Grocery Co. as a labor dispute, it legitimated such protests and set the stage for an expansion of employment boycotts.
There is little doubt that activists involved in “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” defined their grievances as labor disputes partly for opportunistic reasons. As activist and legal scholar Pauli Murray said about New Negro Alliance in 1945, the highest court in the nation “raised a shield to protect the activities of minority groups in those controversies arising out of racial or religious discrimination in matters of employment, by defining those activities as labor disputes and entitled to their immunities under the Norris–LaGuardia Act.”18 So, since Norris–La Guardia and the Wagner Act identified strikes rather than civil rights protests as protected speech, African American activists had few options but to define boycott groups as unions—even if they represented prospective rather than current employees. Still, the legitimacy conferred to organized labor by New Deal labor law sparked a transformation in black politics that extended well beyond mere convenience. African Americans of the 1930s and 1940s came to see race discrimination as an outgrowth of class inequality.19 Thus, by the early 1930s mainstream civil rights organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and NUL began to emphasize the broader advance of the American working class as key to black uplift.
Founded a year after the 1908 Springfield, Illinois, race riot, the NAACP’s mission proceeded from the view that “the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the color line.” The association’s direct challenges to disenfranchisement and de jure segregation resonated with African Americans of the 1910s and 1920s, many of whom had acquired greater political and economic liberties via the Great Migration.20 By the 1930s, however, the NAACP’s narrow integrationist agenda appeared to be out of touch. Though African Americans remained steadfastly opposed to disfranchisement and segregation, poverty and unemployment were the dominant issues shaping black political consciousness during the Great Depression. As a result, the NAACP witnessed a decline in interest and membership.
Hoping to revitalize the flagging civil rights group, NAACP president Joel Spingarn organized the Second Amenia Conference for spring 1933. Spingarn tasked thirty-three participants with reinterpreting the problems confronting blacks “within the larger issues facing the nation.” While the conference was not without dissenters, the activists, academics and civic leaders in attendance ultimately identified interracial working-class alliances as pivotal to racial progress. The Conference proposed no specific course of action; however, one year later, the association set out to craft a prescription via the Committee on the Future Plan and Program of the NAACP.
Headed by black economist Abram L. Harris, the committee encouraged the NAACP to transform itself into a center for workers’ education and agitation. Harris thus urged the association to develop courses intended to assist blacks in making sense of their place in industry while simultaneously promoting interracial solidarity. He also called upon the civil rights group to educate workers about unionization and the importance of political participation. Finally, Harris suggested that the NAACP grant more authority to local chapters, allowing locals to circumvent the board of directors and national office so that they might pursue more aggressive agendas.21
Institutional concerns precluded pursuit of the goals and prescriptions advised by the Amenia Conference and Harris Report respectively. Executive secretary Walter White asserted that the financial crisis made implementation of the Harris Report infeasible. The aims of the Harris Report likewise bumped up against the sensibilities of influential benefactors such as Julius Rosenwald, who were unnerved by the growing economic militancy among African Americans.22 Thus, while Walter White hoped to reinvigorate the association by connecting with the masses, the NAACP did not institutionalize the kind of class agenda called for by Amenia and the Harris Report until the late 1930s. Instead, the association would attempt to enhance its viability in the mid-1930s through a vigorous anti-lynching campaign.
By the end of the decade, a number of political and economic developments would lead the NAACP to reconsider the value of a labor agenda. First, the association’s anti-lynching campaign failed to generate the mass appeal that White had hoped for. Indeed, the NAACP faced stiff competition from civil rights organizations such as the fledgling National Negro Congress (NNC), and, for a time, even the NUL stressed a labor approach to black uplift. Second, the association’s narrow focus on barriers to blacks’ social and political equality had even begun to undercut the civil rights organization’s attractiveness to philanthropists. According to Beth Bates, the labor-friendly Garland Fund’s rejection of the NAACP’s application for a $10,000 grant in 1937 made White and associates alive to the charge that the group’s historic focus looked past the pressing issues of the day.23 Third, the rise of the CIO, with its comparatively progressive racial politics, not only opened the ranks of organized labor to tens of thousands of black Americans but also created new sources of funding. Thus, by the late 1930s, contributions from black unionists and the CIO itself had begun to offset declining philanthropic support for the NAACP.
All of this—along with Joel Spingarn’s death in 1939—cleared the way for the NAACP to develop a coherent labor agenda. Walter White made the NAACP’s commitment to organized labor plain in 1941 when he announced the civil rights group’s support for the United Auto Workers (UAW) strike at Ford’s River Rouge facility. White ultimately called upon the plant’s 9,000 black employees to join in common cause with white workers in pursuit of economic justice. In extending his support to the UAW, White strengthened the NAACP’s relationship with organized labor, enabling the association to create the institutional ties required for a labor-oriented civil rights program.
The NAACP’s commitment to black unionism only intensified during World War II, aided by the creation of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund (LDF) in 1939.24 Functioning as the NAACP’s separate litigation arm, the LDF equipped the civil rights group to pursue the kind of aggressive legal strategy first proposed in 1934 by Howard University law professor Charles Hamilton Houston, the NAACP’s first fulltime lawyer. Under the leadership of Thurgood Marshall—who had partnered with Houston in 1936—the LDF embarked on an incremental legal strategy intended to establish precedents challenging race discrimination. Identifying employment discrimination as the single most important issue facing African Americans, Marshall and the LDF would litigate a number of significant workplace discrimination cases during World War II. The LDF struck major blows against discriminatory labor unions via Steele v. Louisville & NR Co. (1944), Tunstall v. Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen (1944), and James v. Marinship (1944); in these cases, the NAACP argued that unions were state actors—pointing to protections afforded by the Railway Labor Act and the Wagner Act—and were thereby prohibited from denying equal protection to blacks by the Fourteenth Amendment. Though the high court rejected the more expansive definition of state actors sought by the NAACP, it did rule that the government had a compelling public interest to bar racial discrimination in unions.25
The association’s emphasis on equal protection in the workplace was by no means a complete departure from its historic mission. As historian Risa Goluboff contends, the NAACP simply added labor to a legal agenda, centered on the Fourteenth Amendment, that already included education, transportation, housing and voting. Goluboff laments that the NAACP’s emphasis on racial discrimination rather than “inequality, personal insecurity or other manifestations of racial and economic ‘injustice’” reflected the continued sway of middle-class sensibilities over the group’s work.26 Still, whatever its limitations, the addition of labor to the NAACP’s program reflected the leftward drift of black civil rights of the 1930s and 1940s and the related transition from clientage politics to protest activism.
The National Urban League’s program in the 1930s also bore the imprint of the growing labor militancy shaping New Deal–era black politics. Founded in 1910, just a year after the NAACP, by black sociologist George Edmund Haynes, the NUL was established partly to ease rural black migrants’ transition to industrial cities by addressing the material and cultural barriers to black integration. In contrast to
