Seedtime for the Modern Civil Rights Movement: The President's Committee on Fair Employment Practice, 1941-1946.

Octavo, orange cloth (hardcover), gilt letters, x + 384 pp. Fine (As New) in a Fine (As New) dust jacket jacket. From dust jacket: During World War II, influential black leaders, tired of discrimination in the defense industries and segregation in the armed forces, called for a massive demonstration of protest in the nation's capital. Concerned that the proposal 1941 March on Washington Movement would spark a racial violence, embarrass the government, or possibly even fracture the Democratic party, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, creating the President's Committee on Fair Employment Practice. Established to receive and investigate complaints of discrimination in war industries and in governmental departments and agencies, the FEPC became the first federal agency since Reconstruction to deal exclusively with minority problems. Merl E. Reed's Seedtime for the Modern Civil Rights Movement provides the first general study of the FEPC in almost forty years. Utilizing previously untapped sources, including the FEPC's vast collection of case records, Reed describes the founding and activities of the highly controversial agency and explores topically and in depth some of the problems the FEPC and its regional offices sought to resolve. His enlightening study also offers new information on wartime defense training, regional patterns of job discrimination, and emplopyment problems of ethnic groups other than blacks. Of major significance is Reed's examination of the FEPC's operations within the wartime Washington bureaucracy and the repeated attempts by opposition forces to weaken and destroy the agency. Reed shows that the committee pursued its agenda by using the clout of the War Manpower Commission, the War Department, and other governmental bodies. Black History, African American History, Black History, Civil Rights, FDR, Frederick D. Roosevelt. …