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