Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

proof that white business leaders have a sympathetic interest
in the economic problems of the colored race." Even
more to the point the N. Y. Times said that the pact was
reached because of 'year of racial uprisings." (61) So
whatever jobs were gained were really won by the Afrikan
masses in violent uprising - and by the grass-roots nationalism
which alone spoke to their needs and interests.
The tamed and carefully-controlled "Jobs" campaign
was used to picture Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.
and other pro-imperialist leaders as "militants," as leaders
who really fought the "white power structure" and won all
kinds of things for Afrikans. In 1941 Powell won a seat on
the N.Y. City Council. His campaign was supported by
Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, the Republican Party and the
radical American Labor Party. (Powell was a prominent
member of this radical settler party.) In 1944 he became a
U.S. Congressman, where he achieved national fame for
leading a fight to desegregate Congressional facilities. In
the press he was named "Mr. Civil Rights."
There were small concessions and cosmetic victories,
but there was still no change in the basic situation.
Afrikans were still being driven off the land, out of the industrial
economy. Their Nation was being de-stabilized. In
1938 the great, spontaneous movement over the Italo-
Ethiopian War swept the dispersed Afrikan Nation. Nationalist
politics again revived in the Afrikan mainstream.
Walter White, head of the NAACP, wrote of 1941:
"'Discontent and bitterness were growing like wildfire
among Negroes all over the Country. " (62)
The March On Washington Movement
In this situation, their backs against the wall, the
integrationist leadership was forced to put pressure on
their imperialist masters. The A. Philip Randolphs and the
Roy Wilkins desperately needed some real concessions that
they could take back to their community. They also saw
that it was in a long-range sense in imperialism's own interest
to make concessions, to ease up, to give Afrikan neocolonial
leadership a stronger hand against revolutionary
sentiments. It was out of this crisis that the March On
Washington Movement was born.
In early 1941 A. Philip Randolph, together with
Walter White of the NAACP, called for a massive Afrikan
demonstration in Washington, D.C. The goal was to force
the New Deal to integrate the military, and to open up jobs
in defense industry and federal agencies. Randolph said:
"'Black people will not get justice until the administration
leaders in Washington see masses of Negroes - ten, twenty,
fifty thousands - on the White House lawn. "This was
to be the first Afrikan mass march on the Empire's capitol.
It was a confrontation between imperialism and its own
Afrikan allies.
The March On Washington Movement issued a
"Call to Negro America to march on Washington for jobs
and equal participation in a national defense on July 1,
1941":
"Dear fellow Negro Americans, be not dismayed
in these terrible times. You possess power, great power.
Our problem is to hitch it up for action on the broadest,
daring and most gigantic scale ... shake up White
America. "
President Roosevelt ignored the M.O.W.
demands. By June of 1941 there were strong signs that
masses of Afrikans were preparing to come. Churches
were chartering fleets of buses. Worried, the President's
wife and Mayor LaGuardia met with-Randolph in New
York City, urging him to cancel the March. Mrs. Roosevelt
told Randolph that there might be repression if the March
took place. Besides, she said, "Such a march is impractical.
You say you will be able to get 25,000 or more
Negroes to come to Washington. Where will they stay,
where will they eat?" Washington of 1941 was a Southern
city, rigidly Jim Crow, with virtually no public facilities
for "colored."
Mrs. Roosevelt had laid down one threat; Randolph
politely answered with another: "Why, they'll stay
in the hotels and eat in the restaurants." Randolph was
threatening a massive breaking of the Color Bar, crowds of
Afrikans pushing into "white" areas all over the capital -
and the resultant "race riots" as thousands of Afrikans
and settler police clashed! The stakes were high, and the integrationist
leaders were preparing to have an open confrontation.
That alone should tell us how critical their
situation was. The very next day the White House invited
the M.O.W. leaders to come for negotiations on cancelling
the March.
Randolph and Walter White met with President
Roosevelt, who had brought in William Knudson, Chairman
of General Motors, and Sidney Hillman of the CIO.
The M.O.W. leaders rejected the offer of the usual study
commission. Finally, on June 24, 1941, the White House
offered to meet Randolph's demands on employment. The
next day Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 8802,
which for the first time ordered: "...there shall be no
discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries
or Government ..." For the first time a Fair
Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) was set up to
pretend to do something about job discrimination. Randolph
called the March off in a network radio address.
The threat of touching off the Afrikan masses had
produced a surprising turn-about in public imperialist
policy. The breakthrough was credited to Randolph, who
became Amerika's officially-endorsed protest leader. He
was showered with awards. The Amsterdam News said:
"A. Philip Randolph, courageous champion of the rights
of his people, takes the helm as the nation's No. 1 Negro
leader ... already he is being ranked with the great Frederick
Douglass. "(64)
As we know from the 1960s, these official promises
of themselves mean very little in the way of real
change. The gathering pressure from the masses below, the
still unorganized militant nationalist sentiment building
among the grass-roots, had crowded, pushed on U.S. imperialism.
A nodal point was being reached. Notice was
taken that Afrikans were not willing to be passively starved.
Further, U.S. imperialism understood the meaning of
the startling fact that even their chosen Afrikan allies could
not shrug off the pressure from the Afrikan people on the
streets, but had to either lead them into struggle or be left
121 behind. Imperialism's contradiction was that it had to both