movement but outside of it in the job employment field, and to tell you how very happy we are to have you as a witness before us today. Now, this subcommittee is faced with an increasingly difficult problem which is that colleagues of ours, sincere and well-meaning colleagues, I am sure, are nevertheless determined to prevent this subcommittee from sitting whenever the Senate is in session which unfortunately curtails the time available for us to get this bill in shape so that we can do something about it and report it out.

Therefore, we have to do what we can to expedite matters. I am not going to do this unless it is entirely agreeable to you, but I would ask you whether under those circumstances you would be willing to have your statement printed in full in the record where I can assure you all members of the committee and the staff will read it, and then to talk from a summary of your testimony which appears on the last page thereof with the thought that you could then emphasize those parts of your testimony which you think have particular pertinence.

is

Mr. RANDOLPH. I would be glad to accommodate you, Senator, if that your wish.

Senator CLARK. I would appreciate it if you would do that. If you feel, on the other hand it would be more helpful to read your testimony it would be quite agreeable for you to do so.

Mr. RANDOLPH. Probably from the point of view of coordination of ideas it might be well to read it.

Senator CLARK. All right, sir, go right ahead.

STATEMENT OF A. PHILIP RANDOLPH, PRESIDENT, NEGRO AMERICAN LABOR COUNCIL, PRESIDENT, BROTHERHOOD OF SLEEPING CAR PORTERS, AND VICE PRESIDENT, AFL-CIO

Mr. RANDOLPH. My name is A. Philip Randolph. I appreciate the opportunity to appear before your subcommittee on behalf of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, AFL-CIO, and the Negro American Labor Council to testify in favor of the enactment of fair employment practices legislation.

If legislation for a permanent, Federal FEPC had not been killed by filibuster in 1946 and again in 1950, our economy, our democracy and our internal peace would not be in the same crisis that confronts them today. If this renewed attempt should suffer a similar fate, no responsible Negro leader can safely predict or control the ultimate consequences.

Fair employment practices legislation would not, of course, have solved all of our crucial problems of employment and civil rights. But, it might have established a sound basis on which steady progress toward equality could have been made.

The urgency of the accelerating pressures across the country for equality now can best be understood against the background of such past defeats. There is usually a time when gradual, if sustained, change is desirable and possible.

But there is also another time in which a vaccum created by the lack of action explodes when needs which will no longer wait press into it. This summer we have reached that hour.

A superficial look at the national scene might indicate that the civil rights struggle has recently begun to move from the area of intellectual needs such as education and status in public accommodations-to economic needs: jobs and a decent standard of living.

In actual fact, large masses of Negroes were first involved almost spontaneously in a political struggle for their own rights more than 20 years ago in the initial drive for FEPC. Economic and civil rights are inseparable.

The economic gains for the oppressed Negro workers made that time are the basis on which the larger struggle for democracy was built. All of our minority groups have benefited from and now support the executive orders and State legislation which partially embody the FEPC idea.

But it is important to remember that when the national drive toward fair employment practices began it was essentially and in leadership a movement of Negroes.

The march on Washington movement was a march of Negroes, of a Negro community united as never before around a common goal. And the unfilled hopes which filibusters could thwart but could not kill are today the goal of a united Negro community.

History clarifies current events. As always, Negroes had been harder hit by the depression of the thirties than their fellow white Americans. Still, all had suffered together. It was with the beginning of defense industry, when "No Help Wanted" signs changed to "Help Wanted-White" that the indignant organization of Negroes to gain a fairer share in the Nation's reviving economy spurted.

It took the combination of a wartime manpower shortage and the threat of a march on Washington to secure Executive Order 8802 on June 25, 1941, and the establishment of the President's Committee on Fair Employment Practices.

But as soon as the national war emergency was over-and democracy safe the old national pattern of "last hired, first fired" crept back. Fair practices were filibustered away, and even the Korean emergency brought no permanent change.

Further Executive orders, particularly in the field of Government contracts, have shown that the Nation's conscience could never again be completely quieted in the fact of discrimination; and party platforms of both major parties have been better than the voting record of either in the Congress.

But from the fifties until today, efforts to secure for Negroes and other minorities the same right to work as other Americans have progressed slowly and inadequately, State by State.

In more than 20 years, 23 States-including Hawaii and Alaskahave adopted some form of fair employment legislation. But the long and arduous road of investigation of individual complaints has not been good enough; and a majority of States still lack even that.

The result has been that, economically, the Negro appears to stand today in the same relative economic position he occupied in the depths of the depression. The unemployment relief census of October 1933 showed about twice as high a proportion of Negroes on public relief roles as of whites: 18 percent contrasted with 9.5 percent.

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The President's broadcast to the Nation on June 11 indicated about twice the proportion of Negroes in the work force unemployed as of whites: 10 percent contrasted with 5 percent.

When momentum for the march on Washington movement began to gather, October 1940, statistics showed that after 8 years of the New Deal, one-fourth of the Negro work force was unemployed in contrast to 13 percent of the white.

The 2-to-1 proportion seems a constant. But in some ways the relative position of Negroes is worsening, and there are discernible trends of a still worse future.

Whites take home about twice as much in wages as Negroes do. The average American Negro income is $3,233, 54 percent of the white family's $5,835. But 10 years ago, it was 57 percent.

This has a great deal to do with FEPC. The percentage of Negroes in professional, clerical, sales, and skilled labor jobs has doubled in 20 years, and anyone who remembers the first Negro saleswomen in a famous department store and many other firsts knows that State legislation has helped. But where does this enormous gain leave us?

Government figures of 1955 have shown 12 percent of the Negro work force and 42 percent of the white in professional, technical, managerial, and white collar, clerical, and sales positions. Forty-seven percent of the Negro work force is still in service and other unskilled and nonfarm jobs.

Even though segregated and inferior education and lack of training opportunities have much to do with the lower earning capacities of Negro workers, the full responsibility does not rest there.

A report of a conference sponsored by the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity held May 19, 1962, revealed that 22 percent of white college men were reported as becoming proprietors, managers, or officials, compared with 5 percent of Negro college men.

Negroes with some college training were found in service and laborer jobs in numbers five times greater than whites with similar training. Of those who had not completed high school, 34 percent of the nonwhites were nonfarm workers, against 10 percent of the whites with similar training.

The situation of women was similar. Ten percent of the Negro women who finish college end up as domestic workers, but 1 percent of the whites. Two-thirds of the Negro group with some high school are in domestic and other service jobs, but 17 percent of the white.

All this is bad enough. The changing nature of the economy is making it worse. The relatively high-wage heavy industries into which Negroes have been moving since World War I, where union organization has benefited them along with other workers, have failed to grow in the last 5 years. In some cases there are less employed today.

In manufacturing industries, the shift of numbers from plant to office is displacing minority-group workers. It is estimated that 3 million jobs have been eliminated by automation since 1953, and various different estimates indicate that about a 2 million a year dis placement of lesser and unskilled workers.

Because most Negro workers are still in unskilled and semiskilled trades, more of them will be displaced each year. A specific example out of many possibilities may bring this home: within 4 years, 30,000

elevator operators in New York City were displaced by self-service elevators. Within a very few years, this job category will have disappeared completely. Nearly all of these operators are Negroes and Puerto Ricans.

But displacement is by no means confined to the cities. Mechanization of agriculture is adding to the changes that have driven millions of farm families off the land within a generation.

The hardest hit in the last 2 years and in the next two also-are southern Negro hired farmworkers and tenants displaced by mechanization of the cotton harvest.

This is unemployment concealed as underemployment, and unemployment normally not registered because workers are not covered by unemployment insurance. But the worktime of a quarter of a million workers is no longer needed, and an equal number will be replaced in the near future.

Along with other rural pressures, this means a strong likelihood of an exodus from the land and into urban centers in search of work comparable only to that of the 1870's and the World War I period. Thus, as the great city minorities feel the pressures of increasing unemployment and poverty themselves, their numbers may well be swelled by other unskilled workers from the country.

For although the number of unskilled jobs is declining, the need of the Nation for skilled workers is increasing. There is no single craft in which Negroes form even 2 percent of the total number of workers.

And although figures on apprenticeship are hard to get, estimates place the number of Negro apprentices also as something under 2 percent. Unless action is taken at once, "no jobs today" will be perpetuated as "no jobs tomorrow." The Negro community rejects such a future for its children.

It is easy, endless, and perhaps repetitious to belabor the meaning of poverty. It starts with birth. Four Negro women die in childbirth to each white; and infant mortality is five times greater.

It means childhood in slums-cultural deprivation is one way to say it; disproportional criminal statistics and the horror of dope addiction are a few of the byproducts. Inferior education, lack of incentive or the closed door to those with better education and higher aspirations. The cycle must be broken. It must be broken now. And it must be broken at its start with the right to a decent livelihood.

All civil rights are built on this. It is not enough to outlaw discrimination in housing unless the Negro earns sufficient income to pay the rent or to buy the land. It is not enough to permit him to stay at a hotel or eat in a restaurant, to attend a movie or play on a golf course, unless he has the price of admission.

Segregation and discrimination in education must go. But the child must have a break in environment so that he is ready for the school just as the school is ready for him.

The right to vote is inherent in democracy and depends on nothing but humanity. But citizens who participate as equals in the economic life of the country would vote more wisely than those whose just grievance against society begins with inability to support their families.

The rising tide of discontent in both our northern cities and our southern cities is related to the number of adults without jobs and youth without futures. It is no accident that the greatest outburst in the civil rights struggle to date has taken place in an industrial city plagued with unemployment.

It is not coincidence that in the large northern centers where civil rights legislation is on the books demonstrations directed toward equal employment opportunity are growing daily in size and militancy. Yet, so long as we are trying to share more equally in jobs of which there are not enough to go around, we have not tackled a major problem.

We cannot have fair employment until we have full employment. Nor will we have full employment until we have fair employment. National planning for jobs for all Americans is an urgent need of the hour.

Government must take leadership in investment policies, tax policies, public works policies. Management and labor have their part to play. I realize that a program for full employment is not the immediate focus of this subcommittee. But it would be dangerous and misleading to call for fair employment practices enforcement without at the same time calling attention to the declining number of employment opportunities in many fields.

Our insistence upon jobs for Negroes and other minorities in accordance with ability is not a program to replace white workers, but rather for the opportunity to share equally with them in the building of the Nation's future and in the fruits of that greater abundance which only the contribution of all can make possible.

Senator CLARK. Thank you very much, Mr. Randolph.

Senator Burdick?

Senator BURDICK. It was a very fine statement, I have no questions. Senator CLARK. Senator Pell?

Senator PELL. I thank you for a very fine statement. I have one question. In your own union there has been criticism in the past, that there are only Negro members.

Mr. RANDOLPH. No. In Canada one-third of our members are white. We have no color bar in our organization.

Senator PELL. Do you have any in the United States?

Mr. RANDOLPH. We have no white members in the union but we have not had any color bar. The Pullman Co. hires the workers. We have no say over that.

Senator PELL. Thank you.

Senator CLARK. Senator Jordan?

Senator JORDAN. Mr. Randolph, I congratulate you on a very fine

statement.

Will you turn to your statement? I would judge from what you say here that the ratio of 2 to 1 seems to be a constant in unemployment, unemployed Negroes and unemployed white. This carries down through in the earnings; white families have an income much higher than Negro families.

And I gather from your statement that you think this situation is deteriorating rather than improving. Is that true?