fair employment what must be done, and done now, for all American Negroes, and other minorities.

Senator CLARK. Thank you, Mr. Morrow, I think this is a splendid and very helpful statement.

Senator Jordan?

Senator JORDAN. Thank you, Mr. Morrow, your good company has come a long way without the coercive force of law to require it to do what you have accomplished on a voluntary basis and I want to commend you for that fine attitude and I hope that we may have been able to draw on the advice and counsel of you and members of the staff of your good company in helping to draft legislation to meet this issue at hand.

Mr. MORROW. We would be only happy to help wherever we may. Senator CLARK. Thank you, sir. I just have a couple of questions, Mr. Morrow. How many Negroes are you presently employing in your company, or do you not keep your records that way?

Mr. MORROW. Well, we don't keep actual records and I am not sure of how many we have among our sales, service, and clerical personnel. But in Stamford we have approximately 100 Negroes employees.

This, I would guess, is approximately 5 percent of the Negro population of our workforce whereas in Stamford we have maybe 82 or 9 percent of the Negro population.

However, as Mr. Wilkins previously agreed, the Negroes as a group generally are not as well equipped at the present time to be qualified for a lot of the jobs that might be open and I think it is a little optimistic to think that this situation will change immediately. Senator CLARK. You may well be right. So you have an acceptable number of Negroes in your shop and you

Mr. MORROW. And the offices, too, yes.

Senator CLARK. I think you testified that you have them in the offices, too. The percentage is not as high as the percentage of Negroes in the community but this you account for in large part by the fact that the Negroes' skills are not as great as the white skills in that community, is that about it?

Mr. MORROW. And their education. We know, I do not have any figures to prove this, but we get an influx of Negroes from the deep South every year at the end of the school year, along about June, and these are former students in Negro high schools in the South. I think it is pretty generally agreed, the quality of these segregated schools does not compare with the white high schools in the South, and certainly not with the northern high schools. I am very general, of course. We administer tests to our employees for other than menial jobs-clerical and faculty jobs and, of course, the technical, and so on.

We do not find that southern Negroes came up to the level of local Negroes, who are graduates of local high schools and whose families have been here a generation or two.

Senator CLARK. Do you happen to know whether there is a significant school dropout problem in Stamford?

Mr. MORROW. Yes. There is. It has been worked on constantly. I do not think it is quite as bad as in some other areas because the local administration has done quite a bit to try to cure it. This is a sort of a vicious cycle, the Negro boy, when he reaches 16 or 17, his

family is in such poor economic circumstances that they want him to go to work right away and earn money, even though he may have aptitudes and intelligence that would qualify him for, say, a toolmaker's job or a diemaker, some highly skilled industrial skill, he cannot afford to do this, he will go right into a shop as a machine operator or maybe even less-a trucker or laborer of some type.

Senator CLARK. Does your Child Labor Act in Connecticut permit employment after arriving at the 16th birthday?

Mr. MORROW. Not in hazardous employment-he could not operate a machine tool, for instance, until he is 18. But he could go into an apprentice program for tool and die makers and we have such a school, but frankly, we don't have one Negro tool and die maker, because, although we have tried to get Negro boys to enter our trade school, they have to make money right away, they have to help support the family.

Senator CLARK. Therefore, they tend to go to more menial jobs? Mr. MORROW. Or a job that will pay more immediately. Apprentice jobs and as you probably know, this is true of college graduates in trainee jobs-don't pay much until they complete a long training period.

Senator CLARK. So that actually both economic and educational factors play a very real part in minimizing Negro employment in your statement?

Mr. MORROW. That is why I am pessimistic about the Negro attaining anything like full employment equality in a generation because he is starting from a very, very low economic standard.

Senator CLARK. Now, would you say generally speaking that your State Fair Employment Practices Act is working pretty well and where efforts are made through the administrative procedure of that act to obtain equal employment opportunity, those efforts are generally successful?

Mr. MORROW. Yes, I think the State has done a good job in a limited way. It is only recently that the Commission has received enough of an appropriation to do a real job of searching out places where inequality exists.

Senator CLARK. Thank you, sir.

Senator Burdick, do you have any questions?

Senator BURDICK. No questions.

Senator CLARK. Thank you very much, sir. You have been very helpful to the subcommittee.

Our final witness this morning is Mr. James Farmer, national director of the Congress of Racial Equality.

Mr. Farmer, we are very happy to have you with us and I am glad to note your statement finally turned up. We have to apologize for the Post Office Department.

Since your statement is quite short I have no objection to your reading it, but you proceed in your own way.

STATEMENT OF JAMES FARMER, NATIONAL DIRECTOR, CONGRESS OF RACIAL EQUALITY

Mr. FARMER. Thank you very much, Senator, if it is all right with you and the subcommittee I would prefer not to read the statement as such.

Senator CLARK. Good for you, that is the kind of witness I like. We will have the statement printed in full in the record and you just proceed in your own way.

(The prepared statement of Mr. Farmer referred to follows:)

PREPARED STATEMENT OF JAMES FARMER, NATIONAL DIRECTOR OF THE CONGRESS OF RACIAL EQUALITY

I thank you gentlemen for the opportunity to appear here to express my views and the views of the Congress of Racial Equality on this proposed legislation.

Although the burden of the current protests throughout the Nation has been in the area of visible segregation, such as public accommodations and education, there is no doubt that one of the most sinister forms of discrimination in the United States is the historic and aggressive segregation of Negroes from equal employment opportunities throughout our economy. There is no chicken or egg in this fight for freedom. Equal employment is an empty victory without a base of integrated education. Access to public facilities is a token without a pocketful of money to use them. We must approach this incredibly difficult national question on all fronts simultaneously.

We have characterized this struggle in moral terms and that characterization has been the spine and the arms and the heart of the movement until now.

I would like this opportunity to talk to you, however, in much more pragmatic and direct terms. America has a sad and spotty history of employment discrimination. The State of New York has generally excellent laws on the books, some since 1946, providing equality in employment for the State's nonwhite citizens. Yet, at this very moment, close to a thousand people have accepted the penalty and discipline of jail in order to achieve actual integration on State and city supported construction projects. The difference in New York is obviously enforcement-the difference is obviously the will of public officials, State and Federal legislatures, to replace picket lines with serious and conscientious attention to their responsibilities.

So far, we have been unable to achieve this even in the State of New York. If we are in trouble in New York, we are obviously in trouble in Mississippi, and if we are in trouble in Mississippi, no one can deny that the Nation is in trouble throughout the world.

This legislation does indeed make an important Federal stride toward achieving better enforcement of its high-minded and eloquent principles. As I read this new legislation, various Commissions will be able to initiate appropriate investigations, remedial orders, and orders of disqualification of contracts on a Federal level without waiting for the inevitable defeat on the level of the State. This commission system of rerouting enforcement around hostile State authorities is absolutely imperative if we are going to have legislation that does more than gather dust.

Now let's talk some frank and hard facts. As a result of segregation and discrimination in employment, housing, education, voting and public accommodations, the American Negro is in a tightly padlocked economic and social box. How does he unlock it? How does he get out? Most recently he has resorted to direct, nonviolent actions.

The proof in employment alone:

Item (a). The nonwhite worker suffers a severe occupational disadvantage. In 1960, 45 percent of the nonwhite males were working in low wage, dead end jobs as laborers or in the service industries. The proportion of white in these industries was 13 percent. Among women workers, 40 percent of the nonwhites were found in private household employment (domestics) compared with 6.1 percent for their white counterparts. And during the entire decade

from 1950 through 1960 hardly any progress was made in eliminating this imbalance.

Item (b). In 1960 the average Negro family earned 55 percent of what the average white family earned. This percentage has gone up exactly 1 percent point in the 10-year period from 1950 through 1960.

Item (c). For 1962, unemployment fell heaviest on the nonwhite worker. The jobless rate for nonwhite was about double that of white workers (11 percent compared with 5 percent). Nonwhite teenage boys and girls had the highest rates of any population group (21 percent and 21 percent respectively). The rates for white youngsters was high-around 12 percent-but far lower than those of nonwhites in the same age group. A large disparity also persisted among adults. For example, the unemployment rate for nonwhite men 25 years of age and over was 22 times that for white men in the same age group.

Nonwhite workers accounted for 22 percent of the jobless in 1962 as contrasted with 20 percent in 1957. They were 28 percent of the very long-term unemployed compared with 24 percent 5 years earlier, although still representing only 11 percent of the labor force.

Item (d). During the 1960's, 13 million additions will be made to the labor force. The present trends of automation show destruction of 1.4 million jobs a year. Unless a vast national effort is made to create employment, the unemployment figures by 1970 will be staggering.

The impact of this on the nonwhite worker is already clear. When opportunity declines for whites, it stops altogether for the Negro. Between 1956 and 1962 the only area where significant expansion of Negro employment took place was in government. Approximately 85 percent of the increase in nonwhite employment during this period was in the public economy.

Between 1960 and 1962, there was an increase in government employment of nonwhites of approximately 200,000. For the economy as a whole, employment for nonwhites rose by about 100,000, indicating that in the private economy, there was an actual loss of nonwhite jobs.

Now what does this mean? Place yourself in the following postures and you will begin to grasp the meaning in the human and tangible terms of a man's life and livelihood.

You are an unemployed Negro farmhand, facing a declining need for farm labor, your family supported by your wife's earnings as a domestic and you cannot get a job as an apprentice in order to learn a new and more economically feasible trade.

You are a Negro construction worker in New York City. You have "shaped up" every morning for 4 weeks at a city sewer construction project on Delancy Street*** hundreds of white men are hired instantly and finally when you do work, you are placed on a segregated work gang.

You are a Negro college graduate forced into hod-carrying in Chicago because a majority of big business management training programs callously exclude Negroes.

You are a Negro writer, a Negro accountant, a Negro teacher, a skilled Negro drill-press operator *** and you are out of work only because of the color of your skin.

We must have strong, reasoned legislation to combat these inequities and we must have even stronger commitments that such legislation will be enforced. Only in this way can we begin to invoke the image of our Nation as truly brave and truly free.

Gentlemen✶✶✶ our hearts are open

our hands are extended. We do

not want the wash of blood and anguish that some predict. But we do want our simple freedoms *** to live*** to learn *** to work. And if the cost of that freedom will maim us; then we accept that disfigurement. If the cost of that freedom is to lose our own individual freedom in the jails of New York, New Orleans, Jackson, Miss., or Los Angeles * then that cost will be paid, in full.

Mr. FARMER. Very good, Senator. First, of course, I do want to thank you gentlemen for the opportunity to appear here to express my views and the views of the Congress of Racial Equality on the proposed legislation.

Senator CLARK. You better tell us a little bit about what the CORE is.

Mr. FARMER. The Congress of Racial Equality which is better known as CORE, Senator Clark, is not as young an organization as many people think.

The fact of the matter is our organization was founded in 1942 in the city of Chicago, as an interracial organization using nondeontology techniques of nonviolent action.

The fact of the matter was that CORE was staging sit-ins and stand-ins back in the early forties with a great deal of success in northern cities, and I think had a great deal of responsibility for wiping out discrimination in places of public accommodation in those cities in the forties and in the early fifties.

Now, it seems to me that the fair employment practices legislation which is being considered by this committee represents something extremely basic in the civil rights struggle.

I believe really that it is the most basic aspect of our present struggle. It will be a hollow victory, indeed, if we win the important rights to spend our money in places of public accommodation, on buses, or what have you, without also winning the even more vital right to earn money.

Dick Gregory, the comedian, tells of a sit-in student who sat at a lunch counter for a couple of weeks, waiting to be served, when they finally offered to serve him he had no money. He had not expected to be served, of course.

We have to have the money to use these other facilities. It profits us little to wipe out discrimination or segregation in housing and open up the housing market to Negroes unless Negroes have the jobs to earn the money to buy the houses or rent the apartments which are then opened up.

I think that gainful employment in keeping with one's ability and qualifications should be considered in our country to be a right and should not be restricted by any form of discrimination; there is a current notion, Senator, that an employer has the right to choose his employees and to discrimination if he so wishes.

That this is private property and as such he can run it any way he chooses. Well, I think in most aspects the Nation has rejected that view. Businesses are regulated in many, many ways, and it seems to me that they simply must be regulated in this way, too.

Senator CLARK. I wonder if a fair summary would be that in 24 States that right to choose your own employees with discrimination is now clearly illegal. In 19 States the laws to enforce legality of that concern has succeeded, but at the Federal level nothing has yet been done with respect to Federal employment?

Mr. FARMER. That is right.

Senator CLARK. And, therefore, more than half the States have taken no action as yet?

Mr. FARMER. That is right, Senator.

There is also a notion about our not being able to legislate morality and therefore we should not try to have an FEPC that springs from the view that the employer has the right to choose his employees. also.

Well, I think an employer like any other American does have a legal right to his prejudices, but he does not have a legal right or

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