The same pattern, only a different shade" (Course reader, 226). .
Congress was not the only group to acknowledge this need for a fundamental change. The Supreme Court made a series of judgments that were in favor of improving the conditions of blacks in an attempt to ease tense relations between whites and blacks: the 1935 retrial of the Scottsboro boys declared all-white juries unconstitutional; Morgan v. Virginia (1946) declared interstate bus segretation unconstitutional; Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) declared restrictive housing contracts unconstitutional; and the famous Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional (Boyer et al.). Of course, these impressive changes purported change in actual conditions, but in reality, they did very little to ease racial tension because they lacked any means of implementation and enforcement. .
The extent to which black-white relations permeated even the federal government was evidenced when "[a]n antilynching bill passed the House of Representatives in 1935, but southern racist senators--all Democrats--killed it with a filibuster" (Boyer et al. 727). Although this was quite a blow to the black community, Roosevelt was an avid supporter of the efforts of the black community; his Supreme Court "after 1936 issued important antidiscrimination rulings in cases involving voting rights, wage inequity, jury selection, and real estate bias" (Boyer et al. 727). Roosevelt also issued Executive Order 8802 in 1941, which "required full and equitable participation of all workers in the defense industries" (HRC DJ2306200103) and "banned discriminatory employment practices by federal agencies" (Boyer et al. 774). The order created the Fair Employment Practices Commission as its chief enforcement agency; in combination with the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), some improvements in labor relations came about.
