As the Great Depression began to ease in the late 1930s, many – but not all – Americans were able to return to steady work after a lost decade of joblessness and insecurity. Looking at the possibility of war across the Atlantic and the Pacific both, President Franklin D. Roosevelt initiated a massive military buildup, but the resulting boom was typically slow to reach Black households. On one side of the job market, Black workers were excluded from the training and apprenticeship programs need to access the best jobs, while at the other end African Americans with skills and experience were either barred from managerial positions or forbidden from managing whites. Major shipbuilding and manufacturing unions did not accept Black men and women as full members, and the new towns springing up around industrial centers were as segregated and inaccessible as the old.
Frederick Douglass once noted that “power concedes nothing without a demand,” and this was true about Black access to millions of new defense industry jobs.
As Depression gave way to world war, A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the NAACP launched a campaign calling for an end to employment discrimination in the defense industries. Although weapon and munitions makers needed every worker they could get, Roosevelt and the Federal government had no appetite for pursuing domestic social change in the middle of mobilization for foreign war. Powerful southern Democrats in Congress worked against any effort that might aid African Americans, while the predominantly white unions were predominantly interested in maximizing white employment.
Unable to convince Roosevelt using moral suasion, Randolph and the NAACP decided a more direct force needed to be applied. Randolph announced plans for a 1941 March on Washington that would bring together multiple national civil rights groups and upwards of 100,000 Black working men and women to demand fair and equal employment.