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chapter two The St. Louis March on Washington and the Historic Bloc for “Double Victory,” 1942–45 The black working-class political bloc that had arisen during the Depression was further reified in the new wartime crisis raging in Europe. As the United States joined the campaign against the Axis powers of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan, an industrial renaissance occurred on the domestic front. Many aspects of the local economy allowed the St. Louis metropolitan area to benefit from this resurgence. It housed a pool of skilled workers, and its diverse manufacturing base was the largest west of the Mississippi. Further, the city’s strategic location below the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers made it an inland waterway hub. As the nucleus of national railroad links, St. Louis was also an easy destination point for migrant workers, and the largest industrial center west of the Big Muddy. For decades, moreover, it had been a laboratory for the developing aviation industry, which now brought numerous federal war contracts to the city.1 Just as they had been the first fired during the Depression, African Americans now found themselves the last hired as the economy tilted toward full employment. As the 1940s began, 20 percent of St. Louis’s black workers were unemployed, and another 11 percent were on WPA projects. However, wartime tumult created new opportunities for black workingclass struggle. Britain, the United States, “Free France,” and the Soviet Union gave African Americans new discourses with which to fight for full citizenship and self-determination on the U.S. home front. Whereas variants of left-wing radicalism had been pervasive during the Depression, black freedom workers now largely adopted a critical American patriotism. Likening Hitler, Hirohito, and Mussolini to southern segregationists and northern white racists, they highlighted how Jim Crow undermined the moral credibility of the United States in defending the “Four Freedoms” abroad. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, acting through the broad working-class front of the March on Washington Movement (MOWM), 43 formed the cutting edge in a fight for victory over Nazism overseas and racial apartheid at home.2 This chapter discusses the activities of the St. Louis Unit of the MOWM, specifically its campaigns around the hiring and upgrading of black workers in defense plants and public utilities. While confronting a qualitatively different set of circumstances than during the Depression, the St. Louis MOWM continued patterns of black worker self-organization from the 1930s, and thus contributed politically to the ongoing processes of black working-class formation. The St. Louis division was also notable as the MOWM’s most active and militant branch, and among the most successful in achieving defense industry work for African Americans. But while the MOWM occupied the center of black St. Louis militancy during the war, other patterns of resistance thrived. Because they revolved around the interests of a defined—and self-defined—black working class, these developments helped further recreate African American civil society and its evolving class structure. These experiences contributed to heightening a black racial-class consciousness, which not only propelled the black freedom struggles of the 1940s, but also seeded the soil for a subsequent period of black grassroots insurgency.3 “We Fight for the Right to Work as Well as Die for Victory for the United Nations” g Wartime St. Louis remained one of the nation’s most segregated cities. Most downtown hotels, restaurants, and theaters continued to bar African Americans. While athletes Jesse Owens and Joe Louis personified America ’s rejection of the Nazi “master race” doctrine, African Americans could not sit in the grandstand at Sportsman’s Park, home of the St. Louis Cardinals and Browns baseball clubs. Local dime and drug stores prohibited black patrons from dining at their lunch counters. The central business district ’s three major department stores—the Famous-Barr Company, Stix, Baer & Fuller, and Scruggs, Vandervoort, Barney—did not serve black shoppers at their popular eating facilities. These patterns spilled over into the lucrative new war production industries, as black workers were virtually nonexistent in the new job boom. In 1940, the Curtiss-Wright aircraft plant received a $16 million contract for training and cargo planes, while a $14 million facility run by the Atlas Powder Company became the nation’s largest maker of TNT. The American Car and St. Louis Car companies both received hefty contracts for tanks, and in December 1940 the federal government approved plans to build a small-arms...

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