National Negro Congress Research Articles

Rosa Rayside and Domestic Workers in the Fight against War and Fascism

This article explores connections between domestic worker activism and anti-fascism in the United States—two topics that historians have usually considered separately. Through the lens of Black domestic worker and organizer Rosa Rayside, we see the strong links between the two political movements. In 1934, after co-founding the New York Domestic Workers Union (DWU), Rayside attended the World Congress of Women against War and Fascism in Paris. That congress defined fascism broadly, around nationalism, racism, repression of radicals, denial of civil liberties, capitalist and imperialist greed and warmongering, and threats to women. Notably, the congress specifically identified challenging U.S. racism and defending labor rights for domestic workers as part of a global anti-fascist fight. Influenced by this congress, and by communist organizing in Harlem during the Great Depression, Rayside and the DWU drew on anti-fascism ideologically and organizationally in the years that followed. Rayside worked to include domestic workers in labor and social security legislation, testifying before U.S. Congress in 1935 and helping to form the anti-fascist National Negro Congress (NNC) in 1936. Although their immediate legislative achievements were limited, the strategies that Rayside and the DWU pioneered—collaborating with community and political organizations, spearheading legislation, and shaping understandings of Black women’s “triple oppression” based on race, class, and gender—were vital to the Black anti-fascist movement in the United States and shaped gains by domestic workers in later decades.

The Making and Breaking of a Popular Front: The Case of the National Negro Congress

Abstract Drawing together members of the American Communist Party and a variety of non-Communist progressives in the common cause of racial equality, labor rights, and antifascism, the National Negro Congress represented a visible example of the Popular Front (1935/1936 – 39) in action. This article explores how a Popular Front alliance came into being by tracing the events of 1935 that led Communists to eschew their prior sectarianism and non-Communists to recognize the value of collaboration with their now-former rivals. It also contends that contrary to what some recent scholarship argues, from the outset the Communist influence on the NNC's formation and operation was considerable — even decisive — and that after the signing of the 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact, the party's new antiwar stance and its numerical dominance at the NNC's third conference in 1940 led to the collapse of the Popular Front alliance. Understanding the rise and fall of the NNC as a progressive coalition requires a critical evaluation of the role of the Communist Party in the NNC's accomplishments and failures.

Editor's Introduction

Like Appalachian coal mining, the Northwest logging industry has not gone down without a fight. Again, somewhat akin to the politics of mineworking communities in West Virginia, the protagonists in ensuing bitter fights over jobs versus environmental protectionism have skewed traditional class alliances and threatened long-standing regional progressive traditions. As Steven Beda makes clear in his assessment of a still-smoldering controversy that upended ambitious cap-and-trade legislation to stem logging in 2020, environmental regulation combined with a more long-term sectoral economic decline have fueled a decidedly right-wing version of populism across the region since the early 1970s. In this thoughtful assessment of Oregon's internally conflicted Timber Unity rank and file—a movement based on marginal, independent timber contractor-producers and small sawmill operators who draw variously on old-Wobbly and antiregulatory rhetoric redirected at “elitist” protectors of the spotted owl and a recreation-oriented middle class—Beda discovers a microcosm of a larger rural shift away from radical working-class identities (see A. Brooke Boulton's accompanying Common Verse poem) toward the defensiveness of populist backlash.Francis Ryan tracks an important but little-noticed component of the post–World War II labor force: school crossing guards. Born of the Baby Boom expansion of school-age children combined with a population of mothers eager for rewarding part-time work, official, uniformed crossing guards—taking the place of otherwise overworked police officers—became a fixture at urban intersections beginning in the early 1950s. Although initially linked in the public mind to the “voluntary” sector associated with “PTA women” and others, Ryan convincingly connects them to a labor feminist tradition centered on an emergent public sector workforce. By the 1960s, the guards’ economic demands encompassed both benefits and wages, and their formalized associations began to affiliate with established unions like AFSCME and the SEIU. Not surprisingly, the urban fiscal crises of the 1970s also directly touched the interracial guard associations, who fought back against massive job cuts. Yet the real threat—and seeming denouement—to this once-classic urban occupation, suggests Ryan, came with a decline of collective, public protection of street corners by the guards, replaced by the hyper-individualized vigilance over children by their own parents.In the course of a larger biographical study of civil rights and labor icon, A. Philip Randolph, Eric Arnesen pauses here to zero in on Randolph's relation to what might be considered the ultimate expression of late 1930s Popular Front radicalism: the National Negro Congress. With a spirited assault on both racial and economic exploitation—critiquing the inadequacies of the New Deal, supporting interracial trade unionism, combating segregation , and opposing fascism—the NNC temporarily repaired a breach between Communist Party–linked militants led by Ben Davis Jr. and the heretofore vociferously anticommunist socialist, Randolph. Just how responsible (despite their public attempts to submerge their identity) was the party cadre for the NNC's direction and initial strategic success defines a sustained research quest. Against the “reassessment” of many recent historians in the service of a more broad-based, “grassroots” understanding of Popular Front initiatives like the NNC, Arnesen insists that the centrality of the party's role must be reckoned with.As is frequently the case, the books under review cover the labor map, touching down on a rich historical mix of geography and chronology. Subjects covered include at least three that our readers are not likely to have encountered before: turtle harvesters in the Caribbean, women working in the production of British cinema, and Mozambican migrants passing across the “night trains” to and from apartheid South Africa. Among generally positive and respectful treatment of their charges, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer tweaks Michael Kazin's history of Democratic Party successes for forgetting that given the flawed structure of American democracy, the party itself is “not enough to win and govern.” Similarly, Benjamin Goldfrank faults John French's otherwise “excellent” biography of Brazilian leader Lula for underplaying its hero's collaboration with a culture of “clientelism” that (at least temporarily) reversed his and his movement's fortunes. Less positive yet is Joseph Viteritti's treatment of Benjamin Holtzman's study of neoliberalism and New York City's fiscal crisis: curious readers will likely want to consult the original before making up their own minds.

Jenny Carson. A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice.

In A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice, Jenny Carson puts Black women laundry workers and union organizers at the center of US history. Both hand and “power” laundries saw their heydays in the United States from the 1910s to the 1950s, in the years before household washing machines became the norm. “Mini-hells,” power laundries were massive factories where women sorted through disgusting dirty laundry; lifted heavy, wet piles of clothing; ironed sheets, drapery, bedding, and other hard-to-handle items; then sorted it for delivery—all in hot, humid conditions for ten or more hours per day. Although the work was extremely difficult, Black women preferred it to domestic work. The anonymity provided by the factory setting—becoming “proletarianized,” in Joe Trotter’s terminology—was better than working under white women’s microscopes. Carson tells us that the 1930s proved the pinnacle of what was a cross-race union movement. Building on the grassroots efforts of the communist Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), the National Negro Congress under A. Philip Randolph’s leadership, and a burgeoning Left-leaning, Black-oriented labor network, Charlotte Adelmond, Dollie Robinson, Jessie Taft Smith, Beatrice Shapiro Lumpkin, and Noah Walter, among others, pushed the larger labor movement to recognize the connections between race and economic exploitation and to organize purposefully to combat them. In doing so, Carson corrects the narrative that the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) was “the driving force behind the unionization of New York City’s laundry workers” (6). This alone is an important contribution to the literature, but Carson’s detailed study explains how Black women worked with white men at the local and national levels; how they “pursued a civil rights agenda that included equal pay for equal work”; and how, despite its shortcomings, industrial unionism proved a better model than craft unionism for organizing laundry workers (7). By the end of the 1940s, the white men who led the ACWA opted for labor “stability,” as historians have argued about other Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions. Carson claims that that choice privileged white working-class men over the more radical organizing drives that were crucial to building cross-race alliances, bringing Black workers into the labor movement, and keeping the focus on the economic component of racism. By 1950, the very architects of those more radical, left-wing, race-focused drives, including Adelmond and other Black activists, were ousted from the ACWA.

Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America

Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America

Strange Fruit at the United Nations

The UN was founded, in 1945, to rid the world of the scourge of war but also to recognize and to vindicate the rights of every human in virtue of their humanity. At the time of the organization’s founding, “Jim Crow” -- a scheme designed to repress African Americans -- reigned throughout the American South. Jim Crow was especially characterized by the act of lynching, the extrajudicial killing, often, of African American males. Frequently the lynching was committed by hanging its subject from a tree. Some came to know the persons hanged from the tree as “strange fruit.” During the UN’s early years, the civil rights organizations the National Negro Congress, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Civil Rights Congress sought UN assistance in vindicating African Americans’ fundamental rights. But even during some of the worst days of Jim Crow, the UN was largely silent on matters expressly related to African Americans. In 1946, four African Americans were shot execution-style by Caucasian men after one of the African Americans alleged rape against one of the soon-to-be executioners. This event received substantial international attention. In 1955, Emmett Till. This 14-year-old boy was shot, mutilated and drowned, after reportedly whistling at a Caucasian woman. This case, too, was broadcast internationally. The world was well-aware of events in the United States regarding its largest racial minority. This article explores and evaluates the opportunities taken -- and not -- by each relevant UN organ to address Jim Crow practices, during the period 1945 to 1965. Part I, “the United Nations,” discusses the UN’s founding. It also explores the reasons for creating this body and how the Charter reflects the interests of powerful stakeholders. Additionally, it discusses the functions, powers and limitations of each of its principal organs. Part II, “the United States,” discusses African American history and the laws designed to circumscribe African American life. Part III, “Strange Fruit at the United Nations,” considers the efforts within some UN entities to combat racial segregation and discrimination. It also considers the avenues that the UN might have taken to specifically address Jim Crow. This section especially focuses on the opportunities posed by the International Court of Justice.

Grassroots Anti-Fascism: Ethiopia and the Transnational Origins of the National Negro Congress in Philadelphia, 1935–1936

As Fascism spread from Europe to the Kingdom of Abyssinia, a transnational solidarity movement emerged in Philadelphia's black community. For some, this movement ignited a new racial consciousness ...

Ralph Ellison as a Reader of Hegel: Ellison’s Invisible Man as Literary Phenomenology

Ralph Ellison as a Reader of Hegel:Ellison’s Invisible Man as Literary Phenomenology Jack Taylor (bio) Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when,and by the fact that, it so exists for another;that is, it exists only in being acknowledged [recognized]. ~Georg W. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you’re a part of all the sound and anguish and you strike out with your fists, and you curse and swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it’s seldom successful. ~The Invisible Man, Invisible Man There has been little scholarship connecting Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit despite biographical information that Hegel influenced Ellison. Lawrence Jackson acknowledges, for example, that Ellison wrote to Richard Wright in 1940 searching for Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind (229). John Wright argues that Ellison agrees with the Hegelian notions that “consciousness is all,” “human life is a move toward the rational,” and freedom is a byproduct of consciousness, not political projects in the name of abstract ideas (69). Arnold Rampersad discusses how Ellison viewed Bigger Thomas’s consciousness as an “indignant consciousness,” which is a clear appropriation of Hegelian thought (132).1 Rampersad further shows how Ellison in “A Congress Jim Crow Didn’t Attend,” a piece of propaganda written for New Masses, drew on Hegel when he wrote the delegates at the third convention of National Negro Congress possessed “a temper of militant indignation” (134). These insights into Ellison’s use of Hegel are without a doubt valuable. Such biographical facts highlight the need for a discussion of how Ellison utilized and critiqued aspects of Hegelian phenomenology in Invisible Man.2 Invisible Man is laden with philosophical references to Emerson, Kierkegaard, and Hegel at the very least.3 Thus, I argue Ellison’s Invisible Man can be read as a sustained and profound meditation on African American consciousness that draws on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. This article will explore how Invisible Man seeks to investigate black existence and consciousness as it is shaped by anti-black racism from a Hegelian perspective. I argue that the philosophical dimensions of Invisible Man can be read side-by-side Hegel, so [End Page 135] as to position Ellison as an author deeply engaged with understanding black consciousness from the philosophical perspective. To accomplish this task, I discuss Ellison’s Invisible Man as literary phenomenology that can be read through and at times against Hegel’s concept of recognition and his lordship and bondage scene by charting ruptures and movements in the Invisible Man’s consciousness throughout the course of the novel. Jesse Wolfe rightly argues in “‘Ambivalent Man’: Ellison’s Rejection of Communism” that Ellison appropriates the Hegelian and Marxist categories of “recognition” and “contradiction,” to construct his prologue (621). As Wolfe’s title indicates, however, his main concern is Ellison’s dismissal of communist ideology, not Hegelian thought itself, although he does draw out vital connections between Hegel, Marx, and Ellison which I am indebted to and build upon. In regards to Hegel’s concept of recognition, I argue Ellison’s Invisible Man characterizes black existence as a struggle for recognition. I will draw on Hegel’s concept of recognition and his staging of the master-slave scene to provide the backdrop necessary to (re)read Invisible Man as an investigation of African American consciousness. To advance these claims, I analyze the Invisible Man’s struggle for recognition with Mr. Norton, which I argue can be read as a restaging of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic with a difference and his unsuccessful attempt to gain recognition through violence at the outset of the narrative. The point is to emphasize that Invisible Man can be understood as nothing short of a genuine phenomenology of spirit moving according to four environments, which traces the Invisible Man’s trajectory from slavery, or a subservient consciousness, to freedom through his negation of his fear of death and acceptance of invisibility: the school, which is an allegory of the plantation south; New...

Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights

Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights

Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights

Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights

"WE MUST MARCH FORWARD!": JUANITA JACKSON AND THE ORIGINS OF THE NAACP YOUTH MOVEMENT

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, American youth joined and formed an expanding array of organizations tackling problems of widespread poverty and protesting racial bigotry at home and increasing militarism abroad. Propelled by the rise of fascist and racist tyranny in Italy, Germany, Japan, and other nations on the international scene, American youth organizations, including the American Student Union (ASU), the American Youth Congress (AYC), the National Council of Methodist Youth, the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC), the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), the Young Communist League, and the Young People's Socialist League, also sought to address the dismal state of Negro-white relations at home. A disparate group of young activists--socialists, communists, liberals, pacifists, Christians, and civil right advocates--linked their fight against white racist practices at home to the broader international fight against the spread of Nazism and fascism. (1) These young people longed for more egalitarian society at home and abroad, and it was in this spirit that youth within the NAACP was reborn and situated within the context of the 1930s youth movements. This essay examines Juanita Jackson's leadership in the formation of national youth movement within the NAACP between 1935 and 1938, focusing on the activism of the youth councils and college chapters. The activism of NAACP youth organizations has been discussed by several historians. In Along the Color Line: Explorations in the Black Experience, August Meier and Elliot Rudwick showed that the NAACP was not monolithic and did not use litigation as its only strategy to secure black civil rights. Meier and Rudwick maintained that the activism of NAACP youth groups in staging nationwide demonstrations against lynching, initiating early sit-in demonstrations, and protesting other forms of discrimination demonstrates that NAACP groups did employ direct action strategies in their fight for equal rights. In Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression, historian Robin D. G. Kelley reported that the NAACP was not active in Alabama in the late 1930s, and this lack of activism created political vacuum that was filled by the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC), founded as an outgrowth of the militant National Negro Congress, which provided an outlet for black youth activism in that state. (2) More recently, Rebeeca de Schweinitz in If We Could Change the World: Young People and America's Long Struggle for Racial Equality examined the NAACP youth in the late 1930s, and found that although reluctant to fully embrace direct action, the NAACP officially incorporated militant techniques into the program for young people. While de Schweinitz acknowledges that Juanita Jackson, the NAACP's first youth director, was a recent college graduate, former [NAACP] council member, and leader of Baltimore's direct action oriented City-Wide Young People's Forum, Jackson's role and activities in launching the NAACP's youth in the 1930s are missing from that account. (3) Jackson used her astute leadership abilities and personal charisma to create successful youth within the NAACP, in which direct action protests were common. During her tenure as youth director, the NAACP established youth councils and college chapters in 30 states and 128 cities throughout the United States. (4) Jackson's success in building vibrant youth within the NAACP can be attributed to her organizing and activist skills, rooted in legacy of nonviolent direct action activism well established in her family, the Baltimore community, and the African American protest tradition. MOBILIZING YOUTH FOR SOCIAL CHANGE In memorandum to the NAACP Board of Directors dated 2 February 1933, Walter White, executive secretary, bemoaned the lack of definite program and activities for the junior branches. …

The Limits of Black Activism

When the Philadelphia Tribune, the National Negro Congress, and other African American organizations launched a campaign for better housing in the mid-1930s, they displayed the hope many black Philadelphians had that public housing could improve their lives. That campaign, which succeeded in obtaining federal support for housing in Philadelphia, led to the construction of several projects, including the James Weldon Johnson and Richard Allen Homes. Many of the city’s African Americans regarded the new projects with great optimism. Over time, however, they learned that government officials, pressured by white Philadelphians, would not place “black” public housing in white neighborhoods, which meant the projects actually deepened segregation. Ironically, African Americans campaigned for, and won, housing projects that improved their lives in the short term but at the same time deepened their long-term problems. Paying attention to grassroots black politics, this article suggests, helps us understand how African Americans shaped their lives, but also argues that we must pay attention to the limits of their activism.

James Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love

James Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Pp. 336. Cloth $49.95. Most commentators agree that the shift rightward in U.S. politics began in the late 1960s, when Richard Nixon's silent majority reacted against radical antiwar protesters, militant Black Power advocates, and urban violence and abandoned the Democratic Party. Nixon's victory in the 1968 presidential election, and his resounding defeat of George McGovern in 1972, signaled a Republican takeover of national politics that remained virtually undisturbed for thirty years. During that time Republicans won seven of ten presidential elections, and conservatives shaped domestic social and political issues from abortion rights and affirmative action to law and order policies. Why this shift from the New Deal liberal consensus to conservatism occurred has become a subject of growing interest for social and political historians. In 1996 Thomas Sugrue's The Origins of the Urban Crisis challenged the liberal consensus paradigm for the postwar period with a close examination of how Detroit's simmering politics of race constantly undermined and threatened to destroy the Democrats' tenuous interracial alliances. If Sugrue's thesis was borne out by research in other northern cities, then historians would have to confront the possibility that a liberal consensus was, in the words of historian Gary Gerstle, never anything more than a comforting mirage. James Wolfinger's engrossing social history of early 20th-century Philadelphia politics confirms of Sugrue's claims. Philadelphia's Irish, Italian, Jewish, and African American populations are the book's main characters; but much of the book's drama centers on the conflicts and tensions that surrounded African Americans' increasing political clout in the new, New Deal-inspired Democratic Party, which increased African Americans' demands for increased access to housing and jobs. Wolfinger's study revamps the picture of liberalism transcendent and challenges conceptions of the state as a vehicle for positive social change. Adherents to the Congress of Industrial Organization's interracial industrial unionism, leftists who embraced the Communist Party's ethos of workers' interracial solidarity, black activists in the National Negro Congress and the NAACP, and progressive whites from various Jewish and Christian (including Quaker) groups did indeed champion an egalitarian approach to politics and democratic principles. But this occurred for only a brief moment such as during the fabled New Deal coalition that peaked with the presidential election of 1936, or in rare instances when black political assertions did not interfere with whites' lives, such as when African Americans advocated for federal funds to build public housing in predominantly black neighborhoods. Wolfinger argues that ordinary whites in the urban North imposed fundamental limitations on liberalism from below, and rather than being part of a liberal consensus that was later spoiled by events of the late 1960s, many white working-class Democrats made it clear from the start that certain liberal policies were off-limits. Organized into three sections, Philadelphia Divided chronicles how white racism frayed the seams of the Democrats' tenuously woven interracial alliances and the ways in which Republicans capitalized on racism's power to divide working-class whites and African Americans. …

Civil Rights and Human Rights

In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to the African American struggle for equality and the international arena.1 Racial violence in America and de jure segregation and disfranchisement in the South, discriminatory treatment of nonwhite diplomats from newly independent countries, and the need to counter Soviet propaganda about American racism as the two superpowers competed during the Cold War for the allegiance of emerging nations exerted pressure on American presidents to address domestic civil rights. In the late 1940s and the early 1950s, the National Negro Congress (NNC), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) petitioned the United Nations (UN) on behalf of African Americans. International concerns encouraged the Truman administration to file supportive briefs in civil rights cases and establish the President's Committee on Civil Rights (PCCR). Scholars have also noted that foreign policy concerns led the federal government to utilize public relations exercises to challenge claims about American racism. Furthermore, the domestic Red Scare that gathered force in the late 1940s and early 1950s tarred any criticism of American inequalities with the brush of Communism, and anti-Communist attacks and investigations decimated the American left. Civil rights opponents, including the FBI, redbaited, investigated, and harassed civil rights organizations, destroying the CRC and encouraging the NAACP to adopt a strict anti-Communist policy. As Mary L. Dudziak explains: The narrow boundaries of Cold Warera civil rights politics kept discussions of broad-based social change, or a linking of race and class, off the agenda.2 In Eyes Off the Prize, Carol Anderson examines the attempts of American civil rights organizations to take their grievances before the UN and the failure of their efforts. She argues that the black left was too enamored with the Communist Party, U.S.A. and placed the party's interests before those of

Ralph Bunche and the Responsibilities of the Public Intellectual

Drawing from the authoritative sources on Bunche's early years in the academy, his personal papers, and his publications from the 1930s, this essay discusses Bunche's political philosophies and how they were informed by the social realities of the world in which he and other Black scholars lived. This essay urges readers to look beyond his important work in the second half of his career to his earlier years when he repeatedly challenged public and private orthodoxies in service of a larger ideal of a broad and universal humanity. Bunche is remembered as one who frowned on confrontation. Internationally famous for his activities as a peace-broker for the Middle East, Bunche has gone down in history as a natural mediator-one who held his opinions closely and was skilled at political neutrality. Indeed, over the last 30 years of his life, as the modern civil rights movement emerged and then matured, an increasing number of activists thought Bunche was far too adept at avoiding political turmoil. In 1941, his colleague at Howard University, Arthur P. Davis, had only disparaging words for Bunche. Making reference to the hair coverings that allowed one to distinguish the field slaves from those in the plantation house, Davis observed, There [are] bandana-handkerchief-headed Negroes, and silk-handkerchief-headed Negroes, but is a cellophane-handkerchief-headed Negro-you have to get off at a certain angle to see him (Logan diary quoted in Janken, 1993, p. 207). W.E.B. DuBois chimed in as well, confiding to Howard University historian Rayford Logan that Ralph Bunche is getting to be a folks' 'nigger' (p. 206). During the late 1960s, Bunche's do-good image frustrated such young Black radicals as Stokely Carmichael, who, when having Bunche's success offered as an example of civil rights progress, responded, You can't have Bunche for lunch! Other progressive Black leaders held similar views; Adam clayton Powell and Malcolm X dismissed Bunche as an international Uncle Tom (cited in Rivlin, 1990, p. 23). Standing in stark contrast to the image of Bunche as the embodiment of the political establishment and a polished conciliator is the reality of a young intellectual who deplored capitalism on moral grounds and who openly questioned the status quo while urging others to do the same. Consider the fact that DuBois, who, by 1941, thought Bunche a white folks' nigger, believed eight years earlier that Bunche was part of the vanguard of young, progressive Black American intellectuals. DuBois's belief in Bunche's vanguardism grew from the fact that for the better part of the 1930s Bunche urged everyone he could-from interracial betterment organizations to graduate students at Princeton to the federal government-to address the needs of the working class before all else. He organized pickets of the Department of Justice, defended Howard University student protests at the United States Capitol, led a boycott against the segregation policy of Washington's National Theater, and helped organize the National Negro Congress (NNC; Holloway, 2002). During these years, he remained fiercely antiracialist, always trying to change the debate over the race problem in the United States into one that revolved around class. Through it all, Bunche never hesitated to criticize intellectuals and other respectable types who refused their moral obligations and tried to remain above the fray. By looking back over his 1930s work, we can discern several issues about which Bunche never wavered. He did not relent in his desire to eliminate what he termed racialism and racialist thought; he remained a devout believer in the important role unfettered intellectuals and universities had to play in the modern world; and he maintained an abiding faith in the promise of American democracy. In fact, if one can find any change in his opinions on these matters, it would only be the increased intensity of his feelings. …

SYMPOSIUM: AFRICAN AMERICANS AND U.S. FOREIGN RELATIONS From Hope to Disillusion: African Americans, the United Nations, and the Struggle for Human Rights, 1944?1947

“So much suffering, such fleeting hope” is how Melvyn P. Leffler summarized the Second World War. For African Americans that hope was best captured in a Pittsburgh Courier editorial. “What an opportunity the crisis has been,” the editorial declared, “for one to persuade, embarrass, compel and shame our government and our nation … into a more enlightened attitude toward a tenth of its people.” The “crisis” had already led to the Atlantic Charter, the Nazi defeat, India's inevitable independence, and plans to create a United Nations. African American leaders now worked diligently to ensure that the “crisis” would also lead to black equality. Yet, as the U.S. government bowed down before the doctrine of states' rights and consistently pointed to its powerlessness to destroy Jim Crow, African Americans, through their organizations, took their struggle for equality into the international arena.1 These organizations, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the leftist Council on African Affairs (CAA), and the Communist-dominated National Negro Congress (NNC), sought to address more than “domestic” issues, such as lynching, peonage, Jim Crow, and discrimination. Recognizing that African Americans were suffering not only as Negroes in the United States but as coloreds in a white-dominated world, the organizations also sought a comprehensive solution to centuries of worldwide oppression. If human rights were denied abroad, they believed, civil rights could not exist at home. As long as Africans were subjected to white colonialism, African Americans stood little chance of overcoming white supremacy. This realization led the NNC to boldly declare the dawning of a “new day” in which the future of blacks and the future of the “peoples of the world” were “inextricably linked.”2 In short, the struggles for human and civil rights were interwoven, and African Americans were determined to bring about human rights and decolonization in the postwar world.

The National Negro Congress: A Reassessment

The National Negro Congress: A Reassessment