Vol. 71/No. 15      April 16, 2007

A committee of prominent Negroes headed by A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, is now engaged in furthering a march on Washington, which is scheduled to take place July 1.

Ten thousand Negroes, it is planned, will join in the march, demanding an end to Jim Crowism and discrimination in the armed forces and industry.

Certainly, if ever there was a time for the Negro people to take action against Jim Crowism and discrimination, this is the hour… .

The old saying “last hired, first fired” applies as much as ever in the present expanding industrial picture. Most of the comparatively few jobs which Negroes are getting are the lower-paid occupations abandoned by workers getting employment in the strategic industries. Those jobs Negroes do get in the big industries are limited to the menial categories. The heads of big corporations controlling airplane and similar production have openly stated they refuse to hire Negroes except as janitors and similar categories… .

As a result of profiteering and curtailed production of consumers’ goods, food, shelter, and clothing cost more. The increased taxes to raise more money for the war machine hit the Negroes; before long these taxes will include sales taxes on everything workers use and income taxes on practically everyone working. All this is a heavy burden for the workers lucky enough to have halfway decent jobs. For the Negro people it is truly crushing.

Relief and WPA [Works Progress Administration] appropriations are being slashed…. Since Negroes were the group that suffered the most in the depression, and since they find it hardest to get jobs today, these reductions in relief and WPA hit them the hardest.

In addition to being denied work, Negroes are being denied the right to learn how to work at skilled and semiskilled jobs. The usual argument of the officials in charge of the training schools is that there is no use in “wasting the training” when Negroes won’t be able to get jobs afterward to utilize the training. To complete this picture, it should be remembered that one of the many alibis of employers who are put on the spot is that they can’t find Negroes “qualified to handle skilled work.”

They won’t take the Negro into the factories, but they take him into the armed forces. But not as an equal. He can die for democracy but he can’t have it in life.

In the army, Negroes are separated off in segregated regiments. Roosevelt has said that it is in the interests of “national defense” that the Negro should be segregated this way; apparently he feels that a Jim Crow army can best carry on the kind of war for democracy that he wants.

Segregated regiments mean separate eating quarters, separate sleeping quarters, separate seats at the theaters; no Negro officer in command of white soldiers, practically no Negro officers in command of even Negro troops.

In the navy, the Negro is segregated too—into the kitchen. He can serve only as a mess attendant or cook or flunky… .

And if he objects, if he even writes a letter to the Negro press protesting the Jim Crow treatment he receives, as fifteen sailors on the U.S.S. Philadelphia did a few months ago, then he is thrown into the brig and faces court-martial and discharge “for the good of the service.”  
 
 
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