Background 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. 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, 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.
Convention call The call for the American Negro Labor Congress was 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 communists sought to use
front tactics by downplaying their own presence and casting the ANLC as a multi-tendency organization, thereby reducing the chance of the group's ability to challenge the
NAACP and the
Marcus Garvey's UNIA as the paramount voice of the black working class. 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, 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.
Establishment The founding convention of the American Negro Labor Congress 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. 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. At the founding convention was announced that 10 American blacks were already in Moscow enrolled at the
University of the Toilers of the East, where they were ostensibly being trained for work in the Soviet "diplomatic service." The delegates also heard an enthusiastic speech delivered by "Bad Bishop"
William Montgomery Brown, who hammered the capitalist class and declared that "the Christian church was started by workers and you workers must take it back." Such a congress was to be held with a view to establishing a world organization of black workers and farmers which would unite exploited colonial populations to overthrow
imperialism, the Comintern indicated. The Comintern also participated in the ANLC financially, budgeting $2,500 for organizers' salaries, travel expenses, and the production of pamphlets and leaflets. This was no great change in previous practice, as from the perspective of the Comintern and the American Communist Party the ANLC merely replaced the moribund African Blood Brotherhood, an entity which was a previous recipient of financial support. 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. 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 rejecting the entire idea that American blacks could be "bolshevized" as "ridiculously childish."
Discord within ANLC In addition to external hostility, a spirit of factionalism and personal strife existed within the ranks of the ANLC. The selection of Fort-Whiteman as leader by the Comintern had proven controversial, as he seemed to leapfrog long-time party activists with impeccable bona fides, including Moore, Huiswoud, and Briggs. This situation was exacerbated by Fort-Whiteman's own growing sense of self-importance, his tendency to make decisions by fiat, and his propensity to wear grandiose Russian garb. A steady stream of complaints about Fort-Whiteman to the Negro Commission of the Workers (Communist) Party followed, sidetracking the organization's work. In 1929 this was succeeded by a new publication, a magazine called
The Liberator. Dissolution 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. ==See also==