National Negro Labor Council

NATIONAL NEGRO LABOR COUNCIL. A spiritual successor to the Popular Front-era National Negro Congress, the National Negro Labor Committee (NNLC) was the largest coordinator of the labor-based civil rights strategy during the early 1950s. A coalition of largely Communist Party USA (CP) led or influenced national unions and union locals, as well as numerous local labor and community activists, the NNLC began with the June 1950 Conference for Negro Rights in Chicago. The conference’s stated goals were anti-discrimination clauses in all union contracts, an end to lily-white employment in all industries and job categories, admission of African American workers to all apprenticeship courses, and full job opportunities for Black women, a special emphasis of the group. The conference claimed to have set up twenty three local Negro Labor Councils (NLC) by the time of the NNLC founding conference, in Cincinnati, October 27-28, 1951. The NNLC had a rhetorical commitment to organizing the South, with numerous activities and chapters there.

The NNLC drew its primary support from a number of left unions and locals, including the United Electric Workers (UE), the Farm Equipment Workers (FE), the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers (FTA), the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (Mine Mill), the Fur and Leather Workers, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (especially San Francisco Local 10), certain important locals in the United Auto Workers (especially Detroit-River Rouge Local 600), and United Packinghouse Workers of America (especially District 1 in Chicago). The NNLC played a crucial role in coordinating several national campaigns, as well as giving substantial support for key local activities.

As early as 1951, the NNLC emphasized the importance of runaway shops to the South. General Electric opened up a major manufacturing facility in Louisville, Kentucky, planning to expand to as many as 30,000 employees. Half of the workers were women, and, besides a token number of Blacks, the initial 5,000 hirees were all white. With its base in FE Local 236 at the International Harvester plant in Louisville, the NNLC began pressuring for the hiring of more Black workers, especially Black women. They also forced the Louisville City Council to provide training for non-white workers for jobs in the plant. The NNLC’s New York branch led large demonstrations at New York’s GE headquarters, while UE locals at GE plants around the country made demands and led demonstrations in support. This coordinated campaign resulted in the increased hiring of Black workers, especially Black women.

The Chicago NLC, with strong bases of support in the three FE-organized Chicago International Harvester plants and in District 1 of the UPWA, targeted downtown Chicago department stores, groceries, and lunch counters, many of whose customers were African American, but refused to hire Blacks except as janitors or maids. With large demonstrations and boycotts, many local stores quickly capitulated. As a result, by the mid-1950s most of Chicago’s downtown businesses had been integrated. Sears and Woolworth’s were more recalcitrant and became the subjects of national campaigns, both eventually agreeing to hire Blacks on their salesfloors. Another campaign that was less successful was the hiring of Black pilots, office personnel, and flight attendants by American Airlines, culminating in a large demonstration at their Cleveland headquarters coincident with the 1952 annual NNLC meeting. A 2,000-person picket line (police estimated 1,500) carried signs including “Negro pilots fly in Korea - Why Not in America?” District 1 also served as a voice for civil rights inside the UPWA’s national organization, pressing the centrist leadership of the 1950s and 1960s to include anti-discrimination clauses in master contracts.

The NNLC gave wide publicity and support to a strike of 9,000 Black fisherman in the coastal waters of North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida, organized by the Fur and Leather Workers Union. Leftwing UAW Local 600, representing workers at the largest auto plant in the country, Ford’s River Rouge plant (whose recording secretary was NNLC leader William Hood), organized and won a citywide vote in the town of River Rouge—with support from a majority of white voters—for a local Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC). The River Rouge FEPC stipulated “up to 60 days in jail and a $200 dollar fine for persons who discriminate in employment because of race, color, religion, sex, national origin or ancestry.” This success was particularly impressive, given the UAW national leadership’s opposition to both militant civil rights activity and leftwing influence generally.

The NNLC was hounded by government bodies (particularly the House Committee on Un-American Activities), employers, putatively liberal organizations (including the NAACP, National Urban League), and mainstream unions. The NNLC thus also engaged in defense work against government and racist attacks. Typical was their support for Harold Ward, financial secretary of FE Local 108 at McCormick Works at International Harvester in Chicago, who was framed for the murder of a scab on October 3, 1952. The signature model for defense against mob violence was the 1949 trade union mobilization in Peekskill, New York, to protect a concert by Paul Robeson, which had been previously cancelled due to attacks by racist mobs.

As early as 1953, the CP—by then an obsequious arm of Soviet foreign policy—demanded that the NNLC dissolve itself on the grounds that the economic basis of racial inequality (southern sharecropper feudalism) had been eliminated. Harry Haywood, leading theoretician of the CP’s self-determination for the Blackbelt thesis, argued further that “The thinking behind the policy of liquidating all left centers in the Negro field was the idea that the NAACP adequately covered the whole field of Negro freedom struggle—that any other movement would be a splitting movement, comparable to ‘dual-unionism.’” In reality, the CP’s abandonment of civil rights can more simply be attributed to the Soviet foreign policy of “peaceful coexistence,” whereby the USSR attempted to defuse Cold War hostilities by defanging the Communist movement in the United States. Those who refused to disassociate themselves from the NNLC were summarily expelled from the CP, including prominent Black Communists Nelson Peery and Bert Washington.

In 1956—formally detached from the CP, financially overburdened by the perpetual need to legally defend itself from HUAC, and unwilling to turn over its membership list to the federal government—the NNLC voted to dissolve. Coleman Young—who would later serve as the long-term, and first, Black mayor of Detroit—first came to prominence defending the organization at a HUAC hearing in 1952. Young served as the executive secretary of the NNLC during its brief but extraordinarily active existence.

Thompson, Mindy. “The National Negro Labor Council: A History.” American Institute for Marxist Studies, Occasional Paper No. 27. 1978.