Personnel Manual,14/ Although the responsibility for the conduct of the program is placed squarely on the head of the agency, such heads are required to designate a fair employment officer to whom much of the responsibility may be delegated. The following activities are specifically prohibited:

(1) Use of identifying devices, including photographs, to indicate race, color, or religion on pre-employment forms, or post-employment forms except for statistical purposes,

(2) Questions, inquiries, recommendations, and disclosure of information concerning, and consideration or filing of recommendations disclosing, an applicant or employee's race, color, or religion except as may be required for employment surveys or the adjudication of complaints of discrimination.

14/ Ibid., ch. Fl.

CHAPTER II

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND IN THE STATES

For almost a century efforts have been made to improve race relations in the United States, sometimes by formal legislative enactment, at others through the activities of citizen organizations. The legislative enactments have been both constitutional and statutory. During and immediately following the War between the States, amendments were added to the Federal Constitution designed to emancipate the Negro legally by establishing his freedom and his status as a citizen, and insofar as possible by formal enactment, to insure him the right to vote. Statutory enactments designed to prevent discrimination in employment began to appear on the statute books in the States. As a matter of fact, numerous measures now on the books, especially those relating to the civil service and to public school teachers, date back well into the nineteenth century. The rate of new adoptions has, however, been greatly accelerated in recent years.

During the past twenty-five years, important efforts toward better race relations have been carried on through private citizen organizations. These councils on race relations, as they have often been designated, have been most common in the larger cities and in some of the Southern States where the problem of interracial relations assumes important proportions. Prior to World War II, and in some cases even before that time, a considerable number of states had adopted legislation designed to foster better relations between the races. Illustrations of this type are to be found in such agencies as the state commissions on interracial relations in Connecticut and Illinois, established in 1943, and the New Jersey Goodwill Commission, established early in 1938, and local commissions that were set up in various municipalities throughout the country.

It cannot be too strongly emphasized that the problems of prejudice and discrimination are country-wide; in discussing them, no state, section or commmity should feel that it is being singled out for criticism. The problem varies considerably from one section of the country to another, but is everywhere present in some form. It varies because the composition of the minority group varies from place to place. There really is no standardized minority group in America. In New York, which has representatives of all such groups, the Jews are especially numerous, as they are in fact in all large urban centers. The Negroes, formerly a minority group only in the South, now exist in appreciable numbers in all large urban centers--New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, and many more.

While the Jews and the Negroes are the most numerous, minority groups in wide variety exist in sections, States, and cities throughout the country. All are the victims of local prejudice, oftentimes of actual discrimination. In southern New Jersey, it is the Italians; in Pennsylvania, Nebraska, and Wisconsin, the Germans; in Minnesota and the Dakotas, the Scandinavians; in the New England mill villages the French-Canadians, and in Boston, the Irish; in Chicago and Detroit, the Poles; in Texas and the Southwest, the Mexicans; on the Pacific Coast, the Orientals.

Discrimination in Fields Other Than Employment. While this study is concerned primarily with fair employment practice legislation and discrimination in relation to employment, it is well to recall that this is but one of three principal tension points in the field of race relations. Besides the place of work, other tension areas are the area of residence, and the place of public accommodation or recreation. New York has tackled the problem in these areas also, as well as in the field of employment. "The elimination of racial and religious discrimination in the hotel and resort fields, i.e., in places of public accommodation and recreation," writes the Attorney General of New York State, "is as knotty a problem in human relations as one can imagine, being equalled only by the difficulties involved in the elimination of segregated areas and restrictive covenants in connection with residential areas and properties.

In New York the legal provisions relating to racial and religious discrimination are found in the Civil Rights Law of 1895, for the enforcement of which the Attorney General is responsible. Similar legislation exists, incidentally, in about twenty states,15/ while in 1947 the State of New Jersey in its new Constitution incorporated a provision designed to protect the civil rights of citizens in the following language:16/

No person shall be denied the enjoyment of any civil or military right, nor be discriminated against in the exercise of any civil or military right, nor be segregated in the militia or in the public schools, because of religious principles, race, color, ancestry or national origin.

Nathaniel G. Goldstein, the Attorney General of New York, in the article referred to above, indicates something of the nature of his

15/ These provisions, together with penalties and enforcement procedures, are brought together in a small booklet issued by the National CIO Committee to Abolish Discrimination, What is the law? Washington, 1947.

16/ New Jersey Constitution, Article I, Section 5.

experience in this field, during a recent year.17/ The types of cases

that come to his office, he says, fall into four categories:

1. Restaurants refusing service to individuals because of race or religion.

2. Travel bureaus, agents and resort solicitors inquiring into race or religion as a prerequisite for arranging accommodations.

3. Hotels and resorts within the State circulating brochures stating discriminatory limitations on patronage.

4. Hotels and resorts within the State writing letters specifying discriminatory limitations on patronage.

In his article, the Attorney General provides one illustration of each type; from this group of four, the following is presented as adequate for our present purpose:

3. Discriminatory Brochures: A Catskill Mountain hotel which remains open all year, distributed a brochure describing the facilities, which contained specific reference to the religion of its clientele. Through the good offices of a local prosecutor, the management of the hotel promised to issue a new brochure eliminating the offending material and to maintain a policy in line with the law.

The Attorney General reports that the question of the restrictive covenant applied in residential areas is now under study in his office, and that a court test is due shortly. What is happening in New York is happening--or in some instances, has happened--in other jurisdictions. In this connection, note the several court cases that have recently been reported, the decision in each clearly taking the position that such covenants are contrary to public policy and are unenforceable. It is, incidentally, interesting to observe that this problem of segregation in residential areas is quite as acute in the Northern cities as in those of the South, where Negroes frequently reside near their work, in spite of the prevailing pattern of segregation. This is doubtless attributable to customs developed in plantation days, when servants were located on the place, in close proximity to the plantation house. Such arrangements are common in rural areas, and are occasionally found in the cities as well.

17/

New York Proves It--Laws Can Cut Discrimination. Masonic family magazine, July-August, 1948, p. 7, 15 (condensed from The Christian register).

Discrimination in Employment Opportunities. Two fairly comprehensive studies have been made of recent developments in this field, one at the Bureau of Public Administration at the University of California in 1944,18/ the other in the State Law Section, Legislative Reference Service of the Library of Congress four years later. The difference in the results of these two studies would seem to indicate that a good deal had happened in the short period of four years. Whereas the California study showed state legislation prohibiting discrimination in various fields of employment existing in fourteen states, the later study found that at least one such law had been adopted in exactly three-fourths of the states of the Union.19/ The contrast in the findings of the two surveys can, perhaps, be most clearly presented in the form of a short table--Table I.

18/ Duffy, John F., Jr. State organization for fair employment. Berkeley, Bureau of Public Administration, University of California, 1944. 19/ The exceptions were: Arizona, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, and Virginia.

20/ Civil Service: California, Connecticut, Michigan, Minnesota,

Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, and Wisconsin. The names of the States now having such legislation, together with date of original adoption, will be found in Table II of this report.

21/ Public Works: California, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania.

22/ Labor Unions: Kansas, Nebraska, New York, and Pennsylvania. 23 Defense and War Contracts: California, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, New Jersey, and New York.