The League of Struggle for Negro Rights was organized by the Communist Party in 1930 as the successor to the American Negro Labor Congress. [1] [2] [3] The League was particularly active in organizing support for the "Scottsboro Boys", nine black men sentenced to death in 1931 for crimes they had not committed. [4] It also campaigned for a separate black nation in the South, one of the CPUSA's principal tenets in the early 1930s, and against police brutality, the Italian occupation of Ethiopia and Jim Crow laws, while also advocating a more general policy of opposition to fascism and support for the Soviet Union.
Langston Hughes became its President in 1934. Harry Haywood was its General Secretary. Another prominent leader of the organization was Bonita Williams, a migrant from the British Caribbean living in Harlem, who joined the group after abandoning Garveyism. During her time with the league, Williams organized "'Flying Squads,' which mobilized working-class housewives to agitate against high food prices." [5]
The organization largely disappeared after 1935, when the Communist Party, as part of its Popular Front strategy, joined with other non-communist organizations and individuals to form the National Negro Congress.
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.
The civil rights movement (1896–1954) was a long, primarily nonviolent action to bring full civil rights and equality under the law to all Americans. The era has had a lasting impact on American society – in its tactics, the increased social and legal acceptance of civil rights, and in its exposure of the prevalence and cost of racism.
Harry Haywood was an American political activist who was a leading figure in both the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). His goal was to connect the political philosophy of the Communist Party with the issues of race.
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 National Negro Congress (NNC) was an American organization formed in 1936 at Howard University as a broadly based organization with the goal of fighting for Black liberation; it was the successor to the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, both affiliated with the Communist Party. During the Great Depression, the party worked in the United States to unite black and white workers and intellectuals in the fight for racial justice. This period represented the Party's peak of prestige in African-American communities. NNC was opposed to war, fascism, and discrimination, especially racial discrimination. During the Great Depression era, a majority of Americans faced immense economic problems. Many lost their jobs and as a result, were forced to live at the margins of society. The crisis highlighted inequities for many African Americans, who were unemployed at higher rates than white.
Richard Benjamin Moore was a Barbados-born Afro-Caribbean civil rights activist, writer and prominent socialist. He was also one of the earliest advocates of the term African American, as opposed to Negro or "black".
Benjamin DeWayne Amis, known as B. D. Amis, was an African-American labor organizer and civil rights leader. Particularly influential in the fight for African Americans and workers during the period of official segregation in the South and informal discrimination throughout the country, Amis is most remembered for his militant Communist activism on behalf of the notable legal cases of the falsely-accused Scottsboro Boys, the African-American organizer Angelo Herndon, as well as the white labor leader Tom Mooney.
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.
Williana "Liana" Jones Burroughs was an American teacher, communist political activist, and politician. She is best remembered as one of the first women to run for elective office in New York.
James S. "Jim" Allen, born Sol Auerbach (1906–1986), was an American Marxist historian, journalist, editor, activist, and functionary of the Communist Party USA. Allen is best remembered as the author and editor of over two dozen books and pamphlets and as one of the party's leading experts on African-American history.
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.
The Alabama Chapter of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) was one of the most influential political bodies organizing poor African-Americans in the South during and after the Great Depression. Started with just two members, the Alabama chapter CPUSA was established in Birmingham Alabama in 1928, and remained active until it was forced underground by Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and police repression, and was disbanded when it was outlawed in 1951. During the height of Jim Crow and the Great Depression, the Alabama CPUSA organized some of the poorest African-American communities in the country, and was successful in leading organization drives in multiple industries including the Sharecroppers' Union, mine, mill, and industrial workers, as well as leading numerous campaigns to organize unemployed workers. The Alabama CPUSA also played a vital role in organizing African-Americans during a period where many activists would later become leaders of the emerging Civil Rights Movement. Ashbury Howard, who later was a significant leader in Alabama during the Civil Rights Movement, and Rosa Parks, who would later commit an act of civil disobedience launching the Montgomery Bus Boycott, were both trained and active with the Alabama CPUSA.
The Negro Sanhedrin was a national "All-Race Conference" held in the American city of Chicago, Illinois, from February 11 to 15, 1924. The gathering was attended by 250 delegates representing 61 trade unions, civic groups, and fraternal organizations in a short-lived attempt to forge a national program protecting the legal rights of African-American tenant farmers and wage workers and extending the scope of civil rights.
The Yokinen Show Trial was a March 1931 public disciplinary proceeding conducted by leaders of the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA) against August Yokinen, a Finnish-American Communist janitor who allegedly denied several African Americans entry to a dance at the Finnish Workers Club in Harlem and made racially disparaging remarks against several African-American members of the organization at a social event. Attended by more an audience of 2,000 people, the "party trial" of Yokinen was publicized across America and was intended to emphasize the CPUSA's commitment to eliminate "White Chauvinism" from its ranks and to thereby bolster its status in the eyes of the black American working class and among white intellectuals seeking an end to racism.
The Sharecroppers' Union, also known as SCU or Alabama Sharecroppers’ Union, was a trade union of predominantly African American tenant farmers in the American South that operated from 1931 to 1936. Its aims were to improve wages and working conditions for sharecroppers.
African-American self-determination refers to efforts to secure self-determination for African-Americans and related peoples in North America. It often intersects with the historic Back-to-Africa movement and general Black separatism, but also manifests in present and historic demands for self-determination on North American soil, ranging from autonomy to independence. The freedom to make whatever choices as a free American, and willfulness to do for self are often a key demand for advocates of African-American self-determination.
Joseph R. Brodsky, often known as Joseph Brodsky and Joe Brodsky, was an early 20th-century American civil rights lawyer, political activist, general counsel of the International Labor Defense (ILD), co-founder of the International Juridical Association (IJA), member of ILD defense team for members of the Scottsboro Boys Case of the 1930s, and general counsel for the International Workers Order (IWO).
Revels Cayton was an American union leader and civil rights activist active in the states of Washington and California.
Bonita Williams was a British West-Indian Communist Party leader, poet, and civil rights activist in Harlem, New York during the Great Depression in the 1930s. During this time, she wrote several poems and gave speeches focusing on black suffrage and workers' rights in the context of racial discrimination and class inequity. In addition, Williams served as the leader of several Harlem-based organizations, namely the Harlem Unemployment Council, Harlem Tenants' League, Harlem Action Committee against the High Cost of Living, and League of Struggle for Negro Rights (LSNR).