He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America's Most Consequential Black Congressman, and shared the following:
The Page 99 Test fits with my new book, House of Diggs: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Consequential Black Congressman, Charles C. Diggs, Jr. The book shows that Diggs was a serious policy-oriented legislator who took Congress’s “oversight” authority seriously. On page 99 of House of Diggs, Diggs is in his element. Page 99 describes Diggs pressing the Kennedy administration to force the major commercial airlines to hire Black Americans for in-flight positions as pilots, engineers, and flight attendants. Discrimination was rampant in the airline industry. When Diggs entered Congress in 1955, there were nearly 5,919 stewards or stewardesses. None was Black.Learn more about House of Diggs at the University of North Carolina Press website.
Congressman Diggs was aware that it was a violation of executive orders issued by President John F. Kennedy for any corporation receiving federal government contracts to discriminate based on race. Page 99 covers Diggs discussing with Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who chaired Kennedy’s Committee on Government Contracts, a strategy designed to force the airlines to open in-flight employment opportunities to Black pilots, engineers and flight attendants. Diggs pushed Johnson to tell the airline executives that they will lose millions of dollars in federal contracts if they did not hire Black pilots, engineers, and flight attendants. By threatening to cancel existing federal contracts, Lyndon Johnson made hiring Black flight attendants a personal priority, a pace that accelerated after Johnson ascended to the presidency and signed the Civil Rights Act in 1965, outlawing racial discrimination.
I show in the remainder of House of Diggs that Charles Diggs’s approach to the issue of discrimination in the airline industry was emblematic of his approach during his time in Congress, dogged persistence combined with moral certainty.
House of Diggs also shows that Diggs’s contributions were international in scope. In 1959 he became the first Black member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. From this position, and later as chair of the Subcommittee on Africa, a position he assumed in 1969, Diggs ignited, virtually alone, what little congressional interest there was in Africa. Diggs used the Subcommittee on Africa to raise America’s awareness about apartheid, the political system in South Africa that prevented the country’s Black majority from having a public policy voice. House of Diggs describes how a lot of the early work in the American anti-apartheid movement began in Diggs’s congressional office. Diggs played a key role in the formation of TransAfrica, the powerful anti-apartheid organization. Randall Robinson, TransAfrica’s first executive director, worked as Diggs’s chief of staff, and learned a lot about Africa from Diggs.
House of Diggs details how Diggs cajoled and pushed U.S. agency heads, cabinet secretaries, and presidents when necessary to advance civil rights for Black Americans and to change U.S. African policy.
--Marshal Zeringue
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