National Negro Congress and Southern Negro Youth Congress

NATIONAL NEGRO CONGRESS and SOUTHERN NEGRO YOUTH CONGRESS. These sweeping organizations set the pace for a new level of struggle during the Great Depression and the decade to follow.

In May of 1935, a group of Black intellectuals and activists, in collaboration with a few white allies, came together at Howard University to form the National Negro Congress (NNC). At the conference, which was entitled "The Position of the Negro in our National Economic Crisis," attendees agreed that it was urgent to unify their disparate forms of uplift, organizing, and advocacy. New Deal reforms had thus far remained anemic in ameliorating the poverty, disenfranchisement, and racialized violence toward African Americans in the midst of the Great Depression. Drawing on his organizing experience with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), Asa Philip Randolph advocated a labor-based approach and agreed to serve as the NNC’s president. John Preston Davis, a Harvard-trained Black intellectual and Washington DC activist, would become the chief architect of the new organization as its executive secretary. Participants left the capital with the mission to foster unity among African American organizations and look to other allies to battle Jim Crow across America.

The emergence of the NNC in the mid-1930s coincided with the creation of the Popular Front. During the early Great Depression years, Communists and Socialists fought each other almost as much as they struggled for the rights of workers. But the threat of fascism prompted many radical activists to put aside their differences. The Communist Party’s official change of policy to the Popular Front in 1935 created more possibilities for alliances with liberals and Socialists but also for interracial protest coalitions. In addition, new developments in the labor movement, and in particular the creation of the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) by renegade unionists, offered an opportunity for African American workers to “unite and fight” with white allies in forming new industrial unions. The NNC was a crucial part of this convergence. Its members participated in this broad coalition to expand New Deal reforms and reverse the alarming growth of fascism, both at home and abroad.

During the next two years, the NNC and its independent youth affiliate, the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC), came to fruition as organizations. In February 1936, more than 750 delegates from twenty-eight states met during a snowstorm at the Eighth Regiment Armory in South Chicago to inaugurate the NNC. During the conference sessions, Black intellectuals, labor leaders, artists, and churchmen debated issues relating to trade unions, youth, women, churches, businesses, fascism, and interracial relations. The NNC hoped this cross-section of African Americans would ignite a nationwide movement to expand democracy, especially for African American workers. In February of the following year, the NNC helped foster the organization of the SNYC, which began with a conference in Richmond, Virginia. Although the NNC and SNYC began as separate organizations, they formed an activist network with overlapping members and common objectives. This network, at its peak, boasted over seventy-five councils across the nation that collectively demanded a “second emancipation” for African Americans.

To apply these tactics on a mass scale, the NNC tried to organize existing organizations into a broad alliance. Unlike the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the NNC functioned as an organization of organizations and required its members to work within labor unions, churches, and civic groups. The NNC's core network, consisting of a few hundred dedicated activists, connected isolated pockets of anti-racist resistance and coordinated through a national office in Washington, DC. Local councils brought together racial, labor, cultural, and religious institutions, whose members represented hundreds of thousands of African Americans. NNC members waged local and regional campaigns by engaging in pickets, strikes, marches, and boycotts. They did not invent new forms of resistance, but its leaders combined several strands of protest movements from African American history, the labor movement, radical political parties into a Black-led, interracial movement. They hoped to convince both labor unions and Black advancement organizations to endorse and employ aggressive tactics, moving beyond 1920s welfare capitalism and polite negotiations.

In the late 1930s the NNC became the Black vanguard of the Popular Front, advocating for economic and physical security. Local councils organized thousands into unions, opened new sectors of employment to Black workers, demonstrated against extra-legal violence, and resurrected a proud African American culture based upon the nineteenth century history of abolition, emancipation, and Reconstruction. Its activists saw forms of discrimination as symptomatic of the larger problem of racialized laissez-faire American capitalism, which they believed had facilitated the federal government’s retreat from protecting the rights of its citizens. In Chicago and other northern cities, the NNC helped organize Black industrial workers into the CIO unions in packinghouses, steel mills, auto factories, and more. In Richmond, Virginia SNYC members allied with Black tobacco workers to form an independent Black-led union movement ahead of the CIO. Meantime, the local council in Washington DC crusaded against lynching and police brutality as two similar forms of what they termed "domestic fascism." The NAACP-led push for a federal anti-lynching bill stalled due to white supremacist Senate Democrats. But the NNC coalition pushed the Department of Justice to investigate peonage cases in the South, and in the District itself, won a police civilian review board that decreased police brutality.

The NNC's unifying mission and alliance with Communists in the Popular Front caused recurrent tensions for its activists. As radical reformers, NNC members had to appeal to African Americans, labor movement leaders, political party members, and government officials while simultaneously pushing their own anti-racist agenda. But the NAACP leadership viewed the NNC more as a competitor than an ally. And as the political context shifted, the NNC increasingly looked to the Communist Party and the left wing of the CIO for support. While the NNC used these allies to enable much of its activism, these ties also hampered associations with other activists. Their radicalism also came under attack by the congressional committee headed by Martin Dies, Jr. of Texas that investigated “un-American activities,” which further exacerbated tensions within this Popular Front coalition.

All these pressures made the Popular Front alliance untenable within the NNC by 1940. At its Washington conference that April, A. Philip Randolph announced his refusal to continue on as NNC president because of concerns that the organization endured too much influence by white Communists. Randolph and his liberal allies endorsed socialism, and the BSCP union he headed remained in the American Federation of Labor. John P. Davis chose another path by echoing the new Communist Party line (implemented in August 1939 after the infamous Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact), which attacked President Roosevelt and opposed involvement in another “imperialist” war. In so doing, Davis and this group of NNC members also endorsed the new policy of CIO leader John L. Lewis, who was not a Communist but argued against entry into another catastrophic world war shouldered by working-class men. As the keynote speaker at the NNC conference, Lewis asked the NNC to support the new Labor Non-Partisan League. After the convention, the NNC sustained ties to the CP and CIO and became an increasingly vocal critic of the Roosevelt Administration’s rush to war, arguing that the conflict diverted energy away from civil rights at home.

This split was enervating for both groups, but activists regrouped separately. As Randolph and his BSCP and other allies witnessed the mobilization of the economy for wartime production, they saw it as an opportunity for African Americans to pressure the federal government to ban discrimination in employment. This idea, based on Black indignation and mixed with the leverage of patriotism, became the foundation for the March on Washington Movement (MOWM). Its leaders threatened a national march on 1 July 1941 of 100,000 African Americans. MOWM leaders agreed to cancel the proposed march and Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802 on 25 June 1941. That Order would "reaffirm" anti-discrimination policies in all defense programs and establish the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to monitor enforcement. After the creation of the FEPC, the NNC used it as tool for its own campaigns. The NNC launched wartime jobs campaigns, often on the heels of FEPC hearings, at East and West Coast aircraft plants; Detroit and Chicago auto factories; and Midwest and Baltimore plants owned by Bethlehem Steel. Therefore, while the NNC and MOWM rupture seemed tragic to many Black activists, the two groups waged complementary fights in 1941 to gain access to war industries jobs.

The next year, international circumstances once again abruptly shifted the organization’s direction. Hitler's invasion of Russia during the summer of 1941 and the entry of the United States into the war after Pearl Harbor in December produced a sea change in American politics that led to the CIO's no-strike pledge, the CP's cooperation with US war aims above other concerns, and the transformation of the NNC and SNYC into "win-the-war" agencies. The shift to prioritizing the war effort gave many NNC members ideological whiplash and the number of NNC local councils dwindled to about thirty nationwide. Feeling politically compromised by this whiplash, John P. Davis stepped away from his leadership role, and by the end of 1942, the NNC moved its headquarters from Washington to New York. During the rest of the war, it would take the leadership of a dedicated group of black women, especially its new executive secretaries Thelma Dale (NNC) and Esther Cooper-Jackson (SNYC), to rescue both organizations from sectarianism and loss of morale. They would have to use new tactics, with their allies and members in the CP and CIO defending the no-strike pledge, and many others enlisted in the armed forces. The new leaders put energy into three primary areas: education, alliances inside trade unions, and political campaigns. While these directions had mixed results, NNC and SNYC leaders did manage to once again steer the organization to the forefront of the fight for African American civil rights.

Their network began an impressive resurgence in late 1945. Many activists had entered the NNC and SNYC youth movements in the 1930s and had grown up through their activist experiences within it. They, not the top-level CP leaders from an older generation in New York, now vied to direct its present and future course, the war years had shown. Moving the organization to New York put the NNC in comforting radical confines, but it also left little space for the NNC to enjoy freedom from the influence of top-level Communist leaders who resided there. As such, NNC and SNYC leaders fomented a reorganization. They demanded that the NNC offer the executive secretary position to Revels Cayton, a Black trade unionist who had become a Communist in the early 1930s in Seattle. His labor background, West Coast origins, and family lineage as the grandson of the Reconstruction-era Senator from Mississippi, Hiram Revels, made Cayton seem like a great choice for taking the NNC into a mass-based direction. This reorganization led to the NNC’s renewed growth in the Midwest and on the West Coast, and the SNYC grew in places like Alabama, Louisiana, and South Carolina. An NNC conference in Detroit criticized the US government’s hypocrisy in speaking of freedom without supporting civil rights. In June 1946 the NNC followed up by petitioning the United Nations on "behalf of the 13 million oppressed Negro citizens of the United States" to expose the housing, education, civil liberties, and violence that violated the UN's charter. Meanwhile, in the Palmetto State, the SNYC applied novel forms of activism based on an international yet grassroots politics. There and elsewhere in the South, the SNYC posed a challenge to Jim Crow that forecast a southern mass movement on the horizon.

By 1947 the momentum of the postwar resurgence of the NNC and SNYC began to stall. The unprecedented wave of government-supported suppression of civil liberties, legitimized and enforced by white liberals and trade unions, aimed to stop the NNC. More than any other measure, the passage of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act destroyed any hope the NNC and SNYC had in generating an immediate and militant working-class movement among African Americans. The act forced CIO leaders to choose between government protection and keeping Communist and other left forces within their ranks. Much to the dismay of NNC leaders, the CIO chose the safer path. The CIO subsequently harassed and eventually purged NNC and SNYC allies from their positions, and the US attorney general listed both organizations as “subversive.” Further hampering the NNC’s position, the CP tried to place new forms of control and sectarian demands on it. As the organization struggled against Jim Crow policies, their alliance with leftist CIO unions and the Communist Party became their most important sources of power but also their postwar Achilles Heel. In this Cold War atmosphere, the NNC merged into the newfound Civil Rights Congress in 1947 and SNYC folded two years later.
While its members did not succeed in enacting their post-war motto, "Death Blow to Jim Crow," the NNC and SNYC generated much more than a seedbed for the civil rights movement that followed it. The NNC cultivated an oppositional Black culture and fostered anti-racist campaigns that forced American institutions to enact racial and labor reforms for the first time since Reconstruction. Its activists remade the American labor movement to wield powerful demands against industrialists, white supremacists, and the state. The NNC and SNYC cultivated Black working-class leadership and focused upon economic issues as the principal means for racial advancement.

The Cold War largely elided the NNC from popular memory. The demise of the NNC and SNYC weakened collaboration between labor and anti-racist activists that had flourished during the late 1930s and 1940s. This unfinished legacy became visible again in the late 1960s, when, after Black activism dismantled Jim Crow barriers in the South, many Black workers still lacked access to unions and skilled employment. Yet, while former NNC and SNYC leaders would be relegated to the background of subsequent mass movements, many of them still influenced the next generation of the Black Freedom Struggle – from SNYC connections to the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, to subsequent international human rights campaigns, to Black Power activists, to the publication of Freedomways. But perhaps more important, the next generation benefitted indirectly from the NNC and SNYC. The cumulative influence of its political and cultural work made the fate of African Americans central to American democracy and civil rights in postwar America an urgent necessity.

Bates, Beth Tompkins. "A New Crowd Challenges the Agenda of the Old Guard in the NAACP, 1933-1941," American Historical Review. 102, No. 2 (April 1997).

Gellman, Erik S. Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.

Kersten, Andrew and Clarence Lang, eds., Reframing Randolph: Labor, Black Freedom, and the Legacies of A. Philip Randolph. New York: New York University Press, 2015.

Kelley, Robin D.G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

National Negro Congress Records, 1933-1947. Overview. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library. http://archives.nypl.org/scm/20648

Southern Negro Youth Congress Papers, Moreland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.