Thomas J. Sugrue

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Thomas J. Sugrue | Affirmative Action from Below: Civil Rights, the Building Trades, and the Politics of Racial Equality in the Urban North, 1945–1969 | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Affirmative Action from Below: Civil Rights, the Building Trades, and the Politics of Racial Equality in the Urban North, 1945–1969

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. Later that summer, activists in Harlem and Brooklyn in New York City; Newark and Trenton, New Jersey; and Cleveland, Ohio, staged similar protests at construction sites. For the next several years, building trades unions remained a major target of northern civil rights protesters.¹

Just a little over six years after the Philadelphia protests, on June 27, 1969, the administration of Richard M. Nixon announced the Philadelphia Plan, an administrative order designed to open jobs in the white-dominated construction industry to members of minority groups. The Philadelphia Plan, first applied to construction contractors in the City of Brotherly Love, became the blueprint for federally mandated affirmative action in employment. In a terse, jargon-laden memo, Assistant Secretary of Labor Arthur Fletcher denounced the "exclusionary practices" of several nearly all-white trades—the ironworkers, plumbers and pipe fitters, steam fitters, sheet metal workers, electrical workers, roofers, and elevator construction workers. It would take "special measures" to open jobs in those trades to nonwhite workers. Specifically, the Philadelphia Plan required all contractors bidding on government-funded construction projects to submit an "affirmative action program" that included "goals" and "targets" for "minority manpower utilization." The most controversial element of the plan, finalized in September 1969, established numerical targets, defined as a percentage range of minority workers to be employed from a particular trade on each contract. Employers were required to provide statistical evidence of their compliance. Noncompliance could lead to the loss of federal contracts or litigation and legal penalties under federal civil rights laws.²

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