Negro Employment

Report Outline
Improvement in Negroes'S Jor Opportunities
Shifts in Occupational Status of the Negro
Conciliation Vs. Compulsion on Job Bias

Improvement in Negroes'S Jor Opportunities

Concentration on Negro voting rights in the congressional struggle over civil rights legislation has tended to obscure efforts to extend stronger protection to other rights which are of equal, if not greater, immediate importance to the colored population. One of these is the right to protection against discrimination on grounds of race in getting and keeping jobs.

In a special message last Feb. 5, President Eisenhower submitted a seven-point civil rights program to Congress which he said was designed to continue the substantial progress made during recent years toward the goal of “full equality under law for all [our] people.” The sixth of the President's points called for establishment of a permanent Commission on Equal Job Opportunity Under Government Contracts to carry on the work now performed by the President's Committee on Government Contracts under Vice President Nixon. While the program of the existing committee had been widely accepted, full implementation of the policy of equal job opportunities would be “materially advanced by the creation of a statutory commission.”

No provision for such a commission appears in the civil rights bill now pending before the Senate Judiciary Committee. When the requested authorization was stricken from the administration bill by majority vote of the House Judiciary Committee, July 29, Secretary of Labor James P. Mitchell said it was inconceivable that Congress would “refuse to endorse by legislation the principle that there should be equality of opportunity for all Americans on government jobs created solely through tax revenues provided by citizens.”