Executive Order 8802 barely moved black workers into the defense industry.

Evidence

Legally, the defense industry was supposed to include both black and white Americans; in 1941, President Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 8802, prohibiting racial discrimination in the government and the defense industry. But it rarely did in practice—in the ten weeks after the Executive Order became law, Boeing hired one thousand new employees each week, but none were black. Eventually, the Executive Order did help increase the share of black Americans working in the defense industry from 3 percent to 8 percent, although the jobs were lower paying than those held by white employees. (Marginal economic progress of some blacks in the workforce during this period may explain, in part, the increase in black homeownership rates.) — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 1248

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: The gap between formal legal prohibition and actual practice echoes the book’s saturated-system theme of formal neutrality masking real disparity.

Related

• Executive Order 8802 barely integrated hiring in the defense industry. (similarity 0.96)
• Executive Order 8802 barely improved black defense-industry employment or pay (similarity 0.93)