local attempts at passage of fair-practice legislation. A fair-practices ordinance for the city of Detroit has been blocked by a ruling of the corporation counsel that Detroit does not have adequate powers under the Home Rule Act to enforce such an ordinance. Despite an initiative petition campaign which won almost 200,000 signatures in behalf of a State FEPC law, the Michigan Legislature ignored the mandate and sat on the bill until adjournment. The State supreme court barred its presence on the ballot on the petty technicality that it had no title.

When the wartime FEPC experience can be so easily forgotten and the successful New York precedent so readily ignored, it is no wonder that workers in the field of intergroup and minority relations surrender from time to time to passing spells of despondency; no wonder that those Americans who are victims of the stupidities and blindness of exclusion and discrimination lose faith in democratic slogans and in the professed will of the democratic community to remedy a clear and cruel injustice.

THE UNWANTED TENTH

The Negro minority comprises 1 out of every 10 Americans. If those other groups most actively and persistently victimized are added, the minority problem involves one-third of the Nation. When one adds to this fact the realization that a minority's problem is the consequence of the attitudes and actions of a majority, it should be clear that democracy cannot complacently assume that a gradual, intricate, and fitful process vaguely known as "education" will somehow turn bigotry into tolerance and discrimination into equal justic in time to save the free way of life from disintegration.

It should be equally clear that no single institution such as the CIO, or a combination of like-minded organizations, however aggressively they may prosecute an antidiscrimination policy, can do more than fight a holding action until the community moves through law to guarantee basic freedoms. The UAW-CIO and the CIO as a whole have been properly praised for their efforts to break down the discriminatory employment practices of the labor movement and of industry. The southern organizational drive of the CIO has brought to great areas of the South a new dimension of freedom and quickened the appetite of hundreds of thousands for deliverance from the slaveholder mentality. Nevertheless, the national trend has been regressive. The Negro has experienced the quick erosion of his wartime gains; and today again, as in the days before the promulgation of the four freedoms, he represents the unwanted tenth in a country whose politicians never tire of reminding us of America's endless frontiers of opportunity. Of all vicious circles, that of discrimination is the most vicious. As George Bernard Shaw pointed out half a century ago, America "makes the Negro clean its boots and then proves the moral and physical inferiority of the Negro by the fact that he is a shoeblack."

Discrimination deprives Negroes of the opportunity to learn skills and then shuts them out from employment on the ground that they lack the requisite ability. Economic deprivation leads to poverty, ill-health, crime, and general lack of fitness to play a reasonable role in society. And then the wheel of discrimination is given another turn.

The Negro is the marginal element in the labor force. When times are good and labor is scarce, a relatively large proportion is able to find jobs. When times are bad, the proportion of Negroes hired shrinks. This is reflected in the ups and downs of the proportion of applicants for social-security account numbers who are Negroes:

Percent

16.3

16.9

14.4

16.9

11.9

The proportion of Negro applicants rose late in the war and fell off sharply soon after the war ended.

This marginal status of the Negro is also reflected in greater irregularity of employment. Even in the "good" year 1944, far higher proportions of Negroes

than of whites earned social-security wage credits in only three or fewer quarters of the year:

Percent earning wage credits for less than 4 quarters of 1944

Nonwhites also suffer from a serious wage differential. Earnings credits for social security purposes show that, age group for age group and sex for sex, Negro income is far lower than that of whites. Average wage credits for all ages, in 1944, reveal that whereas all men averaged $1,691, Negro men averaged $1,081; and that whereas all women averaged $891, Negro women averaged only $530.

Government, ironically enough, indirectly contributes, through benefits paid under the Social Security Act, to the perpetuation of the injustices and inequities of the private economy. The average monthly retirement payment per beneficiary as of the end of 1945 was $24.19 for all, and only $18.28 for nonwhite. The average monthly payment for surviving children of deceased workers was $12.45 for all children, but only $9.35 for nonwhite children. Here we see another generation of second-class citizens beginning life already doomed by the double standard which metes out unequal economic justices to white and colored Americans.

Discrimination and the economic consequences of discrimination constitute a dangerous drag on a nation which has yet to prove to itself and to the world that its people are capable of utilizing their tremendous productive skills and resources for the common good. The unwanted tenth, if granted that equality of participation in the life of the country which is their due, could prove to be the margin of deliverance from national and world economic catastrophe.

THE OUTLOOK

President Truman, in his letter of acceptance of the Final Report of the Fair Employment Practice Committee, wrote (on June 28, 1946):

"The degree of effectiveness which the Fair Employment Practice Committee was able to attain has shown once and for all that it is possible to equalize job opportunity by governmental action, and thus eventually to eliminate the influence of prejud ice in the field of employment."

Again on January 8, 1947, in transmitting to Congress the Economic Report of the President, Mr. Truman urged:

"We must end discrimination in employment or wages against certain classes of workers regardless of their individual abilities. Discrimination against certain racial and religious groups, against workers in late middle age, and against women, not only is repugnant to the principles of our democracy, but often creates artificial labor shortages' in the midst of labor surplus. Employers and unions both need to reexamine and revise practices resulting in discrimination. I recommend that, at this session, the Congress provide permanent Federal legislation dealing with this problem."

The UAW and CIO experience has demonstrated that labor alone cannot cope with the problem of discrimination in hiring; that while trade-union discipline and education may to a considerable extent break down prejudiced attitudes and even achieve the enviable record of sanity and solidarity shown by white and colored UAW members during the Detroit riot of 1943, only government, through the imposition of legal sanctions, can finally guarantee that the right to employment without discrimination is recognized, in the words of S. 984, as "a civil right of all the people of the United States."

The CIO does not believe that a law against discrimination in employment is the sole answer to the minority-majority problems that afflict Aemrica. Our own intimate experience throughout the past decade amply confirms the undeniable yet elementary truth that attitudes cannot be changed overnight. Yet it is criminal to hold up the need for education as an excuse for inaction in Congress or in State capitals. Passage of a law against discrimination in employment would itself be an educational act of vital importance, for in affirming the creative purpose of law, it would be a sign to both those who discriminate and to their victims that the community does not intend to remain passive in the face of discriminatory acts which are morally wrong and both economically and politically subversive.

limit the number of colored or the num of Jews or the number of any other de as public institutions?

Mr. GOLDMAN. We have numerous ins it is of any importance to you, I would be

Senator ELLENDER. I think it is. I hav sions and as I have indicated here before own personal observation, I believe a lot

Mr. GOLDMAN. I had not thought it woul that kind of statement. The report of the Fair Employment is replete with statemen result of a pretty close contact with condition Senator ELLENDER. A statement such as yo appealing. When you talk of our Constituti course, you can make a wonderful presentatio that; but when one must be specific about all speak of, I would judge that there may be a है ployer or a college or some institution's maintai

For instance, we have a lot of schools through where, should no quotas be established, it is pro our citizenry who are able financially to attend places of enrollment and we would have many u What information I would like to find out fron have any specific cases where there has been the you speak of in regard to employment in a usef in manufacturing or farming or occupations of t what I would like to get before the committee.

Mr. GOLDMAN. We will be very glad to furnish yo so far as any department of B'nai B'rith has it.

It seems to me it is a matter which is so plain ar one of those facts which I think a court would tak of because it is such a well-known fact.. In addition t Senator ELLENDER. You mean a well-known fact t crimination?

Mr. GOLDMAN. That is right.

not

t.

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untouched in those cases where they had

erns of discrimination imposed by manbulk of those Negroes remaining in the d classifications where they had tradi

Law is not merely a reflection of changing community habits and customs. Law influences custom and initiates change in habits. If this were not so, American would still suffer from uncompensated industrial accidents, lack of unemployment compensation, lack of social security, lack of minimum wages, absolute employer dictation of wages, hours, and working conditijns, long and arduous hours of work, and any number of primitive conditions which once were complacently accepted by large sections of the community as "custom."

Neither does the CIO believe that a fair-practices law represents the chief answer to our domestic economic problems. It should not be necessary to labor the point that the Congress of Industrial Organizations does not isolate the factor of discrimination in employment from the multitude of economic problems which must be solved before the United States can control the business cycle and achieve a stable economy of full production, full employment, security, and abundance under freedom. The existence of these other grave problems, however, renders all the more pressing our need to eliminate the intolerable wastage of skills, energies, and productive powers arising from discrimination in employment.

The CIO endorses S. 984 out of the conviction that full and equal economic opportunity for the minorities of this Nation can mean a higher standard of living for all of our people. Access to employment on equal terms for all Americans means releasing the majority as well as the minority from the burden of poverty, disease, crime, and unused talents which represent the high cost of discrimination. The lifting of this burden through passage of S. 984 and through energetic community programs to make the American creed a reality can mean opening the way toward full participation in the national productive effort by the one-tenth to one-third of our people now denied this right. Higher levels of employment and wages mean greater purchasing power, greater demand for the products of our factories and farms, a greater chance to keep America at work and at peace. Fair employment is an essential component of any full employment program which seeks to reach the goal of security and abundance without sacrifice of democracy and basic freedoms.

Congress must also reckon with the fact that, above and beyond the tangible benefits that all Americans may derive from fair-employment legislation, passage of S. 984 would represent a victory of the democratic conscience, an act of extreme symbolical importance. Failure to pass S. 984 would defeat the hopes of millions of Americans. It would be a sign to them that the highest lawmaking body in the land, while voluble about freedom in other nations, stood mute and indifferent while the stage was being set at home for new race riots, for an eruption of domestic unrest of unparallelel proportions at the first sign of economic collapse.

Passage of S. 984, on the other hand, while it is but one step among many that must be taken, would restore the ebbing faith in democracy's promises of millions of Americans whose daily experience of rejection and exclusion has made them skeptical and bitter.

The international implications of discrimination in the United States are no less ominous than its domestic consequences. The United States is a signatory of the United Nations Charter, which affirms the determination to achieve internations cooperation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for "human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion."

The United States cannot escape the responsibilities of world democratic leadership. The "reservoir of good will" of which Wendell Willkie spoke is still high in the hearts of people everywhere who look to America for strength and purpose. Yet it is diminishing. We cannot play our proper role in world affairs without unity and well-being at home. Other nations will regard our professions of concern for world freedoms as hypocrisy if we do not move aggressively to guarantee elementary civil rights within our own borders.

For these reasons the CIO and the UAW-CIO urge passage by Congress of S. 984. We would regard prompt and favorable action on the bill as evidence of the highest statesmanship.

Senator DONNELL. At this time I will offer for the record, subject to the approval by the committee, a certified copy of a resolution adopted by the board of directors of the Chamber of Commerce of Kansas City in regular meeting on the 10th day of June 1947, in which