A00010 - The Chicago Defender

By November of 1929, according to the National Urban League column in The Chicago Defender, unemployment had affected African American workers all over the nation.

The Chicago Defender is a Chicago-based weekly newspaper founded in 1905 by an African American for primarily African-American readers.

In just three years from 1919–1922, the Defender also attracted the writing talents of Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks.

The Editor and founder Robert Sengstacke Abbott played a major role in influencing the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North by means of strong, moralistic rhetoric in his editorials and political cartoons, the promotion of Chicago as a destination, and the advertisement of successful black individuals as inspiration for blacks in the South. The rhetoric and art exhibited in the Defender unmistakably demanded equality of the races and the promotion of a northern migration. The first step Abbott took to achieve this end was to create a necessary sense of oppression and discontentment in southern life, accomplished through the exposés of southern crimes against blacks. The Defender consistently published articles describing lynchings in the south with vivid descriptions of gore and the victims’ deaths. These stories were accompanied by unrestrained blame of the mobs of whites typically involved, forcing readers to accept that these crimes were “systematic and unremitting”. The newspaper’s intense focus on these injustices implicitly laid the groundwork upon which Abbott would build his explicit critiques of society.
The art in the Defender, particularly its political cartoons, also explicitly addressed race issues and advocated northern migration of blacks.

After the movement of southern blacks northward was a quantifiable phenomenon, the Defender took a particular interest in sensationalizing migratory stories, often portraying them as the focus of the front page. Abbott positioned his paper as a primary influence of these movements even before historians would, for he used the Defender to initiate and advertise a “Great Northern Drive” day, set for May 15, 1917.

The promotion of Chicago as an attractive destination for the migration of southern blacks was a main function of the Defender. Abbott presented Chicago as a promised-land with abundant jobs, as he included advertisements "clearly aimed at southerners" that called for massive numbers of wanted workers in factory positions. The Defender was littered with advertisements for desirable commodities, beauty products and technological devices. Interestingly, Abbott’s paper was the first black newspaper to incorporate a full entertainment section, which allowed for the culture of Chicago to be intricately elaborated upon. Chicago was portrayed as a lively city where blacks commonly went to the theaters, ate out at fancy restaurants, attended sports events, including "cheering for the American Black Giants, black America’s favorite baseball team", and could dance all night in the hottest night clubs.

The Defender featured letters and poetry sent in from successful recent migrants; these writings "served as representative anecdotes, supplying readers with prototype examples … that characterized the migration campaign". To supplement these first-person accounts, Abbott often published small features on successful blacks in Chicago.

In 1923, founding publisher Robert Sengstacke Abbott and editor Lucius Harper created the Bud Billiken Club and later organized parades to promote healthy activity among black children in Chicago. In 1929 the organization began the Bud Billiken Parade and Picnic, which is still held annually in Chicago in early August. In the 1950s, under Abbott's direction, the Bud Billiken Parade expanded and emerged as the largest single event in Chicago. Today, it attracts more than one million attendance with more than 25 million television viewers,` making it one of the largest parades in the country.

Abbott's nephew, John H. Sengstacke, took over the Defender in 1940. In 1948, he encouraged President Harry S. Truman to integrate the armed services, which he did soon after. Sengstacke served as a member of Truman's appointed committee to assure that the military implemented this plan.

Sengstacke also brought together for the first time major black newspaper publishers and created the National Negro Publishers Association, later renamed the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA). Today the NNPA consists of over 200 member black newspapers. Two days following the publishers' first meeting in Chicago, Abbott died.

One of Sengstacke's most striking accomplishments occurred on February 6, 1956, when the Defender became a daily newspaper and changed its name to the Chicago Daily Defender, the nation's second black daily newspaper. It published as a daily until 2003, when new owners converted the Defender back to a weekly. The Defender was one of only three African-American dailies in the United States; the other two are the Atlanta Daily World, the first black newspaper founded as a daily in 1928, and the New York Daily Challenge, founded in 1971.

Control of the Chicago Defender and her sister publications was transferred to a new ownership group named Real Times Inc. in January 2003. Real Times, Inc. was organized and led by Thom Picou, and Robert (Bobby) Sengstacke, John H. Sengstacke's surviving child and father of the beneficiaries of the Sengstacke Trust. In effect, Picou, then chairman and CEO of Real Times, Inc., led what was then labeled a "Sengstacke family-led" deal to facilitate trust beneficiaries and other Sengstacke family shareholders to agree to the sale of the company. Picou recruited Sam Logan, former publisher of the Michigan Chronicle, who then recruited O'Neil Swanson, Bill Pickard, Ron Hall and Gordon Follmer, black businessman from Detroit, Michigan (the "Detroit Group"), as investors in Real Times. Chicago investors included Picou, Bobby Sengstacke, David M. Milliner (who served as publisher of the Chicago Defender from 2003 to 2004), Kurt Cherry and James Carr.

A00009 - International Labor Defense

In 1929, the integrated National Textile Workers Union struck against the textile mills in Gastonia, North Carolina. The strikers claimed that they were attacked by the police chief and a detachment of deputized civilians. The police chief and three deputies were killed, and 71 workers were beaten and thrown in jail. The International Labor Defense of New York City undertook the defense of fifteen union members charged with murder.

The International Labor Defense (ILD) was a legal defense organization in the United States, founded by James P. Cannon and headed by William L. Patterson after Cannon's expulsion from the Communist Party. It was the United States section of the International Red Aid organization, and was associated with the Communist Party USA. It defended Sacco and Vanzetti, was active in the civil rights and anti-lynching movements, and participated in the defense of the Scottsboro Boys. It was formed in 1925, and in 1946 merged with the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties to form the Civil Rights Congress.

Max Shachtman was an editor of the ILD's magazine, the Labor Defender, during the 1920s. Whittaker Chambers and Jacob Burck were contributing editors during the early 1930s.

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A00008 - International Ladies Garment Workers Union

In 1929, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union announced that it would organize the 4,000 African American workers in dress shops in New York City.

The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union was once one of the largest labor unions in the United States, one of the first U.S. unions to have a primarily female membership, and a key player in the labor history of the 1920s and 1930s. The union, generally referred to as the "ILGWU" or the "ILG," merged with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union in 1995 to form the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE). UNITE merged with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE) in 2004 to create a new union known as UNITE HERE. The two unions that formed UNITE in 1995 represented only 250,000 workers between them, down from the ILGWU's peak membership of 450,000 in 1969.

The ILGWU was founded in 1900 in New York City by seven local unions, with a few thousand members between them. The union grew rapidly in the next few years but began to stagnate as the conservative leadership favored the interests of skilled workers, such as cutters. This did not sit well with the majority of immigrant workers, particularly Jewish workers with a background in Bundist activities in Tsarist Russia, or with Polish and Italian workers, many of whom had strong socialist and anarchist leanings.

The ILGWU had a sudden upsurge in membership that came as the result of two successful mass strikes in New York City.

The first, in 1909, was known as “the Uprising of 20,000” and lasted for fourteen weeks. It was largely spontaneous, sparked by a short walkout of workers of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, involving only about twenty percent (20%) of the workforce. That, however, only prompted the rest of the workers to seek help from the union. The firm locked out its employees when it learned what was happening.

The news of the strike spread quickly to all the New York garment workers. At a series of mass meetings, after the leading figures of the American labor movement spoke in general terms about the need for solidarity and preparedness, Clara Lemlich rose to speak about the conditions she and other women worked under and demanded an end to talk and the calling of a strike of the entire industry. The crowd responded enthusiastically and, after taking a traditional Yiddish oath, "If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I now raise," voted for a general strike. Approximately 20,000 out of the 32,000 workers in the shirtwaist trade walked out in the next two days.

Those workers – primarily immigrants and mostly women – defied the preconceptions of more conservative labor leaders, who thought that immigrants and women could not be organized. Their slogan "We'd rather starve quick than starve slow" summed up the depth of their bitterness against the sweatshops in which they worked.

The strike was a violent one. Police routinely arrested picketers for trivial or imaginary offenses while employers hired local thugs to beat them as police looked the other way.

A group of wealthy women, among them Frances Perkins, Anne Morgan, and Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, supported the struggles of working class women with money and intervention with officials and often picketed with them. They earned the derisive label "the Mink Brigade".

The strike was only partially successful. The ILGWU accepted an arbitrated settlement in February 1910 that improved workers' wages, working conditions, and hours, but did not provide union recognition. A number of companies, including the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, refused to sign the agreement. But even so, the strike won a number of important gains. It encouraged workers in the industry to take action to improve their conditions and brought public attention to the sweatshop conditions.

Several months later, in 1910, the ILGWU led an even larger strike, later named "The Great Revolt", of 60,000 cloakmakers. After months of picketing, prominent members of the Jewish community, led by Louis Brandeis, mediated between the ILGWU and the Manufacturers Association. The “great revolt” was resolved by Louis Brandeis' “protocol of peace”. Under the "protocol of peace", the employers won a promise that workers would settle their grievances through arbitration rather than strikes during the term of the Agreement (a common clause in Union contracts today).

The union also became more involved in electoral politics, in part as a result of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire on March 25, 1911, in which one hundred and forty-six shirtwaist makers (most of them young immigrant women) either died in the fire that broke out on the eighth floor of the factory, or jumped to their deaths. Many of these workers were unable to escape because the doors on their floors had been locked to prevent them from stealing or taking unauthorized breaks. More than 100,000 people participated in the funeral march for the victims.

The fire had differing effects on the community. For some it radicalized them still further. As Rose Schneiderman said in her speech at the memorial meeting held in the Metropolitan Opera House on April 2, 1911 to an audience largely made up of the well-heeled members of the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL):

I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting. The old Inquisition had its rack and its thumbscrews and its instruments of torture with iron teeth. We know what these things are today; the iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews are the high-powered and swift machinery close to which we must work, and the rack is here in the firetrap structures that will destroy us the minute they catch on fire.

This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in the city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 146 of us are burned to death.

We have tried you citizens; we are trying you now, and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers, brothers and sisters by way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us.

Public officials have only words of warning to us – warning that we must be intensely peaceable, and they have the workhouse just back of all their warnings. The strong hand of the law beats us back, when we rise, into the conditions that make life unbearable.

I can't talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement.

Others in the union drew a different lesson from events: working with local Tammany Hall officials, such as Al Smith and Robert F. Wagner, and progressive reformers, such as Frances Perkins, they pushed for comprehensive safety and workers’ compensation laws. The ILG leadership formed bonds with those reformers and politicians that would continue for another forty years, through the New Deal and beyond.

The ILGWU was able to turn the partial victory of the Great Revolt into a lasting victory. Within two years it had organized roughly ninety percent of the cloakmakers in the industry in New York City. It improved benefits in later contracts and obtained an unemployment insurance fund for its members in 1919.

At the same time political splits within the union were beginning to grow larger. The Socialist Party split in 1919, with its left wing leaving to form various communist parties that ultimately united under the name of the Communist Party USA. Those left wing socialists, joined by others with an IWW or anarchist background, challenged the undemocratic structure of the ILGWU, which gave every local an equal vote in electing its leaders, regardless of the number of workers that local represented, and the accommodations that the ILGWU leadership had made in bargaining with the employers. Left wing activists, drawing inspiration from the shop stewards movement that had swept through British labor in the preceding decade, started building up their strength at the shop floor level.

The Communist Party did not intervene in ILGWU politics in any concerted fashion for the first few years of its existence, when it was focused first on its belief that revolution in the advanced capitalist countries was imminent, followed by a period of underground activity. That changed, however, around 1921, as the party attempted to create a base for itself in the working class and, in particular, in the unions within the AFL.

The party had its greatest success and failure in that effort in the 1920s in the garment trades, where workers had experience with mass strikes and socialist politics were part of the common discourse. Party members had won elections in some of the most important locals within the ILGWU, particularly in New York City, in the early years of the decade and hoped to expand their influence.

In 1923, Benjamin Schlesinger, the International's President, resigned. The convention elected Morris Sigman, who had previously been Secretary-Treasurer of the International before resigning in a dispute with Schlesinger, as its new President. Sigman, a former IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) member and anti-communist, began to remove Communist Party (CP) members from leadership of locals in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston.

Sigman could not, however, regain control of the New York locals, including Dressmakers' Local 22, headed by Charles S. Zimmerman, where the CP leadership and their left wing allies, some anarchists and some Socialists, enjoyed strong support of the membership. Local 22 rallied to prevent the International from physically retaking their union hall. Those unions led the campaign to reject a proposed agreement that Sigman had negotiated with the industry in 1925, bringing more than 30,000 members to a rally at Yankee Stadium to call for a one-day stoppage on August 10, 1925.

After Sigman called a truce in the internecine war with the left-led locals, followed up by a reform of the ILGWU's internal governance system that gave proportional weight to locals based on the size of their membership, the left wing of the union was even stronger than before. Sigman depended on the support of David Dubinsky's cutters union, many of the Italian locals, and the "out-of-town locals", many of which were mere paper organizations, to hold on to his presidency at the 1925 convention.
The inevitable showdown came the next year. The International supported the recommendations of an advisory board appointed by Governor Al Smith that supported the union's demands that wholesale jobbers be financially responsible for the wages owed by their contractors and that workers be guaranteed a set number of hours per year, while allowing employers to reduce their workforces by up to ten percent in any given year. While Sigman and Dubinsky supported the proposal, the CP-led and CP-influenced locals denounced it. The New York Joint Board called a general strike on July 1, 1926.

The left wing locals may have hoped that a general strike, which had the support of even the right wing locals loyal to Sigman, would be a quick success. It was not. Employers hired "Legs" Diamond and other gangsters to beat up strikers. The union hired their own protection, led by "Little Augie" Orgen, to fight back. When the strike went into its third month, the left wing leadership went to A.E. Rothstein, a retired manufacturer, to ask him to intercede. He suggested they talk to his estranged son, Arnold Rothstein, a gambler with widespread influence in the New York underworld.
Rothstein was able to get the hired gangsters on both sides to withdraw. The local leadership was then able to negotiate a modified version of the agreement they had rejected before the strike began. While they had reservations about the concessions they were accepting, the left wing recommended it.

Factional divisions within the CPUSA, however, led the party leadership to reject the offer. As one member of the CPUSA and a leader in Local 22 recalled the scene, one of the members of the committee said, when presenting the agreement to a meeting of the shopfloor leaders, "Maybe we could have gotten more, but . . .", at which point a party leader interjected, "They didn't get more. If there is a possibility of getting more, go and get more." The rest of the leadership, unwilling to appear less militant, joined in urging rejection of the deal.

That ended negotiations with the employers and kept the strike going another four months, at the end of which the union was nearly bankrupt and the left leadership almost wholly discredited. Sigman took over negotiations, settled the strike and then proceeded to drive the Communist Party from any positions of influence within the ILGWU.

The failed 1926 strike nearly bankrupted the ILGWU. The International also lost, for a time, some of the locals that chose to follow their expelled leaders out of the ILGWU rather than remain within it. Sigman also proved nearly as abrasive, although not as fierce, toward the right wing within the ILGWU, leading Dubinsky to suggest in 1928 that the union should bring back Schlesinger, who had gone on to become General Manager of the Forward, the highly influential Yiddish newspaper in New York, as Executive Vice-President of the union.

Sigman did not like the proposal, but acceded to it. Five months later he resigned in a dispute with the union's executive board and Schlesinger replaced him, with Dubinsky named as Secretary-Treasurer. Schlesinger died in 1932 and Dubinsky, still Secretary-Treasurer, became President of the ILGWU as well.

Dubinsky proved to be far more durable than his predecessors. He did not brook dissent within the union and insisted that every employee of the International first submit an undated letter of resignation, to be used should Dubinsky choose to fire him later. He also acquired the power to appoint key officers throughout the union. As he explained his position at one of the union's conventions: "We have a democratic union – but they know who's boss."

Under Dubinsky's leadership the union, more than three-fourths of whose members were women, continued to be led almost exclusively by men. Rose Pesotta, a longtime ILGWU activist and organizer, complained to Dubinsky that she had the same uncomfortable feeling of being the token woman on the ILGWU's executive board that Dubinsky had complained about when he was the only Jew on the AFL's board.

As weak as the ILGWU was in the aftermath of the 1926 strike, it was nearly destroyed by the Great Depression. Its dues-paying membership slipped to 25,000 in 1932 as unionized garment shops shut or went non-union or stopped abiding by their union contracts.

The union recovered, however, after the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act, which promised to protect workers' right to organize. As in the case in other industries with a history of organizing, that promise alone was enough to bring thousands of workers who had never been union members in the past to the union. When the union called a strike of dressmakers in New York on August 16, 1933 more than 70,000 workers joined in it – twice the number that the union had hoped for. It did not hurt, moreover, that the local leader of the National Recovery Administration was quoted as saying – without any basis in fact – that President Roosevelt had authorized the strike. The union rebounded to more than 200,000 members by 1934, increasing to roughly 300,000 by the end of the Depression.

As one of the few industrial unions within the AFL, the ILGWU was eager to advance the cause of organizing employees in the steel, automobile and other mass production industries that employed millions of low-wage workers, many of them immigrants or children of immigrants. The ILGWU was one of the original members of the Committee for Industrial Organization, the group that John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers formed within the AFL in 1935 to organize industrial workers, and provided key financial support and assistance. Rose Pesotta played a key role in early organizing drives in the rubber and steel industries.

Dubinsky was unwilling, on the other hand, to split the AFL into two competing federations and did not follow Lewis and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers when they formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations as a rival to, rather than a part of, the AFL. Dubinsky also had personality differences with Lewis, whom he resented as high-handed.

In addition, Dubinsky was alarmed by the presence of Communist Party members on the payroll of the CIO and the fledgling unions it had sponsored. Dubinsky was opposed to any form of collaboration with communists and had offered financial support to Homer Martin, the controversial president of the United Auto Workers, who was being advised by Jay Lovestone, a former leader of the Communist Party turned anti-communist, in his campaign to drive his opponents out of the union. Lewis, by contrast, was unconcerned with the number of communists working for the CIO. As he told Dubinsky, when asked about the communists on the staff of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, "Who gets the bird? The hunter or the dog?"

The ILGWU began reducing its support for the CIO and, after a few years in which it attempted to be allies with both sides, reaffiliated with the AFL in 1940. Dubinsky regained his former positions as a vice president and member of the executive council of the AFL in 1945. He was the most visible supporter within the AFL of demands to clean house by ousting corrupt union leaders. The AFL-CIO ultimately adopted many of his demands when it established codes of conduct for its affiliates in 1957.

A00007 - The Pullman Company

William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, inaugurated a series of speeches in New York and Chicago designed to underscore the support of the AFL for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Green's speeches were to help recruit 10,000 members for the Brotherhood by September 1. Green said the AFL would resist any attempt by the Pullman Company to impose a company union on the porters.

The Pullman Palace Car Company, founded by George Pullman, manufactured railroad cars in the mid-to-late 19th century through the early decades of the 20th century, during the boom of railroads in the United States. Its workers initially lived in a planned worker community (or "company town") named Pullman. Pullman developed the sleeping car which carried his name into the 1980s. Pullman did not just manufacture the cars: it also operated them on most of the railroads in the United States, paying the railroads to attach the cars to trains. The labor union associated with the company, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which was organized by Pullman porters, was one of the most powerful African-American political entities of the 20th century. The company also built thousands of streetcars and trolley buses for use in cities.

After spending the night sleeping in his seat on a train trip from Buffalo to Westfield, New York, George Pullman was inspired to design an improved passenger railcar that contained sleeper berths for all its passengers. During the day, the upper berth was folded up somewhat like a modern airliner's overhead luggage compartment. At night the upper berth folded down and the two facing seats below it folded over to provide a relatively comfortable bunk for the night. Although this was somewhat spartan accommodation by today's standards, it was a great improvement on the previous layout. Curtains provided privacy, and there were washrooms at each end of the car for men and women.

Pullman established his company in 1862 and built luxury sleeping cars which featured carpeting, draperies, upholstered chairs, libraries and card tables and an unparalleled level of customer service. Once a household name due to their large market share, the Pullman Company is also known for the bitter Pullman Strike staged by their workers and union leaders in 1894. During an economic downturn, Pullman reduced hours and wages but not rents, precipitating the strike. Workers joined the American Railway Union, led by Eugene V. Debs.

After George Pullman's death in 1897, Robert Todd Lincoln, son of Abraham Lincoln, became company president. The company closed its factory in the Pullman neighborhood of Chicago in 1955. Pullman purchased the Standard Steel Car Company in 1930 amid the Great Depression, and the merged entity was known as Pullman-Standard Car Manufacturing Company. The company ceased production after the Amtrak Superliner cars in 1982 and its remaining designs were purchased in 1987 when it was absorbed by Bombardier.

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A00006 - Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters

In 1929, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters held its annual labor conference in Chicago. Members were told that "in order to fit in the scheme of organized industry today, [members] must mobilize their economic power to compete with that of the employing class." Addresses were made concerning crime, juvenile delinquency, housing and health conditions of workers.

The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (hereinafter referred to as "BSCP") was, in 1925, the first labor organization led by blacks to receive a charter in the American Federation of Labor (AFL). It merged in 1978 with the Brotherhood of Railway and Airline Clerks (BRAC), now known as the Transportation Communications International Union.

The leaders of the BSCP—including A. Philip Randolph, its first president,and C. L. Dellums, its vice president and second president, became leaders in the civil rights movement and continued to play a significant role in it after it focused on the eradication of segregation in the South. BSCP members such as E. D. Nixon were among the leadership of local civil rights movements by virtue of their organizing experience, constant movement between communities and freedom from economic dependence on local authorities.

The campaign to found the union was an extraordinarily long one, a campaign that put it at odds with not only the company but also many members of the black community. The Pullman Company was not only one of the largest employers of blacks in the 1920s and 1930s but also had created an image for itself of enlightened benevolence by its financial support for black churches, newspapers and other organizations. Many porters were, moreover, well-paid enough to enjoy the material advantages of a middle-class lifestyle and prominence within their own communities.

Working for the Pullman Company was, however, less glamorous in practice than it appeared from the outside. Porters were dependent on tips for much of their income; that, in turn, made them dependent on the whims of white passengers, who often referred to all porters as "George", the first name of George Pullman, the founder of the company. Porters spent roughly ten percent of their time in unpaid "preparatory" and "terminal" set-up and clean-up duties, had to pay for their food, lodging, and uniforms, which might consume half of their wages, and were charged whenever their passengers stole a towel or a water pitcher. Porters could ride at half fare on their days off — but not on Pullman coaches. They also could not be promoted to conductor, a job reserved for whites, even though they frequently performed many of the conductors' duties.

The Company also squelched any efforts black porters had made to organize a union during the first decades of the 20th century by either isolating or firing any union leaders. Like many other large, ostensibly paternalistic companies of the time, the Company employed a large number of employee spies who kept the company informed of employees' activities. In extreme cases, Company agents assaulted union organizers.

When 500 porters met in Harlem on August 25, 1925, they decided to make another effort to organize. During this meeting, they not only launched their campaign in secret, but also chose Randolph, an outsider beyond the reach of the Company, to lead it. The union chose a dramatic motto that summed up porters' resentment over their working conditions and their sense of their place in history: "Fight or Be Slaves".

At that time the African American community was estranged from organized labor. While the AFL nominally did not exclude black workers, many of its affiliates did. Many black workers saw their employers, whether it was Henry Ford in Detroit or Swift Packing in Chicago, as more sympathetic to them than either their white co-workers or the labor movement. In addition, the economic separation, deprivation, and marginalization of the black community forced by Jim Crow and the doctrine of advancement through self-reliance preached by Booker T. Washington led many black leaders to look with distrust on joining with whites on issues of common concern — and often denied that blacks and whites had any common interests at all. Furthermore, and foremost, white supremacy remained entrenched in almost every institution that existed in the United States, and these racist beliefs, both subtle and overt, precluded the white labor movement from recognizing the black workers or its organized fronts.

In the 1920s, as some elements within the AFL began to lower these barriers, while groups as diverse as the Urban League, the Socialist Party of America and Communist Party began to focus on the rights of black workers. Randolph himself was a prominent member of the Socialist Party. From its inception, the BSCP fought to open doors in the organized labor movement in the United States for black workers, even though it faced staunch opposition and blatant racism. As BSCP co-founder and First Vice President Milton Price Webster, put it, "...any time we have an American institution composed of white people there is prejudice in it....In America, if we should stay out of everything that's prejudiced we wouldn't be in anything."

As early as 1900, efforts were put forth by various collectives of Pullman porters to organize the porters into a union, each effort having been crushed by the Pullman company. In 1925, in the early days of organizing the BSP union, Randolph was invited, by BSCP union organizer Ashley Totten, to address the Porters Athletic Association, in New York City. Exhibiting a sound understanding of the plight of the black worker and the need for a genuine labor union, Randolph was asked to undertake the job of organizing the porters into a bona fide labor union. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was launched on the night of August 25, 1925.

Key to the success of the union was to galvanize membership by way of a national membership drive, with three of the Pullman companies three biggest terminals being most important stops—Chicago, Oakland, and St. Louis. The man to see in Chicago was Milton Price Webster. He was the son of enslaved parents from Clarksville, Tennessee, who, after successfully purchasing their own freedom, eventually moved to Chicago, where Webster was raised. A former Pullman Porter of twenty years, and the devoted husband (of Louie Elizabeth Harris) and father of three, Webster had been fired by the company for attempting to organize porters in the Railroad Men's Benevolent Association.

Webster was a man of strong convictions. As a Lincoln Republican and a tenured, highly respected captain of Chicago's Sixth Ward black Republican machine, Webster was a stern, but gregarious leader of men who was well connected throughout the Chicago politic. Not the orator of Randolph's skill, and not college educated, Webster devoured books and the news of the day, and was a stalwart back room negotiator. He captured his audience with his command of the subject, his keen wit and sharp intellect, and his commitment to alleviating the struggles of the working man.

Although skeptical of Randolph's socialist affiliations, on the recommendations of fellow union organizer John C. Mills of Chicago, Webster facilitated a series of public meetings for Randolph and Chicago porters, nightly for two weeks. At the initial meeting, after hearing Randolph speak, Webster turned to Mills, agreeing that Randolph was the man to head the organization of the new union. For the next two weeks, nightly meetings were held, with two speakers campaigning for Chicago chapter membership—Milton Webster opening and A. Philip Randolph closing—effectively launching the Chicago division of the Brotherhood.

The Pullman Company's response was to denounce, with support from the ministers and African American newspapers whom it had cultivated (or bought), the new union as an outside entity motivated by foreign ideologies, while sponsoring its own company union, variously known as the Employee Representation Plan or the Pullman Porters and Maids Protective Association, to represent its loyal employees. Local authorities, such as Boss Crump in Memphis, Tennessee in some cases helped the Company by interfering with or banning BSCP meetings.

For the first several years of its existence, the union continued fighting the Pullman Company, its allies in the black community, the white power structure, and rival unions within the AFL that were hostile to its members' job claims. They also successfully fought efforts by communists to infiltrate the BSCP. The BSCP also tried to involve the federal government in its fight with the Pullman Company: on September 7, 1927 the Brotherhood filed a case with the Interstate Commerce Commission, requesting an investigation of Pullman rates, porters' wages, tipping practices, and other matters related to wages and working conditions. The ICC ruled that it did not have jurisdiction.

While it had organized roughly half of the porters within the Company, the union was seemingly no closer to obtaining recognition than it had been in 1925. By 1928, BSCP leaders decided that the only way to force the issue was to strike the Company. The leadership was, however, divided on what a strike could accomplish. Some rank-and-file leaders wanted to use the strike as a show of strength and an organizing tool, while Randolph was more cautious, hoping to use the threat of a strike as the lever to get the federal National Mediation Board established pursuant to the Railway Labor Act (RLA) to bring the Pullman Company to the table while mobilizing support from supporters outside the industry.

After secretly meeting with the Pullman Company, the NMB refused to follow precedent it had set in the case of a group of white railroad workers, and refused to act in behalf of the BSCP. The NMB argued that the Brotherhood was incapable of disrupting the Pullman sleeping car service. Although the union had voted for a strike, the Pullman company convinced the NMB that the union did not have the strength in numbers or resources to pull it off. In July 1928, the NMB formally retired the case and Randolph called off the strike just hours before it was scheduled to begin. Randolph, Webster, and the leadership of the BSCP recognized, in the end, that a strike at that time would have seriously crippled the Brotherhood, agreeing that the Brotherhood was still not strong enough to carry off a strike against the powerful corporate giant like Pullman.

That provoked an internal crisis, deepened by the Great Depression, paucity of funding for the union, and perpetual reprisals against the porters by the Pullman company, which led to a sharp drop in BSCP membership. The union might have disappeared altogether if it had not been for the vigilance and dedication of Randolph, Webster, Totten, Mills, C.L. Dellums, Bennie Smith, S.E. Grain, E.J. Bradley, Paul Caldwell, George Price, C. Francis Stratford and Roy Lancaster, who formed the initial organizers and board members of the BSCP.

The relationship between Randolph and Webster, the long standing First Vice President of the BSC and the head of the Chicago division, was centered on their common devotion to a common cause. Differences in personal style, politic and perspective gave way to comradeship, mutual admiration, and a deep and abiding trust and friendship. Both formidable leaders, where Randolph mastered theoretical, economic, and political discussions, Webster mastered the rules, regulations and working conditions of the laborers. Together they had a mutually aggressive and genuine commitment to the imperative that the black worker be organized to improve the working conditions, workers rights and the lives of black workers, their families and their communities.

The union held on through the worst days of the early 1930s until 1934, when the Roosevelt administration amended the RLA, then passed the Wagner-Connery Act, which outlawed company unions and covered porters under the Act, the following year. The BSCP immediately demanded that the NMB certify it as the representative of these porters. The BSCP defeated the company union in the election held by the NMB and on June 1, 1935 was certified. Two years later the union signed its first collective bargaining agreement with the Pullman Company.

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.

A00004 - Frank Crosswaith, Negro Labor Committee Founder

New York Socialists chose an African American, Frank R. Crosswaith, as their candidate to fill the unexpired term of the late Royal M. Weller, Democrat of the 21st Congressional District, which included Harlem. Crosswaith, formerly an organizer for A. Philip Randolph's union, had been elected in June to the national executive committee of the Conference for Progressive Labor Action, and was committed to the creation of an American Labor Party.

Frank Rudolph Crosswaith (1892-1965) was a longtime socialist politician and activist and trade union organizer in New York City. Crosswaith is best remembered as the founder and chairman of the Negro Labor Committee, which was established on July 20, 1935, by the Negro Labor Conference.


Frank Crosswaith was born on July 16, 1892, in Frederiksted, St. Croix, Danish West Indies (the island was sold to the United States in 1917 and became part of the United States Virgin Islands), and emigrated to the United States in his teens. While finishing high school, he worked as an elevator operator, porter and garment worker. He joined the elevator operators' union and when he finished high school, he won a scholarship from the socialist Jewish Daily Forward to attend the Rand School of Social Science, an educational institute in New York City associated with the Socialist Party of America.


Crosswaith founded an organization called the Trade Union Committee for Organizing Negro Workers in 1925, but this work went by the wayside when Crosswaith accepted a position as an organizer for the fledgling Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Crosswaith maintained a long association with union head A. Phillip Randolph, serving with him as officers of the Negro Labor Committee in the 1930s and 1940s.


In the early 1930s Crosswaith worked as an organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, which became one of the major supporters of the Negro Labor Committee.

In 1924, he ran on the Socialist ticket for Secretary of State of New York, and in 1936 for Congressman-at-large. He ran also for the New York City Council in 1939 on the American Labor ticket.


Crosswaith was elected to the governing executive committee of the American Labor Party in New York in 1924, and later ran for Governor of New York on the ALP ticket.

Crosswaith was an anti-communist and believed that the best hope for black workers in the United States was to join bona fide labor unions just as the best hope for the American labor movement was to welcome black workers into unions in order to promote solidarity and eliminate the use of black workers as strike breakers. He believed strongly that "separation of workers by race would only work to undermine the strength of the entire labor movement." Crosswaith spent much of his energy in the late 1930s and early 1940s battling a rival labor organization called the Harlem Labor Union, Inc., which was run by Ira Kemp and had a black nationalist philosophy. He accused Kemp of undermining the interests of black workers by signing agreements with employers that offered them labor at wages below union rates.


Crosswaith also worked with A. Philip Randolph during World War II in organizing the March on Washington Movement, which was called off when President Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed to sign Executive Order 8802, which prohibited racial discrimination in defense industries.