‘business farmers’ to block further administrative control of American business life whether in the farm, field or any other [area] and particularly to stop administration coddling of labor.”42

  Workers on a lunch break at Higgins shipyard, New Orleans, June 1943. African Americans were excluded from most defense industry jobs in the early phases of World War II, but once the pool of white workers was exhausted, employers were forced to hire black labor. LC-USW3-34429-D, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  Pressure from this powerful farm bloc persuaded Roosevelt to approve legislation in April 1943 that placed restrictions on the mobility of agricultural workers and empowered the Extension Service to assist in the recruitment of additional labor for those areas that were experiencing shortages. A labor stabilization plan went into effect in Louisiana at the end of that month. Under the new regulations, workers in “essential activities” like farming could not leave their jobs unless they obtained a “Statement of Availability” from their employers, and they could not be hired for new positions unless they produced pr
oof of their release. Though these obstacles were a potential hindrance to black migration, they were not entirely effective. Many farmworkers registered with employment services as truck drivers, mechanics, or other types of laborers without mentioning their agricultural backgrounds, enabling them to slip through the net. In addition, planters in northeastern Louisiana received a nasty shock when federal authorities designated their region a labor surplus area and began transporting workers to places deemed to be in greater need of their services. Congressman Charles McKenzie eventually managed to convince the meddling officials that his district could not spare any labor, and they agreed to stop encouraging workers to leave.43