Abstract
In April 1963 it was impossible to ignore the tragic events in Birmingham, Alabama, where civil rights protesters faced fire hoses and attack dogs. The clash between unchecked police brutality and nonviolent protest marked a watershed in the battle against Jim Crow. Television news crews and print journalists from around the world descended on Birmingham. Their reports and photographs provided indelible images of the black freedom struggle. A thousand miles to the northeast, overshadowed by events in Alabama, an equally momentous wave of protests swept through Philadelphia, as activists from local chapters of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) began a two-month-long siege of city-sponsored construction projects. Beginning in early April, protesters marched in front of Mayor James Tate’s modest North Philadelphia row house, staged a sit-in at city hall, shut down construction of the city’s Municipal Services Building, battled with police and white unionists at the site of a partially built school, and unleashed an intense debate about racial politics, discrimination, and employment. The Philadelphia protests had national resonance. On June 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy issued Executive Order 11114, calling for a still vaguely defined “affirmative action” in government-contracted construction employment.
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Notes
City of Philadelphia, Commission on Human Relations, Annual Report, 1953, folder 6/I/98, box 4, Philadelphia Branch NAACP Papers; Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, Seventh Annual Report, 1962 (Harrisburg, 1963), 11, 21, 25–26; Alfred W. Blumrosen, Black Employment and the Law (New Brunswick, 1971), 13; George Schermer, “Effectiveness of Equal Opportunity Legislation,” in The Negro and Employment Opportunity: Problems and Practices, ed. Herbert R. Northrup and Richard L. Rowan (Ann Arbor, 1965), 74–75, 79–81; Herbert Hill, “Twenty Years of State Fair Employment Practice Commissions: A Critical Analysis with Recommendations,” Buffalo Law Review, 14 (Fall 1965), 22–69.
Joshua B. Freeman, “Hardhats: Construction Workers, Manliness, and the 1970 Pro-War Demonstrations,” Journal of Social History, 26 (Summer 1993), 725–44
“CORE Demands Action on Bias Charge,” Philadelphia Bulletin, March 31, 1963; “CORE Pickets Tate’s Home and City Hall,” ibid., April 14, 1963; “CORE Stages Hour Sitdown,” ibid., April 19, 1963; “CORE Protests City Job Bias,” ibid., April 20, 1963; “Labor Board Tells Mayor It Can’t Ban Bias,” ibid., April 23, 1963; “Mayor’s Office Sit-in Forces Building Trades Study,” Philadelphia Tribune, April 27, 1963; “CORE Urges City Take Over Project Hiring,” Philadelphia Bulletin, May 6, 1963; D. Herbert Lipson, “Off the Cuff,” Greater Philadelphia Magazine, 58 (May 1963), 1.
“Steamfitters Back Refusal to Join Truce,” Philadelphia Bulletin, June 5, 1963; Roger Waldinger and Thomas Bailey, “The Continuing Significance of Race: Racial Conflict and Racial Discrimination in Construction,” Politics and Society, 19 (Sept. 1991), 291–323.
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© 2006 Edited by Joyce Appleby for the Organization of American Historians
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Sugrue, T.J. (2006). Affirmative Action from Below: Civil Rights, the Building Trades, and the Politics of Racial Equality in the Urban North, 1945–1969. In: Appleby, J. (eds) The Best American History Essays 2006. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06580-3_10
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