whites’ visceral prejudices through proper conduct, the league developed programs intended to acculturate migrants and impoverished blacks. The NUL and its locals likewise encouraged employers and landlords to provide deserving blacks access to decent jobs and housing. The group’s emphasis on self-help has led some scholars to cast the league’s philosophy in the conservative light of Booker T. Washington. Though the NUL was firmly imbedded in the conservative wing of the civil rights movement, the group’s approach owed more to the bourgeois liberalism of the famed Chicago School of Sociology than the Wizard of Tuskegee. Chicago sociology ultimately equipped Urban Leaguers with powerful intellectual tools to counter eugenicists’ claims of black racial (inherent biological) inferiority. Still, Chicago School race-relations models such as social disorganization/reorganization and ethnic cycle often led Urban Leaguers to emphasize the needs of middle-class blacks, as these individuals already possessed the cultural and intellectual attributes necessary to demonstrate the race’s capacity for assimilation. The NUL’s identification of respectable behavior as key to black integration likewise led it to occasionally assist employers and landlords in weeding out undesirable workers and tenants.27
While the Urban League’s work during the 1930s continued to reflect a preoccupation with the interests of middle-class African Americans, New Deal industrial democracy would inspire the social work organization to take an activist turn. The league first began to mobilize black workers in 1933 through its Emergency Advisory Councils (EAC). The EACs set out to combat discrimination in recovery programs both by lobbying officials in the National Recovery Administration (NRA) and other New Deal agencies and by encouraging black workers to demand their fair share of relief. Blending petition and interest group politics, local EACs achieved some success in breaking down barriers to relief programs in Chicago and other cities.28
The NUL’s efforts to mobilize black workers took a more militant direction in 1934 with the creation of the Workers’ Councils (WC). The brainchild of T. Arnold Hill, longtime director of the Urban League’s Department of Industrial Relations, the Workers’ Councils identified collective agitation, rather than personal responsibility, as the surest route to black economic equality. Workers’ Councils thus educated blacks about the implications of federal recovery efforts and labor law. WCs likewise mobilized grassroots protest campaigns, such as the 1936 campaign demanding an antidiscrimination amendment to the Wagner Act. Finally, the Workers’ Councils encouraged African Americans to join in common cause with white workers in labor unions. After centralizing operations in the Workers’ Bureau (WB), headed by Lester Granger, the WC spread like wildfire. At the conclusion of four years of operation, the WB established seventy Workers’ Councils in twenty-one states representing tens of thousands of black workers.29
The bureau’s calls for increased black participation in the union movement required the group to work directly with organized labor. The WB continued the NUL’s longstanding efforts to encourage the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to open its ranks to African Americans.30 Though the AFL ignored the WB’s calls for racial fair play, the Urban League would find an important ally in the fledgling CIO. Founded in 1935 by United Mine Workers’ president John L. Lewis, the CIO focused principally on unskilled and semiskilled laborers, who comprised the core of the nation’s industrial workforce. Since most African American workers were unskilled, the democratic potential of the CIO’s industrial focus was clear to the WB’s Granger from the outset.
The comparative racial liberalism that characterized the CIO’s organizing drives in the steel industry between 1936 and 1943 would affirm the Urban League’s commitment to the industrial union. The NUL’s Workers’ Bureau thus not only encouraged African Americans to affiliate with CIO locals, but in 1938 the NUL would dissolve the Workers’ Councils, turning over their work in support of black unionization to the CIO.31
The same year the NUL discontinued its Workers’ Councils, Granger delivered an address to the NAACP’s Youth Council that left little doubt as to the class perspective that informed the WB’s work. Granger’s “Challenge to the Youth” proceeded from the view that poverty and unemployment were the chief challenges confronting African Americans in the 1930s. After criticizing his own “New Negro” generation for naively presuming that individuals—in the form of respectability politics, self-help or entrepreneurialism—could successfully challenge Jim Crow and uplift the race, Granger lauded New Deal–era black youth for correctly identifying interracial workers’ alliances as the key to racial equality. As Granger put it, young African Americans of the late 1930s not only understood that they must fight for “the man at the bottom,” because anyone could find themselves there in modern times, but they had come to embrace the political necessity of (economic) alliances with whites. “Slowly and painfully young people are learning the Negro’s fight for freedom is not a fight of the Negro for Negro freedom,” Granger asserted, “but that the Negro’s fight is only a small part of a nation-wide struggle—not of ten or twelve million Negroes, but of fifty-five millions of Negroes and whites, the majority of the population of this country.”32
The fact that the Urban League developed a formal commitment to unionism several years before the more militant NAACP highlights the complex relationship between external political pressures and institutional prerogatives. The NUL—despite its comparative conservatism—was better positioned institutionally and, in some ways, philosophically to shift with the labor sensibilities of the era. Though funding constraints—the group’s reliance on corporate benefactors—had prevented the league from adopting a formal union program prior to the New Deal, NUL officials such as T. Arnold Hill had advocated a labor platform since the mid-1920s. In the NUL’s first two decades of operation, Urban Leaguers contended that union affiliation offered African Americans two advantages. First, unionization held the potential to enhance blacks’ wages. Second, drawing from Chicago School race-relations theory, many League officials, such as Charles S. Johnson, believed that shared workplace experiences held the potential to elevate black-white relations by humanizing members of each race, thereby dispelling racial stereotypes.33 These were, of course, among the rationales behind the league’s embrace of labor militancy during the New Deal. The liberal ideology informing the Urban League’s cautious, if not conservative, uplift strategy during the era of the Great Migration served, ironically perhaps, as the foundation on which the NUL’s labor militancy would rest during the 1930s.
Though many scholars and civil rights activists shared the WCs’ identification of interracial unionism as a vehicle for black equality, the National Negro Congress (NNC) was perhaps the clearest institutional expression of the labor orientation of New Deal civil rights politics. Operating from 1936 to 1947, the NNC was the brainchild of John P. Davis. Davis—a graduate of Bates College and Harvard University—had begun his activist career in 1933, when he and a young Robert C. Weaver formed the Joint Committee on National Recovery (JCNR). Davis and Weaver conceived the JCNR as a civil rights lobbying group. The two men thus not only investigated violations of black civil rights in the South but drew attention to the racial limits of New Deal liberalism. In 1935, the JCNR testified before Congress on racial discrimination in NRA wage codes, the implications of the exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers from the then-pending Social Security Act and the Roosevelt administration’s reluctance to press for anti-lynching and anti-poll tax legislation.34
Aware that effective interest group politics required mobilized constituencies, Davis called upon civil rights organizations to establish the National Negro Congress in 1935. The NNC was formed shortly thereafter, holding its first convention in February 1936. Davis, who maintained ties to both New Deal reformers and the Communist Party, modeled the National Negro Congress on the CP’s Popular Front. He thus conceived of the NNC as an umbrella organization representing a broad cross section of labor activists, civil rights leaders, intellectuals and artists. This approach proved effective at the outset: the NNC’s 1936 convention garnered affirmative responses from 750 delegates from twenty-eight states. Notable convention participants included political scientist Ralph Bunche—a key NNC organizer—philosopher Alain Locke, the NUL’s Lester Granger and Elmer Carter, the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins and the BSCP’s A. Philip Randolph.35
