By June, there was every indication that, on the first of July, not ten thousand but perhaps twenty-five thousand Negroes would be streaming into Washington, reporter Murray Kempton wrote, “crying for their rights, to the boundless embarrassment not merely of politicians but of the arsenal of democracy which had forgotten them.” Reports of a phenomenal surge of support were beginning to reach the White House—dozens of trains had already been hired from Chicago, Memphis, and Cleveland; thousands of dollars had been raised. “Let the Negro masses speak,” Randolph proclaimed. “It will wake up Negro as well as white America.”
In the White House, the reaction to the news that the march was gathering force was one of fear and anxiety. All spring long, the president had denied repeated requests from Walter White to discuss the exclusion of Negroes from employment in defense. “The pressures of matters of great importance,” Pa Watson had informed White, “is such that it does not seem probable he will be able to comply with your request for a personal conference.”
Fortunately, the president had Eleanor to keep him at least somewhat informed about the volatile situation. Her exhaustive travels that spring, which had taken her to various Negro projects, homes, and colleges—including Virginia College for Negroes and Tuskegee Institute, where she had addressed five thousand blacks in the chapel, had brought her to a clear understanding of why the idea of the march had so fully captured the heart and soul of the black community. Speaking to a crowd of nine thousand in early June at St. Paul Auditorium in Minnesota, with hecklers and placards in the audience proclaiming, “Who is President? Eleanor or Franklin?” and “My Day is not your day,” she had spurred the black members of the audience to great cheers when she expressed her fervent hope for the time “when there would be no such thing as discrimination against any person in this country.”
“Mrs. Roosevelt’s coming will be a never to be forgotten event,” one of those present, Joseph Albright, wrote the president’s secretary Steve Early after her speech in St. Paul. “The praiseworthy manner in which she flayed racial discrimination before the large audience made a profound impression upon us all . . . . Will you express to the President that the opportunity for Negroes out here to see and hear Mrs. Roosevelt has only served to endear him more deeply in our regard and to strengthen our loyalty to his cause.”
Eleanor returned to Washington armed with stories about blacks with Ph.D.’s and law degrees finding it impossible to secure work in defense plants except as janitors and cleaners. The stories had an effect upon the president. This was not how a democracy was supposed to work, and he knew it. Nor could he justify the position of the Naval Academy earlier that spring, when it refused to allow its lacrosse team to play against Harvard if a black member of Harvard’s team appeared on the field.
On a Sunday in late May, Roosevelt sent a handwritten note to William Knudsen and Sidney Hillman containing a radical suggestion that may well be the first official call for what later became known as affirmative action. “To order taking Negroes up to a certain percentage in factory order work. Judge them on quality—the 1st class Negroes are turned down for 3rd class white boys.” Two days later, Knudsen replied: “I have talked with Mr. Hillman and we will quietly get manufacturers to increase the number of Negroes for defense work. If we set a percentage it will immediately be open to dispute; quiet work with the contractors and the unions will bring better results.”
It was precisely the realization that “quiet work” with contractors would never do the job that had led Randolph to the idea of direct action and mass appeal in the first place. But, however sympathetic the president was to the substance of Randolph’s quest, he was vehemently opposed to the idea of tens of thousands of Negroes converging on the streets of Washington. He feared that people would be hurt or killed and that the march itself would set a bad precedent for other groups.
Recognizing that his wife enjoyed much deeper trust and support within the black community than he did, the president turned to her for help, asking her to share his concerns with the black leaders. Eleanor agreed, and wrote a thoughtful letter to Randolph. “I have talked with the President,” she began, “and I feel very strongly that your group is making a very grave mistake at the present time to allow this march to take place. I am afraid it will set back the progress which is being made, in the Army at least, towards better opportunities and less segregation. I feel if any incident occurs as a result of this, it may engender so much bitterness that it will create in Congress even more solid opposition from certain groups than we have had in the past . . . . You know that I am deeply concerned about the rights of Negro people, but I think one must face situations as they are and not as one wishes them to be. I think this is a very serious decision for you to take.”
Understanding the spirit in which Eleanor’s letter was written, Randolph released it to the Pittsburgh Courier. “I am submitting the letter received from Eleanor Roosevelt,” he explained, “which expresses an important point of view from not only an influential person but a strong and definite friend of the Negro. There is no question that can rise in the minds of the Negroes about the fact that she is a real and genuine friend of the race.”
But Randolph was unable to accept Eleanor’s advice, believing as he did that nothing had arisen in the life of Negroes since the Emancipation that had “gripped their heart and caught their interest and quickened their imagination more than the girding of our country for national defense without according them the recognition and opportunity as citizens, consumers and workers they felt justified in expecting.” Nothing short of the president’s commitment to issue an executive order abolishing discrimination in national defense would warrant calling off the march.
Feeling besieged on every side, Roosevelt called on Aubrey Williams, the liberal head of the National Youth Administration, for help. “When I got into the President’s office,” Williams recalled, “I saw that he was tired and irritable. I said nothing waiting for him to speak . . . . He rubbed his eyes and leaned over towards me and said: ‘Aubrey, I want you to go to New York and get White and Randolph to call off the march . . . . The missus is up there and you can get in touch with her . . . .” “Get the missus and Fiorello [LaGuardia] and Anna [Rosenberg, regional director of New York City’s Social Security Board] and get it stopped.’”
The meeting took place at City Hall on the morning of June 13. “Mrs. Roosevelt reminded me of her sympathy for the cause of racial justice,” Randolph recalled, “and assured me she intended to continue pressuring the President. But the march was something else. Had I considered the problems? Where would all those thousands sleep and eat?” Randolph answered that they would go to hotels and order dinner. “But the attitude of the Washington police, most of them Southerners,” Eleanor went on, “and the general feeling of Washington itself are such that I fear that there may be trouble if the march occurs.” Randolph listened to Eleanor’s concerns but insisted that the movement for the march had touched a chord so deep that he “could not think of calling it off.” Furthermore, Walter White added, they had tried all spring to see the president, but each time had been rebuffed. Eleanor assured White and Randolph that “she was definitely in favor of definite action to be taken now,” and that she would get in touch with the president immediately, “because I think you are right.”
After the meeting, Anna Rosenberg called Pa Watson to report that both Eleanor and LaGuardia agreed strongly that nothing would stop the march “except the President’s pressure and direction.” It was their joint recommendation that the president invite Randolph and White and the relevant government officials to a meeting in his office.
Roosevelt agreed. He scheduled a White House conference for Wednesday afternoon, June 18. Besides the two civil-rights leaders, he invited Secretary of War Stimson, Secretary of the Navy Knox, OPM heads Knudsen and Hillman, Aubrey Williams, and Anna Rosenberg. Eleanor was unable to attend: she and Joe Lash were on their way to Campobello to get the house in order for the arrival
of thirty students for a Student Leadership Institute which Lash was running at the Roosevelt cottage in July.
The president opened the meeting with small talk and then, in typical fashion, turned raconteur, entertaining his audience with political anecdotes. To Roosevelt it seemed so natural that everyone should be fond of hearing his charming stories that he was somewhat taken aback when Randolph broke in. “Mr. President, time is running out. You are quite busy, I know. But what we want to talk with you about is the problem of jobs for Negroes in defense industries.”
“Well, Phil, what do you want me to do?”
“Mr. President, we want you to issue an Executive Order making it mandatory that Negroes be permitted to work in these plants.”
“Well, Phil, you know I can’t do that . . . . In any event I couldn’t do anything unless you called off this march of yours. Questions like this can’t be settled with a sledge hammer . . . . What would happen if Irish and Jewish people were to march on Washington? It would create resentment among the American people because such a march would be considered as an effort to coerce the government and make it do certain things.”
“I’m sorry Mr. President, the march cannot be called off.”
“How many people do you plan to bring?”
“One hundred thousand, Mr. President.”
The astronomical figure staggered belief. Perhaps Randolph was bluffing. Turning to White, Roosevelt asked, “Walter, how many people will really march?” White’s eyes did not blink. “One hundred thousand, Mr. President,” he affirmed.
Years later, NAACP leader Roy Wilkins suggested that it may well have been a bluff on Randolph’s part, but what an extraordinary bluff it was. “A tall courtly black man with Shakespearean diction and the stare of an eagle had looked the patrician FDR in the eye—and made him back down.”
Mayor LaGuardia broke the impasse. “Gentleman,” he said, “it is clear that Mr. Randolph is not going to call off the march and I suggest we all begin to seek a formula.” The president agreed, asking the black leaders to adjourn to the Cabinet Room with the government officials and come up with the kind of order they thought he should issue. Stimson was clearly annoyed. He considered the meeting “one of those rather harassing interruptions with the main business with which the Secretary of War ought to be engaged—namely, in preparing the Army for defense.” Knudsen took the position that an executive order was unnecessary; it was his experience that “more can be done through persuasion and education than by force.” But Randolph stood firm: “It was not enough to depend on persuasion and education since the process had been proved to be ineffective so far.”
The next morning, Joe Rauh, a young government lawyer, was called in by presidential assistant Wayne Coy to draft the actual language of the order. “As Coy was leaving,” Rauh recalled, he said: “‘Hey, Joe, if we’re doing this don’t forget the Poles.’ The Roosevelt administration had been under fire for discriminating against the Poles in Buffalo. So Coy wanted me to throw them in as well, which I did, changing the phrase to read forbidding discrimination on grounds of ‘race, color, creed or national origin.’”
When Rauh completed his work, the draft was sent to LaGuardia and Randolph, but Randolph was still not satisfied, arguing it was not strong enough. Back it came and back it went, and still Randolph wanted more. “Who is this guy Randolph,” Rauh wondered. “What the hell has he got over the President of the U.S.?” Finally, Rauh said, “We’ve got every piece of constitutional power in this, there’s nothing more I can do, but I’ve got an idea. I’ll change it around one more time and then we should send it to Mrs. Roosevelt. Let her read it to Randolph and say: ‘Now, I don’t want a general critique that this is not strong enough; tell me what should be done.’”
Communicating with Eleanor on the remote island of Campobello was not easy. There was no phone in the cottage, so Eleanor had to walk a half-mile down the road to the home of the island’s lone telegrapher, and sit on the steps until a call came through. But at last Eleanor spoke to Randolph, who agreed that the last draft was just great. The struggle was over. In later years, Rauh would come to believe that Randolph was “one of the greatest and most dignified men” he had ever known.
The president signed Executive Order 8802 on June 25. The order called upon both employers and labor unions “to provide for the full and equitable participation of all workers in defense industries, without discrimination because of race, creed, color or national origin.” In addition, a five-member commission was set up, the Fair Employment Practices Commission, soon to be known as the FEPC. Chaired by Mark Ethridge, a liberal newspaperman from the South, the FEPC was empowered to investigate grievances, monitor compliance, and publicize its findings.
Randolph was thrilled. “The President has just drafted the Executive Order,” he telegraphed Eleanor. “I therefore consider that the proposed Negro March on Washington is unnecessary at this time.” The telegram went on to express his warmest thanks for her “fine spirit of cooperation and help in securing this action on the part of the President.” There had grown between Randolph and Eleanor a strong bond of affection and respect. Even at the height of the tensions, Randolph had assured Eleanor that “the Negro people have the utmost faith in your great spirit and purity of heart on their question, and we know that whatever position you take is a result of your convictions that it is in the interest of the Negro people.”
Rejoicing in the news, Eleanor telegraphed Randolph immediately that she was “very glad that the march has been postponed and delighted that the President is issuing an Executive Order on defense industries. I hope from this first step, we may go on to others.”
The response of the black community to the executive order was overwhelmingly positive. It was greeted, the Negro Handbook noted, “as the most significant move on the part of the Government since the Emancipation Proclamation.” The Amsterdam News called it “epochal to say the least,” suggesting that, if Lincoln’s proclamation had been designed to end physical slavery, Roosevelt’s was designed “to end, or at least curb, economic slavery.” To be sure, there remained serious concerns about the inadequate budget, the small staff, and the meager enforcement penalties provided, but it was, the National Negro Congress said, “a great step forward” nonetheless.
“Never before in the history of the nation,” the Chicago Defender observed, had Negroes, from illiterate sharecroppers in Arkansas to college students in Chicago, “ever been so united in an objective and so insistent upon an action being taken.” When the President signed the executive order, “faith in a democracy which Negroes had begun to feel had strayed from its course was renewed throughout the nation.”
• • •
At dawn of June 22, 1941, in a stunning move that would prove to be a great turning point of the war, Germany invaded Russia. “Now the guns will be thundering,” Goebbels recorded in his diary at 3:30 a.m. “May God bless our weapons.”
The idea of invading Russia had been an integral part of Hitler’s imperial dream for decades. “When we speak of new territory in Europe today, we must think principally of Russia and her border vassal states,” he had written in Mein Kampf in 1925. “Destiny itself seems to wish to point out the way to us here. This colossal empire in the East is ripe for dissolution. The end of Jewish domination will also be the end of Russia as a state.” The Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 had not changed but simply postponed Hitler’s plans.
“The novelty,” Hitler’s biographer Alan Bullock has written, “lay not so much in the decision to turn east as in the decision to drop the provision he had hitherto regarded as indispensable, a settlement with Britain first.” Since the beginning of the war, the Nazi leader had insisted that he could oppose Russia only when he was free in the West. A two-front war had been the nightmare of German generals for a century. But in the last month of 1940, while the struggle in England was still unfinished, Hitler had committed himself to what would turn out to be an irrevocable decision to invade Russia in the spri
ng. The war against Russia, he convinced himself, would be over quickly—in three months at most—and then the final attack on England could begin. “We have only to kick in the door,” Hitler told General Alfried Jodl, “and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.”
On the eve of the attack, Hitler dispatched a letter to Mussolini. “Since I struggled through to this decision, I again feel spiritually free,” he claimed. “The partnership with the Soviet Union . . . seemed to me a break with my whole origin, my concepts and my former obligations. I am happy now to be delivered from this torment.”
“Everything is well prepared. The biggest concentration of forces in the history of the world,” Goebbels noted in the last hours before the attack. The propaganda chief was not exaggerating. The Germans had amassed 150 divisions on the Russian border—more than three million men supported by twenty-seven hundred planes, thirty-three hundred tanks and six hundred thousand motor vehicles. “The Führer seems to lose his fear as the decision comes nearer. All the exhaustion seems to drop away.”
For months, Britain and the U.S. had sought to warn Soviet leader Joseph Stalin that Allied intelligence reports indicated large numbers of German troops massing in the east. But nothing could shake the Russian dictator’s blind hope that his country would somehow escape Hitler’s vengeance. Thus the attack, when it came, took the Soviet Union by surprise, catching a large portion of the Soviet air force on the ground, destroying thousands of planes before they could get up into the air. “War is mainly a catalogue of blunders,” Churchill observed in his memoirs, “but it may be doubted whether any mistake in history has equaled that of which Stalin and the Communist Chiefs were guilty when they . . . supinely awaited or were incapable of realizing, the fearful onslaught which impended upon Russia.”
The Germans invaded Russia on a wide front, driving simultaneously toward Kiev and the Dnieper River in the south and toward the Baltic States and Leningrad in the north. Then the two armies were to make a junction and press on to Moscow. The opening days of the campaign seemed to justify Hitler’s optimism. In two weeks’ time, German troops had reached the Dnieper, and by mid-July they were in Smolensk, only two hundred miles from Moscow. Hundreds of thousands of Russians were killed in those first few weeks, and over six hundred thousand were taken prisoner. The German troops seemed unstoppable.