The Economic Civil Rights Movement

African Americans and the Struggle for Economic Power

Michael Ezra

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136274749
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Economic inequalities have been perhaps the most enduring problem facing African Americans since the civil rights movement, despite the attention they have received from activists. Although the civil rights movement dealt successfully with injustices like disenfranchisement and segregated public accommodations, economic disparities between blacks and whites remain sharp, and the wealth gap between the two groups has widened in the twenty-first century.

The Economic Civil Rights Movement is a collection of thirteen original essays that analyze the significance of economic power to the black freedom struggle by exploring how African Americans fought for increased economic autonomy in an attempt to improve the quality of their lives. It covers a wide range of campaigns ranging from the World War II era through the civil rights and black power movements and beyond. The unfinished business of the civil rights movement primarily is economic. This book turns backward toward history to examine the ways African Americans have engaged this continuing challenge.

Part I

African American Campaigns for Economic Power Before the Civil Rights Movement, 1925–1954

1

A. Philip Randolph, Early Pioneer

The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, National Negro Congress, and the March on Washington Movement

Rhonda Jones

As one of the key links between the black protest movement of the early twentieth century and the classical 1960s phase of the civil rights movement, A. Philip Randolph’s five-decade tenure as an organizer inspired countless African Americans to pursue freedom through economic empowerment. Although battles for political recognition have always been important, Randolph’s emphasis on the workplace opened up a battleground that would become central to the movement. Randolph was not only concerned with the black rank-and-file gaining their share of the pie; he also knew that the very survival of the black freedom struggle depended on adequate funding for the direct-action campaigns that drove it. Even the smallest tasks associated with petitioning for fair and equitable wages, civil inclusion, enfranchisement, and equal protection required financial backing and manpower. Randolph’s pursuit of “freedom dollars” came primary from black constituents, although occasionally circumstances caused him to pursue external donations.

Randolph’s activism began when in 1925 he organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) in New York. The Pullman Company had employed the porters, who labored in an environment akin to sharecropping, since the late 1890s. They worked twenty-one-hour shifts, earning about eighteen cents per hour while traveling approximately 11,000 miles monthly. Their uniforms, food, shoe polish, and other necessities were deducted from their pay. Randolph and the BSCP won a major victory in 1937, finally securing a labor contract and collective bargaining rights from Pullman. But with unionization came expenses. The BSCP lacked manpower, funding, and adequate facilities. Seeking $50,000 in start-up costs, Randolph orchestrated a two-pronged fundraising campaign. BSCP representatives traversed Pullman’s routes, soliciting appeals for initiation fees and membership dues from workmen. The organization also requested aid from the general public, through individual appeals to wealthy sympathizers and via small grants from the Garland Fund, otherwise known as the American Fund for Public Service. This approach would characterize Randolph’s early leadership. Get as much money from blacks as possible and retain as much self-sufficiency as you can before soliciting support from outsiders.

At the heart of BSCP activity were Women’s Economic Councils (WEC) made up primarily of porter wives, mothers, daughters, and widows. These auxiliaries collected dues, secured meeting halls, and distributed propaganda for BSCP locals. WECs also took part in direct action. Members walked picket lines and educated trade unionists about the advantages of cooperative buying, thrift, and responsible consumerism. There was also important behind-the-scenes work to be done. Committees generated thousands of dollars for the fledging union through raffles, dances, parties, picnics, flea markets, and card tournaments where they charged admission and sold refreshments. WECs also coordinated events with businesses. A series of 1928 benefits in New York and Philadelphia, for example, netted nearly $6,000 for the BSCP. WECs would remain significant to the BSCP even after the BSCP secured its labor contract in 1937 and existing WECs were reorganized into forty-four Ladies’ Auxiliary chapters. Concentrating on fundraising in order to ensure the BSCP’s financial stability, Ladies’ Auxiliaries collected membership dues and held social events that raised thousands of dollars.¹

As non-employees, WEC members were somewhat insulated from Pullman’s threats and other anti-union forces, although they were not completely shielded. The husband of the St. Louis WEC chapter president was furloughed when an informant reported her affiliation. The family’s insurance was also revoked. A St. Paul BSCP member was terminated because his wife was the recording secretary of the local WEC. At times BSCP loyalty splintered households and pitted husbands against wives. Pullman maid Mary Frances Albrier asserted, “A lot of black women didn’t understand that the union was fighting for porter families to have a more abundant life. Some of the men would pay and some of the wives would be very upset because they were afraid… . They were naturally frightened because their families would suffer, and they didn’t feel it was worth fighting and exposing themselves.”²

The BSCP relied on its members for funding, but it also responded reciprocally to their requests for aid and support in times of need. The union sponsored soup kitchens and rent parties for workers laid off during the Great Depression or fired because of their union activities. Such action not only sustained aggrieved individuals, but also bolstered community morale. The BSCP’s annual ball regularly assisted vulnerable locals. Its headquarters, located in Harlem, served as a community center. It offered classes four days a week and every Saturday afternoon provided an attorney whose pro bono legal advice allowed the BSCP to secure more than 1,631 cases of relief and 147 old-age security pensions on behalf of Harlem residents.³

National Negro Congress

The union was politically active throughout the Depression, including a key role in the National Negro Congress (NNC). The BSCP identified and publicized racial inequities in New Deal economic recovery programs. The economic aspects of social justice campaigns was the theme of a 1933 conference of academics and intellectuals that resulted in a condemnation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for its limited stance on economic issues and a call for a new organization that would forge alliances between the African American middle and laboring classes. Spurred by this, BSCP President Randolph and 250 other prominent individuals, including John P. Davis, Executive Secretary of the Joint Committee of National Recovery, political scientist Dr. Ralph Bunche, and the Urban League’s Lester Granger, formed the NNC in 1935.⁴

The NNC was an umbrella organization that sought not to replicate the function of the several hundred existing groups that were defenders of civil liberties but instead to federate them and identify their common directions. Randolph was appointed NNC President. Davis became its executive secretary. Ella Baker, whose own legendary organizing career paralleled Randolph’s, was named director of publicity. The NNC petitioned for anti-lynching legislation, sought patronage for black businesses, addressed the plight of oppressed people abroad, drummed up support for Ethiopia, and strategized about trade unions and black labor. Although its founders emphasized that African Americans would sustain the organization, they also sought patronage from white organizations that provided entry into the corridors of power.⁵

The planning of the NNC’s first convention provided a potential template for future fundraising efforts by cultivating grassroots black support without ignoring more significant sums that might come from sympathetic whites. The gathering was held in Chicago in 1936 and would cost $10,000, including $125 to rent the Eighth Regiment Armory for five days; nearly $5,000 for supplies and employees; and $1,000 for travel. The NNC spent $1,200 on printing. There were pamphlets, postcards, stationary, placards, posters, and pre-convention newsletters. On top of this was $1,000 more for postage and handling charges. In Harlem, Roi Ottley of the New York Amsterdam News and Reverend Adam Clayton Powell of Abyssinian Baptist Church organized a finance committee. Teams of African American churches, lodges, businesses, labor unions, fraternities, sororities, and women’s clubs were organized in Richmond, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Washington, and Chicago. Davis also applied for a $5,000 grant from the American Fund for Public Service. The NNC hoped that these sources, in addition to proceeds from five-, ten-, and twenty-five-cent stamps, sales of the pamphlet “Let Us Build a National Negro Congress,” and donations and collections from individuals and local groups would cover the convention’s expenses.⁶

Randolph’s and the BSCP’s belief in trade unionism’s centrality to African American emancipation characterized convention rhetoric. In his presidential address, Randolph explained how the struggle for freedom was enmeshed with worker dignity, fair wages, and the right to organize. Economic self-determination was the key, he believed. The delegation must never put “their problems for solution down at the feet of their white sympathetic allies which has been and is the common fashion of old school Negro leadership, for in the final analysis, salvation of the Negro, like the workers, must come from within.”⁷

More than 5,000 people attended the opening session. There were 817 participants representing 585 organizations. Conventioneers came from nearly thirty states and included laborers, black nationalists, Republicans, New Dealers, Social Democrats, housewives, clubwomen, trade unionists, fraternal organizations, lodge groups, Garveyites, communists, and representatives from international organizations. Randolph’s message resonated with conventioneers, who were charged with making the organization a national voice for civil rights politics. Randolph returned afterward to his responsibilities with the BSCP and in 1937 the Pullman Company agreed to the Brotherhood’s union contract. Wages rose, workplace conditions improved, and job security increased.⁸

The NNC carried great momentum out of its first convention and into the field. Members organized labor committees in seventy cities, including New York, Cleveland, and San Francisco. They stumped steel towns and tobacco fields both soliciting help from and providing help to local black communities. Newspaper editorials and press releases reported on the effectiveness of NNC direct-action protest campaigns, contrasting them with the less-aggressive techniques of groups like the NAACP. The NNC developed surveys on labor conditions, which it gave to workers. They proved to be a valuable tool used to analyze community leadership. The NNC utilized the data it gathered from them to pressure ministers, clubs, and organizations to sponsor mass meetings and support black workers who wished to unionize.⁹

The NNC provided a wide range of programs for African Americans. Its organizers cultivated relationships with local leaders and arranged meetings with workers at plants, their homes, and lodge halls. The NNC coordinated parties, picnics, and games for workers’ wives and children. It launched campaigns for better housing conditions, led employment drives, and organized rent strikes in Chicago, where it partnered with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union to assist African American women in the clothing industry. It surveyed public parks and recreational facilities and led a ban against offensive and derogatory public school textbooks in Boston. It called for federal investigations of the enslavement of southern blacks that were forced to pick cotton. NNC councils in Richmond helped organize tobacco workers. In several large cities, including Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, DC, the NNC organized domestic workers and provided free employment services and adult education classes. The NNC carried its program throughout 1937, which culminated in its second annual convention in October in Philadelphia.¹⁰

The decline of the NNC over the next two years indicated just how important Randolph was to the organization’s success. As he turned his attention back to the BSCP, the NNC was unable to sustain what it had initially built. The organization went two-and-a-half years before hosting its third convention in 1940. Internal documents reveal that the NNC was chronically short of funds and financially unstable during this period as its leaders frantically planned the convention. Although the gathering opened with much fanfare, as Washington NNC Chairman Arthur Gray called the meeting to order using a gavel carved from a piece of wood from one of the last slave ships to touch American shores, especially made for the occasion by Hampton Institute students, it would be the organization’s last great moment. The convention featured panels on economic security and citizenship. More than 1,200 delegates from twenty states made the trip to Washington, DC.¹¹

As ceremonious as the opening of the third convention may have been, all momentum was lost when Randolph announced his official resignation from the NNC, which he felt had become the tool of white communists. From its inception Randolph had exhorted the NNC to remain “essentially a Negro organization and not to become part and parcel of any labor or political group of policy,” but now he worried that NNC support of the non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin represented the group’s take-over by communists. Randolph was also displeased by what he believed to be NNC overreliance on white support. Organizational records show that the NNC depended on funding by trade unions like the Congress of Industrial Organizations to stay afloat. Randolph insisted that the NNC “must depend upon the resources supplied by Negro people alone… . [W]here you get your money, you get your ideas and control. When outsiders come in, they dictate the policy of the organization.” Convinced that the NNC no longer represented the will of its black constituents, Randolph left:

I quit the Congress because I saw the Communists were firmly in the saddle … I quit because it was not truly a Negro Congress. Of 1,200 delegates 300 were white, which made the Congress look like a joke. It is unthinkable that the Jewish Congress would have Gentiles in it or Catholics would have Protestants or the famous all-Indian Congress would have members native of Africa. Our people cannot afford to add to the handicap of being black, the handicap of being labeled “red.”¹²

Ordinary delegates followed Randolph’s lead and the organization was soon finished. Rank-and-file members like Pullman maid Frances Mary Albrier, a longtime Randolph disciple who had followed him into the NNC, recalled, “When the radical element came in like they always do … they gradually work themselves up into offices. And when you know it, they have taken over your organization. When that happened Randolph sent a message to all of us to withdraw. And we did.” With its membership declining, the NNC’s programmatic directives of addressing racial inequality and the exploitation of workers succumbed under the weight of the administrative challenges of establishing local councils, sending out charters, generating publicity, distributing leaflets, writing speeches, and fundraising. The death blow was when the House Un-American Activities Committee alleged that the NNC was a red front that was taking donations from the Communist Party.¹³

The harsh realities of the Great Depression had tinged the black freedom struggle with an undeniably economic bent, but as the military conflict in Europe reframed American values, African Americans put aside much of the watchdog consumerism, cooperative buying, and lab...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: The Economic Dimensions of the Black Freedom Struggle
• Part I: African American Campaigns for Economic Power Before the Civil Rights Movement, 1925–1954
• Part II: African American Campaigns for Economic Power During the Civil Rights Era and Beyond
• Contributors
• Index