International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers

Last updated

ITUCNW
International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers
Founded31 July 1928 (1928-07-31)
Dissolved1937 (1937)
HeadquartersHamburg
Key people
  • James W. Ford, General Secretary (1928-31)
  • Geogre Padmore, General Secretary (1931-33)
Affiliations Profintern

The International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW) was a section of the Profintern that existed during the late 1920s and 1930s and acted as a radical transnational platform for black workers in Africa and the Atlantic World. [1]

Contents

History

It was launched in July 1930 at an "International Conference of Negro Workers" that took place in Hamburg. There were 17 delegates including:

It produced a journal, The Negro Worker , which was edited by George Padmore until 1931 and by James W. Ford until 1937 when it ceased publication. [2]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Communist International</span> Political organization (1919–1943)

The Communist International (Comintern), also known as the Third International, was an international organization founded in 1919 that advocated world communism, and which was led and controlled by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The Comintern resolved at its Second Congress in 1920 to "struggle by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and the creation of an international soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the state". The Comintern was preceded by the dissolution of the Second International in 1916.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pan-African Congress</span>

The Pan-African Congress (PAC) was a series of eight meetings which took place on the back of the Pan-African Conference held in London in 1900. The Pan-African Congress gained a reputation as a peacemaker for decolonization in Africa and in the West Indies. It made a significant advance for the Pan-African cause. One of the group's major demands was to end colonial rule and racial discrimination. It stood against imperialism and it demanded human rights and equality of economic opportunity. The manifesto given by the Pan-African Congress included the political and economic demands of the Congress for a new world context of international cooperation and the need to address the issues facing Africa as a result of European colonization of most of the continent.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Z. Foster</span> American labor organizer and Communist politician (1881–1961)

William Z. Foster was a radical American labor organizer and Communist politician, whose career included serving as General Secretary of the Communist Party USA from 1945 to 1957. He was previously a member of the Socialist Party of America and the Industrial Workers of the World, leading the drive to organize packinghouse industry workers during World War I and the steel strike of 1919.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Earl Browder</span> American Communist politician (1891–1973)

Earl Russell Browder was an American politician, spy for the Soviet Union, communist activist and leader of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Browder was the General Secretary of the CPUSA during the 1930s and first half of the 1940s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Padmore</span> Trinidadian Pan-Africanist and writer (1903–1959)

George Padmore, born Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse, was a leading Pan-Africanist, journalist, and author. He left his native Trinidad in 1924 to study medicine in the United States, where he also joined the Communist Party.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">American Negro Labor Congress</span> Congress established to advance the rights of African Americans

The American Negro Labor Congress was established in 1925 by the Communist Party as a vehicle for advancing the rights of African Americans, propagandizing for communism within the black community and recruiting African American members for the party.

The Communist Party USA, ideologically committed to foster a socialist revolution in the United States, played a significant role in defending the civil rights of African Americans during its most influential years of the 1930s and 1940s. In that period, the African-American population was still concentrated in the South, where it was largely disenfranchised, excluded from the political system, and oppressed under Jim Crow laws.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson</span> Trade unionist, journalist, activist, and politician in West Africa (1894–1965)

Isaac Theophilus Akunna Wallace-Johnson was a Sierra Leonean, British West African workers' leader, journalist, activist and politician.

John La Rose was a political and cultural activist, poet, writer, publisher, founder in 1966 of New Beacon Books, the first specialist Caribbean publishing company in Britain, and subsequently Chairman of the George Padmore Institute. He was originally from Trinidad and Tobago but was involved in the struggle for political independence and cultural and social change in the Caribbean in the 1940s and 1950s and later in Britain, the rest of Europe and the Third World.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James W. Ford</span> American politician

James W. “Jim” Ford was an activist, a politician, and the vice-presidential candidate for the Communist Party USA in the years 1932, 1936, and 1940. Ford was born in Alabama and later worked as a party organizer for the CPUSA in New York City. He was also the first African American to run on a U.S. presidential ticket (1932) in the 20th century.

The International African Service Bureau (IASB) was a pan-African organisation founded in London in 1937 by West Indians George Padmore, C. L. R. James, Amy Ashwood Garvey, T. Ras Makonnen and Kenyan nationalist Jomo Kenyatta and Sierra Leonean labour activist and agitator I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson. Chris Braithwaite, was Secretary of this organisation.

Manning Rudolph Johnson AKA Manning Johnson and Manning R. Johnson was a Communist Party USA African-American leader and the party's candidate for U.S. Representative from New York's 22nd congressional district during a special election in 1935. Later, he left the Party and became an anti-communist government informant and witness.

Otto Eduard Gerardus Majella Huiswoud was a Surinamese political activist who was a charter member of the Communist Party of America. Huiswoud is regarded as the first black member of the American communist movement. Huiswoud served briefly as the Communist Party's representative to the Executive Committee of the Communist International in 1922 and was a leading black Comintern functionary during the decade of the 1920s.

Chris Braithwaite, also known as Chris Jones, was a black Barbadian who was leader of the Colonial Seamen's Association in the 1930s.

The International Labor Defense (ILD) (1925–1947) was a legal advocacy organization established in 1925 in the United States as the American section of the Comintern's International Red Aid network. The ILD defended Sacco and Vanzetti, was active in the anti-lynching, movements for civil rights, and prominently participated in the defense and legal appeals in the cause célèbre of the Scottsboro Boys in the early 1930s. Its work contributed to the appeal of the Communist Party among African Americans in the South. In addition to fundraising for defense and assisting in defense strategies, from January 1926 it published Labor Defender, a monthly illustrated magazine that achieved wide circulation. In 1946 the ILD was merged with the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties to form the Civil Rights Congress, which served as the new legal defense organization of the Communist Party USA. It intended to expand its appeal, especially to African Americans in the South. In several prominent cases in which blacks had been sentenced to death in the South, the CRC campaigned on behalf of black defendants. It had some conflict with former allies, such as the NAACP, and became increasingly isolated. Because of federal government pressure against organizations it considered subversive, such as the CRC, it became less useful in representing defendants in criminal justice cases. The CRC was dissolved in 1956. At the same time, in this period, black leaders were expanding the activities and reach of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1954, in a case managed by the NAACP, the US Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">C. L. R. James</span> Trinidadian historian, journalist and Marxist (1901–1989)

Cyril Lionel Robert James, who sometimes wrote under the pen-name J. R. Johnson, was a Trinidadian historian, journalist, Trotskyist activist and Marxist writer. His works are influential in various theoretical, social, and historiographical contexts. His work is a staple of Marxism, and he figures as a pioneering and influential voice in postcolonial literature. A tireless political activist, James is the author of the 1937 work World Revolution outlining the history of the Communist International, which stirred debate in Trotskyist circles, and in 1938 he wrote on the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Negro Worker</span> Newspaper of the International Trade Union Committee for Black Workers.

The Negro Worker was the newspaper of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers. It was called The International Negro Workers' Review, when launched in 1928, but the name was changed in March 1931. It ceased publication in 1937.

Trade unions in The Gambia are regulated under the Labour Act 2007. The first trade union was the Bathurst Trade Union (BTU), founded in 1929, which led a general strike that year. General strikes were also led by the Gambia Workers' Union (GWU) in 1960, 1961, 1967, and 1970, although not all were successful. There are three trade union centres in The Gambia: the Gambia Trade Union Bureau (GamTUB), the Gambian Workers' Confederation (GWC), and the Gambia National Trade Union Congress (GNTUC). The country joined the International Labour Organization (ILO) in 1995.

The Marine Workers Industrial Union (MWIU) was a short-lived union (1930-1935), initiated by the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA).

Roy Hudson, also known as Roy B. Hudson, served on the national executive board of the Communist Party USA and national trade union director and trade union expert.

References

Footnotes

  1. Weiss 2012, pp. 362–3.
  2. "The Negro Worker A Comintern Publication of 1928-37". Marxists.org. Retrieved 24 January 2016.

Sources