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

first chairman. In a speech following his appointment, Ethridge praised
segregation in defense plants. A public uproar forced his resignation, but he
remained as an FEPC member, stating that nondiscrimination was a federal
order “in the Nazi dictator pattern,” and not even “the mechanized armies of
the earth, Allied or Axis . . . could now force the Southern white people to
give up the principle of social segregation” in war industries. *
FEPC accomplishments were small. On one occasion, two skilled African
American steamfitters in the Richmond shipyards filed a complaint with the
committee over their relegation to the auxiliary local; the union agreed to
create an exception for these two, provided that its policy covering all others
would be unchanged. On another occasion, an African American was
refused work at the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Company in San Francisco
because the Machinists Union would not admit African Americans to
membership; the FEPC called the union leaders to a hearing, but they
ignored the invitation and no further action was taken.
Like cities nationwide, San Francisco practiced discrimination in public
employment and in its public utilities, such as telephone companies, which
at the time were very heavily regulated because they had local monopolies.
Pacific Telephone and Telegraph, one of the region’s largest firms, did not
have a single black operator; it hired African Americans only as janitors or
for similar low-level work, and it even refused an FEPC request that it issue
a statement saying it would comply with the president’s nondiscrimination
order. The city’s streetcar system refused to hire African Americans until
1942. Maya Angelou, who lied about her age to get a conductor’s job as a
teenager, was one of the first. Indicating the considerable availability of
qualified African American workers in the Bay Area, within two years of the
new policy there were 700 black platform operators when there had been
none at the beginning of the war.