Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

Negotiating Coalition \\ 171
Finder, 14 September 1942. See also Finder to Richman, 4 September 1942; Stanley
Jacobs [ADL] to Finder, 10 September 1942, "I could have told you that Philip
Randolph is persona non grata with responsible officialdom in Washington, and his
proposed March on Washington, which was stymied, would have had serious repercussions
and proved most harmful to the war effort." Also Abe Rosenfeld to Finder,
22 July 1942 regarding Adam Clayton Powell, all ADL Y 1942 nrp.
8. Unidentified fragment of report or memorandum, ADL, n.d. [1942], ADL Y
1942 nrp.
9. Many of the papers of the Committee for a Permanent FEPC, the Leadership
Conference for Civil Rights, and Civil Rights Mobilization can be found in NAACP
files, especially boxes II A 351, 353, 186, some in NCJW Washington Bureau papers,
box 18. Roy Wilkins followed A. Philip Randolph as chairman of the Committee;
Arnold Aronson of NJCRAC served as secretary. See also, for example, Minutes of the
NAACP Board of Directors, 11 October 1943, p. 5; 11 February 1946, pp. 3-4; 14
October 1946, pp. 2-3; 14 February 1949, p. 4, all NAACP I A 134-35; Arnold
Aronson, NJCRAC (and National Council for a Permanent FEPC) to NJCRAC
Committee on Employment Discrimination and Civil Rights, 17 January 1949;
Isaiah Minkoff, "Report of the Executive Director to 6th Plenary Session, NJCRAC,"
April 1948, pp. 5-6; NJCRAC, Minutes of "informal dinner meeting" of "intergroup
relations" agencies, 27 December 1951; all NAACP II A 386-87; ADL National
Committee Meeting Minutes, ADL warehouse box 176, and "nrp" files in ADL micro
1945-1958; NCJW, Civil Rights Council materials and "Planks Recommended for
Inclusion in 1948 National Party Platforms," 16 June 1948, NCJW box 73; "FEPC;
Its Development and Trends," n.d.; "Legislative Highlights," May 1943, pp. 2—4,
NCJW box 142; AJCong Commission on Law and Social Action (CLSA) papers,
AJCong library, New York, NY.
10. See, for example, ADL, "City and State Inter-racial and Good Will
Commissions," June 1944, pp. 2-5, ADL Y 1944 nrp; Charles Collier, Jr., Citywide
Citizens' Committee on Harlem, to Leonard Finder, 2 September 1943, ADL Y 1943
nrp; AJCong, CLSA, "Report of Activities July-September, 1947," p. 2, NAACP II
A 360.
11. Pluralism, first coined by Jewish sociologist Horace Kallen in 1924, has had
a long and convoluted history, due in large measure to the fuzziness of the concept in
the public mind. At first including only white ethnics in its description of the
American cultural scene, separatist in its prognosis, and essentialist in its definitions
("Men may change their clothes, their politics, ...their philosophies to a greater or
lesser extent; they cannot change their grandfathers," Kallen argued in a famous passage
in Culture and Democracy in the United States [New York, 1924] p. 122), it later
became more assimilationist in its tone, abandoned essentialism for cultural identities
voluntarily chosen, and by the 1940s included non-white groups as well. Alain Locke,
the Black philosopher, was the first to apply cultural pluralism to African Americans;