The Color of Law A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein (z-lib.org).epub

African Americans could not promote to foreman if the role involved
supervising whites. Even if fully qualified African Americans performed
skilled work, the shipyards classified and paid them as trainees. One Kaiser
worker went to a civil rights meeting in protest of these policies; the
company fired him for attending.
The NAACP filed an NLRB complaint regarding these practices; the
agency criticized the Boilermakers’ policy but maintained its certification of
the whites-only union. At least twenty-nine other national unions either
excluded African Americans entirely or restricted them to second-class
auxiliaries.
In the postwar years, some unions began to desegregate voluntarily, but
federal agencies continued to recognize segregated unions within the
government itself until 1962, when President Kennedy banned the practice.
Nonetheless, the Post Office’s National Association of Letter Carriers did
not permit African Americans to join in some areas until the 1970s. African
American mailmen could not file grievances to protest mistreatment and
instead had to join a catchall organization for African Americans, the
National Alliance of Postal Employees, a union mostly serving truck drivers,
sorters, and miscellaneous lower-paid job categories. The alliance, one
member later recalled, “didn’t have the clout with the [local] postmaster the
way the Letter Carriers did,” so African Americans were less likely to
receive promotions, consideration of vacation time preferences, and other
job rights.
The construction trades continued to exclude African Americans during
the home and highway construction booms of the postwar years, so black
workers did not share with whites the substantial income gains that blue
collar workers realized in the two big wage growth periods of the midtwentieth
century—war production and subsequent suburbanization. African
Americans were neither permitted to live in the new suburbs nor, for the
most part, to boost their incomes by participating in suburban construction.
In 1964 the NLRB finally refused to certify whites-only unions. Although
the policy was now changed, the agency offered African Americans no
remedy for decades of income suppression that flowed from its
unconstitutional embrace of segregation. Still another decade passed before
African Americans were admitted to most AFL craft unions, but seniority
rules meant it would take many more years for them to achieve incomes in