Racial Integration in Corporate America, 1940-1990.

• Author: McCabe, Joshua T.
• Position: Book review

Racial Integration in Corporate America, 1940-1990

By Jennifer Delton

New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Pp. x, 313. $80.00 cloth, $24.99 paperback.

Racial discrimination in the workplace has received much attention from social scientists in several disciplines. Labor historians have focused on whether unions have been a help or a hindrance to workplace integration. Sociologists who study social movements have analyzed the role of groups such as the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in combating discrimination. Political scientists have examined the impact of civil rights legislation.

In Racial Integration in Corporate America, 1940-1990, historian Jennifer Delton looks at corporate America. According to Delton, "Historians have attributed the racial integration of American workplaces in the late twentieth century to activists, the state, and labor unions. They have not only ignored corporations' contributions to integration but they have also portrayed them as impediments to it." She goes on to announce her bold argument "that American corporations played a significant role in opening the American workplace to racial minorities" (p. 3), and she devotes the rest of the book to backing this argument with an examination of corporate leaders' intentions and actions both before and after the modern civil rights movement.

Corporate executives of the 1940s and 1950s saw the value of racial integration from two very different perspectives. The first perspective reflected the idea that fair employment is good business. According to these executives, racial discrimination harms the bottom line. Excluding black workers or eschewing black consumers is irrational because it leaves profit opportunities untapped. For example, one advertising executive defended his decision to hire a black man in 1952 by saying, "I'm not a crusader. This is a cold calculated move on my part for the dollar sign only. I was not pushed. I was not shoved. I was only moved by the dollar sign" (qtd. on p. 47). Delton gives numerous examples of executives who made such arguments, but she still doubts whether fair employment was actually profitable at this point: "if fair employment was really good business, that is, profitable, more employers would have practiced it. The truth was that effective fair employment policies required elaborate planning and costly implementation that challenged both traditional racial norms and...