John G. Feild

He is listed as Executive Director of The President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity (PCEEO) in the first annual report that covered the committee’s actions through Jan. 15, 1962.

In an oral interview conducted for the Kennedy presidential library, John G. Feild discusses the role that he played in drafting Executive Order 10925:

There were two areas that I was very much involved in, one was the requirement for reporting. One of the great lacks that the previous experience had demonstrated was they had no factual information to know how many Negroes were working where, and I felt strongly that we had to have that, we had to have bench marks, and that was ultimately bled into it.

Secondly, the concept of affirmative action, that we ought to be in a position to require, in the public interest, more performance of a government contractor than we would of a private employer, and that concept was built into it. I still regard those as two of the most important; the decision to do it, the decision upon its main lines was pretty much agreed to by Johnson, by Fortas. Fortas‟ great contribution, as I remember it, was they were going to give merit awards to all good guys. I‟m sure he made more than that.

Johnson, of course, was Lyndon Baines Johnson, Kennedy’s Vice President and the chairman of the PCEEO. Fortas was Abraham “Abe” Fortas, a Rhodes Scholar lawyer from Memphis, TN, who helped Johnson with legal issues in the 1948 Democratic primary, and was later appointed by Johnson to the US Supreme Court.

Feild describes himself as part of the civil rights unit of the Kennedy team.

After returning from World War II to his hometown of Detroit, Michigan, John G. Feild worked as a secretary for the American Veterans Committee and served on the Mayor’s Interracial Committee, working to pass city and state anti-discrimination laws. He soon went to work as the first director of the Michigan Fair Employment Practices Commission, and in 1960, helped with Senator John F. Kennedy’s Presidential campaign. (Kennedy Library Blog)