STATEMENT OF DR. HERMAN H. LONG, DIRECTOR, RACE RELATIONS DEPARTMENT, BOARD FOR HOMELAND MINISTRIES, UNITED CHURCH OF CHRIST, FISK UNIVERSITY, NASHVILLE, TENN.

Dr. LONG. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I had intended doing that. I have placed on about three cards the substance of what I want to discuss with the committee; and I will allow, as you suggest, the entire statement, the total statement, to be filed for the record.

Mr. DENT. It will go into the record at this time.

(The prepared statement of Dr. Long follows:)

TESTIMONY BY DR. HERMAN H. LONG, DIRECTOR, RACE RELATIONS DEPARTMENT, Board for HOMELAND MINISTRIES, UNITED CHURCH OF CHRIST; FISK UNIVERSITY, NASHVILLE, TENN.

PATTERNS OF NEGRO USE IN SELECTED SOUTHERN INDUSTRIES

Discrimination is a selective process which may be initiated and sustained by a variety of policies, assumptions, motivations, and established rules of operation and procedure. I believe this committee to be concerned with group discrimination, whatever may be the causal and sustaining factors, which places persons of a given group identification-race, religion, sex, or nationality-at categorical disadvantage in competing for opportunity and livelihood in the American economic system. Insofar as it is concerned with either the negative effects of such practice upon individuals or the full use of economic nad human resources, its considerations bear upon the basic question of public policy in a freely competitive democratic society. But even more, to the extent that such discrimination is real and substantial-in fact and in substance the task at hand is that of shaping an effective national policy in national legislation and of providing useful implementing vehicles in furtherance of that policy.

The considerations which I bring to this hearing are in the direction of establishing the fact of job discrimination against the Negro worker as revealed in the established selective and operating practices of industry. I shall not deal with the why, the causes, or the attitudes, although I am personally convinced that group discrimination in any form is a great moral wrong, social perhaps more than personal; and although I speak out of the context of the work in race relations of one of the major religious denominations of this country-the Congregational Christian Churches (now the United Church of Christ)-which is based upon the firm religious conviction that racial and group discrimination is an injustice and a denial of fundamental Christian principle. I might add parenthetically that this program has been in existence for 20 years, that it is located at one of the country's most important university centers, and that it has produced numerous studies of discrimination in American cities and among adjuncts of both labor and industry.

The testimony I offer seeks to detail for the Special Subcommittee on Labor the nature and extent of job discrimination revealed in the practices of southern industrial plants. It is based upon a survey of 372 industrial firms located in 4 Southern States-Kentucky, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee-done in the spring and summer of 1961.1 A related coverage was also made of the employment practices of 248 State administrative agencies in West Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, and some reference will be made to these findings as well. The central focus in this effort was upon practices of employment and upgrading affecting the Negro worker. All of the firms covered were engaged in some form of production on contract agreement with the Federal Government. In Kentucky the survey findings are based upon 36 percent of all Government contracting firms in the State; in South Carolina and Tennessee, 40 percent; and in North Carolina, 57 percent.

Two qualifying observations are called for at this point. One is that all of the firms covered were Federal Government contractors, and the likelihood is that they represent a more liberal pattern of practice in regard to the Negro

1 Undertaken under the direction of Mr. John Hope II, director of industrial relations for the race relations department (now of the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity staff) as a service to and in a consultant relationship with the civil rights advisory committees of these States.

worker that might be found among noncontracting firms which have no sanctions against racial discrimination pressing upon them from Federal or other sources. What is reported here, therefore, should be weighed as representing the better southern industrial situations, with great probability that the wider pattern of use is even less favorable.

The other is that although the firms studied are southern in location, no implication is either intended or sought in their selection insofar as comparisons with other sections of the country are concerned. They are important in their own right as suggesting the character of practices of private industry toward the Negro work force in the Southern States involved. However, in the light of considerations of national nondiscrimination policy and legislation in this field, it should be emphasized that in these and other States of this region there is no State sanction to either protect or extend the enjoyment of equal rights and opportunities for Negroes or other so-called minorities under the demand of public interest and welfare.

While the experience cited here is limited in terms of the types of industry (Federal contractors) and the number of private industrial firms covered in these States, it bears special significance for the considerations of this committee because it deals with the current situation of Negro employment practices as reported directly by industrial firms themselves. There has been, by and large, a regrettable lack of research seeking to give objective presentation of the Negro employment situation, especially in southern localities. The present effort, limited though it may be, stands almost alone as a benchmark of the current vastly uncultivated field.

II

What, then, do these studies show as to the character of employment practice affecting the opportunities of Negro workers? In summary, the answer lies in the direction of both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of employment practice. The former raises the criterion of the sheer number of Negro workers who have managed to find their way into industrial jobs, regardless of the types of jobs involved, in any degree approaching even such crude standards as their proportion in the State work force or the State population. The latter concerns the equally important matters of occupational use and upgrading— considerations which, in other words, relate to the extent to which the Negro worker has access to the full range of industrial job opportunity in the employment of his skills, abilities, and aspirations.

(1) With respect to the quantitative factor-sheer representation in and access to industrial jobs-the Negro worker is at a clear disadvantage as revealed by the experience of these firms. The 372 firms covered reported a total employee force of 88,727 workers. Of this number, the Negro employee force amounted to 12,509, or approximately 14 percent of the total. At the same time, the Negro population in the four States involved, taken as a whole, averaged to about 21 percent.

But it is more meaningful to look at the figures for each segment of industrial firms represented in the separate coverages:

(2) In three of the four segments of private industrial firms in the respective States, representation of Negroes in the work force is below Negro population percentage. In the South Carolina and North Carolina private firms the differentials are substantial. Only in the Tennessee group of firms does the proportion of Negroes in the work force exceed the gross standard of State Negro population percentage.

(3) As to the number of firms employing Negro workers, better than one out of four (27 percent) had no Negro employees at all. A high 40 percent of the firms in Kentucky did not have Negro workers, with Tennessee falling

second with 32 percent of its firms. North Carolina and South Carolina firms both had 20 percent of their industrial establishments without Negro workers. In view of the fact that these are all plants which have Federal Government contracts, the expectation would be 100 percent representation of at least some Negro workers. One can say in this respect that the range of Negro work opportunity, as expressed in terms of representation, is restricted by from a fifth to 40 percent of the potential in these southern private firms.

(4) And as might be expected from these quantitative trends, the average size of the Negro work force reflected similar differentials. In slightly more than a third of the Tennessee firms, the number of Negro employees was five or less persons. Of the South Carolina establishments, 37 percent had less than 10 Negro workers; and in North Carolina, where the total work force averaged 363 employees, the average number of Negro workers was only about 20.

(5) Finally in this regard, the most serious disparity in these practices is reflected in the case of the Negro female industrial worker. In the entire work force of the Kentucky firms only 14 Negro women could be accounted for. For the North Carolina firms, only 3.5 percent had some Negro workers while 76 percent had some white female employees. In South Carolina, the corresponding proportions were: 17 percent of the firms with some Negro women as against 80 percent of firms with white women workers.

Current experience regarding the qualitative aspects of employment practice toward the Negro worker in private industrial firms is similarly discriminatory. The most salient consideration here is that even with limited and restricted access to industrial work opportunity, the Negro worker has the additional handicap of not finding access to better jobs, fuller use of his potential skills, and better paying positions. This is then, to borrow a rough legal analogy reference, a matter of "double jeopardy." In practical terms, however, it points up the cumulative nature of racially discriminatory employment practices over the full range of experience from recruitment, hiring, and job placement, to training, transfer, upgrading, and promotion. Having somewhat miraculously negotiated the hurdle of getting inside the industrial work opportunity, the Negro employee finds himself in a dead end with nowhere to go.

(1) The dominant and consistent pattern of Negro use in these firms was the heavy concentration of Negroes in the unskilled and service jobs. In performances classified as "skilled" among the Tennessee firms, 61 percent of the firms had white employees in such jobs as compared with only 32 percent having at least one Negro worker. Corresponding proportions of firms reporting a similar pattern of practice for Negro workers in the other State samples were: Kentucky, only 25 percent; North Carolina and South Carolina, approximately 4 out of every 10 firms.

(2) Practices at the upper end of the occupation scale are represented by the case of the South Carolina firms which had no Negro employees in technical and professional jobs. In about 5 percent of the firms, some Negro workers were used in supervisory functions. North Carolina had a like proportion of firms with Negro supervisory workers, although, somewhat better than locations in its bordering State, a few Negro technical and professional workers were present, as reported in the experience of 2.8 percent of the firms.

(3) The pattern of upgrading practices in these industries toward the Negro worker assumed a similarly restrictive character. In North Carolina's 149 firms with more than 7,000 Negro employees 58 percent of the plants had not upgraded a single Negro worker in recent experience; the related proportion in Tennessee was 50 percent; in South Carolina, 44 percent; and in Kentucky, 66 percent. Although the opposite instance of some upgrading of Negro workers appears high, the seemingly favorable trend is substantially qualified by the fact that extremely small numbers of Negro employees are involved. The North Carolina report indicates that in the case of some 39 firms which had done Negro upgrading, only an average of two or three workers were involved. In South Carolina the modal number of Negro workers upgraded was only 4 among 24 firms taking such action. These experiences warrant the conclusion that on the whole the upgrading of Negro workers has been negligible.

(4) All of these matters hinge insignificant degree upon the industrial firms actively involved in recruiting workers, either in terms of adding to their production force or locating the scarce commodity of technical, engineering, and managerial personnel. Almost without exception, the uniform experience of these firms was that they were not engaged in recruiting production workers; by

and large their work force had reached maximum size. In many instances, sizable groups of workers were on layoff who had first claim on new openings and opportunities for higher jobs. This avenue for altering the existing pattern of Negro use, therefore, was largely closed for the present.

(5) Effort did exist, however, to find specialists and technical workers of various sorts. Some recruitment was done, accordingly, among the colleges, engineering, and technical schools of the State and region. But in almost no instance was a Negro institution of this type, either State or private, used as a regular basis of contact, promotion, and recruitment. This is, obviously, a serious lag in active effort to establish new patterns of Negro worker use, for these institutions constitute the largest single source of trained and able Negro young people.

(6) Lastly, the means through which workers are usually added to the work force of these firms is important in assessment of the discrimination pattern. For all of the 372 firms reporting the most frequently mentioned avenues were, in this order: (a) friends and relatives of present employees; (b) workers coming on their own to the gate or employment office of the firm; and (c) referrals from the State employment services. This pattern, it may be summarily observed, constitutes in effect a built-in procedure whereby the existing character of the employed work force and its use remains the same. It closes, in other words, the vicious cycle of restrictive practice in which the Negro worker is caught in the industrial situation.

A special word should be added about the State employment services as one of the important avenues of access to industrial jobs. In practically all States of the southern region, including those with the industrial firms covered in this report, the physical arrangements of State employment agencies and the procedures for filling job applications and job orders, by and large, follow a pattern of racial segregation. Not only are racially specified job orders received and processed, but orders which have no racial specification, particularly if they are in the nontraditional higher occupational performances, rarely if ever get before the Negro job applicant or even to the separate offices, where such exist, handling the major load of Negro jobseekers. In the background of the broadly racially selective and discriminatory industrial practices which have been cited here, this is the capstone of the train of practice affecting opportunity for the Negro citizen. In this case, not only is State action a party to the unfortunate and inequitable effect, but Federal action as well, insofar as this situation in federally subsidized State employment services remains uncorrected.

III

A brief report of the racial practices of the public agencies in the three Southern States covered should also be given, primarily because it helps to complete the larger picture of Negro employment opportunity. Studies were done in three States with the following totals for the number of agencies and the number of workers:

No estimate was made of the total number of State agency Negro employees in Tennessee, but in the case of West Virginia and North Carolina somewhat opposite pictures emerge. In the former case, the number of Negro employees exceeds the State Negro population percentage, and in the latter the number falls substantially below. At the same time, a higher proportion of Negro workers in North Carolina have found their way into State agency employment than in West Virginia.

In respect to the number of agencies using Negro workers, the pattern of restricted range of use which obtained among the private industrial firms is evident. This matter is of equal, if not greater, importance than mere numbers of Negro employees found in the agencies, inasmuch as the more liberal use of

Negro workers by a few agencies may inflate the Negro totals considerably. In Tennessee approximately 39 percent of the State agencies do not have any Negro employees at all. For North Carolina the proportion was 30 percent, while in North Carolina it rose to 48 percent, almost half of the agencies.

There occurs in these instances a grouping of Negro work force among a small number of State agencies, as in the instance of West Virginia where the situation indicated by the above trends would seem to be favorable. In this State 15 agencies out of the total of 89 covered account for 8 out of every 10 Negro workers under employment. Therefore only about 17 percent of the agencies have 80 percent of the total Negro employee force. Furthermore, 40 percent of the State agencies had only 5 or fewer Negro workers in their employee force, and 84 percent had only 10 or less.

An important factor not present in the case of the private industrial firms obtains in the situation of the State public agencies. It is that because of the existence of traditional segregation patterns along racial lines, a number of the State agencies are distinctly Negro in character. This qualifies even more the general figures as to the range and size of Negro State employment, inasmuch as in most of the States a sizable proportion of the Negro worker totals and agency representation is accounted for by the presence of these separate Negrodesignated institutions. In West Virginia, which has accomplished a wider range of desegregation in its State institutions than exists in the other two States, some 37 percent of the entire Negro State employee force can be accounted for in the traditional segregated educational, health, and medical institutions.

In other respects, however, qualitative aspects of employment practice regarding the Negro worker in the State agencies closely follow the patterns described for the private firms. While a fifth of the agency work force in West Virginia was found in unskilled and service jobs, more than 40 percent of the Negro workers were so located. And in both Tennessee and North Carolina, service and unskilled jobs ranked highest in frequency in the use of Negro workers.

At the professional technical job levels, however, the State patterns depart radically from the private firm experience. Here, largely because of the presence of Negro agencies and institutions, there is less disparity between the total State agency work force and the Negro segment. In West Virginia, for example, 10 percent of the State Negro workers could be classified as professional as compared with about 14 percent of the total employee force.

With respect to upgrading practices, the restrictive pattern of Negro use again appears. Of the total of 205 workers reported as having been upgraded in the West Virginia agencies, 91.2 percent were white and only 8.8 percent Negro. In Tennessee, 82 percent of the agencies had ungraded white workers as compared with about half of the agencies reporting similar action for Negro employees. Comparable figures for North Carolina were 77 percent involving white workers and only 46 percent involving the Negro work force.

It is perhaps unnecessary to carry the analysis of these State practices further. The indexes mentioned suffice to describe the predominant pattern, and, with the exception of slight variations, it is similar to the experience of private firms in the use of Negro workers. Limited inclusion in the work force, limited range of use over the wide variety and number of State agencies, heavy clustering of Negro workers in the lowest job levels, and low incidence and quantity of Negro job upgrading-these are the characteristic and salient features of employment practice regarding the Negro worker by the State agencies. Add to these the practice of separate applicant and eligibility listings for Negro and white workers from which positions are filled, including the racially separate State employment service procedures and arrangements, and you have again a situation which offers little prospect for the Negro citizen beyond his present marginal status.

CONCLUSION

The impression is inescapable from this analysis of the southern-based private firms and the comparison drawn from the practices of State agencies that the pattern of discrimination against the Negro worker is not only real but it is likewise substantial. As serious as this condition is, not only among the firms and agencies studied but in the larger regional and national industrial structure as well, the most dire consequence lies in the fact that the racially discriminatory practices are part and parcel of a self-sustaining industrial procedure and system. The Negro worker, occupying a longstanding marginal position in the industrial situation, is literally held in that position by a vicious cycle of de