of the NNC’s civil rights agenda. The NNC’s faith in the civil rights potential of interracial working-class solidarity was, in part, a reflection of the racial liberalism taking root in the American union movement. Like the Workers’ Councils, the National Negro Congress enthusiastically supported the CIO. Indeed, shortly after the NNC’s first convention, John P. Davis, working directly with the CIO’s John L. Lewis, placed three black organizers from the NNC’s fold with the Steel Workers’ Organizing Committee (SWOC). These individuals—Henry Johnson, Leonidas McDonald, Eleanor Rye—worked tirelessly to recruit blacks in SWOC’s 1936 and 1937 organizing drives in mills from Chicago, Illinois, to Gary, Indiana. NNC members would likewise assist the Packinghouse Workers’ Organizing Committee (PWOC) and the Tobacco Stemmers and Laborers’ Union (TSLU) in their organizing drives in Chicago and Virginia respectively.36
The National Negro Congress’s labor approach to African American civil rights likewise reflected the politics of the NNC’s leadership and members. Labor unionists and leftists —Communist Party members in particular—comprised the bulk of the National Negro Congress’s membership. Though left activists were generally committed to redressing both race and class inequality, leftists and labor-liberals of the era typically perceived racism as an outgrowth of class exploitation. As A. Philip Randolph, who served as NNC president from 1936 to 1940, asserted: “no black worker can be free so long as the white worker is a slave and by the same token, no white worker is certain of security while his black brother is bound.”37 Like the JCNR that spawned it, the National Negro Congress not only fought for racial parity in the administration of New Deal programs, but it also railed against Jim Crow. Moreover, the NNC’s labor activities, particularly in the South, required the group to challenge racialist sensibilities among both black and white rank-and-file unionists as well regional social conventions. Such efforts notwithstanding, the NNC’s left orientation led the group to emphasize economic over social equality, as its leadership generally presumed that racism could only be eliminated by elevating the American working class irrespective of race.
The Communist Party’s significance to the National Negro Congress ensured that the NNC’s most important years spanned from 1936 through 1939—the era of the Popular Front. In this period, the group not only mobilized African Americans and whites to demand economic and racial equality but also organized rallies against European fascism. With the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Soviet-German nonaggression pact in August 1939, however, the NNC’s fortunes waned. The NNC’s Communist Party members closed ranks, appearing to repudiate the antifascist politics they had embraced to that point. Dismayed by what they perceived to be the CP’s unprincipled conversion, most non-Communist members bolted from the National Negro Congress. By April 1940, Randolph had resigned from the group, citing his concerns that the NNC had become a front for the CP, an organization Randolph, a Socialist Party member, had long considered suspect.38
Though the NNC operated until 1947—when it finally succumbed to postwar anticommunism—the group never recovered from the political infighting that prompted Randolph’s departure. Despite the NNC’s short history, however, many scholars contend that it left an enduring legacy. Historian Thomas J. Sugrue asserts that the NNC’s antifascist campaigns established the blueprint for the kind of internationalism that would shape Cold War civil rights. The NNC’s success also, as historian Beth Bates has noted, pushed mainstream civil rights organizations such as the NAACP to the left. Some have likewise suggested then that the NNC set the stage for a more activist civil rights movement, as local chapters in cities such as Chicago and New York skillfully mobilized African Americans in grassroots campaigns.
While there is little doubt that the National Negro Congress’s left-wing politics distinguished it from the liberal middle-class NAACP and NUL, it is not clear that the NNC ushered in a new era in black activism. As mentioned, the NAACP had begun to consider a labor platform as early as 1933. More importantly, the labor program initiated by the NUL’s Workers’ Councils in 1934 overlapped the agenda begun by the NNC in 1936. Instead of transforming black politics, then, the NNC’s popularity is illustrative of the wide appeal of labor activism among African Americans during the 1930s and 1940s. The NNC may therefore represent the apotheosis of the industrial democratic slant of New Deal era civil rights activism.
Black Labor Activism and Antidiscrimination Policy
By the early 1940s, the left liberalism that had shaped New Deal—era civil rights activism had culminated in a national political campaign—A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement (MOWM). Several months after his resignation from the NNC, Randolph would use the protest tactics he had honed as a labor and civil rights activist to pressure President Roosevelt to redress pervasive workplace discrimination. By late 1940, the economic recovery precipitated by World War II had put a significant dent in white unemployment. African American unemployment, however, remained virtually unchanged. Racist hiring practices were largely to blame for the widening gulf between black and white workers. Indeed, a US Employment Services survey of defense contractors found that more than 50 percent of respondents refused to hire African Americans under any circumstances.39
In fall 1940, Randolph, NAACP executive secretary Walter White and NUL’s acting executive secretary, T. Arnold Hill, met with President Roosevelt to discuss the economic crisis afflicting black Americans. Randolph would make four demands of Roosevelt. He called upon Roosevelt to bar discrimination on the part of defense contractors, federal agencies and labor unions. He also demanded that the president desegregate the armed forces. Randolph ultimately threatened to march as many as 100,000 African Americans on Washington, DC, if he did not receive a satisfactory response. Concerned that the proposed march might incite a race riot on the eve of war, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 in June of 1941, barring discrimination in federal agencies and in defense employment. The Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), EO8802’s centerpiece, served as a compliance board.40
Randolph’s victory cannot be attributed to the efforts of one man alone. Indeed, Randolph’s proposed march functioned as a meaningful threat only because he and the BSCP leadership had created networks of organizers and sympathizers via the porters’ union and the NNC. The political infrastructure established by the BSCP enabled Randolph to turn a simple threat into a movement. Though Randolph called off the march shortly after Roosevelt issued EO8802, he maintained the MOWM through late 1943 both to adopt a posture of vigilance vis-à-vis Roosevelt and to stave off African American critics who believed Randolph had not gone far enough.41 The MOWM’s popularity faded in 1943, as middle-class black leaders withdrew their already qualified support following the Detroit race riot. The MOWM had nonetheless achieved all that it could by this point.
Black unemployment declined between 1942 and 1945; however, the FEPC’s contribution to this trend is unclear. Though EO8802 provided the nation’s courts—in cases such as James v. Marinship—a wedge with which to open employment to blacks and other racial/ethnic groups, the FEPC lacked the power to enforce its own antidiscrimination guidelines. Indeed, the committee’s efficacy hinged on employers’ and unions’ susceptibility to shame, as it relied principally on moral suasion and education to discourage workplace discrimination.
The FEPC was further hampered by President Roosevelt’s questionable commitment to its work, particularly during the FEPC’s first incarnation from 1941 to early 1943. Indeed, President Roosevelt greatly weakened the FEPC in 1942, when he transferred control over the committee from the Office of Price Management to the War Manpower Commission headed by Paul McNutt, an antagonist to the FEPC. In response to pressure from Randolph and other activists, President Roosevelt reorganized the FEPC again, in 1943, this time strengthening it, via Executive Order 9346.42 In light of the constraints on the FEPC’s work, the increases in black gainful employment over the course of World War II may have had more to do with wartime labor shortages than antidiscrimination policy. Still, as historian Paula Pfeffer argues, the FEPC and the threat of the march on Washington that spawned it would have a significant impact on the scope of black protest politics
