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

and agreed to include them on an integrated line only when the war was
winding down and most workers were laid off.
“We Fight for the Right to Work as well as Die for Victory for the United Nations.” In
1942, demonstrators protest the refusal of the St. Louis Small Arms Ammunition Plant
to hire black workers.
Noncompliance with the president’s nondiscrimination order did not
affect companies’ federal contracts, partly because the Roosevelt
administration’s enthusiasm for racial equality, while genuine, was
lukewarm. More important was the president’s conviction, hard to dispute,
that every other objective had to be subordinated to winning the war. But
even granting this premise, the unconstitutional treatment of African
Americans called for remediation, if not during the war, then afterward, yet
the federal government’s complicity in the suppression of African American
labor rights and opportunities was never addressed, not then and not since.