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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 February 2014
The eleven-week dispute at the Amsterdam News in Harlem was the first time in US history that black workers were successful in a labour dispute with black management. Some contemporaries argued that the event represented a triumph for the class-inspired activism of the left, an interpretation in line with the historiography of the long civil rights movement. This article argues that the dispute actually demonstrated the challenges inherent in pursuing labour-based protest strategies. Success was achieved by a concentrated group of workers who used their collective power and propitious geographical and social standing to harness the support of a cross-section of leadership groups. This moment of apparent unity concealed enduring divides over interracial activism, not only between nationalist groups and the radical left but also within mainstream groups like the NAACP. Temporary success could be achieved when workers like the Amsterdam News staff managed to bridge these divides. Supporters, however, proved unable to avoid the subsequent dismissal of union instigators by the newspaper's new owners. More broadly, the problems of coordinating activism to target the different groups who controlled black employment continued to bedevil subsequent protests during the transformative era of the New Deal.
1 New York Amsterdam News, 19 Oct., 26 Oct. 1935. For a broad outline of the dispute see Ottley, R. and Weatherby, W. J., eds., The Negro in New York: An Informal Social History (New York: New York Public Library 1967), 283–85Google Scholar; Leab, Daniel J., A Union of Individuals: The Formation of the American Newspaper Guild 1933–1936 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 234Google Scholar.
2 Franklin, Charles Lionel, The Negro Unionist of New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), 212Google Scholar.
3 The most explicit statement of the “long” civil rights movement has been offered by Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History, 91 (2005), 1233–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar (“decisive first phase,” at 1245). Key works contributing to the “long” civil rights narrative include Korstad, Robert and Lichtenstein, Nelson, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of American History, 75 (1988), 786–811CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Korstad, Robert Rodgers, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sugrue, Thomas, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2009)Google Scholar; Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights 1919–1950 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008)Google Scholar; Kelley, Robin D. G., Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Sullivan, Patricia, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Egerton, John, Speak Now against the Day: The Generation before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Denning, Michael, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1996)Google Scholar.
4 Manfred Berg has drawn attention to the limited evidence for an antiradical purge within the ranks of the NAACP in the postwar years, while Eric Arnesen has challenged the triumphalist tone of accounts of Communist Party civil rights activities, posing fundamental questions regarding the potential of a left-led coalition to meaningfully advance economic rights. Berg, Manfred, “Black Civil Rights and Liberal Anticommunism: The NAACP in the Early Cold War,” Journal of American History, 94 (2007), 75–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Arnesen, Eric, “Civil Rights and the Cold War at Home: Postwar Activism, Anticommunism, and the Decline of the Left,” American Communist History, 11 (2012), 5–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The more general criticism that the “long” movement tends to flatten and distort important differences between phases of civil rights struggle is advanced in Cha-Jua, Sundiata Keita and Lang, Clarence, “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” Journal of African American History, 92 (2007), 265–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 For case studies which emphasize the potential of CIO-era unionism see Horowitz, Roger, “Negro and White Unite and Fight!” A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930–90 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Halpern, Rick, Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago's Packinghouses (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997)Google Scholar. Highly contested debates have often followed the attempts of scholars to draw wider conclusions regarding divergences in racial policies. See Goldfield, Michael, “Race and the CIO: The Possibilities for Racial Egalitarianism in the 1930s and 1940s,” International Labor and Working-Class History, 44 (1993), 1–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gary Gerstel, “Working-Class Racism: Broaden the Focus,” ibid., 33–40; Marshall F. Stevenson, “Beyond Theoretical Models: The Limited Possibilities of Racial Egalitarianism,” ibid., 45–52; Goldfield, Michael, “Race and the CIO: Reply to Critics,” International Labor and Working-Class History, 46 (1994), 142–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Sugrue, 36, for instance, emphasizes the importance of the NNC, arguing that it represented the “culmination of the proletarian turn.” Other works which position local, pro-union, left-wing activists in a central role include Kelley; Bates, Beth T., “A New Crowd Challenges the Agenda of the Old Guard in the NAACP, 1933–1941,” American Historical Review, 102 (1997), 340–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Naison, Mark, Communists in Harlem during the Depression (New York: Grove Press, 1984)Google Scholar.
7 New Masses, 22 Oct. 1935.
8 Naison, 177; Cheryl Lynn Greenberg noted the divisions that the dispute opened up between interracial trade unionist and nationalist groups in an interpretation which largely sees the 1930s as an era that laid the “groundwork” for more successful postwar protests. Greenberg, Cheryl Lynn, “Or Does It Explode?” Black Harlem in the Great Depression (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 129CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 139.
9 Dowd Hall, 1245.
10 In this successful four-day action, the guild displayed a flair for publicizing their members’ quest for reinstatement, attempting to organize a community boycott of the paper while staging radio appearances and flying slogans on biplanes over the surrounding neighbourhood. Leab, A Union of Individuals, 84–85, 137–40.
11 Kramer, Dale, Heywood Broun: A Biographical Portrait (New York: Current Books, 1949), 244Google Scholar; Leab, 234.
12 Interview with Marvel Cooke by Kathleen Currie, Washington Press Club Foundation, Women in Journalism Oral History Program, http://wpcf.org/marvel-cooke, accessed 24 January 2014, 58–59. The seven editorial staff initially dismissed were Thelma Berlack-Boozer, Henry Lee Moon, Marie King-Barr, Ida Mae Ryan, Sadie Hall, Charles Grutzner and Stephen Hall. New York Age, 12 Oct. 1935.
13 Cooke, 68, 71.
14 Moon later said that he had never “felt more at home among a people than among the Russians.” Lewis, David Levering, When Harlem Was in Vogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 290Google Scholar.
15 Had there not been a disagreement over the cancellation of the film project when in the Soviet Union, Ted Poston believed that Moon “might well have developed into a fellow traveller.” Ted Poston article from New York Post, 7 June 1948, quoted in Hauke, Kathleen A., ed., A First Draft of History: Ted Poston (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 52Google Scholar. Moon later went on to advocate black union participation in a chapter entitled “Labor as an Ally,” where he made reference to the reluctance of black newspaper owners to grant union recognition to their own employees, in Moon, Henry Lee, Balance of Power: The Negro Vote (New York: Doubleday, 1948), 137Google Scholar; Cooke, 77.
16 Cooke, 73–74.
17 Ibid., 61, 87.
18 New York Age, 21 Dec. 1935; Cooke, 73.
19 Leab, 235.
20 Ibid. Details of the meeting of 500 were contained in The Reporter, 7 Nov. 1935, Box 11, e19, Papers of the UNIA, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York City.
21 Cooke, 73–74.
22 Ibid., 74.
23 Naison, Communists in Harlem, 187.
24 Cooke, 148.
25 Undated, “Rules Governing the Negro Labor Committee and the Negro Labor Assembly,” Reel 1, NLC Papers, Schomburg Center. For an overly positive assessment of the NLC's impact see Walter, John C., “Frank R. Crosswaith and the Negro Labor Committee in Harlem,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, 3 (1979), 36–41Google Scholar.
26 New York Age, 9 Nov. 1935.
27 New York Age, 16 Nov. 1935.
28 Noah Walter, “Organizational Report,” undated, NLC Papers, Reel 1.
29 Walter, “Frank R. Crosswaith and the Negro Labor Committee in Harlem,” 42.
30 Harlem's Don't Buy Where You Can't Work campaigns have received reasonably extensive treatment in the secondary literature. See William A. Muraskin, “The Harlem Boycott of 1934 and Its Aftermath”, unpublished master's thesis, Columbia University, 1966; Melville J. Weiss, “Don't Buy Where You Can't Work: An Analysis of Consumer Action Against Employment Discrimination in Harlem, 1934–1940,” unpublished master's thesis, Columbia University, 1941; Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode?”, 114–39.
31 New York Age, 12 Oct. 1935. The NLC records also listed Dr. Coleman, T. Arnold Hill of the Urban League, lawyer Charles Houston and Reverend Lloyd Imes as members of this committee. Reel 1, NLC Papers; New York Amsterdam News, 28 Dec. 1935.
32 New York Age, 26 Oct. 1935.
33 “Has the Amsterdam News gone over to Jim-crowism?”, found in Box 11, e19, UNIA Papers.
34 Chase, Allen, “The Amsterdam News Is Winning,” The Nation, 141 (13 Nov. 1935), 567Google Scholar, New Deal Network, http://www.newdeal.feri.org/nation/na35567.htm, accessed 20 July 2011.
35 Ibid.
36 New York Age, 26 Oct. 1935.
37 Other provisions included a maximum 45-hour week and a week of paid holiday after six months of employment. The reinstated workers were listed in the strike agreement as Obie McCollum, Thelma Berlack-Boozer, Ted R. Poston, Henry L. Moon, William Chase, Marvel Cooke, Marie King Barr, Ida Mae Ryan and Roi Ottley. Agreement listed in Roi Ottley, ed., Federal Writers Project, “Negroes in New York,” microfilm version, Reel 4, Schomburg Center.
38 New York Amsterdam News, 28 Dec. 1935.
39 New Masses, 7 Jan. 1936.
40 Franklin, The Negro Labor Unionist of New York, 214.
41 New York Amsterdam News, 26 Oct. 1935.
42 Leab, A Union of Individuals, 42, 266–67, 271, 280–81.
43 Bonnie Brennen argues that the ANG fostered the emergence of a “class consciousness” among newspaper workers, but considerable conflicts accompanied the growth of the union. These conflicts not only involved the efforts of publisher to deter unionization, but also included an interorganizational dispute with the AFL and with communist elements within the guild. See Glende, Philip M., “Trouble on the Right, Trouble on the Left: The Early History of the American Newspaper Guild,” Journalism History, 38 (2012), 142–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 143; Brennen, Bonnie, “The Emergence of Class Consciousness in the American Newspaper Guild,” in Heider, Don, ed., Class and News (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, Inc., 2004), 233–47Google Scholar.
44 NLC Minutes, 14 May 1936, Reel 1, NLC Papers.
45 Leab, 239, 244, 248–52, 261.
46 Poston later went on to find work as the first black writer at the New York Post, while Moon began working for the NAACP. Marvel Cooke, meanwhile, was subsequently called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities for her membership of the Communist Party. NLC Minutes, 14 May 1936, Reel 1, NLC Papers; Ottley and Weatherby, The Negro in New York, 285; Cooke, Washington Press Club Foundation Oral History Project, 77, 90.
47 “Race Progress Used as Smoke Screen by Publishers,” Guild Reporter, 7 Nov. 1935, copy in UNIA papers Box 11, e19, Reel 4.
48 This included Ted Poston, who continued to write for the New York Post. Leab, 234; Roberts, Gene and Klibanoff, Hank, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 214Google Scholar, 365.
49 Ottley and Weatherby, 285.
50 New York Age, 15 Mar. 1941.
51 Ottley and Weatherby, 288–89.
52 Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode?”, 133–36.
53 New York Age, 23 Nov. 1935. Throughout the 1930s Powell Jr. was happy to make common cause on certain issues with a variety of left-wing activists. Though he was never seemingly a CPUSA member, he later explained his links with members of the radical left by saying that during this “period of conflict I used everyone I thought might aid us.” Powell, Adam Clayton Jr., Adam by Adam: The Autobiography of Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (New York: Dial Press, 1971), 67Google Scholar; As his biographer Charles Hamilton put it, future Congressman Powell's “career was constantly one of positioning himself on the ‘militant’ wing of the racial protest movement … this was a complex mixture of sincere temperament and astute tactics.” Hamilton, Charles V., Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Political Biography of an American Dilemma (New York: Atheneum, 1991), 5Google Scholar.
54 Marvel Cooke described how Rev. Bishop said to her, “You know, just this past Sunday I talked about the people on the picket line at the Amsterdam News and what an important thing it was for this community,” before he decided to back up his words with support on the picket line. Cooke, 146–47; New York Age, 23 Nov. 1935.
55 One of Powell's parishioners remembered his dramatic flair for entering protests at the “psychological moment” during the jobs campaign against utility companies in 1938. Interview of Helen Brown by Martia Goodson, 17 Aug. 1992, p. 30, Box 1, Folder 1, Abyssinian Baptist Church Oral History Project, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center.
56 Undated, “Rules Governing the Negro Labor Committee and the Negro Labor Assembly,” Reel 1, NLC Papers.
57 Letter from Frank Crosswaith to John P. Davis, 11 April 1938, Reel 12, NNC Papers, Schomburg Center.
58 Minutes of the NLC, 6 Oct. 1937, Reel 1, NLC Papers.
59 Daily Worker, 7 Feb. 1936.
60 Minutes of Meeting, 29 Jan. 1937, Reel 1, NLC Papers.
61 New York Age, 14 Oct. 1939.
62 Naison, Communists in Harlem, 256, estimates that at the time of the Nazi–Soviet Pact in 1939, the Communist Party had approximately 50,000 members and a role in one-third of the CIO's industrial unions. But, equally, Naison also notes that many black workers remained “structurally incapable” of reaping the benefits of union membership as a result of their continued underemployment.
63 Undated memo from William Gaulden and John P. Davis to Abram Flaxer, Reel 20, NNC Papers.
64 New York Amsterdam News, 26 Oct. 1935.
65 An editorial said that the mission of paper was ‘to protect and advance the interests of Negroes and to serve as a medium of inspiring racial pride. Its mission is not to a certain few, nor to a certain class of Negroes who make belabored efforts to act and think like white persons.” New York Amsterdam News, 26 Oct. 1935.
66 Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode?”, 120–21.
67 Weiss, ‘Don't Buy Where You Can't Work,’ 86; Naison, 176. On the changes occurring in black identity in interwar Harlem, including the impact of the invasion of Ethiopia, see Corbould, Clare, Becoming African Americans: Black Public Life in Harlem, 1919–1939 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
68 Chase, “The Amsterdam News Is Winning.”
69 The HLU was frequently referred to as a “racket organization” by other mainstream trade union groups, most notably the NLC, which went to great lengths to have the HLU's charter revoked. See letter from Frank Crosswaith, Jack Stein, Jacob Shaffren, Thomas Young, Ted Poston and David Rose to Mayor La Guardia, 28 Sept. 1938, Reel 1, NLC Papers.
70 “Report of Activities of the Negro Labor Committee January 1st to December 31st,” 1938, Reel 2, NLC Papers.
71 Memo from George Murphy to Walter White, 1 Nov. 1939, Box I, C-323;9, Papers of the NAACP, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
72 Letter from Charles H. Houston to “Amsterdam News Unit” of New York Newspaper Guild, 16 Oct. 1935, Box I, C-204, Papers of the NAACP.
73 Letter from Henry Lee Moon to Charles Houston, 20 Oct. 1935, Box I, C-204, Papers of the NAACP.
74 This phraseology is borrowed from the influential article by Beth Tompkins Bates, “A New Crowd Challenges the Agenda of the Old Guard in the NAACP, 1933–1941.” On Houston's role in labour litigation see Goluboff, Risa L., The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.
75 Letter from Henry Lee Moon to Charles Houston, 20 Oct. 1935, Box I, C-204, Papers of the NAACP.
76 Note from William Pickens to Walter White, 24 Oct., Box I, C-204, Papers of the NAACP.
77 New York Amsterdam News, 19 Oct. 1935.
78 Memo from Walter White to William Pickens, 11 Oct. 1935, Box I, C-204, Papers of the NAACP.
79 Memo of the NAACP's “Committee on Amsterdam News Strike,” 19 Nov. 1935, Box I, C-204, Papers of the NAACP.
80 Naison, Communists in Harlem, 176.
81 New York Age, 26 Oct. 1935. In the second broadcast on 15 December, White spoke alongside A. Philip Randolph and Frank Crosswaith. “Negro Labor News Service,” 1935, Reel 1, NLC Papers.
82 Radio address by Walter White, 24 Oct. 1935, Box I, C-204, Papers of the NAACP.
83 Manfred Berg, “Black Civil Rights and Liberal Anticommunism,” 79.
84 White argued, “If the UAW-CIO wins the right to represent the Ford workers, as now seems inevitable, it has a golden opportunity to demonstrate to Negro workers everywhere in the country that some labor unions are straight on the race question.” White subsequently expended much energy attempting to position the NAACP in a central role over proceedings in Detroit and to marginalize the role of other activists, especially John P. Davis of the NNC. Following Governor [Murray] Von Wagoner's suggestion that the national secretary of the NNC, John P. Davis, be included in a conference to discuss black employment, White wrote frustratedly to Detroit branch leader J. McClendon, “Frankly, I am just a little annoyed at the Governor's action. We invited him to sit in as a conferee and not to dictate what should be done and with whom we should or should not work.” In the same letter, White criticized the endorsement by Charles Diggs, Michigan's black state Senator, of Davis's involvement, asking, “Does Diggs know of the widespread belief that John Davis and the National Negro Congress are reputed to be Communists? … how would that fit in with the recent action of Reuther and Frankenstein to deny official jobs in the UAW-CIO to Communists, Nazis or Bundists?” See “Statement by Walter White,” 9 April 1941, and letter from Walter White to J. McClendon, 5 May 1941, “Ford Strike File 1941,” Part 13, Series A, Reel 3, Papers of the NAACP, microfilm edition.
85 The committee, named the United Negro Bus Association, engaged with and challenged a combination of the Transport Workers’ Union (TWU), the NLRB and the bus company. New York Age, 26 Apr. 1941. Coverage of the TWU's changing racial policies is contained in Meier, August and Rudwick, Elliott, “Communist Unions and the Black Community: The Case of the Transport Workers Union, 1934–44,” Labor History, 23 (1982), 165–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Freeman, Joshua B., In Transit: The Transport Workers Union in New York City, 1933–1966, 2nd edn (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.
86 New York Age, 12 April 1941.
87 New York Age, 11 Jan. 1941.
88 A critique of positive assessments of wartime civil rights activism is also advanced by Stephen Tuck and Kevin Kruse, who argue that “closer inspection shows that evidence of a widespread mobilization of the civil rights struggle during the war years is thinner than it may initially appear … much of the ‘watershed’ argument rest[s] to a great extent on vague estimates of black attitudes and aspirations rather than concrete accomplishments.” Kruse, Kevin M. and Tuck, Stephen, eds., Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
