The climax came when the House of Representatives took a direct slap at Eleanor by issuing a ban against the use of civilian-defense funds for “instruction in physical fitness by dancers.” Eleanor realized that by staying in the job she was jeopardizing the survival of the OCD. The time had come to resign. “I still believe in all the things we started out to do,” she wrote Florence Kerr, director of WPA Community Services Projects, explaining her resignation, “but I know if I stayed longer, I would bring more harm than good to the program.”
Furthermore, Eleanor admitted, she had come to the reluctant conclusion that it was impossible for the wife of the president to have an official job with the government. Since no one could ever be sure if she was acting on her own behalf or in the name of the president (a circumstance she and her husband had often employed to great political advantage in an unofficial capacity), she was now, as a public official, being accorded a measure of influence and blame that went far beyond that of the ordinary public servant.
On the evening of February 20, Eleanor held a farewell party for all the people who had worked for her in the OCD. Looking back over her five months, she said, she felt no little pride in what she had accomplished, particularly in broadening the definition of defense to include nutrition, housing, recreation, and medical care. Now that everything was in place, she maintained, it was time to move on.
Yet, no matter what she said about the proper time to go, an aura of defeat clouded Eleanor’s resignation. For she knew, and the press knew, that with her departure her dream of the OCD as a people’s movement had come to a humiliating end.
• • •
No sooner had Eleanor resigned from the OCD than she became entangled in further controversy—a brutal battle between blacks and whites over the occupancy of a newly built federal housing project in Detroit. The two-hundred-unit development, named the Sojourner Truth project, had been developed for black defense workers by Eleanor’s friend at the Federal Works Agency, Clark Foreman, a liberal Southerner who took the position that blacks were as entitled as whites to enjoy the benefits of the public-housing boom necessitated by the war.
Eleanor had repeatedly urged Franklin to use the defense emergency as a lever for replacing the slums of the city with permanent new housing that could still be used after the war ended. There was a chance, she believed, if new neighborhoods could be properly planned and designed, that blacks and whites could live together in peace. But Eleanor’s ideas for the future were shattered at every turn by her old nemesis Charles Palmer, the housing coordinator she had vehemently opposed at the time of his appointment.
It was Palmer’s position, backed by private real-estate interests, that the federal government should limit its role to the construction of temporary housing. As long as the workers had some sort of shelter while they produced for the war, it mattered little how long the buildings lasted. The Congress agreed. When the House approved a bill authorizing $300 million for new construction, it specified that none of it could be spent for slum clearance.
Even with these restrictions, Clark Foreman had managed to target money for the Sojourner Truth project. Everything proceeded according to plan until word of the project reached the white community in Detroit. Coming at a time when the majority of white workers were living in overcrowded, overpriced apartments, with three shifts to the same “hot” bed, the news provoked an emotional outburst.
The population of Detroit had exploded since 1940, as some three hundred thousand whites and fifty thousand blacks migrated from farmlands in Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Louisiana in search of employment in war plants. Thousands of workers were sleeping in boxcars, tents, church pews, and jails. Every habitable shed had been rented for all the traffic would bear, and new families were still pouring into Detroit at a rate of five thousand a month.
When white workers heard about the Sojourner Truth project, they demanded the units for themselves and enlisted the support of white residents in the neighborhood where the development was being built. Rudolph Tenerowicz, Detroit’s congressman, carried the ball in Washington, successfully prevailing upon the members of the Conference Committee, consisting mostly of Southerners, to add a clause to the FWA’s $300,000 appropriations bill specifying that “no money would be released unless the ‘nigger lover’ [Clark Foreman] was fired and the project converted to white occupancy.” The FWA capitulated quickly and dishonorably. That same day, the Detroit housing committee was ordered to redirect its recruitment of prospective tenants from black to white. Minutes later, Clark Foreman “resigned.”
Civil-rights leaders reacted with rage. Their first impulse was to contact Eleanor. “Surely you would not stand by and see the Sojourner Truth defense homes that were built for Negroes be taken away from us,” Mrs. Charles Diggs wrote from Detroit. Calmly and directly, Eleanor approached the president, emphasizing that both blacks and whites, including Edward Jeffries, Detroit’s mayor, and leaders of the UAW, were firmly committed to the position that the blacks should have the project.
Eleanor’s intervention prevailed. “After a conference last night with many Negroes from Detroit,” Palmer solicitously told her, “it looks as though we are going to get that project straightened out to their entire satisfaction.” Two weeks later, the FWA directed the Detroit Housing Committee to begin its selection of black tenants, with occupancy set for the last day of February.
On Saturday morning, February 28, the first twenty-four Negro families, their household goods loaded on trucks and vans, began moving into their new homes. Overnight, seven hundred white pickets, armed with knives, guns, rifles, and clubs, gathered at the entrance to the project. A fiery cross was burning at the site. As the trucks, supported by a crowd of three hundred blacks, tried to cross the picket line, a battle erupted. Before it ended, many people, both black and white, were hospitalized, and 104 were arrested.
The disorder occasioned a great outpouring of Axis propaganda; newspapers in both Germany and Japan carried pictures of the bloody struggle. According to wire reports in Tokyo, Washington had arbitrarily ordered white Detroiters to take Negro war workers into their homes. “Many dead and wounded,” Tokyo radio claimed.
Convinced that the government’s vacillation had set the stage for the riot, Eleanor rushed headlong into the battle. From here on, she argued, the government must stay its course in behalf of the rights of black citizens. Her pleas did not go unheeded. On April 29, while eight hundred Michigan troops with fixed bayonets stood guard, black tenants were again moved into the Sojourner Truth project, this time without incident. With the situation happily resolved, Eleanor turned her attention to Clark Foreman. It was not fair, she told her husband, that Foreman was being blacklisted simply because he had exhibited the courage to stand up for the rights of black citizens. The president agreed. “What can we do for Foreman?” he wrote his Southern-born aide Marvin McIntyre. “He is not as bad as you think.” A few weeks later, a job was found for Foreman in the manpower operation.
Even as Franklin acceded to some of Eleanor’s specific requests, he refused to admit that, in so doing, he was planning for the future. When, shortly after the Sojourner Truth riot, Edwin Embree of the Rosenwald Fund pleaded with him to create a wide-ranging commission on race and color, he flatly refused. “Such a commission appears to me at this time premature,” he explained. “We must start winning the war with all the brains, wisdom and experience we’ve got before we do much general or specific planning for the future . . . . I am not convinced that we can be realists about the war and planners for the future at this critical time.”
For Eleanor, whose primary concern was the home front, not the war, the present and the future were inextricably linked. Speaking to a group of Washington church women shortly after Pearl Harbor, she had argued, “The nation cannot expect the colored people to feel that the U.S. is worth defending if they continue to be treated as they are treated now.” These incendiary remarks, a man from Kentucky angrily wrote, “are probably t
he most dangerous ever uttered by a woman in your position . . . . Your quarrel in this respect seems to me to be with Providence.”
“I am not agitating the race question,” Eleanor replied. “The race question is agitated because people will not act justly and fairly toward each other as human beings.”
Nowhere was this unjust treatment more obvious, Eleanor believed, than in the navy. The previous year, in response to the vigorous protest by civil-rights leaders against the relegation of Negroes to the position of mess men, the navy had created a committee to analyze the relationship between the “U.S. Navy and the Negro race.” The committee held three short meetings before coming to the conclusion that “the enlistment of Negroes (other than as mess attendants) leads to disruptive and undermining conditions.”
Pearl Harbor provoked a whole new round of protest. On December 9, the NAACP sent a telegram to Navy Secretary Frank Knox asking whether, “in view of the intensive recruiting campaign then underway, the Navy would accept colored recruits for other than the messman’s branch.” Answering for the Navy, the Bureau of Navigation (responsible for procurement and assignment of personnel) abruptly replied that “there had been no change in policy and that none was contemplated.”
The navy’s obstinate refusal to bend unleashed fierce pressure on the White House from black leaders and black newspapers across the land. The clamor and increasing political pressure convinced Roosevelt that something had to give. “I think,” he wrote Knox on January 9, “that with all the Navy activities the Bureau of Navigation might invent something that colored enlistees could do in addition to the rating of messman.”
Responding to the president’s tone, Knox asked the General Board to submit a plan for taking five thousand Negroes for billets other than as mess men. Two weeks later, the board reported back, concluding in no uncertain terms “that members of the colored race be accepted only in messman branch.” The rationale once again was the intimate nature of life on a ship. “Men on board ship live in particularly close association; in their messes one man sits beside another, their hammocks or bunks are close together; in their common tasks they work side by side . . . . How many white men would choose that their closest associates in sleeping quarters, in mess be of another race? General Board believes that the answer is ‘few if any’ and further believes that if the issue were forced, there would be a lowering of contentment, teamwork and discipline in the service.”
The president, much to Eleanor’s satisfaction, refused to accept the board’s report. In a blistering reply, Roosevelt told Knox that he regarded the report as (a) unsatisfactory and (b) insufficient. “Officers of the U.S. Navy are not officers only but are American citizens . . . . They should, therefore, be expected to recognize social and economic problems which are related to national welfare . . . . It is incumbent on all officers to recognize the fact that about 1/10th of the population of the United States is composed of members of the Negro race who are American citizens . . . . It is my considered opinion that there are additional tasks in the Naval establishment to which we could properly assign an additional number of enlisted men who are members of the Negro race . . . . I [ask] you to return the recommendations of the General Board to that Board for further study and report.”
As the General Board reanalyzed the situation, the pressures for change continued to mount. Through February and March 1942, every black newspaper carried the story of black mess man Dorie Miller, whose heroic exploits on the bridge of his battleship at Pearl Harbor earned him the Navy Cross. The example of Miller’s heroism became a principal weapon in the battle to end discrimination in the navy. Here was a high-school dropout who raced through flaming oil to carry his captain to safety. Seizing a machine gun left beside a dead gunner, Miller, without any weapons training, began to fire at the oncoming Japanese planes, downing one or maybe two of the enemy aircraft. Only after his ammunition was exhausted, the ship sinking rapidly, did he finally obey the order to abandon ship.
Although Miller’s acts of heroism were mentioned in the first navy dispatches, he was referred to simply as “an unidentified Negro messman.” The navy, it seems, did not want the first hero of the war to be a black man. That honor was reserved for West Point graduate Colin Kelly, who perished three days later. When Miller’s name was finally released in March, the result of a determined effort by the Pittsburgh Courier, bills were introduced to accord him the Congressional Medal of Honor, and schools and parks were given his name. But “the greatest honor that could be paid mess attendant Dorie Miller,” the NAACP argued, “would be for the U.S. Navy to abolish restrictions against Negro enlistments at once.”
Now the navy’s General Board had no choice but to capitulate. They issued a second report to Knox, agreeing that blacks could enlist for general service other than mess-man duty—as gunners, clerks, signalmen, radio operators, ammunition handlers, etc.—as long as the training and the units remained segregated. The change in policy was not as broad as civil-rights leaders had hoped for, but it was, the Pittsburgh Courier agreed, “a forward step.” “Navy broke down a historic barrier,” The New York Times reported. A door was now open, however slightly.
• • •
Some halting progress was also recorded in removing barriers against Negro labor in war industries. By early 1942, as a result of pressure from the Fair Employment Practices Commission, more than half the defense employees were committed to the principle of using Negro labor in production jobs. In hundreds of cases, Negroes were working in firms which had formerly banned them. In shipyards, Negro employment had risen from six thousand to fourteen thousand in twelve months. In the aircraft industry, which had employed no Negroes in 1940, five thousand were now employed. The gains were small but significant. “I look for an acceleration of this improvement,” Roosevelt promised the Fraternal Council of Negro Churches, “as the demand for labor in our war industries increases.”
Eleanor possessed less faith in the power of momentum. Without continual pressure, she feared, management would do all it could to shun its responsibility, either by keeping the numbers so small as to afford only token compliance, or by concentrating Negroes in unskilled jobs. And, beyond problems with management, there remained recalcitrant unions and prejudiced workers who threatened to strike when blacks were hired. Eleanor realized that the power of the FEPC was limited by the fact that its ultimate weapon—requesting cancellation of a defense contract—was no weapon at all, since the administration was loath to jeopardize war production. “For the government to terminate an important war contract by reason of the contractor’s indulgence in discriminatory employment,” one friend of the FEPC admitted, “would be highly impractical.”
Still, Eleanor believed in the power of publicity generated by the hearings the FEPC held throughout the country in response to complaints of discrimination. Traveling from coast to coast, she engaged anyone who would listen, even at the risk of courting public displeasure, in a blunt dialogue about the role of the FEPC and the importance of bringing blacks into defense jobs. In the South, a mood of fury and indignation set in as Southern newspapers accused the FEPC “of trying to turn the South upside down under the clock of necessity brought on by the war emergency.” With taunting sarcasm, the Alabama Times announced that “a bunch of snoopers, two of whom are Negroes, will assemble in Birmingham to determine whether the South is doing right by Little Sambo.”
Believing that the existing Southern order was inherently harmonious, white Southerners rationalized away the rising dissatisfaction in the black community as the product of outside agitation. “Anyone who hears Delta Negroes singing at their work,” a cotton trade journal in Tennessee intoned, “who sees them dancing in the streets, who listens to their rich laughter, knows that the Southern Negro is not mistreated. He has a carefree, childlike mentality and looks to the white man to solve his problems and take care of him.”
“Don’t you think there are enough difficulties,” a woman from Winston-Salem wrote the president,
“without Mrs. Roosevelt going around over the country stirring up strife between white and colored people? She can’t realize the grave danger . . . . So see Mr. President if you can’t put a stop to Mrs. Roosevelt stirring up trouble down here telling these people they are ‘as good as the white people.’”
Resisting the mounting criticism of her progressive stance on civil rights, Eleanor continued to speak out, and without public objection from the president. Though his sense of what the country would accept on civil rights at particular moments was invariably more cautious, he refused to “put a stop to Mrs. Roosevelt’s stirring up trouble.” As long as he was persuaded that the advances she advocated corresponded to the general direction in which the American society was moving, and did not interfere with the conduct of the war, he was willing to bend with her current.
• • •
The differences between Franklin and Eleanor on the issue of compulsory national service were harder to reconcile. During the spring of 1942, a fierce debate divided Washington over how best to mobilize the labor force. Without government control in the form of civilian conscription for war work, the military argued, the organizational problems presented by the task of marshaling and directing seventy million people employed in fifteen hundred different trades and occupations in dozens of different defense centers would be insurmountable. In the absence of centralized control, the spontaneous movement of workers, wandering the country to the lure of premium wages, had resulted in too many workers in some areas, too few in others.
Convinced that the government’s decentralized approach would never solve the manpower problem in a time of war, Eleanor came down strongly on the side of civilian conscription. “I’ve come to one very clear decision,” she announced in mid-March, after a White House conference on manpower, “namely, that all of us—men in the services and women at home—should be drafted and told what is the job we are to do. So long as we are left to volunteer we are bound to waste our capacities and to do things which are not necessary.”