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

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt supported civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph’s
demand that war industries be required to hire black workers. She was his emissary to
her husband, but also her husband’s emissary to Randolph, urging him to call off the
threatened June 1941 march on Washington.
The order created a Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) that
could recommend cancellation of defense contracts in cases of persistent
discrimination, but at the West Coast FEPC office, for example, no such
recommendation was ever made. The FEPC had jurisdiction over any firm
that was related to the war effort, such as nonmilitary hospitals that might be
called upon to treat wounded soldiers. Yet the San Francisco FEPC director
was unable to get San Francisco’s medical centers to admit African
American physicians.
President Roosevelt ensured the agency’s weakness by naming Mark
Ethridge, publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal, as the committee’s