Civil Rights Congress

CIVIL RIGHTS CONGRESS. It was called the most successful “Communist front” of all time. Dashiell Hammett, author of The Thin Man and longtime companion of Lillian Hellman, went to jail because of his association with it. Paul Robeson was stoned at Peekskill as he raised money for it. What stirred such passion was the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), which during its existence from 1946 to 1956 fought for and established a number of civil rights and liberties rulings that expanded the rights of all in the United States.

CRC was formed in the early postwar period when the impending Cold War and McCarthyism could be sensed but had not yet been established. It was formed as a result of a merger among the International Labor Defense (which was catapulted to prominence as a result of its vigorous defense of the Scottsboro Nine and Angelo Herndon, among others), the National Negro Congress (an early effort to form a “Black United Front” among African Americans), and the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties. Early on they developed a specialty in fighting “black” and “red” cases.

One of CRC’s earliest Black cases was that of Willie McGee, a Mississippi truck driver whose white lover accused him of rape after her husband discovered their affair. In their attempt to save McGee’s life, CRC launched a national and international campaign that made his name a household word. They helped to publicize the fact that rape of white women had been used historically as a reason to lynch or execute black men. A significant percentage of their cases had this theme, including the Martinsville Seven—another one of their more significant cases. Even in their declining days, they were still able to mobilize masses around the case of Black teenager Emmett Till, the Chicago resident who was lynched on an ill-fated trip to Mississippi in 1955 after allegedly “getting fresh” with a white woman. The flip side of this emphasis was their defense of Rosa Lee Ingram, a Black female sharecropper from Georgia who was assaulted by her white landlord, whom she then fatally dispatched. This emphasis touched a raw nerve in the national consciousness among Blacks and whites, as CRC linked sensitive questions of race, sex and exploitation.

Long before Montgomery, CRC was “softening up” the racists in the Deep South for the subsequent onslaught led by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. In the early 1950s they led “Freedom Rides” to Virginia to save the Martinsville Seven. But their success in bringing domestic racism to the international arena may have been their most significant contribution. In the postwar period Jim Crow was becoming an aching Achilles heel in the execution of US foreign policy. How could hearts and minds be won in an increasingly “colored” world when people of color were being subjected to such pernicious discrimination here? CRC seized upon this contradiction when it published the landmark study We Charge Genocide (1951), which detailed the heinous crimes committed against African Americans and was filed at the United Nations. Reprinted in many languages and many thousands of copies, this work was an international embarrassment for the US government and was a factor in bringing down the walls of Jim Crow.

Still, as dramatic and riveting as their “black” cases were, perhaps more controversial were their “red” cases. CRC was the major organization fighting the Smith Act frame-ups, the McCarran Act, the Communist Control Act, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and the panoply of laws and institutions formed to enforce a Cold War consensus. Their opinion was that defense of the Communist Party was the first line in the defense of civil liberties generally. Hence, they were avid in their defense of the Communist Party leadership, which ultimately involved imprisonment for scores of activists on the grounds of “teaching and advocating” Marxism-Leninism—not seeking to overthrow the government, as is commonly misunderstood. Despite this gargantuan labor, a number of Communists in CRC felt that not enough attention was paid to these cases or to repression of the labor movement, as evidenced by the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act. Others felt that the battle for racial equality was the cutting edge in the battle for democracy generally, thus justifying this emphasis. The fact that the beginning of the end for HUAC came when they brought their traveling roadshow to Atlanta and encountered a united civil rights leadership does lend some credence to the last notion.

The practical and theoretical battles were conducted within an organization that at its zenith may have had 10,000 members, during a time when progressive organizations were not proliferating. The CRC’s strongest chapters were in such critically important cities as New York, Detroit, Seattle, the San Francisco Bay area, and Los Angeles. Though it was derided as a “Communist front,” a number of the Party’s internal weaknesses did not unduly influence CRC negatively. For example, during a time when the Communist Party was conducting a vigorous campaign to uproot white chauvinism that was later deemed by the leadership to have been conducted improperly, the brunt of the deleterious impact managed to escape CRC despite—or perhaps because of—their own vigorous campaigns on behalf of McGee, Ingram, and others.

CRC had titanic clashes with both the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). “Free speech” for racists and the Ku Klux Klan was a bone of contention with the ACLU, though that organization’s ingrained anticommunism certainly played a role in their conflicts. CRC’s conflicts with the NAACP were more complex. That group was avowedly “anti-imperialist” and experienced tremendous growth during those days of lessened anticommunism, 1941–1945. This was the time when Black Communist Ben Davis was elected to the New York City Council from Harlem with the support of NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins; but the alliance was not able to withstand the blows of the Cold War. Nevertheless, just as Booker T. Washington publicly disdained battles against aspects of Jim Crow while secretly funding them, the NAACP maintained forms of cooperation with CRC while hewing to the official line publicly. This was aided by the contradictions of Jim Crow itself; Wilkins lived across the hall from CRC leader William Patterson in a segregated Harlem apartment building.

The US government, a major target of CRC broadsides, was a key factor in bringing on their dissolution. The Subversive Activities Control Board, in particular, forced the liquidation not only of CRC but also the Council on African Affairs (the premier organization pushing decolonization and anti-apartheid) and other Left-led organizations. Yet, there was significant continuity between CRC and the post-Montgomery movement, as many who had honed their skills fighting for McGee went on to press for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and to counsel the Black Panther Party. This was CRC’s ultimate legacy.

Burnett, Lucy. “Communist Civil Rights: Seattle Civil Rights Congress, 1948-1955.” Seattle Civil Rights

History Project. University of Washington. http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/CivilRightsCongress.htm
Horne, Gerald. Communist Front? The Civil Rights Congress, 1946–1956. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987.

Website: Civil Rights Congress (1946-1956). Black Past. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/civil-rights-congress-1946-1956/