St. Paul recorder. [volume] (St. Paul, Minn.) 1934-2000, 1943-02-26
ST. PAUL RECORDER

sAAAASSo Va VIC City POPulnIiOA -aioo
produced about a fifth of all the
complaints filed with the FEPC
from the whole nation. The New
York hearing, held year ago, first
traced the discriminatory pattern
prevailing in the metropolitan area.
Some of the evidence dredged up
by the FEPC showed that:
Wright Aeronautical of Paterson
kept Negroes off the production
line. In cahoots with Wright's, the
Paterson Board of Education
barred Negroes from free aircraft
training which the federal govern
ment was paying for. The FEPC
Strengthened out Wright's on this
and the Paterson educational au-
thorities lined up.
The United Electrical Radio and
Machine Workers (CIO) sent Ne
groes to Babcock and Wilcox of
Bayonne-only to have them bounce
back. "We don't discriminate" the
personnel manager told the union
organizer, "but we feel it is not
necessary to hire these people"
Fairchild Aviation, aircraft in
strument makers of Queens, picked
employees for character" a cri-
terion which screened out all but
a handful of Negroes and Jews. In
its pursuit of the ideal, Fairchild
had asked the Employment Service
for "WX"-white Christians. The
FEPC hearing and subsequent
directions had no apparent force or
effect on Fairchild, which by-passes
1902 to this day. Despite almost
tripled employment in the Queens
plant, a recent FEPC investigation
disclosed that Negroes were less
than one per cent of the employees
as against 20 per cent in the sur
rounding Jamaica community. Jews
were one-half of one per cent, while
sampling of the "reject" files ran
better than rs per cent Jewish.
The United States Employment
Service and national defense train
ing authorities had consistently re-
ferred workers to the company but
had strangely failed to detect any
discrimination in the pattern of &C.
ceptance and rejection.
A year after the issuance of 1902
almost to the day-the FEPC fin
ally took on the South, holding a
public hearing in Birmingham on
June 1920. Certain professional
irreconcilables and colonial resi-
dents-general for Northern capital
istic interests first tried to block
the show, then to break it up in a
riot, and, failing lamentably in both
endeavors, got in their dirty ticks
afterwards.
AS soon as the FEPC field office
in Birmingham was opened, stories
began to circulate from sources
close to Governor Dixon that the
FEPC's real purpose was to estab-
fish "social equality" Highly
imaginative accounts of what the
FEPC had in store for the hapless
white majority were put forth and
somehow tied into another yarn at
tributed to the Governor-that the
administration was Systematically
replacing white soldiers with Ne
groes in Alabama camps, and that
at the proper time, upon orders of
the Commander-in-C Chiefs wife, the
black garrison would take over the
state. These tall tales circulated
among Birmingham Kiwanians at
their weekly lunch and gave Noun
tain Brook ladies something to
shudder over while rolling band
ages. Nobody else paid the slight
est attention.
Birmingham white workers were
much too busy mining coal and iron
ore, making TINT and steel along
side their Negro union brothers in
the CLIO and the AFL. They had
heard this white supremacy line
directed against themselves when
they were getting organized in the
thirties. They knew the guys put
ting it out now were the same guys
who then tried to keep white and
Negro workers from getting to-
gether to break up one of the worst
open-shop situations in the country.
They remembered also how these
guys had always stood against the
President and every decent New
Deal measure. Knowing the real
score, Birmingham union men were
all for the FEPC hearing. They
made it known, too, through forth
right resolutions of support and
through the labor press.
On the eve, desperate pressure