[Ninety years ago this month, at the Amenia conference
co-organized by W. E. B. Du Bois, young black leftists argued for a
mass politics aligned with the labor movement. Their radical approach
set the stage for the civil rights unionism that would hel]
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THE 1933 CONFERENCE THAT HELPED FORGE CIVIL RIGHTS UNIONISM  
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Eben Miller
August 8, 2023
Jacobin
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_ Ninety years ago this month, at the Amenia conference co-organized
by W. E. B. Du Bois, young black leftists argued for a mass politics
aligned with the labor movement. Their radical approach set the stage
for the civil rights unionism that would hel _

The economic hardships which the Great Depression brought for African
Americans caused the NAACP to reconsider its mission, tactics and
organization.,

 

Ninety years ago this month, the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) hosted the 1933 Amenia
Conference. Called as the NAACP neared its twenty-fifth anniversary,
the group convened about thirty “coming leaders of Negro thought,”
in the words of the invitation, to assess the state of the civil
rights struggle.

That summer, the nation was mired in the fourth year of the Great
Depression. The incoming Democratic administration of Franklin D.
Roosevelt had promised a New Deal in response to the economic
calamity. NAACP membership was falling. The radical left —
particularly the Communist Party, then leading the defense of the nine
“Scottsboro boys”
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falsely accused of raping two white women — was challenging the
NAACP’s relevance as the nation’s leading civil rights
organization.

NAACP leaders grappled with how to respond. Joel Spingarn and W. E. B.
Du Bois, founding editor of the NAACP’s monthly magazine the_
Crisis_, favored hosting a small conference at Troutbeck, Spingarn’s
home in Amenia, New York, about ninety miles north of New York City in
the Hudson River Valley.

The plan was to gather at Troutbeck for a few days, with large canvas
tents and folding cots for sleeping accommodation. Guests were welcome
to walk the grounds, enjoy the gardens and swimming hole, and to play
some tennis, if they felt game. But mainly they would talk. Spingarn
and Du Bois hoped that their discussion would help the NAACP chart a
course through the challenges of the Depression era.

They proposed to meet with a selection of the younger generation of
black intellectuals and activists. After reaching out to contacts
across the United States for suggestions, they sent invitations to a
few dozen black women and men between, roughly, twenty and forty years
old.

The more radical among them envisioned a mass-oriented approach
aligned with the burgeoning labor movement, a departure from the
traditional emphasis on racial uplift.

The Attendees

The black women who participated in the Amenia Conference included
Virginia Alexander, a physician from Philadelphia; librarians; social
workers, such as Anna Arnold (Hedgeman); and Frances Williams, one of
several of the invitees who worked for the YWCA. Twenty-year-old
college student Juanita Jackson (Mitchell) was the youngest of the
group. In the conference photograph, Jackson is third from left in the
middle row, wearing a dark dress with white trim around the collar.

Among the black men who made the trip to Troutbeck were several
scholars, such as sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, political scientist
Ralph Bunche, and poet Sterling Brown. Charles Houston served on the
Howard University faculty alongside Bunche and Brown, leading its law
school. Roy Wilkins was on staff at the NAACP; Ira De Augustine Reid
represented the National Urban League. Sitting to the right of
Jackson, in a dark suit and tie, M. Moran Weston II was still in
college. Wilkins paid for his train fare from New York City to Amenia
station.

Juanita Jackson Mitchell in 1936. (National Portrait Gallery via
Wikimedia Commons)

Over the weekend of August 18–20, 1933, the Amenia Conference
delegates discussed the status of black freedom during a period of
global transformation when the future of capitalism seemed uncertain.
What, the attendees debated, was the best way to challenge racial
oppression?

Some advocated for a pragmatic electoral approach. Roy Wilkins argued
that black voters should back candidates willing to respect black
Americans, no matter the party. Though white Southerners traditionally
cast Democratic votes, he and others were eager to gauge the
effectiveness of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Emmett Dorsey, a political
scientist at Howard, emphasized the need to ensure that New Deal
programs reached African Americans plagued by unemployment and bank
failures.

Anna Arnold had observed this suffering in Harlem, working with
stricken families; Virginia Anderson saw it in her patients in
Philadelphia. The need for equitable relief was likewise clear to
Louis Redding, a lawyer from Wilmington, Delaware, who worked with
destitute clients.

Redding’s ears pricked up when Charles Houston spoke of how the
NAACP could systematically challenge _Plessy v. Ferguson_, the Supreme
Court’s 1896 decision that set the “separate but equal”
precedent for de jure segregation. Challenging inequality between
schools for white and black children in court could help crack Jim
Crow education.

On the other hand, E. Franklin Frazier asserted that the full
integration into American society — whether in schools or New Deal
relief agencies — was not imminent. Should black Americans adopt a
“radical Black nationalism,” focusing on black institutions while
awaiting integration? Frazier wondered if black solidarity could serve
“as a cohesive force among a people . . . exploited by the white
master class in this country.”

Fighting Racial Oppression, Fighting Class Oppression

To Abram Harris, the key word here was _class_. In the conference
photograph, the thirty-four-year old economist is standing next to his
friend and intellectual mentor, W. E. B. Du Bois, in the back row,
fourth from the left. A light-colored hat shades his face.

If his suit jacket looks loose, it was likely from weight lost during
a recent bout of tuberculosis. But he had recovered enough by August
to accept a ride to Amenia in Du Bois’s automobile.

Du Bois was keen to bring Harris to the conference because he offered
a perspective that Du Bois considered crucial for the future of the
civil rights movement.

Abram Harris. (Wikimedia Commons)

Abram Harris championed the creation of an interracial workers’
movement. He came to this view not as a union organizer but as a
social scientist. After surveying conditions among West Virginia coal
miners and black migrants in Pittsburgh and the Twin Cities during the
1920s, Harris believed that it was time to forge unity across — not
to separate along — racial lines.

Harris acknowledged that the NAACP achieved laudable legal advances
during the 1910s and 1920s. The Supreme Court’s _Guinn v. United
States_ decision in 1915, for instance, reflected its success in
outlawing the “grandfather clause” that inhibited black voting
rights in Oklahoma. But as he researched the NAACP’s record for his
landmark 1931 book _The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor
Movement_
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(coauthored with social scientist Sterling Spero), he counted its lack
of a labor program as its greatest shortcoming.

At Amenia, Harris insisted that it was time to rethink the “race
question.” No transcript recorded his exact words, but he put it
this way in _The Black Worker_:

Negro leadership of the past generation has put its stress on the
element of race. Their people’s plight, they feel is the plight of
race. They turn a deaf ear to those who say that the Negro’s plight
is the plight of the working class in general.

Harris strongly supported antilynching laws. He favored pragmatic
politics, scrutiny of the New Deal, and overturning _Plessy_. But
radical change, the young leftist argued, required building an
interracial mass movement among black and white workers. Without
economic equality, there would be no political or civil equality.

Harris summarized his argument in the Amenia Conference Findings
Report, writing that “the welfare of white and black labor are one
and inseparable.” His peers at the Amenia Conference tended to
agree. The NAACP would do well to strengthen its economic program.

“Unite All Labor, White and Black”

As the conferees left Troutbeck after their weekend together, Harris
was determined to press the NAACP in his preferred direction. He
agreed to take an unpaid role with the civil rights group, creating a
Committee on the Future Plan and Program of the NAACP. Over the next
year, he led a study of the NAACP’s past agenda and recommended
future changes.

“The adoption of the economic program contemplated here,” Harris
wrote in the report, “calls for a reformulation of the
Association’s ultimate objectives.” The Association ought to host
labor conferences, both locally and nationally, and to challenge
racial discrimination in unions. In sum, its goal should be to
“foster the building of a labor movement, industrial in character,
which will unite all labor, white and black, skilled and unskilled,
agricultural and industrial.” The NAACP’s system of local branches
offered a ready-made infrastructure for “centers of education” and
interracial collaboration among workers.

It is difficult to overstate the transformation that Harris was
proposing. Local branches of the NAACP were typically the bastion of
the black middle class. Black attorneys and dentists hosted meetings
and paid annual dues. They sought dignity and opportunity within Jim
Crow America.

In Wilmington, Delaware, for instance, the local NAACP labored to
convince city newspapers to capitalize the word “Negro.” It took
nearly two decades for branch members to compel the Delaware legal
establishment to permit the first black lawyer in the state to pass
the bar exam. That young man was Louis Redding, a graduate of Harvard
Law School with a penchant for Brooks Brothers. He empathized with
Harris’s plea to reinvigorate the NAACP, but a labor organizer he
was not.

The NAACP did not, in the end, adopt the Harris plan. Yet, many of
Harris’s peers shared his conviction in a broader, democratic mass
movement for civil, political, and economic equality.

The National Negro Congress
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founded in 1936, embodied this spirit. Among the Amenia delegates, M.
Moran Weston II participated in the New York branch, which became the
Negro Labor Victory Committee during the World War II years. As its
name implies, the organization brought the civil rights and labor
movement together and was most known for its “Negro Freedom
Rallies.” Staged between 1943 and 1945, these spectacular pageants
dramatized the power of an interracial workers’ coalition to defeat
fascism abroad and racial oppression at home.

With the wave of mass unionization in the 1930s and ’40s, unions
like the Packinghouse Workers
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Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
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Tobacco Workers
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put into action Abram Harris’s call for a civil rights unionism. The
Packinghouse Workers fiercely opposed
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color line dividing workers, the Tobacco Workers in North Carolina
fought Jim Crow on the plant level, and the Sleeping Car Porters,
helmed by A. Philip Randolph, used their base of support to launch the
March on Washington movement of the 1940s
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McCarthyism decimated
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many left-led unions in the 1950s — invariably those with the
strongest commitment
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to racial equality — the labor movement still played a crucial role
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in the “classic” civil rights era of the mid-1950s to mid-1960s.

Within the NAACP, too, younger leaders strengthened and broadened its
mission. After the Amenia Conference, Charles Houston left Howard to
serve directly for the NAACP. Until his death in 1950, Houston
spearheaded a systematic strategy of undermining segregation in public
education that resulted in the epochal _Brown v. Board of Education_
decision.

A sleeping car porter employed by the Pullman Company at Union Station
in Chicago, Illinois, January, 1943. (Jack Delano / Library of
Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

The NAACP also hired Juanita Jackson following the Amenia Conference.
A dynamo youth activist, Jackson helped form the City-Wide Young
People’s Forum, arguably the leading civil rights organization in
Baltimore during the early 1930s. With the NAACP, Jackson traveled the
country stoking mass support for the group’s legal and antilynching
efforts. She created a network of youth councils, whose participation
in the NAACP infused new passion and members through the end of the
decade.

Jackson left her role with the NAACP in 1938, but the youth councils
would remain a force within the organization over the next decade,
through the dawn of the more widely recognized civil rights struggles
of the 1950s and 1960s.

The Echoes of Amenia

Thirty years before a quarter of a million civil rights supporters
assembled on the National Mall for the March on Washington for Jobs
and Freedom in August 1963 — “probably the biggest march of union
members in American history up to that point
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— a far smaller contingent of young black leaders met in Amenia, New
York.

Their contributions reveal the 1930s as a crucial period in civil
rights history. Black activists and intellectuals during this era
strengthened ties between the civil rights and labor movements. They
broadened the scope and membership of the NAACP, enhancing its mass
appeal.

By the early 1960s, they were no longer “coming leaders of Negro
thought,” but veteran black freedom fighters whose efforts had
helped topple legalized segregation and create a national civil rights
movement.

And in the case of Abram Harris, they presaged the movement’s turn
from civil rights to economic rights in the late 1960s. As Martin
Luther King put it
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his death in 1968, as he stood with striking sanitation workers in
Memphis: “With Selma and the voting rights bill, one era of our
struggle came to a close and a new era came into being. Now our
struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality.”

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* Amenia Conference 1933; NAACP; W. E. B. Dubois: Troutbeck;
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