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

In 1943 at the Marinship yard in Sausalito, where workers’ dormitories
had been unintentionally integrated after recruits arrived too rapidly to be
separated by race, half of the African American workers refused to pay dues
to the segregated branch of the Boilermakers. The union then demanded that
Marinship dismiss the delinquent African Americans, and the shipyard
complied. The California attorney general and the navy admiral in charge of
the area’s shipbuilding pressed the workers to abandon their protest and
rejoin the segregated auxiliary, but when they refused, the officials urged
Marinship, without success, to cancel the layoffs.
At an FEPC hearing, the union argued that it was in full compliance with
the president’s order because no African American was denied work if he
paid his dues, the same requirement that applied to whites. The FEPC
rejected this claim but suspended the ruling pending a company appeal. The
black Marinship workers then sued, but a federal judge concluded that the
workers had no relevant rights under the “federal constitution or any federal
statutes.”
The African Americans then took their case to California state courts,
where a judge suspended the firings, pending a company appeal. Eventually,
in 1945, the California Supreme Court upheld the order, stating in
unprecedented language that racial discrimination is “contrary to the public
policy of the United States and this state.” The Boilermakers complied with
the decisions, but they had come too late. At the time of the California
Supreme Court ruling, 25,000 African Americans worked in area shipyards,
but the war was ending. Eight months later, the number had dropped to
12,000, and in another nine months, the shipyards shut down and virtually
all its employees were laid off.
The FEPC was similarly ineffective elsewhere. Lockheed and North
American Aviation in Los Angeles and Boeing in Seattle only hired African
Americans as janitors; when labor shortages forced these defense contractors
to open other categories, the companies denied equal compensation and job
rights to the black workers. In Kansas City, Standard Steel responded to the
FEPC by saying, “We have not had a Negro working in twenty-five years
and do not plan to start now.” In St. Louis, the Small Arms Ammunition
Plant employed 40,000 workers at the height of World War II and initially
refused to hire African Americans. It responded to civil rights
demonstrations by setting up a segregated production line for black workers