FEPC v. the Railroads

Hottest problem on Franklin Roosevelt's desk--so hot that White House aides let word get out that the President would not touch it for some time, was race relations. The issue had been raised by the President's Fair Employment Practice Committee.

Last month FEPC bluntly ordered 16 Southern railroads to stop discriminating against Negroes, to give them an equal shot with whites at almost all jobs, including the best paid, most aristocratic job a Negro can aspire to in the South, that of railroad fireman. Last week the railroads replied with equal bluntness. Said they:

"It is wholly impracticable, and indeed impossible. . . . Any attempt to comply, for instance, to promote Negroes to locomotive engineers or train conductors, would inevitably disrupt present peaceful relations with employes and . . . antagonize the traveling public. . . .

"It is utterly unrealistic to suppose that . . . problems of such delicacy can be solved out-of-hand by the fiat of your committee's directives. . . . Manifestly, such directives are wholly lacking in due process of law and for that reason are without legal effect. . . . Your committee was and is wholly without Constitutional and legal jurisdiction. . . ."

To such high, hot talk, the tall, tough new FEPChairman Malcolm Ross, 48, had a ready answer. FEPC, said Mike Ross, did not contemplate promoting Negroes to the job of engineers. FEPC merely wanred to restore the Negroes' chance to rise to the job of fireman, to give them an equal chance at other jobs down the line. He cited figures showing a recent shortage of 850 firemen on U.S. railroads, although trained Negro firemen were unemployed. Chairman Ross was itching for a showdown. Said he: "We may not be able to wipe out discrimination overnight, but where war manpower needs are at stake we can and shall try."

Crossfire. FEPC was, in fact, attempting to do nothing more than re-establish what was once the status quo. Almost the oldest tradition in Southern railroading is the Negro fireman. For years, no white wanted the job; and every Negro railroader recalls that Casey Jones's fireman was a Negro. But in time, whites wanted and took the job of fireman. The firemen's union barred Negroes from membership. Whenever a Negro fireman died, he was replaced by a white.

In trying to restore an old practice, and in trying to fill the railroad manpower shortage, FEPC had run smack into the biggest hornet's nest in domestic politics. Franklin Roosevelt's relations with Southern Democrats have never been worse. The FEPC ruling merely poured gasoline on a fire. Virginia's Representative Howard Smith, always ready to investigate the New Deal, stood ready to probe the whole FEPC setup.

But FEPC, and the Democratic Party, are under equal pressure from Negroes. FEPC, itself, was established as the result of a Negro threat in 1941 to march, 50,-ooo strong, on Washington. The threatener: Florida-born, New York-educated A. (for Asa) Philip Randolph, 54, who, though no porter himself, runs the airtight sleeping car porters union. He has been the main author of the relentless pressure on FEPC ever since. In political terms, if FEPC moves forward, it is damned by Southern Democrats; if it stands still, it receives the scorn of the Negro population--and may lose the all-important Negro vote.

At least once before, Franklin Roosevelt has been able to finesse the question; in July 1942, he turned FEPC over to WMCzar Paul McNutt, who conveniently forgot to take any action. But Mike Ross, one of the original bright boys of the early New Deal, has no intention of treading water. A Hotchkiss & Yale graduate, onetime miner, newsman and author (Death of a Yale Man), Mike Ross believes in FEPC's principles. Franklin Roosevelt cannot outwait this one.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.