FEDERAL FAIR EMPLOYMENT PRACTICE ACT TUESDAY, MAY 17, 1949 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, SPECIAL SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE Washington, D. C. The subcommittee met, pursuant to adjournment, at 10 a. m., Hon. Adam C. Powell, Jr. (chairman), presiding. Mr. POWELL. The committee will come to order. Our first witness for the morning is Theodore E. Brown, research director for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, representing that organization and representing A. Philip Randolph, the president of that organization. Mr. Brown. TESTIMONY OF THEODORE E. BROWN, RESEARCH DIRECTOR, INTERNATIONAL BROTHERHOOD OF SLEEPING CAR PORTERS, A. F. OF L. Mr. BROWN. I welcome this opportunity to appear here. Mr. Randolph wanted to be present but, unfortunately, he found it necessary to be in the far West at this particular time. One of the reasons he is in the far West is on one of the very questions you are here considering, one of the issues we have before the Federal courts involving one of the railroad brotherhoods that I understand is going to appear here this afternoon. He asked me to present to you his statement. As I said, I welcome the opportunity afforded me by your committee to appear here in behalf of H. R. 4453. A quick passage of this bill by the Eighty-first Congress is vitally necessary if democracy is to have meaning in many areas of national life. I have followed very closely through the daily press and the radio the statements made by earlier witnesses before this committee. Those who have appeared in favor of the bill have argued eloquently, and I hope convincingly, to this committee for the urgent need at this time for legislation to outlaw discrimination in our national economic life, based upon race, religion, color, national origin, or ancestry. The question of fair employment practice is of grave concern to me, and it is because of that reason that I have dedicated much of my time and energies in the interest of this issue. I request that you hear the remarks that I shall present in my official capacity as the research director of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. As you may perhaps know, I serve as a cochairman of the National Council for a Permanent FEPC. Mr. Martin Quigley will present the arguments of the council, but I should like to request that you hear, as one of many illustrations, how this question of racial discrimination is snuffing out the economic life of thousands of Negro railroad workers, solely because of their color. Before you is a bill designed to enact legislation in the interest of fair employment practice opportunities for all workers, regardless of race, religion, color, or national origin. The tragic display of racial discrimination in the various industries throughout this Nation, North, East, South, and West, has seriously hampered our economic development. It has provided an opportunity to illustrate the most serious and glaring weakness in our avowed claim for a democratic society. Negro workers in the railroad industry who are competent enough to fill a number of vacancies either by direct hire or upgrading are banned solely because of racial discrimination. Numerous efforts have been made by various means to correct this racially economic injustice. The records of the wartime FEPC and recent litigation in the courts have failed to correct the gradual elimination of Negro locomotive firemen from the Nation's railroads. The infamous nonpromotable agreement entered into by the Brotherhood of Enginemen and Firemen and 22 southeastern railroads with the help of the National Mediation Board on February 8, 1941, has resulted in reducing the percentage of Negro firemen from 41.4 percent to 5 percent. More recently, we in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters are gravely concerned with the future of the Negro train porter. For more than 30 years the craft of train_porters has been a definite craft for many of the Nation's railroads. Recent demands by the lilywhite Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen and numerous carriers including the Missouri, Kansas, Texas and Santa Fe Railroads have placed the jobs of veteran Negro employees in jeopardy. This issue is also in the Federal courts, but because of the lack of a definite Federal statute dealing precisely with the question of racial discrimination, we have been unable to resolve this issue with justice to the thousands of Negroes who are involved. The same type of discrimination which prevails in the railways, also obtains in the public utilities and many other industries throughout the country. The policy of some employers not to employ Negroes is justified by the claim that the Negro workers do not have union cards. Upon receiving this information, some of the Negro workers promptly go to the unions and request the opportunity to join in order to receive union cards to work in a plant under a closed-shop agreement, and they are politely advised that they cannot get union cards until they get union jobs. Thus they are caught between the Sylla and Charybdis of union evasion discrimination and employer discrimination. May I say that this is not true of all unions or all employers, but it is sadly true of far too many. Obviously, the Negro workers are victimized when both the shops and unions are closed. But, may I observe here, that I am by no means opposed to the principle of the closed shop, if the union is open to all workers, regardless of race, color, religion, or national origin. Not only are the railroads and public utilities guilty of racial economic discrimination, but also most, if not all, of the large American corporations doing interstate business. The oil, aircraft, automobile, food producers, insurance and banking institutions and the many other great corporations which comprise much of the big business in this Nation are guilty of minority discriminatory practices. Mr. Chairman, your committee need not go any further than examining the hiring practices and policies of the Federal Government itself. Notwithstanding President Truman's bold and courageous directive banning discriminatory employment in the Federal Government, the age-old policy of considering the race, color, religion, national origin, or ancestry of an American citizen is still present in the hiring and upgrading practices of the Federal Government. A strong FEPC law by the Eighty-first Congress will do much to supplement and complement the President's efforts on the FEPC issue. The achievements of the New York and Massachusetts State FEPC and numerous other statutes on this question in other States, offers abundant proof that this issue can be met by legislative means. However, the nature of American business in its daily intercourse is interstate and, therefore, State FEPC's are hampered in their efforts. The records of wartime FEPC in placing hundreds of thousands of minority citizens in jobs formerly denied them in the skilled occupations, often with the determined help of certain industrial concerns also illustrate that most of American industry will accept the national policy once it becomes the law of the land. Objection is raised to this bill on the grounds that it is coercive and that it is an attempt to eliminate race prejudice out of the hearts of employers and the workers, and hence H. R. 4453, stressing education and legislation without enforcement powers, is urged. The fallacy of stereotyped education on FEPC is to pose education as the opposite of legislation with enforcement powers. This is an example of setting up a straw man to knock down. Legislation, in fact, is an important part of the process of popular education. Legislation provides the arena in which opportunity is afforded for the people in the schools, barber shops, churches, tradeunions, chambers of commerce and fraternal lodges, to discuss, debate and explore all aspects of vital social issues so as to develop sound social thinking for the welfare of the country. People cannot discuss that which is not brought before them. The fight to secure the enactment of bills into law dramatically presents social questions to the people, and helps to awaken and inform public opinion as to the significance of these questions. This bill H. R. 4453 is not concerned with race or religious or national prejudice. It deals with only one thing, and that is the practce of discrimination on the grounds of color, religion, national origin, or ancestry, which deprives a worker of a job, or rather his right to live, because on the job the worker receives wages, and with wages he buys food, clothing and shelter, the basis of his life. Therefore, whoever seeks to prevent a worker from securing a job, because of any reason, is seeking to deny him the right to live, which is a very definite nullification of the basic principles of the Declaration of Independence, the Federal Constitution of our Nation, and the Human Rights Charter of the United Nations. It is a fallacy to construe race prejudice as synonymous with racial discrimination. They are two different things. Race prejudice is an emotion or feeling. Racial discrimination is a practice. While we cannot by law make a white worker love a Negro worker or a Protestant worker love a Jewish worker, or a worker in Boston love a worker in Atlanta, Ga., we can stop the workers from closing the shops and the unions at the same time. Laws can stop hoodlums from smearing synagogs with swastikas, and cathedrals with the hammer and sickle. They can stop mobs from lynching people for any reason. I do not condemn the trade-union workers who discriminate against Negro workers and other minorities. Fundamentally, black and white workers do not fight each other because they hate each other, but they hate each other because they fight each other, and they fight each other because they do not understand each other. But if they work together, they will understand each other. Now, the fair-employment-practice bill, H. R. 4453, does not seek to make white workers, black workers, or Jewish or Catholic workers love each other, but to respect each other's right to work and to live. If laws are ineffective to prevent discrimination, why maintain them to continue discrimination, such as a Jim-Crow car, and so forth? It is well-nigh axiomatic that the instinct to live in human beings, regardless of race or color, religion or national origin, is so strong that they will fight for the right to work in order to live. Hence, it is apparent that color wars may beset and plague our country in a recession or depression period, as a result of increased tensions incident to discrimination in employment relations, unless the Congress shows the social vision and wisdom to enact H. R. 4453. For this reason, the enactment of this bill will play an effective and constructive role in achieving social peace in our various communities. Without fair employment to supplement and complement full employment, the poison of Hitler's fascism and Stalin's communism may get into the blood stream of our country and run to the heart of our Nation. In very truth, there cannot be full employment unless there is fair employment. This is true not only with respect to numbers, but also in relation to the utilization of the skills of the minorities, and it is apparent that there cannot be fair employment without an FEPC law with enforcement powers. This question of increased racial tensions in the area of employment is not an imaginary but a real danger. A bill lacking enforcement powers cannot serve any useful purpose, because it fails to make economic discrimination unlawful. The 22 southern railroads and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Enginemen and Firemen flouted the directives of the President's Committee on Fair Employment Practice in December 1943. The Stacy committee, appointed by President Roosevelt in 1943 to attempt to unravel this problem, was without effect and force. Why? Precisely because the President's Executive Order 8802 had no enforcement powers. If this was true in wartime, how much more true it is in peacetime, when we do not have a war emergency with which to appeal to the patriotic spirit of employers and unions. The argument that a law with enforcement powers cannot achieve its objective will not bear examination. Witness the National Labor Relations Act, which served a useful national purpose of providing an opportunity for workers to choose their bargaining agent, without coercion, interference, or intimidation. Before that act was on our Federal statute books, employers discriminated against union workers, just as some of them now discriminate against minorities. The workers were afraid to join unions lest they be fired or not hired. The company union held sway, and the yellow-dog contract was jammed down the throats of the wage earners. Prior to the Wagner Act, and today with the Taft-Hartley law, violent abuses and recriminations are heaped upon the heads of the American workers who seek to organize. If we enact this fair-employment-practice measure, H. R. 4453, it will serve as a legislative educational force that will some day make it a matter of history when workers, on account of race or color, national origin or religion, are the victims of the abuses and violence and misrepresentation that are now their unhappy lot. I feel that the FEPC is not a Negro question-though there are 15,000,000 Negroes in the United States-one-tenth of the population. It is not a minority question-though there are many Jews, Mexicans, Catholics, and other minority groups. It is an American question. It is real and dynamic democracy here at home where we and the rest of the world can see that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are not "Globaloney." It will help to make democracy a reality in New York and Alabama, for black as well as white, Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Mexican, Filipino workers. This bill does not only serve the cause of better relations for the minorities in America; it also constitutes one of the major bastions of American democracy. American democracy will support H. R. 4453. I admit that the question is of such magnitude that the solution must stem from action by the Federal Government. The history of the Federal courts in respect to questions of economic discrimination is rather vague. It seems that the question could be approached by two methods: (1) Specific legislation by the Congress for litigation in the Federal courts; (2) Federal legislation by the Congress creating an administrative agency for the sole purpose of dealing with discrimination for race, religion, color or national origin in our economic life. Of the two methods, I feel the latter is the more practical. For an administrative agency dealing only with this question could approach it with a greater degree of expertness. The procedure under administrative agencies could be much quicker than that required by the long, drawn-out process generally familiar with court litigation. The complainants would find an administrative agency less steeped with the formal process generally associated with courts. Congress has often created administrative agencies to deal with higher specialized economic problems. We need only to look to the National Labor Relations Act, designed by Congress as an approach to an ultimate solution by the Government in problems affecting labor and management in interstate industry. We of the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters salute President Harry S. Truman for his courageous and forthright stand and continued advocacy of the civil-rights program. The fact that both Democratic and Republican Parties endorsed a national statute, outlawing discrimination because of race, religion, or color, would seem to indicate, to reasonable and logical men of good will, that H. R. 4453 will be approved by this session of Congress. The time has come in the economic and political development of the American Negro and his fellow citizens of minority status, to increase his vigor and determination for all the civil rights that are necessary to remove the shackles of second-class citizenship. A Federal FEPC, establishing a national policy guaranteeing to all, regardless of race, religion, or color, an economic existence commen |