A. Philip Randolph was the central figure in the early history of the National Negro Congress, its genuine mass leader and first President. Here, his inaugural address to the February, 1936 Congress. The Congress was, in many ways, the successor of League of Struggle for Negro Rights, but far more important and influential. Over 800 delegates representing 551 organizations and 5000 others attended the founding meeting. Randolph was elected President and John P. Davis was elected National Secretary. The N.N.C. was one of the most important mass political organizations in U.S. labor history and introduced thousands of Black workers to the Communist Party. More importantly, it helped to integrate the C.I.O. and was an organized, radical voice of Black America during the later Depression and World War Two.

‘Hope of Negro People Lies in Unity with Labor’ by A. Philip Randolph from the Daily Worker. Vol. 13 No. 53. March 1, 1936.

The National Negro Congress held in Chicago on February 14-16, and which brought together more than 900 delegates representing hundreds of organizations of Negro people and their friends built a living monument to the great Negro Abolitionist, Frederick Douglass.

Perhaps the outstanding factor together with the energetic and capable work of John P. Davis, influencing the success of the Congress was the participation of A. Philip Randolph, President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The speech of Brother Randolph gave a clear line for the Congress to follow. His words on the united front, trade unions and the Labor Party represented a new change within the ranks of the Negro people, viz, first, the maturing of the Negro working class, its willingness and readiness to fight determinedly against oppression; and secondly the realization on its part of its power, force and leadership in the Negro liberation movement. We are printing in an abridged form the speech of Brother Randolph.

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Greetings and felicitations upon this great Congress. Though absent in the flesh, I am with you in the spirit, in the spirit of the deathless courage of the 18th and 19th century black rebels and martyrs for human justice in the spirit of Frederick Douglass and Nat Turner, of Gabriel and Denmark Vesey, of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth.

Economic Plight

With the economic affliction of nation-wide joblessness stand the liquidation of the farmers, the small shop owners, the middle class, the poor share-crop and tenant farmers and farm laborers, the foreclosure of hundreds of thousands of mortgages upon the homes of the workers and the lower strata of the middle class, with no prospects of permanent rehabilitation by the hectic, sketchy, patchy, and makeshift capitalist program.

But economic insecurity, though baffling, is not the only challenge to the American workers, black and white and the middle classes. There is also political and civil insecurity. Even the most credulous can sense an existing grave danger to our democratic institutions and constitutional liberties.

This danger is fascism–Fascism which seeks the complete abrogation of all civil and political liberties in the manner and method of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. It is a menace to America.

And war is the twin evil sister of Fascism. Its coming is not now improbable. It is a danger.

“National Negro Congress”

But this congress is called to attempt to meet the problems of blacks, they are a hated, maligned tenth of the population. While this is true, it is also true that the problems of the Negro peoples are the problems of the workers, for practically 99 per cent of the Negro peoples win their bread by selling their labor power in the labor market from day to day. They cannot escape the dangers and penalties of the depression, war or Fascism.

However, our contemporary history is a witness to the stark fact that black America is a victim of both class and race prejudice and oppression. Because Negroes are black, they are hated, maligned and spat upon; lynched, mobbed, and murdered. Because Negroes are workers, they are brow-beaten, bullied, intimidated, robbed, exploited, jailed and shot down.

No Union Card

Thus, voteless in 13 states; politically disregarded and discounted in the others; victims of the lynch terror in Dixie, with a Scottsboro frame-up of notorious memory; faced with the label of the white man’s job and the white man’s union; unequal before the law; jim-crowed in schools and colleges throughout the nation; segregated in the slums and ghettos of the urban centers; landless peons of a merciless white landlordism; hunted down, harassed and hounded as vagrants in the southern cities, the Negro peoples face a hard, deceptive and brutal capitalist order, despite its preachments of Christian love and brotherhood.

War Brings Change

What has brought us to this, is the insistent question? The answer in brief lies in the World War, the sharpening and deepening of capitalist exploitation of the workers of hand and brain, the acceleration of a techno- logical revolution creating a standing army of unemployed, the ripening and maturing of monopoly capitalism thru trustification rationalization and the rapid march of financial imperialism, and the intensification of racial and religious hatreds, together with increasingly blatant and provocative nationalism.

But the war itself was the effect of a deeper cause and that cause was the profit system which provides and permits the enrichment of the few at the expense of the many, allowing two per cent of the people to own ninety per cent of the wealth of these United States, a condition not much different in other capitalist countries, and also makes for the robbery and oppression of the darker, and weaker colonial peoples of the world.

“Of the Remedies”

But the diagnosis of the causes of social problems such as wars, economic depressions and Fascism is only designed to enable the victims to seek and find a remedy. Before dealing with some of the remedies, however, let me speak briefly of what are not remedies:

First, the New Deal is no remedy. It does not seek to change the profit system. It does not place human rights above property rights, but gives the business interests the support of the state. It is no insurance against the coming of Fascism or the prevention of war or a recurrent depression, though it be more liberal than the Republican Tories.

Second, the restoration of Republican rule is no solution. It was during the rule of the Grand Old Party under which the depression came. Negroes have watched themselves disfranchised and lynched under both regimes, Republican and Democratic.

Third, the Townsend Plan is no panacea. While an adequate old age pension should be fought for, a pension far greater than that offered by the New Deal Security legislation, the Townsend Plan is well nigh impossible of execution, and if executed would not achieve its aim.

Back to Remedies

But back to remedies. At the top of the list of remedies I wish to suggest the struggle of the workers against exploitation of the employers. Next, the struggle of the workers against Fascism and for the preservation of democratic institutions, the arena in which alone their economic power may be built.

Third, the struggle to build powerful Negro civil rights organizations. Fourth, the struggle against war which wrecks the organizations of the workers, and stifles and suppresses freedom of speech, the press and assembly. Fifth, the struggle to strengthen the forces of the exploited sharecrop and tenant farmers. Sixth, the struggle to build mass consumers’ movements to protect the housewives against price manipulation.

Instrumentalities for Action

But the struggle to apply the aforementioned remedies can only be achieved through definite social, economic and political instrumentalities. Thus the fight against the economic exploitation of the workers can only be effectively carried on through industrial and craft unions, with the emphasis on the former.

The industrial union is important in this stage of economic development because modern business has changed in structure and assumed the form of giant trust and holding companies, with which the craft union can no longer effectively grapple.

Moreover, the craft union invariably has a color bar against the Negro worker, but the industrial union in structure renders race discrimination less possible, since it embraces all the workers included in the industry, regardless of race, creed, color or craft, skilled or unskilled.

Must Fight Color Bar

Thus, this congress should seek to broaden and intensify the movement to draw Negro workers into labor organizations and break down the color bar in the trade unions that now have it.

The next instrumentality which the workers must build and employ for their protection against economic exploitation, war and fascism, is an independent working class political party. It should take the form of a farmer-labor political organization. This is indispensable in view of the bankruptcy in principles, courage and vision of the old line parties, Republican and Democratic.

They are the political committees of Wall Street and are constructed to serve the profit making agencies.

The fight for civil and political rights of the Negro peoples can effectively be carried on if only those organizations that are pushing the struggles are broadened and built with a wider mass base. Those organizations that are serving on the civil rights front effectively for the Negro are the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the International Labor Defense.

It needs to be definitely understood, however, that the fight in the courts for civil and political rights cannot be effective except when backed by a broad, nationwide, of not international mass protest through demonstrations in the form of parades, mass meetings and publicity.

United Front

But the fight for civil and political liberties for the Negro peoples, while it has been brilliantly waged by the N.A.A.C.P. and the I.L.D., the gravity and complexity of the problems of civil and political liberties, accentuated and widened by the evil of fascist trends in America, demands that new tactics and strategy be employed to meet the situation.

The maneuvering and disposing of the forces of Negro peoples and their sympathetic allies against their enemies can only be effectively worked out through the tactics and strategy of the united front. The task of overcoming the enemies of democratic institutions and constitutional liberties is too big for any single organization. It requires the united and formal integrating and coordinating of the various Negro organizations, church, fraternal, civil, trade union, farmer, professional, college and whatnot, into the framework of a united front, together with the white groups of workers, lovers of liberty and those whose liberties are similarly menaced for a common attack upon the forces of reaction, backed by the embattled masses of black and white workers.

Mass Action

The united front strategy and tactics should be executed through methods of mass demonstration, such as parades, picketing, boycotting, mass protests, the mass distribution of propaganda literature, as well as legal action.

The united front does not provide an excuse for weakness or timidity or reliance by any one organization upon the others who comprise it, but, on the contrary, it affords an opportunity for the contribution of strength by each organization to the common pool of organizational power for a common attack or a common defense against the enemy. Thus the Negro peoples should not place their problems for solution down at the feet of their white sympathetic allies, which has been and is the common fashion of the old school Negro leadership, for, in the final analysis, the salvation of the Negro, like the workers, must come from within.

Clear Issues

The power and effectiveness of the united front will be developed by waging the struggles around definite, vital and immediate issues of life and living.

These issues should be obvious, clear and simple, such as prevention of stoppage of relief, cuts in relief allotments, lay-offs, of relief workers, of workers in any industry, discrimination in the giving of relief, exorbitant rents, evictions, rent increases, police brutality, denial of free assembly, freedom of the press, freedom of speech to unpopular groups, denial of civil rights to Negroes, such as the right to be served in hotels and restaurants, to have access to public utilities and forms of transportation, such as the Pullman car.

Wage struggles around war upon Ethiopia by the fascist dictator Mussolini, strikes and lockouts of black and white workers, the amendment to the federal Constitution of the adoption of social legislation such as the Retirement Pension Act for railroad workers, fight for the freedom of Angelo Herndon, the Scottsboro boys, the Wagner-Costigan anti-lynching bill, the violations of the Wagner Labor Disputes bill, etc., American Liberty League, William Randolph Hearst and the Ku Klux Klan, and supporting the movement of John L. Lewis for industrial unionism.

Such is the task of Negro peoples. This task comes as a sharp and decisive challenge at a time when new atrocities and nameless terrorism are directed against black America and when the workers, black and white, are being goaded by oppression and intimidation, to resort to general strikes such as took place in San Francisco and in Pekin, Ill., as well as national strikes such as the textile workers, the miners, and the workers’ revolts in Minnesota and Toledo.

To meet this task, the Negro people, pressed with their backs against the wall, must face the future with heads erect, hearts undaunted and undismayed, ready and willing and determined to pay the price in struggle, sacrifices and suffering that freedom, justice and peace shall share and enjoy a more abundant life.

Forward to complete economic, political and social equality for Negro peoples. Forward to the abolition of this sinister system of jim-crowism in these United States! The united front points the way. More power to the National Negro Congress! The future belongs to the people!