American Negro Labor Congress
AMERICAN NEGRO LABOR CONGRESS. Formed in Chicago in October 1925 under the auspices of the American Communist Party and the Trade Union Educational League, also a Party organization, the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC) in effect replaced earlier attempts by the Party to organize black laborers along what might be termed (for lack of space), “Left Pan-Africanist” lines into the African Blood Brotherhood. According to its constitution, the stated goals of the ANLC were to unify the efforts … of all the organizations of Negro workers and farmers … as well as organizations composed of both Negro and white workers and farmers … for the abolition of all discrimination, persecution and exploitation of the Negro race and working people generally; …to bring the Negro working people into the trade unions and the general labor movement with the white workers; … to remove all bars and discrimination against Negroes and other races in the trade unions; … and to aid the general liberation of the darker races and the working people throughout all countries.
The first congress convened on 25 October at the Metropolitan Community Center on Chicago’s South Side, under the leadership of Lovett Fort-Whiteman, national organizer; H. V. Phillips, national secretary; and organizing committee members Edward Doty and Harry Haywood. Haywood reported that, although he estimated the opening-night crowd to be around five hundred people, the majority of these were from the surrounding community; the following morning, only forty or so delegates participated in the actual work of the congress. Not too surprisingly, there were no farmer-delegates. Robert Minor claimed that black federal union members of the American Federation of Labor had been scared off by the anticommunist baiting of federation president William Green in the press.
Viewed from a historical perspective, the organizational plan of the ANLC proposed by the October conference is familiar enough: it called for the formation of “united fronts”—dubbed “local councils”—in all centers of black population, with special emphasis on the role played by labor unions. Organizations composed of black and white workers were to be admitted, as were unorganized black workers. “Local councils” were not to compete with existing black or labor organizations, but rather were to help coordinate the work of such bodies. And finally, the councils were to facilitate the admission of black workers into existing trade unions by forming “interracial labor committees,”the ultimate purpose of which was to halt practices that divided white and black laborers and to support those that united them: the elimination of trade union discrimination and the undercutting of wages, struggles against lynching and race riots, and the like.
The inauspicious beginnings of the ANLC set the tone for its future work: “Few local units were formed,” wrote Haywood, “resolutions and plans were never carried into action. Only its official paper, the Negro Champion, subsidized by the Party, continued [sporadically] for several years.” The principal and perhaps only center of “effective” organizing appears to have been Chicago, whose “local council” included some fifty members at the end of 1925. Attempts were made to organize workers as far away as Jamaica, British West Indies, but efforts failed there as well. The ANLC lasted until 1930, and was succeeded by the National Negro Labor Congress the following year.
Further reading
Draper, Theodore. American Communism and Soviet Russia (1960). New York:Random House, 1986.
Fort-Whiteman, Lovett. “American Negro Labor Congress.” International Press Correspondence, 27 August 1925.
Haywood, Harry. Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist. Chicago: Liberator Press, 1978.
Huiswoud, Otto E. . "ANLC Organizes Labor Unions in West Indies.” Liberator, December 7, 1929.
Minor, Robert, “The First Negro Workers’ Congress.” The Workers Monthly,December 1925.
Rabinovitch, M. “The American Negro Congress.” International Press Correspondence, 10 December 1925.
Spero, Sterling D., and Abram L. Harris. The Black Worker. New York: Columbia University Press, 1931.
“American Negro Labor Meet Opens with Gigantic Mass Demonstration in Chicago,” Daily Worker [Chicago] vol. 2, No. 244, October
26, 1923, p.1