Manpower, region and race: Mobilizing southern workers for World War Two, 1939-1948
Description
This study examines the mobilizing of southern workers for the Second World War, and how the mobilization process exposed regional anxieties over race and labor relations. With the expanded federal presence in the South during the war, the process of state-building and economic development remained fraught with tension. As the experiences of the War Manpower Commission (WMC), the U.S. Employment Service (USES) and the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) illustrate, southern economic boosters hoped to achieve the economic benefits of industrial modernization, while co-opting federal agencies to serve their conservative interests Within this context of state-building and economic development during the war, historians have failed to acknowledge adequately the key role that federal manpower agencies played in transforming southern and national labor markets. Paradoxically, the War Manpower Commission often hindered the utilization of black industrial labor on the southern home-front, while exporting southern black workers to defense industries in other regions. This manpower policy reinforced migration trails out of the South, and hence, left a permanent imprint on national race relations. For southern employers, this policy illustrated the limits of their power to control local labor markets. For all southern workers, and especially African-Americans, these WMC inter-regional recruitment networks to the West and the North provided new opportunities for economic and geographic mobility