On the eve of American involvement in the Second World War, questions of equality, opportunity, and fairness framed the African American struggle for rights. Thus Richmond, Virginia attorney Oliver W. Hill told the Norfolk County School Board in August 1941: "Anything short of equal opportunity for all is not democracy, but the most vicious kind of Nazi-Fascist system." Hill had challenged the unequal pay scales of black compared to white teachers in the Norfolk public schools on behalf of the National Association of Colored People (NAACP). The NAACP had achieved victory in November 1940 when the Supreme Court let stand Fourth Circuit Judge John J. Parker's command to end "discrimination of the grounds of race or color in fixing salaries to be paid school teachers." Nearly a year later, the Norfolk school board still had refused to abide by the decision of the federal courts. Instead, it threatened to dismiss married African American women if black teachers persisted in demanding equalization of salaries.

The initial plaintiff in the Norfolk challenge was a woman and women teachers earned less than male ones. NAACP lawyers had considered analogous cases involving married women in constructing their arguments. While the NAACP focused on racial, not gender, discrimination, the school board's attacks on black women suggests how race and gender could not be so easily sundered in political struggle. Neither should they in our scholarship.

Thus, this paper interrogates the meanings of equality and democracy on the U.S. homefront during WWII by comparing the politics of equal pay for African American schoolteachers with the setting of equal pay on the basis of sex and race by wartime agencies of the federal government, particularly the War Labor Board. At the same time that African Americans demanded the end to discrimination on government contracts, the Women's Bureau stepped up efforts for "equal pay." Women complained to the Women's Bureau and to the War Labor Board that they were not receiving the same rate for the job as men. Historians have suggested that wartime breakdown of job segregation by sex (because of the shortage of male workers) contributed to this renewed demand along with two other factors: pent up consumerism that justified women's desire for higher wages and the ideology of the war itself that equated the American standard of living with democracy. White women legitimatized their demand for equality in terms of the dominant individualistic meaning of rights, but also in terms of the traditional role of women to provide for their own children and relatives; African American women saw their rights in terms of the family which stood as part of a larger black community. Understandings of rights reflected the different positions of these group s of women in discourse and social life.

I seek to untangle the ways that race and gender (or sex, to use the term of the time) stood apart in law and social policy as well as in social movements challenging the status quo. The example of equal pay illuminates the paths to social justice open to groups with contested relationships to the political process (access to agencies of the state, legal organizations, lobbying efforts). African Americans temporarily gained the formal "right to earn" during WWII (through federal fair employment directives), but their political weakness, white worker intransigence, and the strength of Southern Democrats vitiated equal opportunity, no less than undermining equal pay. White women too found that the larger structures of society--especially the sexual division of labor at home and in the family and lack of seniority in workplaces and thus vulnerability to layoff--made the attainment of equal pay less significant than their formal political recognition suggested.