Black History Month Spotlight -- The National Negro Congress

The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) helped rally black support for the union movement and attract new members through the National Negro Congress (NNC), a Party initiative founded in February 1935 by black communists James W. Ford and Manning Johnson, and faculty members at Howard University. The NNC replaced the League of Struggle for Negro Rights (LSNR) formed in 1930, which had followed the American Negro Labor Congress---all were subsidiaries of the CPUSA. Black communist and poet Langston Hughes was the president of the LSNR in 1934; Hughes was a recipient of the NAACP’s highest award, the Spingarn Medal.

Representing over 800 black organizations, the NNC held its first national meeting in February 1936 in Chicago. As a convergence of black socialists and communists, fellow travelers and a wide range of black personalities, the organization campaigned in favor of a federal anti-lynching bill and against racial discrimination, but the preponderance of its activities centered around bringing blacks into the labor movement and Sidney Hillman’s communist-dominated Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Hillman had been instrumental in delivering the communist vote to FDR in New York in his race for governor, Hillman became FDR’s labor union advisor after entering the White House in 1932.

National Negro Congress founder James W. Ford became the first black American on a presidential ticket when he was tapped as the CPUSA’s vice-presidential nominee in 1932, 1936, and 1940, running with William Z. Foster the first campaign, and Earl Browder the second and third. The NNC’s executive board selected black socialist and union organizer A. Philip Randolph to be president of the Congress. The anti-fascist NNC initially supported the Soviet Union, but foundered after the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact.

Sources:

The Communist Party of the US, F.M. Ottanelli, Rutgers Press, 1991 Wikipedia online