March on Washington Movement

The March on Washington Movement (MOWM), 1941–1946, organized by activists A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin as a tool to produce a mass march on Washington, D.C., was designed to pressure the U.S. government into desegregating the armed forces and providing fair working opportunities for African Americans. When President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 in 1941, prohibiting discrimination in the defense industry under contract to federal agencies, Randolph and collaborators called off the march.

Randolph continued to promote non-violent actions to advance goals for African Americans. Future civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. and other younger men were strongly influenced by Randolph and his ideals and methods.

In the lead-up to the United States' entry into World War II, African Americans resented calls to "defend democracy" against Nazi racism while having to deal with discrimination in all sectors of life and business in the United States, especially the South, where they had been disenfranchised since the turn of the century and oppressed by Jim Crow laws.

By the fall of 1940, the American economy was emerging from the Depression. The defense boom benefited whites, but black workers were denied opportunities because of widespread racial discrimination in employment. Some government training programs excluded blacks based on their being refused entry to defense industries, and many skilled black workers with proper training were unable to gain employment. In 1940 the president of the North American Aviation Co. was quoted as saying, "While we are in complete sympathy with the Negro, it is against company policy to employ them as aircraft workers or mechanics ... regardless of their training.... There will be some jobs as janitors for Negroes." It was in this climate that activists began to develop the March on Washington Movement.

The March on Washington Movement was an attempt to pressure the United States government and President Franklin D. Roosevelt into establishing policy and protections against employment discrimination as the nation prepared for war. A. Philip Randolph was the driving force behind the movement, with allies from the NAACP and other civil rights organizations. He had formed and led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters beginning in 1925. His leadership in the March on Washington Movement, in which organizing middle and lower class members would be so important, was based on his strong experience in grassroots and union organizing. Randolph's independence from white sources of power was shown when he said of the movement, "If it costs money to finance a march on Washington, let Negroes pay for it. If any sacrifices are made for Negro rights in national defense, let Negroes make them...."

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