Suit against C&P cites lack of black operators: 1953

The Washington Post newspaper notes that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) filed suit against the Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Company over the firm’s refusal to hire Black telephone operators in a short article September 14, 1953.

 

Like many companies in Jim Crow Washington, D.C., C&P Telephone openly practiced discrimination against Black people. Black people were hired only for the most menial jobs, including janitorial, food service and window washing. Elevator operator was the top position open to African Americans.

 

Black workers were not permitted to eat with White workers in the eight company cafeterias, according to one person whose mother worked for the company.

 

On the union side, when the District Federation of Telephone Employees was formed around 1935, predominantly Black classifications were covered and Black workers in those classifications were signed up as union members. This positive step avoided establishing separate Black and White unions like the postal workers had at that time.

 

In response to a threatened march on Washington organized by Black labor leader A. Phillip Randolph, President Franklin Roosevelt issued executive order 8802 in June 1941 that barred discrimination in defense and defense-related industries based on “race, creed, color or national origin” and quickly established a Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) to enforce desegregation orders.

 

In 1942 the Committee on Jobs for Negroes in Public Utilities under the leadership of William S. Johnson, of local Communist Party and the leader of the cooks union, and Ralph Matthews ,of the Washington Afro American newspaper, was formed to challenge Jim Crow in publicly regulated utilities that included Capital Transit, Chesapeake and Potomac (C&P) Telephone, Washington Gas Light Co. and Potomac Electric Power Co. (Pepco).

 

An FEPC investigation into public utilities in 1942 and pressure from the Committee on Jobs spurred the company to establish a business office at 14th and U Streets staffed by Black employees.

 

The jobs included a Black manager, service representatives, consumer representative, accounting and toll clerks and typists—about 25 workers in total. These were first Black workers hired into these positions.

 

However, no Black telephone operators were permitted and Black workers were not permitted to transfer to all-White facilities elsewhere in the city and suburbs.

 

Johnson and Mayme Brown of the Committee on Jobs protested the move as a “dodge” to evade training Black workers for operator and other jobs in the phone company across the city.

 

“Your company’s long-time policy of racial discrimination in employment is now quite untenable. This fact is in no way altered by the segregated business office you now propose to establish,” a letter to the company said.

 

“Your public responsibility requires the supplementing of your staff of operators with the large number of competent colored girls now available for employment. This we call upon you to do,” it continued.

 

Citing President Roosevelt’s executive order, the group stated that “whether to employ colored operators is no longer solely a question of social ethics, but an established policy of the government.”

 

Most of the jobs created at the facility at 14th and U Streets were covered by union contracts. The telephone traffic union covered clerical employees and helpers while the installer’s union covered accountants and service representatives.

 

The unions signed up most of those employed at the facility for union membership.

 

The national union was not a loud voice for desegregation of the operator job. But the NFTW ran a favorable article in their national publication The Telephone Worker on the 1944 FEPC-sponsored agreement in New York to hire 26 Black people into telephone operator positions for the first time in a major metropolitan area.

 

The article noted that the local Traffic Employees Association took part in the conference and quoted the union as saying that they "did not anticipate any problem in the union because of the employment of Negro operators."

 

The article had some additional significance because it appeared shortly after a long unionization drive by the NFTW and subsequently tough contract negotiations in the south.

 

Washington, D.C. was still a Jim Crow town and there were few large facilities that permitted mixed-race seating so a decision had to be made as to whether to hold separate union meetings for Black and White members, establish Jim Crow seating in a facility that permitted Black and White to gather in the same hall or to hold meetings with no seating restrictions.

 

Washington Telephone Traffic Union president Mary Gannon took the issue head on and held mass strike meetings in facilities with no seating restrictions--Black and White workers mixing together in 1944-45 at the Hamilton Hotel and in 1946-47 at Turner’s Arena.

 

However, a joint meeting of three D.C. unions sponsored by the national NFTW was held at the Uline Arena, a Jim Crow facility, for their 4-hour work stoppage in 1945.

 

The FEPC lapsed in 1946, failing in its attempt to desegregate C&P telephone operators.

 

During the 1947 nationwide strike by telephone workers, Black union members marched together with white workers on picket lines at the various locations around the city in addition to the all-Black facility at 14th & U Streets NW.

 

After World War II, the Urban League pressed the White House to act on integrating public utilities while the NAACP filed suit against C&P Telephone in 1953.

 

Dr. Tomlinson D. Todd was a key figure in the desegregation of Washington, D.C. Jim Crow restaurants, along with civil rights icon Mary Church Terrell.

 

Todd had in 1943 first discovered the 1871 and 1872 "lost laws" in the District that prohibited discrimination in public accommodations.

 

Regular pickets and boycotts of Jim Crow restaurants were held 1949-53 and a lawsuit was filed where in 1953 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the District’s so-called “lost laws” and outlawed segregation in public accommodations in the city.

 

However, employment was not covered by those 19th century laws. Todd had a radio show in 1953 and interviewed C&P Telephone officials about their refusal to hire Black operators.

 

The Washington Afro American reported officials said:

 

“The telephone company would never hire colored operators…until other things in Washington changed such as the integration of the school system.”

 

“When children learned through the schools to live and work together, then industry would be willing to accept them on an integrated basis—this would take time…within the next two or three generations.”

 

However rights activists were not waiting and were now pressuring the President’s Committee on Government Contracts, which was the agency charged with ensuring that firms holding government contracts did not practice discrimination.

 

In February 1954, C&P agreed to begin desegregating clerical employees and transferred two Black accounting clerks from the 14th & U Streets office to the downtown office.

 

The U.S. Supreme Court issued its Bolling v. Sharpe decision May 17, 1954, ordering desegregation of District of Columbia schools.

 

By 1956, the company permitted some Black clerical employees to train as telephone operators and ultimately transferred some into previously all-White facilities, beginning a slow process of desegregation that would continue long after the 1964 Civil Rights Act banned discrimination in employment.

 

For more information and related images, see flic.kr/s/aHsmbnHJap

 

For a blog post on the Washington Telephone Traffic Union, see washingtonareaspark.com/2022/02/08/the-washington-telepho...

 

The article appeared in the September 14, 1953 Washington Post.

 

 

 

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