George White walked into Independence Hall and looked around. The building was nearly empty and that was good: White wanted no interference with the statement he was about to make. It was all so infuriating, White thought, his brother risking his life in the military while his wife and five children sat at home waiting and worrying. And all the while the white employees of the Philadelphia Transportation Company (PTC) refused to work because African Americans wanted to drive trolleys. Those drivers were ready, White knew, to shut down America’s third–largest war production centre for as long as it took to preserve their racial prerogatives. White must have looked down one last time at the bulky quartz paperweight, cool and heavy in his hand, and then he smashed the rock with all his might into the Liberty Bell. The crash brought the police running. ‘Liberty Bell’, White shouted at them. ‘Liberty Bell. That’s a lot of bunk!’ A few hours later he appeared in court and angrily told the judge that he had struck the bell to call America’s attention to the hateful strike.1

The feelings the 1944 Philadelphia transit strike inspired in George White were common to most black Philadelphians. The walkout angered them, but with the nation at war they knew they had a prime opportunity to finally secure the democracy America was fighting for overseas. The fact that the U.S. needed their labour both in the military and in industry strengthened their hand considerably, a fact made plain by the federal government’s reluctant acceptance of A. Philip Randolph’s request to establish a Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to combat discrimination in war plants. The government now seemed at least a tentative ally. To African Americans in this new context, the strike clearly revealed the nation’s hypocrisy as it prosecuted a war to preserve democracy while maintaining a Jim Crow state at home. To them, government intervention could change the nature of American race relations, and they demanded that federal authorities support their right to equal employment opportunities. If the government backed them, then the country could be on its way to constructing a more equitable state. The outcome of the strike, then, mattered not just for the job opportunities it could lead to in the transit industry, it also suggested the kind of nation America could become in the postwar world.2

The transit strike, which was one of the longest and costliest hate strikes of the war era, began at 4:00am 1 August, 1944 when the PTC’s nearly 10,000 white workers walked out. Across the city, trolleys, buses, and subway cars sat waiting for drivers who would not come. America’s third largest war production centre, hamstrung by wartime gas rationing, came to a halt. The Frankford Arsenal, Bendix Aviation, and dozens of other plants reported debilitating absentee rates that eventually amounted to some three million lost hours of labour (a fourth of the total). Coming just weeks after D–Day, Rear Admiral Milo Draemel worried the strike could ‘delay the day of victory’.3

While the strike had obvious ramifications for America’s war effort, what particularly infuriated African Americans was that white workers struck not for better wages or working conditions, but to prevent black promotions to the position of driver, a job that had been reserved for whites only. African Americans could work for the company, but only in menial positions such as janitor and mechanic. PTC employees were organised in a company union (the Philadelphia Rapid Transit Employees Union – PRTEU) that in negotiations won wages lower than other big cities, no overtime pay, and no paid holidays. The quid pro quo that made the PRTEU palatable was that union leadership, through its close connections with management, guaranteed white drivers would not face outside, meaning black, competition. As the newspaper PM put it, ‘PTC has operated along Southern lines [for years and white workers have] simply accepted the fact that [driving] is a white man’s job, and no Negro is going to get it’. To an extent this was the ‘psychological wage’ David Roediger and other scholars have analysed, ensuring whites sole access to the company’s better jobs and giving them greater security in these years just after the Depression. But while the wage may have been ‘psychological’ in some ways, it also had the material effect of making sure African Americans did the dirty, menial labour while whites occupied the most respected, best–paying jobs. This situation kept the PTC’s labour force divided along racial lines for years, a managerial divide and rule strategy that kept wages depressed and workers focused on race rather than class concerns.4

Black PTC employees knew how the company structured its employment as well as anyone and lived with the situation for a time. During the Depression, as many as 500 African Americans were happy just to find work there. But by the start of World War II, black Americans’ attitude toward employment discrimination shifted. The Double V campaign that urged victory over fascism abroad and Jim Crow at home, A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement that that led to the creation of the FEPC, black service in the armed forces, and the general rhetoric about defending democracy in a time of war led African Americans to more openly challenge discrimination. So in August 1941 a group of long time transit workers formed the Committee for Equal Job Opportunity of PTC Employees and asked company president Ralph Senter and PRTEU head Frank Carney to overturn the PTC’s unfair employment system. Both refused, and their stance sparked a two year campaign by Philadelphia’s African Americans to secure equal opportunity at the transit company.5

That campaign, which has been detailed in other studies, involved the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Transport Workers Union (TWU – a Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) affiliate), and the FEPC. Of the three groups, the NAACP assumed leadership in the battle. Headed by a new Executive Secretary, Carolyn Davenport Moore, the NAACP worked with area churches and other black organizations throughout fall 1943 to put together protest marches and ‘indignation meetings’ that attracted thousands of supporters. In those protests, black Philadelphians demanded verbally and in petitions that the PTC ‘put into practice the principles of democracy in American life, including employment practices in American industry’. To Moore, the PTC struggle was no different than the war overseas. ‘We are in the front lines in the battle for democracy’, she said, ‘just as much as if we were in the fox holes of the Solomons’, and all of the city’s African Americans had to fight for equality.6

While black Philadelphians led the campaign, they could not have won without the support of the Transport Workers’ Union. The TWU, which had several Communists in its leadership corps and advocated non-discrimination among its members, had tried to organise the company in the past. It had always foundered, however, on the racist management–company union alliance. But with wartime contracts making the transit company’s low wages and poor working conditions abundantly clear, the TWU thought it could finally organise the PTC. In a series of meetings the TWU’s James Fitzsimon assured black transit workers that the union would treat them fairly, but that it had to downplay racial equality to win a representation election. The key, Fitzsimon argued, was to convince white workers that the TWU would bring higher wages and better working conditions. Organisers would not deny the union’s stance on racial equality, but they would not promote it either. Throughout the campaign TWU organisers claimed, ‘We want unity in a militant industrial union’, and ‘[Follow us for] higher wages, better working conditions, and genuine collective bargaining’. Race was rarely discussed. Within a few months the TWU earned enough support to carry the PTC representation election in spring 1944. The TWU’s victory and sotto voce support of black rights demonstrated the complexity of white working–class racial views. Some white workers believed racism benefited them, preserving their better jobs and higher pay. Others, particularly with a leftist politics, understood racial divisions fractured working–class solidarity to management’s gain and tried to organise across the color line.7

To build on the work of black organisations and the TWU, African Americans next turned to the Fair Employment Practices Committee. The committee had opened a branch in Philadelphia in summer 1943 and received dozens of complaints against the transit company in the first few weeks after the office opened. In response, FEPC chair Malcolm Ross in November met with the PTC and PRTEU and ordered them to halt their discrimination and accept black drivers by the following summer. The PRTEU balked, and at a public FEPC hearing on December 8 union Secretary–Treasurer Frank Cobourn warned ‘chaos’ would envelop the city if African Americans became drivers. Coming just a few months after Detroit had exploded in a race riot, everyone understood just what Cobourn meant. Ross responded that ‘chaos’ was not inevitable and that the union and company bore responsibility for keeping the peace. The hearing showed black Philadelphians the support the federal government could offer, but many remained unsure the PTC’s white workers would really accept the promotions.8

Their feelings were justified: In the six months before the eight promoted black drivers’ August 1, 1944 start date, racist rhetoric swept the carbarns. Fliers produced by the company–backed PRTEU told workers: ‘Your Sons and Buddies that are away Fighting  …  are being Stabed [sic] in the Back on the Home Front, [by blacks who want to take] All The Jobs and Everything Else that Belongs to the White People’. Another called for ‘a white supremacy movement for the protection of [our] jobs’. Such language goaded white employees into action. On the morning of August 1 they walked out, shutting down the PTC and, by extension, the city. The strike itself lasted only a week, ending when Franklin Roosevelt, primarily concerned about declining war production, sent 5,000 troops into Philadelphia to drive the transit vehicles and had the Selective Service threaten to revoke the draft deferments of any strikers who refused to return. While the strike lasted only a week, for African Americans and white liberals it laid bare the fundamental injustice of the PTC’s employment system and raised crucial questions about the nature and future of black rights in American society.9

Black and white commentators argued from the start that the transit strike offered a prime example of why the U.S. had to buttress the FEPC. The Nation wrote that the strike teaches us that we must ‘give [the FEPC] full statutory recognition, with power to enforce its decisions’. The New York Post added that a permanent FEPC backed by federal law would make white workers think twice about staging future hate strikes. Black commentators agreed the strike proved the need for a permanent FEPC, but expanded their arguments to take on all forms of discrimination. For Arthur Huff Fauset, a local leftist black leader, the transit strike was ‘the test of the FEPC’. ‘The Negro people wait patiently’, he warned, ‘but not too patiently …  If there is no equity now  …  they have even less hope for equity once the war emergency has been safely passed’. Others made the links between the FEPC and black equality even more explicit. ‘Congress’, a leader of the National Negro Congress insisted, ‘must give permanent status  …  to [the FEPC] and it must adopt legislation to abolish the polltax and end Jimcrowism in all other areas of our social life’.10

For many observers the strike went beyond demonstrating the need for a stronger FEPC to highlighting their country’s greatest hypocrisy. As one man wrote, ‘If the Negro is good enough to die for me on the battlefront, [surely] he is good enough to drive for me in Philadelphia’. To people with this view, backing down in the strike, accepting that certain Americans did not deserve equal treatment, undermined the country’s very principles. An FEPC lawyer argued that acceptance of the strikers’ aims was tantamount to ‘suspending the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights’. ‘Over there’, wrote one woman, ‘where the blood of white and black men flows in a common stream for a common cause – Democracy – they might well ask, where is this Democracy for which we die?’11

Not everyone opposed to the strike held such high principles. Many argued the strike must end because it was damaging the war effort, nothing more. Proponents of this view believed black equality could be ‘negotiated’ in the future, once the war drew to a conclusion. ‘The major imperative is to get the cars, trains and buses running’, wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer. ‘Philadelphians and the national war effort have suffered enough through this  …  walkout. It must be ended …  There will be time [to settle racial matters] later’. Many letters to the editor agreed. ‘Let’s do first things first’, wrote one man. ‘Get our transportation system rolling so our war workers can get to [work] …  Discussion  …  of controversial questions should be postponed until after the war’.12

African Americans dismissed this view, arguing that there was nothing to negotiate. Their country could either live up to its democratic promises or expose itself as the defender of Jim Crow in a war against other proponents of ‘Master Race’ theories. In telegrams to Philadelphia Mayor Bernard Samuel, Pennsylvania Governor Edward Martin, and President Roosevelt, NAACP officials demanded the government ‘stand absolutely firm and refuse to yield to strikers  …  [because] the American Government cannot afford to yield to mob action [that] negate[s] Democracy’. ‘Mr. President’, one man asked, ‘will we ever have a true Democratic country? Will what has been printed in our constitution just be mere words?’ And a woman whose family had lost two young men overseas added a poignant appeal. ‘We who have lost boys have a right to expect something because of it’, she wrote. ‘We sent them to the ends of the world to fight for this thing – and we don’t seem to enforce it [at home]. The government has a right to stick to its guns in this issue, and let us know that they expect to insist on a better life for all because our boys have died for it’.13

With the strike stirring ever stronger emotions, many feared Philadelphia would explode in racial violence. The town, wrote one reporter, felt ‘panicky’, and local NAACP president Theodore Spaulding commented that ‘All the ingredients of a first class race riot were boiling and brewing’. In North Philadelphia, the city’s largest black ghetto, African Americans threw coal at passing motorists and smashed the windows in some 300 stores. The violence had a political edge as blacks avoided damaging businesses known for fair practices, but singled out stores that discriminated against them. African Americans told one merchant, ‘We aren’t going to hurt you none …  You haven’t done anything to us; it’s those damned transit fellers who think they’re too good to work with us. They’re our real enemies’. One black Philadelphian reflecting back on the strike put into words what many were thinking: ‘I thought then and many times afterwards, how much and how far did they (the whites) feel they could push us? Did they not realise that the point beyond which no human being can go and maintain dignity was dangerously close?  …  In a matter of seconds every indignity suffered, every injustice or hurt received at the hands of whites flashed  …  through my mind …  I felt and knew I could kill easily, whom did not matter, just so the person was white’.14

While the city had the right climate for a massive racial clash, the actions of black organisations and the arrival of federal soldiers kept things relatively peaceful. The NAACP and other black groups, for example, sent members into the most disturbed neighbourhoods, urging people to remain calm and distributing thousands of fliers telling African Americans to ‘Keep Your Heads and Your Tempers!  …  This stoppage is a disgrace to Philadelphia, to America and to Democracy’. The government, they promised, would not fail them. Ultimately federal intervention ensured the peace. Across the city, the arrival of troops brought laughing, clapping crowds into the streets. ‘The Negroes in this section are satisfied now that Uncle Sam has taken over’, said a black policeman in north Philadelphia. ‘They have confidence that things will work out without them getting shoved around, now that Washington [is involved]’. The NNC, the Urban League, and local black leaders such as Fauset offered their thanks to the federal government and the CIO. ‘Aren’t you proud of our great President!’ Fauset wrote. ‘And of the mighty CIO! Suppose either had faltered. Every gain made in recent years would have been lost. The FEPC would be a dead letter; trade unionism among Negroes would pass away like a summer’s breeze’. No one was happier than the eight recently promoted drivers who always believed the government would compel Philadelphians to observe the principle of non–discrimination. They all told reporters they thought of themselves as pioneers and that, with the government’s help, they would make it. Their ‘implicit faith’ in the government, as one reporter put it, led them to believe federal authorities would ‘take swift action to guarantee [their] rights’. Some still had nagging doubts, however, about what the strike said about American society. One of the drivers’ wives, after telling a reporter her husband had served nine months in the south Pacific, said, ‘What I wonder about is whether the sacrifice was worth it?’ When the strike ended a few days later and African Americans began taking trolleys out on their runs, most of the city’s blacks would have answered yes to her question. Within a year, when the PTC employed some 900 blacks, many more would have agreed.15

Strictly from the viewpoint of access to transit jobs, the outcome of the strike was a victory for African Americans. But the strike’s importance goes beyond the employment of 1,000 or so people in an industry that went into decline in the decade after World War II. The Philadelphia transit strike highlighted the necessity of government support of black rights, including the role the FEPC should play in settling workplace disputes and the government’s use of force to promote racial equality. It also highlighted for many Americans, white and black, their nation’s hypocrisy as it claimed to fight a world war for democracy at the same time that it accepted Jim Crow at home. And it was part of a broader movement across the United States that saw African Americans no longer accept second class status. In many ways it contributed to a new black view of the country that spurred the civil rights movement in the years ahead. As one woman put it: ‘The deaths and tragedies of war won’t have served a Goddam purpose’ if we do not realise that equality, as typified by the PTC struggle, is a big part of what we are fighting for.16