The All-Race Assembly, also known as the ‘Negro Sanhedrin,’ was a gathering held in Chicago during February, 1924 and convened by Kelly Miller to discuss the new post-war situation and largely, though not exclusively, attended by academics, journalists, and religious leaders. Black Communists who attended and put forward these resolutions–opposing segregation in housing, schools, and unions–included Otto Huiswoud, Lovett Fort-Whiteman, S.V. Phillips, and Gordon Owens.

‘Negro Workers Have Program to End Race Discrimination’ from the Daily Worker. Vol. 1 No. 340. February 15, 1924.

Discrimination against the Negro is practiced by some labor unions, which draw the color line; by municipalities and landlords, who segregate the Negroes into “Black Belts” and charge them excessive rents, and by boards of education, which allow Negro schools only a fraction of the funds accorded white schools.

Following is the Negro workers program for dealing with these evils, as proposed by Negro delegates from the Workers Party in resolutions at the Sanhedrin:

The Segregation Evil

The Sanhedrin Conference declares itself unalterably opposed to the segregation of Negroes into “black belt” residence districts. We declare the discrimination against Negroes in regard to which part of a city they may live in and which part they may not live in, is a political question, and must be dealt with just as we deal with discrimination in voting. The time has come when the living accommodations of the public cannot be left to the private control of a few wealthy parasites who decide where the colored man may live and where he may not live.

We demand legislation by which all tenements, apartment houses and homes to let shall be subject to the claim of the first comer, regardless of race or color or the will of the landlord.

Whereas, it is common knowledge that Negroes are customarily charged rent at a rate of 20 per cent to 100 per cent higher than is charged for the same apartments rented to white people, we demand legislation for a fixed rental for all places to be let, with heavy penalties and damages whenever a landlord charges higher rents for one race than would be charged another race for similar accommodations.

We declare that any Negro real estate agent who connives in charging more rent to his own color than would be paid by whites, is a renegade and a traitor to his own people.

In advocating the foregoing measures of relief, we do not regard them as being permanently effective. This conference advocates taking the whole housing question out of the hands of private individuals, and advocates the taking over of all rented residences by the public, to be rented without discrimination of color to the people at a fixed low rental.

Whereas, it is a custom of large employers of colored and white labor, such as mine operators and mill owners, to house  their employees in “company houses” and thereby to control the lives of the workers, being able to throw them out of house and home whenever the bosses please and wherever there is a disagreement about wages or working conditions, we demand any legal measure that may be necessary to prevent any employer of industrial labor owning or controlling the homes rented to his employees.

Pending legislative relief, and during the present period when the Negro’s rights are ignored by governmental agencies, we call upon the residents of all Negro communities to organize colored tenants unions so as to be able in an organized way to refuse to pay exorbitant rents, or to consent to live in inferior buildings or segregated districts.

Discrimination in Schools

Our race in its struggle to complete its racial, political, economical and social emancipations, is hampered and cruelly retarded by laws and customs of Southern states in the matter of education. The Negro men and women who will finally realize complete emancipation and equality are those children and those young men and young women who are today of school age. Their schooling or their lack of schooling is their preparation for future citizenship. In all parts of the South, as well as a large part of the North, they are more or less discriminated against, for we declare that any involuntary separation of the children of the two races in schools is but preparation for a future Jim Crow life. Enforced segregation in schools is a necessary preliminary to segregation in street cars, railroad cars, restaurants, residence districts, hotels and theaters, and creates a ground of race distinction which leads to continued disfranchisement at the ballot box.

As long as local and state authorities are permitted to put colored children in one school and white children in another, they will give the biggest of their support to the white schools and will let the Negro schools lie in neglect and stagnation for lack of funds and attention. It is often the case that for each dollar spent on the education of a white child, ten cents is spent on the “education of a Negro child. Such brutal treatment is the direct inheritance of slavery, in which the Negro was forbidden to have any education at all. It is a continuation of the tradition of deliberate degradation of the Negro.

This conference declares that the American Negro cannot continue to leave the shaping of the minds of his children in the hands of localities where all institutions are dedicated to the principle of “white supremacy, that is, Negro inferiority. We protest against unequal appropriations as between the schools of the two races, but in doing so we do not consent to school segregation. We declare that white and Black children who are expected to share citizenship in the future must begin that common citizenship in common schools together. Segregation in schools is as injurious to whites as to Negroes, teaching snobbishness to the whites and race hatred to both races alike; it prevents for all afterlife any understanding between the races; it is the seed of future race riots, bloodshed, and tyranny.

We therefore demand:

1. A national constitutional amendment placing the entire public educational system in the hands of the federal government, and taking it out of the hands of local municipal and state authorities.

2. That such constitutional amendment shall forbid any segregation or separation of races or creeds in any public

school, and forbid any recognition by law of any distinction of race or creed in public schools.

Color Line in Labor Unions

We declare the interest of the white workers and the Negro workers to be the same and call for unity and harmony between them. Large industrial employers often stir up friction between the workers of the two races for the sake of dividing the workers along a convenient line and thus keeping the workers of both races in weakness and subjection.

We call upon the labor unions to let down all remaining bars to membership in their organizations by colored people and all discriminations and distinctions of color within them. We are not blind to the fact that the American labor movement is in a bad condition today, is getting weaker in some instances, and altogether has organized only a small fraction of the working class. The Negro is a large part of the working class of this country and we declare that the labor unions owe their present weakness in a large part to their neglect of the Negro worker. Hundreds of thousands of Negroes are flooding into the field of industrial labor. We demand of the American Federation of Labor, of the Railroad Brotherhoods and other independent unions, that those Negroes be welcomed into all unions on a basis of equality, and point out that it is for the sake of the white worker as well as the Black worker. We demand:

1. That the American Federation of Labor (and all other bodies of organized labor) make an intensive drive in the immediate future to organize Negro workers wherever found on a basis of equality in the same unions with the whites.

2. That all such labor organizations be fraternally addressed by this body, with the request that such labor bodies shall immediately conduct among their members an official propaganda against discrimination of color and against racial snobbishness in the labor unions and in favor of enrolling all Negro workers into the unions. Further, that such campaign be carried on in collaboration with representatives of the Negro Sanhedrin.

3. That all Negro papers be requested to carry on an intensive propaganda among the race for the joining of labor unions on the basis of equality.

4. In view of the fact that the Negro in industry is as yet an unskilled laborer as a rule, and as the industrial form of union and the breaking down of craft aristocracy in the unions are in the interest of the Negro, as an unskilled worker, we therefore favor the transformation of all craft unions into industrial unions. However, we are opposed to dual unionism, as well as “Jim Crow” unionism, and favor the Negro joining everywhere the main body of labor organizations.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

Access to PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1924/v01-n340-feb-15-1924-DW-LOC.pdf