Winning the War for Democracy: The March on Washington Movement, 1941–1946 by David Lucander (review)

Historians have long stressed the significance of the March on Washington Movement (MOWM) of the World War II era. Organized in 1941 by African American labor activist A. Philip Randolph, MOWM planned to stage a massive demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial on July 1 of that year to demand, among other things, federal enforcement of nondiscrimination in employment in the nation’s defense industries and civil service and the desegregation of its armed forces. The threat of the march compelled the presidential administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt to negotiate with Randolph, who agreed to cancel the march on the president’s signing of Executive Order 8802 (EO 8802), which banned companies that received federal defense contracts from discriminating in hiring and promotion. It also established a new federal agency—the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC)—empowered to investigate and redress violations of the order. Even if the president’s executive order only partially met one of MOWM’s six demands, it gave the nascent civil rights organization and its tactics of aggressive, confrontational nonviolent protest instant credibility. But as David Lucander’s thoroughly researched and intensely documented study reveals, historians have known surprisingly little about the inner workings of MOWM and of the people who built and sustained the organization throughout the war years.

To capture the essence of MOWM, Lucander directs our attention away from Randolph and his charismatic leadership and shifts it instead to the local grassroots mobilizations that the original march inspired. If those organized under the banner of MOWM never marched on the nation’s capital, thousands of them did stage their own marches—as well as rallies, sit-ins, picket lines, and other tactics of mass protest—to contest manifestations of America’s culture of racial exclusion closer to their hometowns. Drawing on recently declassified FBI files as well as the personal papers of local and lesser-known national organizers of MOWM, Lucander aspires to tell a “true people’s history” (15) of those whom he calls the “lifeblood” (6) of the organization. Most of the book centers on the activities of the St. Louis chapter, which not only introduces readers to a new pantheon of activists but also reveals the indispensable political work that black women performed on behalf of MOWM. Lucander’s study adds to a growing body of literature that interprets the war years as a distinctive period in the history of black working-class politics in its own right rather than seeing it as merely a forerunner of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

One of the central claims that Lucander makes throughout the book is that the political strategies and tactics that produced EO 8802 were as important as the executive order itself. After Roosevelt signed the order, MOWM shifted its energies into becoming an all-black national organization of local chapters, each of which would use the power of pressure politics to ensure the enforcement of the executive order. Confrontational, nonviolent direct action was key to this political vision. MOWM’s national executive secretary, E. Pauline Myers, believed that aggressive, bold, courageous, and disciplined protest had the capacity to disrupt public life, dramatize racial injustice, and ultimately weaken the will of the oppressor. The world war against fascism provided activists with a language of protest, one that Myers defined as critical patriotism. The American flag appeared prominently in MOWM rallies and marches, a symbol of participants’ patriotic commitment to the victory of democratic principles over fascism abroad and Jim Crow at home. That language of unyielding protest wedded to an explicit patriotism situates MOWM as a reformist, rather than a revolutionary, organization. MOWM activists saw themselves as working within a New Deal political framework that envisioned an egalitarian society committed to the promise of gainful employment as a right of American citizenship. Despite the extraordinary commitment of national organizers such as Myers and...