A00005 - The American Negro Labor Congress

Marching to the tune of "John Brown's Body", and jazz tunes, 300 tenants and scores of children marched in the streets of Harlem to protest the expiration of rent control laws. The parade of marchers was led by the Harlem Tenants' League, the Council of Working Class Women, the American Negro Labor Congress, and groups from the Communist Party.

The American Negro Labor Congress was established in 1925 by the Communist Party as a vehicle for advancing the rights of African-Americans, propagandizing for communism within the black community and recruiting African-American members for the party.

The organization attacked the segregationist practices of many of the unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. It also campaigned against lynching, the disfranchisement of black Americans, and Jim Crow laws. The group was renamed theLeague of Struggle for Negro Rights in 1930.

The first mass organization of the American Communist Party dedicated to advancing issues of importance to American blacks and building a party presence within the black community was the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB). The ABB was established independently of the nascent Communist movement but had been formally brought under party auspices as a byproduct of its need for funding. In 1923, the tiny New York City-based organization was formally integrated into the structure of the Workers Party of America, as the party was then known. The group's handful of activists had proven insufficient to maintain critical mass, however, and by 1924 the ABB had been virtually dissolved.

American Communists had been ineffectual in its efforts to build a significant mass organization among American blacks during the first half decade of the movement's existence and the Communist International prodded the Workers Party to begin a new initiative to establish a group able to mobilize black workers. The result of this push was the establishment of a new organization called the American Negro Labor Congress.

According to historian Maria Gertrudis van Enckevort, archival evidence indicates that the idea for the new mass organization directed to American blacks came from Lovett Fort-Whiteman, a national organizer for the ABB who had been sent to Moscow by the summer of 1924 for ideological and technical training. Fort-Whiteman complained in an October 1924 letter to head of the Comintern Gregory Zinoviev about the lack of work being conducted by the American Communist and repeated a call to act on a plan he had submitted to the Far Eastern Section of the Comintern seeking convocation of an "American Negro Labor Congress."

This idea found support among Comintern decision-makers and in December 1924 a communication was passed on to the Workers Party of America, the then current name of the Communist Party, stating "it has been proposed to call an American Negro Labour Congress at Chicago, to be held sometime during the summer" and seeking the American party's advice.

The call for the American Negro Labor Congress is believed to have been issued late in the spring of 1925 with the proposal emanating from the Workers (Communist) Party. Although the convention call vaguely established "some time in the summer" for the time of the gathering, in actuality the founding convention did not take place in Chicago until October 25, 1925.

The man most directly responsible for the idea of the new group, Lovett Fort-Whiteman was named its national organizer. Fort-Whiteman had been a delegate to the 5th World Congress of the Comintern in 1924 and the recipient of a crash course in party organization at the International Lenin School in Moscow and was regarded as one of the party's leading black cadres.

American-born and educated at the Tuskegee Institute, the veteran former member of the Socialist Party of America Fort-Whiteman had been selected to lead the new group over other top black Communists, including Cyril Briggs, Richard B. Moore, and Otto Huiswoud. Fort-Whiteman was a close friend of Robert Minor, a staunch loyalist to the party faction headed by C.E. Ruthenberg, John Pepper, and Jay Lovestone which controlled the American Communist movement during the second half of the 1920s.

Fort-Whiteman, who sometimes wrote under the pseudonym "James Jackson," was the advocate of the idea of convening an "American-Negro Labor Congress" at Chicago to bring together black workers from around the country and had written to Moscow in an attempt to win support for the idea from the Far-Eastern Section of the Comintern. Fort-Whiteman sought "to approach the negro on his own mental grounds" by concentrating activity on fighting racism in American society, the prevalence of which Fort-Whiteman believed dulled black Americans' sense of class consciousness and immunized them to calls for class struggle.

The call for the founding convention consequently touched upon not only matters of importance to labor in general but also spoke to specifically racial interests such as the "abolition of Jim Crowism," an end to electoral restrictions disfranchising blacks, enforcement of "the right of the Negro to equal accommodations with whites in all theaters, restaurants, hotels, etc.," an end to discrimination in education, and Congressional action to make lynching a federal crime.

The founding convention of the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC) opened on the evening of Sunday, October 25, 1925, with a mass meeting which heard the reports of national organizer Fort-Whitman and national secretary H.V. Williams. Fort-Whitman's keynote speech declared that the new organization was established "to gather, to mobilize, and to coordinate into a fighting machine the most enlightened and militant and class-conscious workers of the race" in support of concrete objectives.

Approximately 40 delegates attended the founding congress of the ANLC, which was organized around the slogan "Organization is the first step to freedom." Delegate Otto Huiswood, a prominent black Communist party activist from New York, emphasized the need to bring black workers into the trade unions of the American Federation of Labor, declaring that if the established unions could not be racially integrated, it would fall to black workers to establish parallel unions of their own.

The October 1925 founding convention passed resolutions demanding "the full equality of the Negro people in the social system of the United States, and everywhere." An end to Jim Crow laws, segregation, electoral discrimination, and discrimination in public education was demanded and discrimination in housing and public accommodation duly noted as part of a demand for "full social equality for the Negro people". The Ku Klux Klan was condemned and the exclusion of black jurors from the juries picked for the trials of black defendants was sharply criticized, as was continued segregation in the United States military.

The officialdom of the American Federation of Labor was hostile to the new ANLC, with AFL President William Green cautioning black unionists that they were "being led into a trap." Green charged that the Communists were attempting to foster "race hatred into the lives" of African-Americans and to trick blacks into believing that the revolutionary overthrow of the American government and its replacement with a Soviet republic was the sole solution to their social ills.

Green's attitude drew return fire from the ANLC, which called the AFL chief's position "clearly erroneous, harmful, and prejudicial to the best interests of the American labor movement."

Despite such protestations, the mainstream press of America echoed Green's hostile sentiments, with the Chicago Tribune accusing the Communists of attempting to "stir up race hatred and disorder" and the Philadelphia Record belittling the entire idea that American blacks could be "bolshevized" as "ridiculously childish."

The official organ of the American Negro Labor Congress was a newspaper called The Negro Champion, published in New York. In 1929 this was succeeded by a new publication, a magazine called The Liberator.

In 1930, the American Negro Labor Congress was terminated through the initiative of the Communist Party and replaced by a new organization called the League of Struggle for Negro Rights.