Racial groups plan active part in 1944 vote drives
By Fred W. Perkins, Pittsburgh Press staff writer
Washington –
Color and racial discrimination will be kept a live issue through this session of Congress and the 1944 political campaign, according to plans being made here by a conference of more than 100 leaders of Negro and other minority groups.
Their main effort will be centered in the next few weeks on urging Congress to enact legislation, just introduced, to make a statutory and permanent agency out of the Fair Employment Practices Committee, which was established by presidential order June 25, 1941.
March is planned
This committee, now under investigation by a House committee on a charge of exceeding its authority, would be made into a commission of seven $10,000-a-year members, and would be empowered to issue orders and cause the punishment of persons who resist them, including employers in interstate commerce and officers of labor unions maintaining bars to membership on color or racial grounds.
A “mass march on Washington” to impress Congress with the demand for this bill is in a stage of advanced planning, said B. F. McLaurin, national organizer of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, who declared it would be “a peaceful demonstration intended to prevent possible violence and rioting in the middle of war, or after the war.”
Such a march was planned in early 1941, and is said to have been averted when President Roosevelt agreed to appoint the Fair Employment Committee. A. Philip Randolph, the Harvard graduate who heads the sleeping car porters and is guiding the present Washington conference, went on the radio on two nationwide hookups to call off the march.
Committee called blunder
In the first session of the conference, Mr. Randolph charged President Roosevelt with “a great blunder” in appointing a committee to seek a solution to the present controversy of FEPC with 16 Southeastern railroads and some of their unions of white employees. The committee has met with outright refusal from these railroads to obey its directives ordering employment of Negroes, and the unions have ignored the committee.
The committee is headed by Judge Walter P. Stacy of North Carolina. Its appointment, the Negro leader said, was:
…a delaying tactic which kept us from being farther on our way. Some Southern railroads already have begun to give jobs to colored men who were heretofore barred, and there has been definite progress. The President must be made to see that he made a great blunder in that the Stacy Committee serves to give aid and comfort to the recalcitrant railroads.
To write political planks
The conference also plans a meeting of Negro politicians prior to the Republican and Democratic National Conventions this summer, to draft proposals for incorporation into the party platforms.
The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, headed by David Dubinsky, is announced as contributor of $5,000 to an expense fund now at $25,000.
Among well-known names listed in the membership of the National Council for a Permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission are those of Senators Capper (R-KS), Gillette (R-IA) and Wagner (D-NY); several members of the House; William Green, Philip Murray, R. J. Thomas, Walter Reuther and other labor leaders; Msgr. John A. Ryan, Roger Baldwin, Norman Thomas and Wendell Willkie.