If all you know about the modern civil rights movement comes from TV or one class in high school, it seems like it started with Brown vs. the Board of Education in 1954 and was mostly about desegregating schools, lunch counters, and water fountains.
In fact, its roots were in the Great Depression of the 1930s and then World War II in the 1940s. And the war powerfully demonstrated something that had only been theoretical before: that democracies can set government policies that create full employment.
This meant more for African-Americans than anyone. Blacks had always been locked out of decent work, with unemployment rates far higher than that of whites. But the war created the demand for so much labor that for the first time significant numbers of blacks could find good jobs and gain a small toehold of economic security. The question was what would happen when the war ended.
The paper quotes Willard Townsend, a prominent African-American union leader, saying this in a 1944 speech at Fisk University in Nashville:
Will peace destroy the gains toward full employment of the Negro? What will be his status at the end of hostilities? A depressed economy has always meant but one thing for the Negro worker — widespread unemployment. If we have an economy of full employment, it will establish a framework favorable to the continuing occupational advancement of the black worker; and to the removal of white worker’s fear of him as economic rival.
Noticeably, Townsend’s perspective was not just that full employment was critical for the material well-being of African-Americans, but that it would in fact weaken white bigotry. How true that it is is certainly up for debate. But it’s a reasonable read of human nature, since people are far less hostile to others and more willing to share in environments of plenty than in environments of scarcity.
Regular Americans’ post-war economic hopes were embodied in the proposed Full Employment Act of 1945, which stated that the government must “assure the existence at all times of sufficient employment opportunities” for all adults. But after it passed the Senate, the bill was partially neutered in the House — not just by GOP business interests but by Southern Democrats who clearly understood how it would change racial power dynamics. Among the bill’s leading opponents were Rep. William Whittington of Mississippi, who thanks to Jim Crow was elected by just 4,000 people in a district of 435,000, and Rep. Carter Manasco of Alabama, who worried that full employment would let sharecroppers leave for better work elsewhere. The equivalent of today’s D.C. Twitterati liked to joke that the bill had been “Manascolated.”
This did not lead the civil rights movement to discard the economic side of its agenda. The 1963 rally at which Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the “I Have a Dream Speech” was officially named the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and in its planning stages had been called the Emancipation March for Jobs. One of the most prominent placards at the Lincoln Memorial was “Civil Rights Plus Full Employment Equals Freedom.”