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WHEN BLACK PROGRESSIVES DIDN’T SEPARATE RACE FROM CLASS

In the 1980s, president Ronald Reagan launched a racialized assault on the American welfare state. A Goldwater Republican, Reagan was philosophically opposed to the public interest model of government that had informed the New Deal and postwar liberalism. Though Reagan’s hostility to entitlements helped deny him the Republican presidential nomination in 1976, four years later he understood that the breadth of support for entitlements—welfare programs whose eligibility requirements transcend class—precluded a direct assault on programs like Social Security’s old age retirement benefits and Medicare. Instead, Reagan set his sights on hobbling meanstested programs—welfare programs whose beneficiaries are poor and disproportionately black and brown.

Reagan repealed President Nixon’s Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) and cut funding to programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), Medicaid and Social Security Disability Insurance.¹ Reagan, who had been an outspoken critic of antidiscrimination legislation since the 1960s, also tried a number of schemes intended to undermine affirmative action. Despite his best efforts, Reagan failed to either narrow the scope of affirmative action compliance guidelines for government contractors or to end Nixon-era “goals and timetables.” He was, however, able to curtail enforcement of antidiscrimination policy by both cutting funding to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and appointing Clarence Thomas, a well-known black critic of affirmative action, as its director.²

Reagan’s assault on the American welfare state extended well beyond means-tested programs and antidiscrimination policies, as the nation’s first neoliberal president slashed both income tax and corporate tax, deregulated the banking, energy, telecommunication and transportation industries, and undercut consumer protections as well as labor and environmental laws by either underfunding the relevant federal agencies or by cynically appointing antagonists to direct them. Still, there is no denying that Reagan used a language steeped in racial resentment to attack the welfare state through its soft underbelly, means-tested programs and antidiscrimination policy.

Indeed, Reagan and his followers’ contention that permissive liberal social policies of the 1960s had spawned legions of parasitic black “welfare queens” who were bankrupting the nation one out-of-wedlock birth and tricked-out Cadillac at a time bound racial animus to economic anxiety in a narrative intended to nurture antistatist sensibilities among working-class and middle-class white Americans, whose prosperity was itself the product of the American welfare state.

As Reaganism became bipartisan consensus in the 1990s, scholars such as Michael K. Brown, Michael B. Katz, Jill Quadagno and Adolph L. Reed Jr. responded to neoliberalism’s racialized attacks on welfare by drawing attention to the uneven distribution of the American welfare state’s rewards. Specifically, they not only challenged the culturalist interpretations of poverty that informed the “welfare queen” and “crack baby” tropes, they also demonstrated the welfare state’s crucial role—in the form of New Deal labor and housing policy, entitlements and state stewardship of postwar economic growth—in the creation of the white American middle class. Indeed, Brown, Katz, Quadagno and Reed made clear that the white middle class reaped the lion’s share of the American welfare state’s benefits via the NLRA, the FHA’s mortgage policies, the GI Bill, the Federal-Aid Highway Act, entitlements and an elaborate private welfare system—including pensions and employer-sponsored health insurance—which most blacks had been denied access to thanks to discriminatory housing policies and employer and union discrimination (particularly in the elite building trades).³

Brown’s, Katz’s, Quadagno’s and Reed’s respective defenses of affirmative action and means-tested programs did not stop with the observation that state intervention in capitalist labor and housing markets had been crucially important to the expansion of the postwar white American middle class. To be sure, these left scholars were highly critical of New Democratic social scientists like Theda Skocpol, William Julius Wilson and Paul Starr, whose calls for universalism complemented the neoliberal assault on affirmative action and means-tested programs.⁴ Nevertheless, Brown, Katz, Quadagno and Reed were clear that—given the disproportionate impact of deindustrialization, the decline of the union movement and public sector retrenchment on blacks—truly universal redistributive programs, implemented equitably with the aid of the Voting Rights Act and antidiscrimination policy, were the only effective means of ending economic and racial inequality. In other words, their historically grounded defenses of the types of programs that benefited blacks disproportionately were wed to a broader case for a return to the public-interest model of government that had fueled the postwar expansion of America’s disproportionately white middle class.

As neoliberalism’s grip on the liberal-left imagination tightened during the first two decades of the twenty-first century, however, a new generation of students of race and inequality took the bifurcation of the New Deal and postwar welfare states as evidence of the inherent limitations of universal programs. Historians Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore, for example, posit what political scientist Cedric Johnson has termed the “constraint of race” thesis. Arguing that New Deal liberalism was restrained by racist Southern Democrats, Cowie and Salvatore ultimately contend that racism has perpetually hobbled broad, class-based redistributive reforms.⁵

Public intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates has made much the same case. Drawing from the work of political scientist Ira Katznelson, Coates takes FHA mortgage discrimination and the SSA’s exemptions for agricultural workers and domestic and personal servants as partial bases for his case for racial reparations—a redistributive agenda from which only African Americans might benefit. Specifically, Coates contends that, since the late colonial period, working-class whites’ pathological commitment to white-skin privilege has not only precluded interracial political alliances based on mutual economic interest, but ontological race/racism ensures that universal redistributive programs are incapable of redressing racial disparities.⁶

As I will discuss in detail in Chapter 4, the constraint of race thesis downplays capitalists’ sway over New Deal labor and housing policies. What is no less problematic, however, is that the framework looks past the New Deal’s much-studied, transformative effect on African American life and politics.

To be sure, New Deal programs, which were generally administered at the local level, were marred by discrimination. Nevertheless, millions of African Americans benefited from New Deal initiatives—sometimes in greater proportion than their share of the general population, even if they were underrepresented in relation to their need. Blacks were just 10 percent of the total population, for example, but accounted for 20 percent of all individuals on welfare rolls. Several hundred thousand African Americans, likewise, acquired work through the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Public Works Administration (PWA) and Works Progress Administration (WPA), while quotas, intended to ensure proportional representation, gave many African Americans access to newly constructed public housing projects in the era before public housing was a vehicle for warehousing poor people.⁷ Yes, the 23 percent of agricultural and domestic workers who happened to be black were, like their white counterparts, excluded from coverage under the NLRA, the FLSA, and the SSA. But African American industrial workers—such as the 500,000 blacks who comprised 8 percent of the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (CIO) membership in 1945⁸—were covered by each of these pieces of legislation.

There is no question that African Americans did not receive their fair share of New Deal programs—particularly in housing. But the now commonplace tendency to dismiss the Roosevelt administration’s crucial role in improving the material lives of millions of African Americans has obscured both the importance of the New Deal’s redistributive policies to blacks—who demonstrated their support for the administration with their votes—and the influence of New Deal liberalism over the scope of black political activism from the 1930s through the civil rights movement.

New Deal Industrial Democracy and Black Civil Rights

In 1978, historian Harvard Sitkoff’s A New Deal for Blacks laid the foundation on which a generation of civil rights scholarship would rest. Sitkoff’s ambitious study of Depression-era race relations and politics traced the origins of the modern civil rights movement to the 1930s and early 1940s. While Sitkoff was clear that African American civil rights advanced little during the New Deal, he convincingly argued that the so-called Depression decade was fertile ground for several political, social and intellectual developments that would eventually blossom into the insurgent black political activism of the 1950s and 1960s.

The Roosevelt administration’s emphasis on redistributive economic policies and the presence of civil rights advocates in key positions in New Deal agencies set the stage for the era of black Democratic interest-group politics. The left-labor militancy advanced by the Communist Party’s (CP) Popular Front and the CIO engendered racial liberalism among a stratum of white activists and rank-and-file unionists, opening access to good blue-collar jobs while providing African Americans useful political allies. Finally, the antifascist impulses influencing both left activism and America’s support for the European Allies strengthened the hand of social scientists and liberals who challenged notions of racial hierarchy rooted in eugenics or other biological metaphors. Each of the above, according to Sitkoff, not only informed the activist sensibilities of African Americans during the Depression and World War II, they also shaped the scope of the modern civil rights movement.⁹

While A New Deal for Blacks offered a compelling overview of the relationship between New Deal policy and the struggle for black equality, it did not explore the complex issues shaping civil rights institutions and their leaders during the 1930s. Thus, a great many scholars have since written books on each of the various themes Sitkoff first examined in 1978. The relationship between New Deal industrial democracy and civil rights activism during the 1930s and early 1940s has been of particular interest.

The New Deal’s efforts to redress the problem of under-consumption through unionization—best exemplified by the NLRA—transformed not just the workplace but American democracy. Aware of the contradictions between the Jeffersonian democratic ideal still celebrated by most Americans in the 1930s and the realities of industrial society, New Dealers sought to use government, as President Roosevelt stated, to “assist in the development of an economic declaration of rights, an economic constitutional order.”¹⁰ The right to unionize was at the center of this agenda.

Though today’s neoliberals generally disparage unions as “special interests,” New Dealers understood collective agitation in the workplace as a public good. Unionization enhanced consumer purchasing power and, along with entitlements, afforded dignity and security to the nation’s producer classes. This industrial democratic turn in political culture and the related rights discourse would, as I will discuss, shift the focus of African American civil rights away from narrow calls for racial equality—which basically took economic inequality as a given—toward broader demands for economic justice. New Deal industrial democracy would also encourage political militancy among black activists, who came to identify mass protest as a responsibility of citizenship.

New Deal labor law had a profound impact on the scope of African American activism during the 1930s and 1940s. Black unionists were the obvious beneficiaries of the Roosevelt administration’s efforts to enhance consumer purchasing power and workers’ rights. In 1937, for example, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) became the first African American labor union to successfully negotiate a contract with a major employer. As historian Beth Bates has argued, the BSCP’s success stemmed at least partly from the political acumen of the union’s leadership. Facing stiff opposition from a black elite dogmatically committed to clientage/petition politics, BSCP president A. Philip Randolph and his organizers framed the porters’ quest for recognition as a matter of African American civil rights. Thus, between 1925 and the start of the New Deal, the porters’ union not only established a deep base of support among blacks, but the BSCP itself helped legitimate African American protest politics.¹¹ Still, the organizing genius of Randolph and associates notwithstanding, the BSCP owed its legal recognition to the protections afforded unions by the Norris–La Guardia Act (1932), the Railway Labor Act of 1934 and the 1935 NLRA, more commonly referred to as the Wagner Act.

The Norris–La Guardia and Wagner Acts not only played significant roles in labor disputes, they also influenced New Deal–era civil rights politics. Norris–La Guardia prevented the courts from issuing injunctions halting legitimate labor disputes, while the Wagner Act—like section 7A of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) that preceded it—enhanced workers’ rights to collective bargaining.

Together, they marked a major shift in American politics and life. In the three decades or so preceding the passage of the Wagner Act—a period known as the Lochner era—not only had the Supreme Court sanctioned employers’ use of intimidation and coercion to curb unions’ organizing campaigns, but it had also checked the government’s ability to intervene in the employer-employee relationship through the principle known as “freedom of contract.” Freedom of contract presumed that an employer and an individual employee came to the negotiating table as coequals. Taylorism should have made the absurdity of this premise plain; however, it would take the economic and political turmoil precipitated by the Great Depression to challenge the Lochner era’s employer-friendly conception of work and workplace regulations. Identifying collective bargaining as the most effective vehicle for bolstering workers’ negotiating strength with employers for more equitable wages, the NLRA’s architects—Senator Robert Wagner and his assistant, Leon Keyserling—believed that unionization was essential to stimulating consumer demand and ending the Great Depression.¹² New Deal liberals likewise argued that unions held the potential to check managerial caprice by allowing workers to bargain collectively for contracts establishing formal guidelines for hiring, termination, promotions, raises and more.

To achieve its tandem goals of establishing a sustainable model of capitalism and addressing managerial authoritarianism, the Wagner Act eliminated the “yellow-dog” contract,¹³ established the closed shop and created the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which was responsible for mediating legitimate labor disputes.

As can be said of any institution in America, many unions—particularly in the skilled trades—were guilty of discrimination. The absence of an antidiscrimination clause from the Wagner Act thus alarmed many civil rights leaders, who feared that the closed shop would enable discriminatory unions to bar blacks from not just their collective bargaining units but the workplace itself. Nevertheless, mainstream civil rights leaders generally called for amending the NLRA rather than repealing it.

New Deal Civil Rights Activism Was Working Class

The civil rights community’s support for collective bargaining signified a notable turn in African Americans’ political sensibilities. As alluded to above, the protected status afforded labor unions both inspired and legitimated a new class-inflected militancy among African American civil rights activists. With black unemployment hovering around 50 percent in cities such as New York, Chicago and Baltimore in the early 1930s, African Americans began to mobilize protest campaigns aimed at expanding employment and housing opportunities. Working-class blacks participated in Communist Party–organized Unemployed Councils, taking to the streets both to demand jobs and to thwart evictions. They also organized “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns.

The seeds of “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” were sown in 1929, when Chicago Whip editor Joseph Bibb encouraged African American consumers to boycott businesses that relied on black patronage but refused to hire black employees. Bibb’s call resonated with African Americans shaped by both Depression-era unemployment and the race consciousness of the New Negro movement of the 1920s. Indeed, the earliest boycotts reflected a pronounced racial nationalism. Sufi Abdul Hamid’s 1932 boycott of Harlem’s Koch’s department store, for example, played on racial/ethnic tensions between blacks and Jews as well as color and class divisions among African Americans.

While Hamid briefly garnered the support of a small number of middle-class black leaders, including Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr., his bombastic style and anti-Semitic rhetoric quickly alienated most black elites. Hamid, who had a penchant for flowing robes and turbans, was an especially theatrical and controversial figure; nevertheless, the employment aims of early “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” protests revealed a narrow racialism that unnerved many “respectable” black leaders.¹⁴ T. Arnold Hill of the National Urban League (NUL), for example, expressed concern as early as 1930 that these campaigns might fuel racial tensions, undermining the cause of workplace integration.¹⁵

The growing popularity of “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” would eventually compel mainstream African American leaders to play active roles in the movement. As picketers benefited from both experience and a deepening pool of financial and intellectual resources, they came to frame their employment demands in accordance with New Deal labor law. In late 1933, Kiowa Costonie’s Citizens Committee characterized its boycott of A&P grocery stores in Baltimore as a labor dispute. By holding itself out as a union, the Citizens Committee hoped to gain the protections against injunction afforded strikers by the Norris–La Guardia Act. The Citizens Committee failed to persuade the courts that a legitimate labor dispute existed between its membership and A&P groceries, though, both because the group represented aspirant rather than current employees and because it demanded racial proportionalism—in other words, a quota—in employment.¹⁶ By 1938, however, the US Supreme Court’s verdict in New Negro Alliance v. Sanitary Grocery Co. would extend protection against injunctions to “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work.” The New Negro Alliance (NNA) initiated its boycott of DC’s Sanitary Grocery shops in 1936, leading the store to seek and obtain an injunction against picketers. With the aid of Howard University law professor William Hastie and sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, the New Negro Alliance eschewed calls for racial quotas in its bid for recognition as a union, focusing instead on the sociological consequences of black unemployment.

As historian Paul Moreno makes clear, the Supreme Court would ultimately rule in the NNA’s favor to ensure a broad enough interpretation of Norris–La Guardia to prevent lower courts from interpreting the act too narrowly.¹⁷ Whatever the Supreme Court’s overarching aims, however, in recognizing the NNA’s grievance with Sanitary Grocery Co. as a labor dispute, it legitimated such protests and set the stage for an expansion of employment boycotts.

There is little doubt that activists involved in “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” defined their grievances as labor disputes partly for opportunistic reasons. As activist and legal scholar Pauli Murray said about New Negro Alliance in 1945, the highest court in the nation “raised a shield to protect the activities of minority groups in those controversies arising out of racial or religious discrimination in matters of employment, by defining those activities as labor disputes and entitled to their immunities under the Norris–LaGuardia Act.”¹⁸ So, since Norris–La Guardia and the Wagner Act identified strikes rather than civil rights protests as protected speech, African American activists had few options but to define boycott groups as unions—even if they represented prospective rather than current employees. Still, the legitimacy conferred to organized labor by New Deal labor law sparked a transformation in black politics that extended well beyond mere convenience. African Americans of the 1930s and 1940s came to see race discrimination as an outgrowth of class inequality.¹⁹ Thus, by the early 1930s mainstream civil rights organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and NUL began to emphasize the broader advance of the American working class as key to black uplift.

Founded a year after the 1908 Springfield, Illinois, race riot, the NAACP’s mission proceeded from the view that “the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the color line.” The association’s direct challenges to disenfranchisement and de jure segregation resonated with African Americans of the 1910s and 1920s, many of whom had acquired greater political and economic liberties via the Great Migration.²⁰ By the 1930s, however, the NAACP’s narrow integrationist agenda appeared to be out of touch. Though African Americans remained steadfastly opposed to disfranchisement and segregation, poverty and unemployment were the dominant issues shaping black political consciousness during the Great Depression. As a result, the NAACP witnessed a decline in interest and membership.

Hoping to revitalize the flagging civil rights group, NAACP president Joel Spingarn organized the Second Amenia Conference for spring 1933. Spingarn tasked thirty-three participants with reinterpreting the problems confronting blacks “within the larger issues facing the nation.” While the conference was not without dissenters, the activists, academics and civic leaders in attendance ultimately identified interracial working-class alliances as pivotal to racial progress. The Conference proposed no specific course of action; however, one year later, the association set out to craft a prescription via the Committee on the Future Plan and Program of the NAACP.

Headed by black economist Abram L. Harris, the committee encouraged the NAACP to transform itself into a center for workers’ education and agitation. Harris thus urged the association to develop courses intended to assist blacks in making sense of their place in industry while simultaneously promoting interracial solidarity. He also called upon the civil rights group to educate workers about unionization and the importance of political participation. Finally, Harris suggested that the NAACP grant more authority to local chapters, allowing locals to circumvent the board of directors and national office so that they might pursue more aggressive agendas.²¹

Institutional concerns precluded pursuit of the goals and prescriptions advised by the Amenia Conference and Harris Report respectively. Executive secretary Walter White asserted that the financial crisis made implementation of the Harris Report infeasible. The aims of the Harris Report likewise bumped up against the sensibilities of influential benefactors such as Julius Rosenwald, who were unnerved by the growing economic militancy among African Americans.²² Thus, while Walter White hoped to reinvigorate the association by connecting with the masses, the NAACP did not institutionalize the kind of class agenda called for by Amenia and the Harris Report until the late 1930s. Instead, the association would attempt to enhance its viability in the mid-1930s through a vigorous anti-lynching campaign.

By the end of the decade, a number of political and economic developments would lead the NAACP to reconsider the value of a labor agenda. First, the association’s anti-lynching campaign failed to generate the mass appeal that White had hoped for. Indeed, the NAACP faced stiff competition from civil rights organizations such as the fledgling National Negro Congress (NNC), and, for a time, even the NUL stressed a labor approach to black uplift. Second, the association’s narrow focus on barriers to blacks’ social and political equality had even begun to undercut the civil rights organization’s attractiveness to philanthropists. According to Beth Bates, the labor-friendly Garland Fund’s rejection of the NAACP’s application for a $10,000 grant in 1937 made White and associates alive to the charge that the group’s historic focus looked past the pressing issues of the day.²³ Third, the rise of the CIO, with its comparatively progressive racial politics, not only opened the ranks of organized labor to tens of thousands of black Americans but also created new sources of funding. Thus, by the late 1930s, contributions from black unionists and the CIO itself had begun to offset declining philanthropic support for the NAACP.

All of this—along with Joel Spingarn’s death in 1939—cleared the way for the NAACP to develop a coherent labor agenda. Walter White made the NAACP’s commitment to organized labor plain in 1941 when he announced the civil rights group’s support for the United Auto Workers (UAW) strike at Ford’s River Rouge facility. White ultimately called upon the plant’s 9,000 black employees to join in common cause with white workers in pursuit of economic justice. In extending his support to the UAW, White strengthened the NAACP’s relationship with organized labor, enabling the association to create the institutional ties required for a labor-oriented civil rights program.

The NAACP’s commitment to black unionism only intensified during World War II, aided by the creation of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund (LDF) in 1939.²⁴ Functioning as the NAACP’s separate litigation arm, the LDF equipped the civil rights group to pursue the kind of aggressive legal strategy first proposed in 1934 by Howard University law professor Charles Hamilton Houston, the NAACP’s first fulltime lawyer. Under the leadership of Thurgood Marshall—who had partnered with Houston in 1936—the LDF embarked on an incremental legal strategy intended to establish precedents challenging race discrimination. Identifying employment discrimination as the single most important issue facing African Americans, Marshall and the LDF would litigate a number of significant workplace discrimination cases during World War II. The LDF struck major blows against discriminatory labor unions via Steele v. Louisville & NR Co. (1944), Tunstall v. Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen (1944), and James v. Marinship (1944); in these cases, the NAACP argued that unions were state actors—pointing to protections afforded by the Railway Labor Act and the Wagner Act—and were thereby prohibited from denying equal protection to blacks by the Fourteenth Amendment. Though the high court rejected the more expansive definition of state actors sought by the NAACP, it did rule that the government had a compelling public interest to bar racial discrimination in unions.²⁵

The association’s emphasis on equal protection in the workplace was by no means a complete departure from its historic mission. As historian Risa Goluboff contends, the NAACP simply added labor to a legal agenda, centered on the Fourteenth Amendment, that already included education, transportation, housing and voting. Goluboff laments that the NAACP’s emphasis on racial discrimination rather than “inequality, personal insecurity or other manifestations of racial and economic ‘injustice’” reflected the continued sway of middle-class sensibilities over the group’s work.²⁶ Still, whatever its limitations, the addition of labor to the NAACP’s program reflected the leftward drift of black civil rights of the 1930s and 1940s and the related transition from clientage politics to protest activism.

The National Urban League’s program in the 1930s also bore the imprint of the growing labor militancy shaping New Deal–era black politics. Founded in 1910, just a year after the NAACP, by black sociologist George Edmund Haynes, the NUL was established partly to ease rural black migrants’ transition to industrial cities by addressing the material and cultural barriers to black integration. In contrast to the NAACP, the Urban League eschewed direct challenges to racist policies and practice. Proceeding from the view that blacks would only overcome whites’ visceral prejudices through proper conduct, the league developed programs intended to acculturate migrants and impoverished blacks. The NUL and its locals likewise encouraged employers and landlords to provide deserving blacks access to decent jobs and housing. The group’s emphasis on self-help has led some scholars to cast the league’s philosophy in the conservative light of Booker T. Washington. Though the NUL was firmly imbedded in the conservative wing of the civil rights movement, the group’s approach owed more to the bourgeois liberalism of the famed Chicago School of Sociology than the Wizard of Tuskegee. Chicago sociology ultimately equipped Urban Leaguers with powerful intellectual tools to counter eugenicists’ claims of black racial (inherent biological) inferiority. Still, Chicago School race-relations models such as social disorganization/reorganization and ethnic cycle often led Urban Leaguers to emphasize the needs of middle-class blacks, as these individuals already possessed the cultural and intellectual attributes necessary to demonstrate the race’s capacity for assimilation. The NUL’s identification of respectable behavior as key to black integration likewise led it to occasionally assist employers and landlords in weeding out undesirable workers and tenants.²⁷

While the Urban League’s work during the 1930s continued to reflect a preoccupation with the interests of middle-class African Americans, New Deal industrial democracy would inspire the social work organization to take an activist turn. The league first began to mobilize black workers in 1933 through its Emergency Advisory Councils (EAC). The EACs set out to combat discrimination in recovery programs both by lobbying officials in the National Recovery Administration (NRA) and other New Deal agencies and by encouraging black workers to demand their fair share of relief. Blending petition and interest group politics, local EACs achieved some success in breaking down barriers to relief programs in Chicago and other cities.²⁸

The NUL’s efforts to mobilize black workers took a more militant direction in 1934 with the creation of the Workers’ Councils (WC). The brainchild of T. Arnold Hill, longtime director of the Urban League’s Department of Industrial Relations, the Workers’ Councils identified collective agitation, rather than personal responsibility, as the surest route to black economic equality. Workers’ Councils thus educated blacks about the implications of federal recovery efforts and labor law. WCs likewise mobilized grassroots protest campaigns, such as the 1936 campaign demanding an antidiscrimination amendment to the Wagner Act. Finally, the Workers’ Councils encouraged African Americans to join in common cause with white workers in labor unions. After centralizing operations in the Workers’ Bureau (WB), headed by Lester Granger, the WC spread like wildfire. At the conclusion of four years of operation, the WB established seventy Workers’ Councils in twenty-one states representing tens of thousands of black workers.²⁹

The bureau’s calls for increased black participation in the union movement required the group to work directly with organized labor. The WB continued the NUL’s longstanding efforts to encourage the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to open its ranks to African Americans.³⁰ Though the AFL ignored the WB’s calls for racial fair play, the Urban League would find an important ally in the fledgling CIO. Founded in 1935 by United Mine Workers’ president John L. Lewis, the CIO focused principally on unskilled and semiskilled laborers, who comprised the core of the nation’s industrial workforce. Since most African American workers were unskilled, the democratic potential of the CIO’s industrial focus was clear to the WB’s Granger from the outset.

The comparative racial liberalism that characterized the CIO’s organizing drives in the steel industry between 1936 and 1943 would affirm the Urban League’s commitment to the industrial union. The NUL’s Workers’ Bureau thus not only encouraged African Americans to affiliate with CIO locals, but in 1938 the NUL would dissolve the Workers’ Councils, turning over their work in support of black unionization to the CIO.³¹

The same year the NUL discontinued its Workers’ Councils, Granger delivered an address to the NAACP’s Youth Council that left little doubt as to the class perspective that informed the WB’s work. Granger’s “Challenge to the Youth” proceeded from the view that poverty and unemployment were the chief challenges confronting African Americans in the 1930s. After criticizing his own “New Negro” generation for naively presuming that individuals—in the form of respectability politics, self-help or entrepreneurialism—could successfully challenge Jim Crow and uplift the race, Granger lauded New Deal–era black youth for correctly identifying interracial workers’ alliances as the key to racial equality. As Granger put it, young African Americans of the late 1930s not only understood that they must fight for “the man at the bottom,” because anyone could find themselves there in modern times, but they had come to embrace the political necessity of (economic) alliances with whites. “Slowly and painfully young people are learning the Negro’s fight for freedom is not a fight of the Negro for Negro freedom,” Granger asserted, “but that the Negro’s fight is only a small part of a nation-wide struggle—not of ten or twelve million Negroes, but of fifty-five millions of Negroes and whites, the majority of the population of this country.”³²

The fact that the Urban League developed a formal commitment to unionism several years before the more militant NAACP highlights the complex relationship between external political pressures and institutional prerogatives. The NUL—despite its comparative conservatism—was better positioned institutionally and, in some ways, philosophically to shift with the labor sensibilities of the era. Though funding constraints—the group’s reliance on corporate benefactors—had prevented the league from adopting a formal union program prior to the New Deal, NUL officials such as T. Arnold Hill had advocated a labor platform since the mid-1920s. In the NUL’s first two decades of operation, Urban Leaguers contended that union affiliation offered African Americans two advantages. First, unionization held the potential to enhance blacks’ wages. Second, drawing from Chicago School race-relations theory, many League officials, such as Charles S. Johnson, believed that shared workplace experiences held the potential to elevate black-white relations by humanizing members of each race, thereby dispelling racial stereotypes.³³ These were, of course, among the rationales behind the league’s embrace of labor militancy during the New Deal. The liberal ideology informing the Urban League’s cautious, if not conservative, uplift strategy during the era of the Great Migration served, ironically perhaps, as the foundation on which the NUL’s labor militancy would rest during the 1930s.

Though many scholars and civil rights activists shared the WCs’ identification of interracial unionism as a vehicle for black equality, the National Negro Congress (NNC) was perhaps the clearest institutional expression of the labor orientation of New Deal civil rights politics. Operating from 1936 to 1947, the NNC was the brainchild of John P. Davis. Davis—a graduate of Bates College and Harvard University—had begun his activist career in 1933, when he and a young Robert C. Weaver formed the Joint Committee on National Recovery (JCNR). Davis and Weaver conceived the JCNR as a civil rights lobbying group. The two men thus not only investigated violations of black civil rights in the South but drew attention to the racial limits of New Deal liberalism. In 1935, the JCNR testified before Congress on racial discrimination in NRA wage codes, the implications of the exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers from the then-pending Social Security Act and the Roosevelt administration’s reluctance to press for anti-lynching and anti-poll tax legislation.³⁴

Aware that effective interest group politics required mobilized constituencies, Davis called upon civil rights organizations to establish the National Negro Congress in 1935. The NNC was formed shortly thereafter, holding its first convention in February 1936. Davis, who maintained ties to both New Deal reformers and the Communist Party, modeled the National Negro Congress on the CP’s Popular Front. He thus conceived of the NNC as an umbrella organization representing a broad cross section of labor activists, civil rights leaders, intellectuals and artists. This approach proved effective at the outset: the NNC’s 1936 convention garnered affirmative responses from 750 delegates from twenty-eight states. Notable convention participants included political scientist Ralph Bunche—a key NNC organizer—philosopher Alain Locke, the NUL’s Lester Granger and Elmer Carter, the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins and the BSCP’s A. Philip Randolph.³⁵

Interracial unionism was at the center of the NNC’s civil rights agenda. The NNC’s faith in the civil rights potential of interracial working-class solidarity was, in part, a reflection of the racial liberalism taking root in the American union movement. Like the Workers’ Councils, the National Negro Congress enthusiastically supported the CIO. Indeed, shortly after the NNC’s first convention, John P. Davis, working directly with the CIO’s John L. Lewis, placed three black organizers from the NNC’s fold with the Steel Workers’ Organizing Committee (SWOC). These individuals—Henry Johnson, Leonidas McDonald, Eleanor Rye—worked tirelessly to recruit blacks in SWOC’s 1936 and 1937 organizing drives in mills from Chicago, Illinois, to Gary, Indiana. NNC members would likewise assist the Packinghouse Workers’ Organizing Committee (PWOC) and the Tobacco Stemmers and Laborers’ Union (TSLU) in their organizing drives in Chicago and Virginia respectively.³⁶

The National Negro Congress’s labor approach to African American civil rights likewise reflected the politics of the NNC’s leadership and members. Labor unionists and leftists —Communist Party members in particular—comprised the bulk of the National Negro Congress’s membership. Though left activists were generally committed to redressing both race and class inequality, leftists and labor-liberals of the era typically perceived racism as an outgrowth of class exploitation. As A. Philip Randolph, who served as NNC president from 1936 to 1940, asserted: “no black worker can be free so long as the white worker is a slave and by the same token, no white worker is certain of security while his black brother is bound.”³⁷ Like the JCNR that spawned it, the National Negro Congress not only fought for racial parity in the administration of New Deal programs, but it also railed against Jim Crow. Moreover, the NNC’s labor activities, particularly in the South, required the group to challenge racialist sensibilities among both black and white rank-and-file unionists as well regional social conventions. Such efforts notwithstanding, the NNC’s left orientation led the group to emphasize economic over social equality, as its leadership generally presumed that racism could only be eliminated by elevating the American working class irrespective of race.

The Communist Party’s significance to the National Negro Congress ensured that the NNC’s most important years spanned from 1936 through 1939—the era of the Popular Front. In this period, the group not only mobilized African Americans and whites to demand economic and racial equality but also organized rallies against European fascism. With the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Soviet-German nonaggression pact in August 1939, however, the NNC’s fortunes waned. The NNC’s Communist Party members closed ranks, appearing to repudiate the antifascist politics they had embraced to that point. Dismayed by what they perceived to be the CP’s unprincipled conversion, most non-Communist members bolted from the National Negro Congress. By April 1940, Randolph had resigned from the group, citing his concerns that the NNC had become a front for the CP, an organization Randolph, a Socialist Party member, had long considered suspect.³⁸

Though the NNC operated until 1947—when it finally succumbed to postwar anticommunism—the group never recovered from the political infighting that prompted Randolph’s departure. Despite the NNC’s short history, however, many scholars contend that it left an enduring legacy. Historian Thomas J. Sugrue asserts that the NNC’s antifascist campaigns established the blueprint for the kind of internationalism that would shape Cold War civil rights. The NNC’s success also, as historian Beth Bates has noted, pushed mainstream civil rights organizations such as the NAACP to the left. Some have likewise suggested then that the NNC set the stage for a more activist civil rights movement, as local chapters in cities such as Chicago and New York skillfully mobilized African Americans in grassroots campaigns.

While there is little doubt that the National Negro Congress’s left-wing politics distinguished it from the liberal middle-class NAACP and NUL, it is not clear that the NNC ushered in a new era in black activism. As mentioned, the NAACP had begun to consider a labor platform as early as 1933. More importantly, the labor program initiated by the NUL’s Workers’ Councils in 1934 overlapped the agenda begun by the NNC in 1936. Instead of transforming black politics, then, the NNC’s popularity is illustrative of the wide appeal of labor activism among African Americans during the 1930s and 1940s. The NNC may therefore represent the apotheosis of the industrial democratic slant of New Deal era civil rights activism.

Black Labor Activism and Antidiscrimination Policy

By the early 1940s, the left liberalism that had shaped New Deal—era civil rights activism had culminated in a national political campaign—A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement (MOWM). Several months after his resignation from the NNC, Randolph would use the protest tactics he had honed as a labor and civil rights activist to pressure President Roosevelt to redress pervasive workplace discrimination. By late 1940, the economic recovery precipitated by World War II had put a significant dent in white unemployment. African American unemployment, however, remained virtually unchanged. Racist hiring practices were largely to blame for the widening gulf between black and white workers. Indeed, a US Employment Services survey of defense contractors found that more than 50 percent of respondents refused to hire African Americans under any circumstances.³⁹

In fall 1940, Randolph, NAACP executive secretary Walter White and NUL’s acting executive secretary, T. Arnold Hill, met with President Roosevelt to discuss the economic crisis afflicting black Americans. Randolph would make four demands of Roosevelt. He called upon Roosevelt to bar discrimination on the part of defense contractors, federal agencies and labor unions. He also demanded that the president desegregate the armed forces. Randolph ultimately threatened to march as many as 100,000 African Americans on Washington, DC, if he did not receive a satisfactory response. Concerned that the proposed march might incite a race riot on the eve of war, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 in June of 1941, barring discrimination in federal agencies and in defense employment. The Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), EO8802’s centerpiece, served as a compliance board.⁴⁰

Randolph’s victory cannot be attributed to the efforts of one man alone. Indeed, Randolph’s proposed march functioned as a meaningful threat only because he and the BSCP leadership had created networks of organizers and sympathizers via the porters’ union and the NNC. The political infrastructure established by the BSCP enabled Randolph to turn a simple threat into a movement. Though Randolph called off the march shortly after Roosevelt issued EO8802, he maintained the MOWM through late 1943 both to adopt a posture of vigilance vis-à-vis Roosevelt and to stave off African American critics who believed Randolph had not gone far enough.⁴¹ The MOWM’s popularity faded in 1943, as middle-class black leaders withdrew their already qualified support following the Detroit race riot. The MOWM had nonetheless achieved all that it could by this point.

Black unemployment declined between 1942 and 1945; however, the FEPC’s contribution to this trend is unclear. Though EO8802 provided the nation’s courts—in cases such as James v. Marinship—a wedge with which to open employment to blacks and other racial/ethnic groups, the FEPC lacked the power to enforce its own antidiscrimination guidelines. Indeed, the committee’s efficacy hinged on employers’ and unions’ susceptibility to shame, as it relied principally on moral suasion and education to discourage workplace discrimination.

The FEPC was further hampered by President Roosevelt’s questionable commitment to its work, particularly during the FEPC’s first incarnation from 1941 to early 1943. Indeed, President Roosevelt greatly weakened the FEPC in 1942, when he transferred control over the committee from the Office of Price Management to the War Manpower Commission headed by Paul McNutt, an antagonist to the FEPC. In response to pressure from Randolph and other activists, President Roosevelt reorganized the FEPC again, in 1943, this time strengthening it, via Executive Order 9346.⁴² In light of the constraints on the FEPC’s work, the increases in black gainful employment over the course of World War II may have had more to do with wartime labor shortages than antidiscrimination policy. Still, as historian Paula Pfeffer argues, the FEPC and the threat of the march on Washington that spawned it would have a significant impact on the scope of black protest politics in decades to come.⁴³

Studies of A. Philip Randolph and the BSCP have demonstrated strong continuities between the labor militancy shaping civil rights activism during the New Deal and World War II and the modern civil rights movement. Following the war, Randolph fought for integration of the armed forces, desegregation of public accommodations, voting rights legislation, and integration of craft unions. The breadth of civil rights issues with which Randolph was concerned was not simply a reflection of his own sense of social justice; it was also illustrative of the rightward drift in American politics.

McCarthyism and the related assault on organized labor had lessened the sway of working-class militancy over African American civil rights. Civil rights campaigns of the 1950s and early 1960s were thus less concerned with economic justice than social and political equality. Nevertheless, Randolph, a committed trade unionist, continued to press for economic fairness. Identifying lingering discrimination in skilled trades as an important source of black poverty, Randolph established the Negro American Labor Council (NALC) in 1959. The NALC failed to convince AFL leadership of the value of eliminating racial bars in skilled trades. Undeterred, Randolph and the NALC began organizing what would become the 1963 March on Washington.⁴⁴

The 1963 “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” reflected many of the lessons Randolph learned from the March on Washington Movement of the 1940s. The march was convened by both labor and civil rights activists, including Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King Jr., the NAACP, the NUL, the NALC, the UAW, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The rally’s overarching aims reflected the lingering influence of New Deal industrial democracy. Organizers hoped to demonstrate a broad cross section of support for the Civil Rights Act of 1963 and a new permanent FEPC. They also demanded school desegregation, fair housing legislation, WPA-styled jobs programs for residents of America’s declining inner cities, an increase to the federal minimum wage and a full-employment economy.⁴⁵

Like the MOWM, the 1963 March on Washington achieved many of its desired policy outcomes, albeit in much attenuated form. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations did not accede to demands for work relief for underemployed and unemployed African Americans; however, the Johnson administration would attempt to redress the problem of black indigence through the War on Poverty and related jobs training programs. President Johnson also worked with Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which would establish the legislative framework for affirmative action. Unlike the FEPC, the Civil Rights Act’s compliance board, the EEOC, would eventually be endowed with the authority to compel employers and universities to comply with its antidiscrimination guidelines. The greater powers granted the EEOC notwithstanding, its origins can be traced to the FEPC. While Southern congressional Democrats killed the FEPC in 1946, more than two dozen states created their own antidiscrimination commissions between World War II and the early 1960s. As historian Paul Moreno notes, these state boards—New York’s State Commission Against Discrimination (SCAD) in particular—would serve as the blueprint for the Civil Rights Act and the EEOC.⁴⁶

The Wagner Act likewise helped lay the foundation on which antidiscrimination policy would be built. In fact, the phrase “affirmative action” first appeared in a provision in the Wagner Act that directed judges to impose financial penalties on employers who discriminated against union organizers. More to the point, antidiscrimination legislation, and the eventual implementation of affirmative action in the workplace, drew on precedent stemming from the Wagner Act.

As study after study has shown, few if any employers use quotas—which are prohibited by Title VII. Instead, employers hoping to avoid costly discrimination lawsuits established offices of equal employment to ensure compliance with antidiscrimination law. These new equal employment offices were modeled on the labor relations departments that union and nonunion firms had established in the wake of the Wagner Act. Moreover, many of the policies implemented by equal employment offices to ensure fair employment practices—including in-house grievance procedures, formal job descriptions, published guidelines for promotion and termination, salary classifications and open bidding—were already in use by labor relations departments partly because unions had demanded them. Finally, the National Labor Relations Act established a precedent, on which antidiscrimination policy would rely, for government intervention in the employer-employee relationship for the public good. Indeed, it is hard to imagine on what basis black civil rights leaders—who lobbied on behalf of a group that accounted for just 10 percent of the nation’s population—would have demanded a fair employment practices act in the 1960s if the Wagner Act had not already established a precedent, in the name of the public good, for abridging the right to freedom of contract.⁴⁷

If the labor politics of the New Deal did not catalyze the activist spirit of the modern civil rights movement, they did impart direction and, by extension, momentum to the so-called African American liberation movement. The New Deal created a legal framework, shaped by popular discontent over a decade of economic crisis, that legitimated citizens’ demands on government for a more equitable and democratic society—a perspective that transcended both the labor movement and the Depression decade. Civil rights activists of the 1930s and 1940s, like most Americans of that period, embraced statist or what we might think of as social democratic curatives to the nation’s economic and social ills. The labor orientation of New Deal–era black civil rights activism faded as the conservative turn in American politics following World War II reined in labor militancy, most notably by way of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.

The rightward drift of American politics ushered in by the Cold War ultimately led many African American activists in the postwar period to identify race prejudice as a psychological defect rather than a symptom of class exploitation. Still, black leaders remained committed to the notion, rooted in New Deal industrial democracy, that the government’s proper role was to ensure “fairness” in civil society by providing some semblance of security to the citizenry. The New Deal was indeed, as Harvard Sitkoff asserted in 1978, a time for planting but not harvesting black civil rights. But for poor and working-class blacks, the harvest of Cold War–era civil rights politics was far less bountiful than it might have been had political and academic discourse on race and inequality remained rooted in political economy.