Winning the War for Democracy: The March on Washington Movement, 1941-1946
David Lucander
Language: English
Pages: 330
ISBN: 0252038622
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Winning the War for Democracy: The March on Washington Movement, 1941-1946 recalls that triumph, but also looks beyond Randolph and the MOWM's national leadership to focus on the organization's evolution and actions at the local level. Using personal papers of MOWM members such as T.D. McNeal, internal government documents from the Roosevelt administration, and other primary sources, David Lucander highlights how local affiliates fighting for a double victory against fascism and racism helped the national MOWM accrue the political capital it needed to effect change.
Lucander details the efforts of grassroots organizers to implement MOWM's program of empowering African Americans via meetings and marches at defense plants and government buildings and, in particular, focuses on the contributions of women activists like Layle Lane, E. Pauline Myers, and Anna Arnold Hedgeman. Throughout he shows how local activities often diverged from policies laid out at MOWM's national office, and how grassroots participants on both sides ignored the rivalry between Randolph and the leadership of the NAACP to align with one-another on the ground.
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Transitioned into a permanent institution. Randolph tried to carve a niche for MOWM, and its organizational identity as an all-black vehicle for a form of protest that it called “nonviolent goodwill direct action” galvanized around the slogan “We Are Americans, Too.” The demonstrations and rallies occurring in this period suggest that numerous grassroots activists and indigenous institutions such as churches and labor unions were involved in making Randolph’s threat to march matter locally.
While selections such as “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “God Bless America” gestured toward MOWM’s avowed patriotism.56 “The large attendance and high enthusiasm,” a reporter remarked, “is real proof that the Negro masses are awake and vitally interested in obtaining their full and unadulterated rights.”57 That two thousand attendees came to “We Are Americans, Too” speaks to the urgency of African American activists and to the organizing expertise of local MOWM member Ethel Payne.58 Known as.
Louis Race Relations Institute’s three-day program that was attended by an estimated four hundred people.61 E. Pauline Myers’s visit to St. Louis was paid for by FOR as part of a broader national strategy to instruct and train MOWM activists in how to confront racism through what amounted to a combination of Thoreauvian noncooperation with Gandhian spiritual solidarity.62 Myers tried to demystify nonviolent goodwill direct action as something that “seems like a really long hard name but it is.
MOWM supplied the FEPC with so much information that the agency needed to extend its 1944 hearings in St. Louis for an additional day. During two ten-hour sessions in a “crowded courtroom with white and Negro spectators,” eight companies were charged with racial bias in selecting the composition of their workforces and in the promotion of existing employees. Seven of these companies were charged with, in FEPC chairman Malcolm Ross’s words, “the alleged refusal . . . to hire needed and available.
Country.” This was something that created “a fine feeling within the Negro citizenry . . . not a feeling of celebration or overt jubilation, but one in welling respect for a deed done in the cause of [Christian] brotherhood.”76 St. Louis University established a standard for initiating institutional desegregation, but it was a precedent that took most institutions several years to follow. The University of Missouri monitored the situation, and by mid-June 1944 it began interviewing its.