EG

At the NNC’s 1940 convention in Washington, John L. Lewis, then the head of the CIO, spoke in opposition to entering the war. Lewis was not a Communist, but he did not want another war fought by working-class men for what he determined was the benefit of corporations. John P. Davis, who had been the executive secretary and architect of the NNC since its inception, backed Lewis’s demands, but more from a Communist-influenced perspective.

To put this moment in context, in 1939 the Soviet Union signed a Non-Aggression Pact with Germany. Almost overnight, Communists and some of their leftist allies begin to preach that getting involved in another world war would sacrifice working-class people for imperialist aims. Then protest politics changed dramatically in the other direction when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, making for what I call “ideological whiplash.” After the second shift back to the Popular Front, Davis resigned as the head of the NNC.

For black leftists during this 1939–1941 period, charting a path forward and retaining these larger coalitions was complicated and confusing. While NNC president A. Philip Randolph had previously attacked others for red-baiting the NNC, by the 1940 conference he had become convinced that the organization had become too influenced by its principal allies — the CIO (and Lewis) but especially the Communist Party. As head of the AFL-affiliated Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Randolph did not have a strong CIO allegiance. He was a Socialist Party stalwart going back to the First World War in New York, where he had a long history of sectarian fighting with Communists. The 1939 shift away from antifascism and the Popular Front convinced him to sever ties with them. As a result, Randolph resigned as president, and many socialists and liberals went with him. The NNC split apart in 1940.

But I argue that the split was not totally debilitating to either group. Randolph and his allies went on to lead the March on Washington Movement, whose chief achievement was to threaten a march of 100,000 black people on Washington. FDR blinked and issued Executive Order 8802, which led to the Fair Employment Practice Committee and opened up some wartime jobs to African Americans. Meanwhile, the NNC started working on its own campaign that paralleled Randolph’s demand for war-industries jobs. They protested discrimination in large aircraft manufacturing plants in Baltimore and Los Angeles and opened up these and other war-industries jobs through campaigns of their own.

In short, the NNC and Randolph continued with vigor after 1940, but the tragedy of this split was that neither group was able to build the kind of mass movement that they had once dreamed of in the late 1930s.