NATIONAL NEGRO CONGRESS

The idea of a representative assembly for all of black America began with John P. Davis, a militant civil rights activist of the 1920s and 1930s. At a Howard University conference in Washington, D.C., in 1935, Davis, Ralph Bunche, and other prominent African Americans decided to push ahead. A year later the first National Negro Congress met in Chicago and included some 817 delegates representing 585 religious, labor, civic, and fraternal groups. They intended to pursue racial justice at home and abroad by securing "the right of the Negro people to be free from Jim Crowism...and mob violence" and otherwise promoting "the spirit of unity and cooperation between Negro and white people." Prominent members included not only Bunche and Davis, who served as executive secretary, but A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Randolph was elected president.

If this ambitious coalition held great promise given the particular problems black Americans faced during the Great Depression years, its scope also made it vulnerable to factionalism. Predictably, the nation's most prominent civil rights group, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), saw the National Negro Congress as a rival and kept its distance. Roy Wilkins, nonetheless, attended the Chicago convention as an observer and several local NAACP activists were more directly involved. Davis had more success courting the National Urban League and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), focusing on a working-class constituency that the NAACP largely ignored even during the Depression's depths. That focus, however, led to an increasing Communist Party presence.

The National Negro Congress's accomplishments were substantial given the constraints of the times. On the grassroots level, the Congress helped organize boycotts, rent strikes, and other directaction protests against racial discrimination. Meanwhile, Davis convinced the CIO to recruit black members and the WPA Federal Writers Project to guarantee positions for black writers. Whether organizing voting drives in New York or condemning imperialism in Africa and fascism in Germany, the National Negro Congress was very active through the late 1930s, emerging as a force that could not be ignored. With President Franklin D. Roosevelt sending greetings to its annual meetings, even the NAACP's Walter White felt compelled to participate.

Yet, the National Negro Congress fell apart as quickly as it had come together. The Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 led to a raucous debate culminating in Randolph's decision to leave the organization and begin work on an all-black March on Washington movement. When other prominent members left and general membership plummeted, what was left of the National Negro Congress remained largely in Communist hands. In 1946, the Congress joined two other organizations, the International Labor Defense and the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties, to form the Civil Rights Congress. Under pressure from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the Subversive Activities Control Board, and the Internal Revenue Service, the Civil Rights Congress closed its doors for good in 1956, citing declining membership and the legal costs of defending itself against the Cold War's investigatory apparatus.

NATIONAL NEGRO CONGRESS

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