apr 22, 1940 - executive order 8802

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"DOuble V" campaign: An African American civil rights campaign during World War II that called for victory over Nazism abroad and over discrimination in jobs, housing, and voting at home.

Executive ORder 8802: An order signed by President Roosevelt in 1941 that prohibited “discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin” and established the Fair Employment Practices Commission


Among African Americans, a new protest militancy emerged during the war. Pointing to parallels between anti-Semitism in Germany and racial discrimination in the United States, black leaders waged the “Double V” campaign: calling for victory over Nazism abroad and Jim Crow discrimination at home. The domestic struggle included renewed calls to end job and housing discrimination and sharp criticism of black voter suppression in the South. “This is a war for freedom. Whose freedom?” the renowned black leader W. E. B. Du Bois asked. If it meant “the freedom of Negroes in the Southern United States,” Du Bois answered, “my gun is on my shoulder.”

Even before Pearl Harbor, black activism was on the rise. In 1940, only 240 of the nation’s 100,000 aircraft workers were black, and most of those were janitors. African American leaders demanded that the government require defense contractors to hire more black workers. When the Roosevelt administration took no action, A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the largest black labor union in the country, announced plans for a march on Washington in the summer of 1941.


anted to avoid public protest and a disruption of the nation’s war preparations. So the president made a deal: he issued Executive Order 8802, and Randolph canceled the march. The order prohibited “discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin” and established the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC) as a watchdog. Mary McLeod Bethune called the wartime FEPC “a refreshing shower in a thirsty land,” but its practical impact was limited. The committee had no say on segregation in the armed forces and no power to compel compliance with its orders in either the public or private sector.


Wartime Civil Rights Fighting fascism abroad while battling racism at home was the approach taken by black communities across the country during World War II. Securing democracy in Europe and Asia while not enjoying it in the United States did not seem just. Here picketers rally for defense jobs outside the Glenn Martin Plant in Omaha, Nebraska, in the early 1940s.


Nevertheless, wartime developments laid the groundwork for the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. The NAACP grew ninefold, with 450,000 members by 1945. In Chicago, James Farmer helped to found the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1942, a group that would rise to prominence in the 1960s with its direct action protests such as sit-ins. The FEPC inspired black organizing against employment discrimination in hundreds of cities and workplaces. That renewed militancy, under the banner of the “Double V” campaign, combined with modest government support would advance black civil rights on multiple fronts in the postwar years.


bracero program:A federal program that brought hundreds of thousands of Mexican agricultural workers to the United States during and after World War II. The program continued until 1964 and was a major spur of Mexican immigration to the United States.


Mexican Americans also challenged long-standing practices of discrimination and exclusion. Throughout much of the Southwest, signs reading “No Mexicans Allowed” remained common, and Mexican American workers were often limited to menial, low-paying jobs. Several organizations, including the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) and the Spanish-Speaking People’s Congress, pressed the government and private employers to end such discrimination. Mexican American workers themselves, often members of Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions such as the Cannery Workers and Shipyard Workers, also led efforts to enforce the FEPC’s equal employment mandate.

However, exploitation persisted and sometimes worsened in the wartime economic expansion. To meet wartime labor demands, the U.S. government brought tens of thousands of Mexican contract laborers into the United States under the Bracero Program. Paid little and treated poorly, the braceros (who took their name from the Spanish brazo, “arm”) exemplified the oppressive conditions of farm labor in the United States. After the war, the federal government continued to bring hundreds of thousands of Mexicans into the country to perform low-wage agricultural work — a system fraught with injustices that Mexican American civil rights leaders began battling in the 1950s.

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