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This page traces the chronological development of the President's Committee on Fair Employment Practice (FEPC), a U.S. federal agency that existed from 1941 to 1946. For an overview of the agency itself, see FEPIC. For interpretive disputes over the FEPC's effectiveness and legacy, see FEPC Significance - Debate. For broader background on race and federal policy during the New Deal era, see New Deal and Race - History.

By 1940, the United States was expanding defense production in advance of likely entry into the Second World War, creating millions of new industrial jobs. African-American workers, concentrated in agricultural and domestic labor, were largely excluded from this expansion; many defense contractors and unions maintained explicit hiring bars on racial grounds.¹⁾ Labor leader A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, together with NAACP executive secretary Walter White and other civil rights figures, pressed President Franklin D. Roosevelt to act. When direct appeals produced no commitment, Randolph and his allies organized the March on Washington Movement (MOWM), announcing plans to bring as many as 100,000 demonstrators to Washington, D.C., on July 1, 1941, to protest discrimination in defense industries and the armed forces.²⁾

In the week before the planned march, New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt met with Randolph and White to discuss a possible executive order limited to federal vocational training programs. Randolph and his allies argued that this was insufficient and that any order needed to reach defense contractors directly. Attorney Joseph Rauh drafted the resulting order.³⁾ On June 25, 1941, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, declaring it the policy of the United States that there be no discrimination in employment in defense industries or government on grounds of race, creed, color, or national origin, and establishing a five-member Committee on Fair Employment Practice within the Office of Production Management to receive and investigate complaints and recommend redress.⁴⁾ Randolph called off the march in response.

The order did not address segregation in the armed forces, which Roosevelt declined to take up at this time.

Roosevelt appointed Mark Ethridge, editor of the *Louisville Courier-Journal*, as chairman, along with David Sarnoff of RCA, Chicago alderman Earl Dickerson, AFL president William Green, CIO president Philip Murray, and Milton Webster of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.⁵⁾ The committee operated on an initial budget of $80,000 drawn from presidential emergency funds, with a staff of eleven.⁶⁾ It held its first public hearings in Los Angeles in October 1941, followed by hearings in Chicago and New York in January and February 1942.⁷⁾ Hearings scheduled in Birmingham, Alabama, drew organized opposition from local officials and were conducted under a different format than the earlier hearings because of anticipated resistance in the South.⁸⁾

In January 1942, Malcolm MacLean, president of the Hampton Institute, replaced Ethridge as chairman. The committee began an investigation into discriminatory hiring practices on southern railroads, scheduling hearings for early 1943.

In January 1942, the Office of Production Management was abolished and the FEPC was transferred to the War Production Board by Executive Order 9040.⁹⁾

In July 1942, Roosevelt placed the FEPC under the newly created War Manpower Commission, chaired by former Indiana governor Paul V. McNutt.¹⁰⁾ McNutt required his approval for any FEPC public hearing, reduced its budget, and in January 1943 announced that the scheduled railroad hearings would be postponed indefinitely, citing jurisdictional concerns.¹¹⁾ Chairman MacLean publicly objected that the change reduced the FEPC to “a small Federal bureau without power,” and Randolph called the policy “emasculating.”¹²⁾ MacLean, Ethridge (then a special assistant), Sarnoff, and the FEPC's general counsel, Lawrence Cramer, along with the attorneys retained for the railroad case, resigned in protest.¹³⁾

Civil rights organizations, labor unions, and religious groups organized a “Save the FEPC” conference in Washington in February 1943, drawing delegates from roughly forty-two organizations, and the MOWM again raised the prospect of a march on the capital.¹⁴⁾ These protests are recorded in the FEPC Significance - Debate page in connection with disputes over how much credit MOWM pressure, as opposed to wartime labor demand, deserves for subsequent gains.

On May 27, 1943, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9346, abolishing the first committee and establishing a new Committee on Fair Employment Practice within the Office for Emergency Management, restoring its independent status and extending its jurisdiction to cover discrimination by federal agencies generally, not only defense contractors.¹⁵⁾ Roosevelt appointed Father Francis J. Haas as chairman; Haas resigned in October 1943 to become a Catholic bishop and was succeeded by Malcolm Ross, a former newspaperman who served as executive secretary and then chairman for the remainder of the agency's existence.¹⁶⁾ The reorganized agency established regional field offices - eventually twelve, later expanded to sixteen - and created separate divisions for field operations, legal matters, and administration.¹⁷⁾

During 1943 the FEPC also faced a congressional investigation by a special committee chaired by Representative Howard W. Smith of Virginia, which examined the agency's operations and was generally hostile to its mandate. Southern Democrats in Congress sought, with partial success, to require that the agency's funding come through annual congressional appropriation rather than presidential emergency funds, a change that tightened legislative control over its budget.¹⁸⁾ A notable 1944 case involved the Philadelphia Transportation Company, where the FEPC's order to upgrade black employees to operator positions produced a wildcat strike by white transit workers; federal troops were deployed to operate the transit system until the dispute was resolved.¹⁹⁾

Wartime labor demand combined with FEPC pressure to expand black employment in shipbuilding, aircraft manufacturing, and automotive plants converted to war production. In one widely cited episode, a 1943 wildcat strike at the Packard plant in Detroit followed the promotion of three black workers to positions alongside white workers; CIO officials subsequently increased pressure on member shops to comply with non-discrimination requirements.²⁰⁾ Some historians link the same period of demographic upheaval to outbreaks of racial violence in 1943 in Detroit, Los Angeles, Mobile, Alabama, and Beaumont, Texas, attributing the unrest to competition over wartime jobs and housing; see fepc-1943-race-riots-causation-debate.

Roosevelt died in April 1945 and was succeeded by Harry S. Truman. Congress, in the National War Agencies Appropriation Act of 1945, provided reduced funding and directed that the FEPC cease operations by June 30, 1946.²¹⁾ The agency's functions ended that date, after roughly five years of operation under its original and reorganized forms.

While the federal agency wound down, several states began enacting their own fair-employment statutes modeled explicitly on the FEPC's procedures. New York's Ives-Quinn Act, signed by Governor Thomas E. Dewey on March 12, 1945, was the first such state law, creating a State Commission Against Discrimination with investigatory and enforcement authority.²²⁾ New Jersey and Massachusetts enacted similar statutes the same year, and bills were introduced in twenty-two state legislatures in 1945 and 1946.²³⁾ By 1955, fourteen states had adopted fair-employment laws.

Civil rights organizations and labor unions pressed Congress to make the FEPC a permanent statutory agency. Bills to this effect were introduced and failed in 1946 and 1948.²⁴⁾ In 1948, Truman sent Congress a civil rights program that included a permanent FEPC, anti-lynching legislation, and abolition of the poll tax; the program did not pass. In 1950, the House of Representatives approved a permanent FEPC bill, but it was blocked in the Senate by a filibuster led by Southern senators.²⁵⁾ No permanent federal fair-employment agency was created until Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; see Civil Rights Act of 1964 - History.

• Historians dispute how much of the wartime employment gains made by black workers should be attributed to FEPC enforcement as opposed to general wartime labor shortages and union pressure independent of the agency. See FEPC Significance - Debate.
• Scholars disagree over whether the FEPC's treatment of complaints by Mexican-American workers, including repeated postponement of hearings touching the Good Neighbor Policy, reflected a deliberate priority ranking among protected groups or incidental wartime diplomatic caution. See fepc-mexican-american-discrimination-debate.
• Accounts differ on whether Roosevelt's 1942-43 transfer of the FEPC to the War Manpower Commission was intended, as Roosevelt stated, to strengthen the agency, or was intended primarily to limit its independence, as MacLean and Randolph charged at the time. See fepc-1942-reorganization-intent-debate.

²⁶⁾

1. Garfinkel, Herbert. *When Negroes March: The March on Washington Movement in the Organizational Politics for FEPC*. New York: Atheneum, 1969.
2. Reed, Merl E. *Seedtime for the Modern Civil Rights Movement: The President's Committee on Fair Employment Practice, 1941-1946*. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991.
3. Ruchames, Louis. *Race, Jobs & Politics: The Story of FEPC*. New York: Columbia University Press, 1953.
4. “Executive Order 8802: Prohibition of Discrimination in the Defense Industry (1941).” National Archives. Accessed June 2026. https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/executive-order-8802.
5. “Executive Order 8802.” U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Accessed June 2026. https://www.eeoc.gov/history/executive-order-8802.
6. “Fair Employment Practice Committee.” Wikipedia. Accessed June 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Employment_Practice_Committee.
7. “Fair Employment Practice Committee.” Encyclopedia.com. Accessed June 2026. https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/fair-employment-practice-committee.
8. “President's Committee on Fair Employment Practice (FEPC).” Social Welfare History Project. Accessed June 2026. https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/federal/presidents-committee-fair-employment-practice-fepc/.
9. “Records of the Committee on Fair Employment Practice [COFEP].” National Archives. Accessed June 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/228.html.
10. “Roosevelt Bans Discrimination in Defense-Industry Employment.” EBSCO Research Starters. Accessed June 2026. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/law/roosevelt-bans-discrimination-defense-industry-employment.
11. “The March on Washington Movement, the Fair Employment Practices Committee, and the Long Quest for Racial Justice.” *Studies in American Political Development*. Cambridge Core, 2023. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/studies-in-american-political-development/article/march-on-washington-movement-the-fair-employment-practices-committee-and-the-long-quest-for-racial-justice/B8574E660BABFC1961B5F87B8249152E.
12. “State-Level and Local Legislation.” Princeton University Digital Collections. Accessed June 2026. https://dpul.princeton.edu/discrimination_employment_pamphlets/feature/state-level-and-local-legislation.
13. “Ives-Quinn Act.” Wikipedia. Accessed June 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ives-Quinn_Act.
14. First Report, Fair Employment Practice Committee, July 1943 - December 1944. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.