Racial Integration in Corporate America, 1940–1990

by Jennifer Delton

• ISBN13: 9780521515092
• ISBN10: 0521515092
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-11-13
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

In the space of about thirty years - from 1964 to 1994 - American corporations abandoned racially exclusionary employment policies and embraced some form of affirmative action to diversify their workforces. It was an extraordinary transformation, which most historians attribute to civil rights activists, federal legislation, and labor unions. This is the first book to examine the role of corporations in that transformation. Whereas others emphasize corporate obstruction, this book argues that there were corporate executives and managers who promoted fair employment and equal employment opportunity long before the federal government required it, and who thereby helped prepare the corporate world for racial integration. The book examines the pioneering corporations that experimented with integration in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as corporate responses to the civil rights movement and urban crisis in the 1960s and 1970s and the widespread adoption of affirmative action in the 1980s and 1990s.

Table of Contents

List of Tables	p. vi
Introduction	p. 1
Color-Blind Groundwork, 1940-1961
The African American Struggle for Jobs	p. 17
Fair Employment Is Good Business	p. 42
Racial Liberalism and the Mid-Twentieth-Century Businessman	p. 72
Human Relations in Management	p. 99
Human Relations at International Harvester and Pitney-Bowes	p. 130
Color-Conscious Ascendancy, 1961-1990
How Compliance Became Voluntarism	p. 163
The National Association of Manufacturers Helps Out	p. 194
Changing Hiring Criteria	p. 225
The Du Pont Company's Affirmative Action Efforts	p. 255
Epilogue: From Affirmative Action to Diversity	p. 280
Statistical Tables	p. 285
Bibliography	p. 289
Acknowledgments	p. 307
Index	p. 309
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