[Dubbed “the Negro Eugene Debs,” Frank Crosswaith was one of
the great socialists of the early to mid-20th century. And his message
was unwavering: only a vigorous labor movement and democratic
socialist policies can deliver a better life for black workers.]
[[link removed]]

BLACK SOCIALIST AND TRADE UNIONIST FRANK CROSSWAITH SHOULD BE A
HOUSEHOLD NAME  
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Paul Prescod
September 1, 2022
Jacobin
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_ Dubbed “the Negro Eugene Debs,” Frank Crosswaith was one of the
great socialists of the early to mid-20th century. And his message was
unwavering: only a vigorous labor movement and democratic socialist
policies can deliver a better life for black workers. _

Frank Crosswaith, in his role as a New York City Housing Authority
board member, presents a key to a couple at the door to their new
apartment in the Lincoln Houses in East Harlem, New York, 1947. , La
Guardia and Wagner Archives / Flickr

 

On a summer night in June 1942, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
leader A. Philip Randolph
[[link removed]] approached
the microphone before an electric crowd of mostly black Harlemites at
Madison Square Garden. Eighteen thousand people had jammed into the
stadium to attend a mass rally of the March on Washington Movement
[[link removed]] (MOWM).
Organized by Randolph, the gathering highlighted issues of
discrimination in defense jobs, segregation, and lynching.

One of the many things attendees were anticipating was the
announcement of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s first black appointment
to the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). Many thought it would
be Randolph. But instead, a less familiar figure was named: black
socialist and labor activist Frank Rudolph Crosswaith.

Crosswaith never attained the same recognition as other early black
socialists, such as Randolph or Hubert Harrison
[[link removed]].
But he played a critical role
[[link removed]] in building support for
both trade unionism and socialism among black Americans and in forging
the institutional links between the labor movement and early civil
rights organizing.

Throughout his long and productive life, Crosswaith never wavered in
his belief that a strong interracial labor movement and democratic
socialist policies were the best antidote to the fundamental problems
facing black people. Even more importantly, Crosswaith — dubbed the
“Negro Debs,” after socialist trade unionist Eugene Debs
[[link removed]] —
was an embodiment of the need to put these ideals into practice by
building robust working-class institutions.

A Young Socialist

Like so many other early twentieth-century black radicals, Crosswaith
hailed from the Caribbean. Born in the Virgin Islands in 1892, he left
at the age of fifteen to join the US Navy. Unbeknownst to him, his
move to Harlem to live with his godfather in 1910 would put him at the
center of a vibrant black political culture.

Crosswaith attained a level of basic financial stability when he got a
job as a porter at the men’s tailoring firm Zeeman and Grossman.
From this firm footing, he launched himself into political activity
and self-education. He began attending classes at the University Prep
School of Harlem, where he was radicalized by reading writers such as
Thomas Paine and Charles Darwin. By 1915 the budding leftist had
joined the Socialist Party
[[link removed]].

Crosswaith’s socialist education accelerated when he enrolled at
the Rand School of Social Science
[[link removed]],
where he took classes such as “The Fundamentals of Socialism” and
honed his public speaking skills. Importantly, the Rand School also
allowed him to establish contacts with local leaders in both the
Socialist Party and the labor movement.

It was during this period when Crosswaith began his deep collaboration
with A. Philip Randolph, by then an established Socialist leader.
Randolph had organized the party’s Twenty-first Assembly District
local, located in the heart of Harlem. Crosswaith lived and worked in
this district, which the Socialist Party considered the first “Negro
branch of the party in New York.”

By 1917, Crosswaith had also become part of the core group that
produced the _Messenger_
[[link removed]], the
black radical magazine that Randolph coedited. This cohort also
included black socialist heavyweights such as Harrison, Chandler Owen,
and journalist George Schuyler. They often found themselves in direct
conflict with other highly regarded leaders such as W. E. B. du Bois,
who they saw as too moderate and too unfocused on the black working
masses.

The Messenger magazine staff at work, 1920. (New York Public Library)

Meanwhile, Crosswaith and his socialist comrades faced the daunting
task of trying to win black workers away from both the black
nationalist appeals of Marcus Garvey and the hegemonic hold of the
Republican Party machine. Electoral campaigns at all levels of
government were a significant component of the party’s activities,
and Crosswaith was early on recognized as the best candidate for the
Twenty-first Assembly District. His first experience as a candidate
came in 1922, when he received the joint nomination from the American
Labor Party and the Socialist Party to run for Congress.

The young Harlemite, rail-thin and bespectacled, proved himself an
energetic and impressive campaigner. The _New York Call_, a socialist
newspaper, described Crosswaith as

a brilliant speaker and an intelligent debater, the logical choice of
the Party in Harlem for Congress in the great fight to win over the
masses from Garveyism on the one hand and blind allegiance to the
Republican Party on the other.

While he only received 2,046 votes, the party continued to run
Crosswaith in the district in most elections until 1938.

By this point, Crosswaith’s political work had become all consuming.
And his employer noticed. He was eventually fired from his porter job
for his Socialist Party association. This was a blessing in disguise,
however, for it freed Crosswaith up to pursue his chief passion:
organizing black workers into labor unions.

Organizing Black Workers

As a socialist, Crosswaith insisted the only way black workers could
improve their lot was to join the labor movement and organize with
other workers across racial and ethnic lines. Still, he recognized the
wide gap between this historic necessity and the reality of racial
discrimination in the existing craft unions of the American Federation
of Labor (AFL). Crosswaith, now in his thirties, set out to bridge
that gap.

Frank R. Crosswaith, labor organizer and socialist political activist.
(New York Public Library)

In October 1923, he joined Local 67 of the Elevator Operators and
Starters Union. The following year, he was tapped to work as a staff
organizer. The union’s membership was mostly white, even though most
of New York City’s elevator operators were black. In just a few
months, Crosswaith helped boost the number of black members from
twenty to five hundred. As reward for his work, Crosswaith was elected
vice president of the local.

Seemingly poised for a career with the union, things turned sour
quickly. His election was overturned based on flimsy claims of
irregularities in balloting. In the revote, he lost by a margin of
just six votes and then resigned as an organizer. Despite this
disappointing end, the experience demonstrated to Crosswaith that it
wasn’t impossible to organize black workers into a white-dominated
union.

Again out of a job, Crosswaith took to writing to earn a living and
clarify his own political views. One product of that intellectual
labor was a groundbreaking study, _Black Man’s Burden: Harlem
Doubly Enslaved by Color and Capitalism_
[[link removed]],
in which he elaborated the many ways African-American workers in
Harlem were exploited by different interests.

Crosswaith insisted the only way black workers could improve their lot
was to join the labor movement and organize with other workers across
racial and ethnic lines.

Crosswaith didn’t shy away from critiquing trade unions in the
pamphlet, writing that “all of them show practically no desire to
unionize the Negro worker except during the period of a strike when he
is used by the employer against the union.” But white racism was not
his only target, for he also declared that black workers were
“gouged by the capitalist-minded Negro, who makes his appeal on the
basis of race.”

These years were very difficult for black socialists like Crosswaith.
The appeal of Garveyism, with its race-based solutions and rejection
of interracial solidarity, was at its peak, capturing the imagination
of many black workers. The trade union movement was weak and seemingly
devoid of the will to organize black workers.

However, the Socialist Party would soon give “the Negro Debs” a
new cause for optimism.

The TUC and the Sleeping Car Porters

In 1924, Socialist Party leaders established a committee called the
“Trade Union League for Organizing Negro Workers.” The outfit
quickly became a larger formation called the Trade Union Committee
(TUC), with Crosswaith as its main driver. Its goal was to facilitate
and provide organizational support for bringing black workers into
trade unions.

Crosswaith knew the TUC could not be a project of the Socialist Party
alone; it would need material and financial support from the existing
labor movement. He managed to obtain early buy-in from other local
labor leaders, including Thomas Curtis of the Building Trades and
Samuel Irving of the Carpenters Union. Curtis used his connections to
get the TUC endorsed by the New York General Trades Council and the
Carpenters District Council.

Crosswaith used his connections to make referrals and act as a kind of
broker, helping solve problems that arose between black workers and
labor.

Seeking additional labor support, the TUC sent letters to two hundred
unions requesting time to present its agenda at local meetings. Dozens
of unions allowed it to do so, and most wound up endorsing the new
group. The TUC also secured crucial funding from the Garland Fund —
administered by socialists like Norman Thomas — and obtained office
space from the_ Messenger_.

Now up and running, the TUC tried to serve as a conduit between
unorganized black workers and unions. Frequently, workers would come
to the TUC and request information about local unions. Crosswaith used
his connections to make referrals and act as a kind of broker, helping
solve problems that arose between black workers and labor.

Unfortunately, unions often dropped the ball. In one case, a group of
black motion picture operators approached the TUC because their union
cards were taken away after an anticipated strike failed to
materialize. Crosswaith had to go all the way up to the national
leadership before he got its attention, and still the best they could
win was a separate auxiliary black union local.

In a more promising opportunity, the TUC met with Rose Schneiderman
[[link removed]] of
the Women’s Trade Union League to discuss an initiative to organize
the city’s laundry workers. Of the 30,000 laundry workers in the
city, 20,000 were black.

However, the TUC’s union affiliates didn’t put enough money into
the effort to make it viable. This was a recurring problem: organized
labor would pledge support to Crosswaith then fail to back it up with
real money and resources.

After just one year, the TUC ceased operations due to lack of money.
During an era of retreat, it seemed the labor movement simply wasn’t
ready for an expansive program to organize black workers.

A Pullman porter, photographed in Chicago in 1943. (Jack Delano /
Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

Fortunately for Crosswaith, a compelling new campaign cropped up just
as the TUC was folding: the epic fight to organize the Brotherhood of
Sleeping Car Porters
[[link removed]] (BSCP),
which had been launched by his good friend and comrade A. Philip
Randolph.

In 1925, Crosswaith spoke at the porters’ first rally at Harlem’s
Ellis Hall; the following August, he was elected secretary of the
Brotherhood’s executive committee. Throughout 1927 the black
socialist proved to be an invaluable speaker for the porters’ cause,
touring the country and winning support among other unions and
progressive organizations. Randolph later recalled, “He was
priceless because he was one of the best speakers we had: the best
orator, not only in the union but . . . in the country.”

Crosswaith, though, would not stay long with the Brotherhood. He
suspected that the union’s treasurer was stealing money and demanded
an audit. Unable to resolve the issue, he left the Brotherhood in
1928. He never blamed Randolph or suspected him of any wrongdoing, and
they maintained good relations. Crosswaith was still tapped for
specific projects throughout the rest of the Brotherhood’s campaign.
(The union finally won recognition from the Pullman Company in 1935
and secured its first contract two years later.)

By the late 1920s, Crosswaith had established himself as a leading
figure both among black people and the local labor movement. But his
efforts to merge these two worlds into a powerful movement remained
frustrated.

Black Workers and the Socialist Party

Undeterred, Crosswaith continued to immerse himself in Socialist Party
work and spearhead efforts to strengthen their appeal to black
workers.

After a period of membership decline in the mid-1920s, the Socialist
Party began to grow again by the end of the decade. The years from
1929 to 1934 marked Crosswaith’s most intense stretch of party
activity. He continued to dazzle as an orator and was often dispatched
on long speaking tours recruiting for the party.

Alfred Baker Lewis, the Socialists’ general organizer in New
England, said of the now-seasoned organizer: “I know of few if any
speakers in the party who can rouse their hearers to such enthusiasm
as he can.” Party activist William Stone praised Crosswaith for
reviving a Socialist Party local in Louisville following a trip there.

Crosswaith’s speaking engagements drew the largest black turnout the
party had ever seen.

Crosswaith’s speaking engagements — often at black churches and
YMCAs — drew the largest black turnout the party had ever seen.
After a meeting in Denver, Stone joyfully declared, “Frank has won
for the Socialist Party a complete entree into the Negro world in
Denver, in both high and low places, as well as an unexcelled
opportunity for party propaganda in the Negro press out here.” In
Los Angeles, Crosswaith organized a black local for the party that
included “an editor of the largest Negro newspaper on the
Pacific.” In Pennsylvania, he spoke to black mining communities.

Crosswaith argued that the party must craft its appeal to black
workers in a way that recognized the brutal impact of racism without
wavering in its commitment to interracial working-class solidarity.

In October 1929 Crosswaith wrote to Socialist Party leader Clarence
Senior: “our party must take into consideration the fact that the
Negro has become alarmingly race conscious, and therefore any
instrument that we intend to utilize in our work must be chosen with
an appreciation of this psychological fact.”

He went on to explain that the party’s role was to channel this
discontent into support for class-based politics: “Our immediate
task is to temper this racial consciousness, and through agitation,
education, organization and cooperation turn it into a class and
social consciousness.”

Crosswaith proposed a list of actions the party could take to bolster
its standing with black workers: creating a press service for black
newspapers; building relationships with black newspaper editors;
holding a series of public forums in black neighborhoods on topics
like “Old Age Pensions and the Negro Worker,” ‘The Economic
Basis for Race Prejudice,” and “Imperialism and the Colored
Worker.” Unfortunately, the suggestions fell on deaf ears.

Nevertheless, Crosswaith was back on the campaign trail come 1930,
serving as usual as the party’s congressional candidate to represent
Harlem. His ten-point platform foreshadowed the kinds of policies that
would become a regular feature of the New Deal–Civil Rights
coalition: an anti-lynching bill, the eight-hour workday, old-age
pensions, and legislation to stop the use of injunctions against labor
unions. He also campaigned on reducing the military budget and putting
that money toward public education.

The Negro Labor Committee

After focusing on party politics for several years, Crosswaith found
his way back to the labor movement and renewed his efforts to bring
black workers into unions. In 1934, he got a job with the
International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) as a general
organizer. The ILGWU leadership was filled with Socialist Party
stalwarts, which meant the union could serve as an institutional ally
for his initiatives.

Crosswaith could not envision being a socialist activist without a
deep immersion in the existing labor movement. In a 1935 speech,
Crosswaith declared:

The Socialist in the trade union is not a sectarian making political
capital for a sect but one whose interests are the interests of the
working class and one who understands that every step forward in the
growth, the self-confidence, the political consciousness of the
working class, no matter how small, is a step toward a worker’s
world.

In late 1934, he convinced the Twenty-first Assembly District local to
help form the Negro Labor Committee
[[link removed]] (NLC). The aim of the
new Crosswaith-led group mirrored that of the now-defunct TUC: to
foster organizing among black workers.

This time, however, the organization garnered more labor buy-in. In
July 1935, NLC convened a conference featuring representatives from
seventy union locals, as well as civil rights organizations like the
NAACP and the Urban League (which, amid the Great Depression, were
shifting toward a more pro-labor orientation). Randolph was elected to
the executive committee, as were others from ILGWU.

Yale Law Library / Flickr

The NLC established working relationships with unions such as the
Building Service Employees International Union, the Boot and Shoe
Workers’ Union, the Dining Car Employees Union, and the
International Laundry Workers Union. Its first substantial campaign
involved a strike of editorial workers at the _New York Amsterdam
News_, a black newspaper.

Just as he did with the TUC, Crosswaith acted as a broker between
black workers and unions. At one point, for instance, he was
approached by black clerks trying to join the Retail Hat and
Furnishing Salesman’s Union. The local kept its initiation fees to
exclude black workers. Crosswaith met with the local’s officials and
convinced them to bring down the membership fee. Even better, he got
the union to accept the membership of black graduates of a
job-training program for black clerks being run by the Harlem YMCA.

The NLC’s flurry of activity was enabled by the rise of the Congress
of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the new federation of industrial
unions that attempted to bring workers of all races into labor’s
ranks. The NLC positioned itself as a resource for both the existing
AFL unions and the new CIO ones (which had scores of Communist
organizers). Crosswaith experimented with organizing all kinds of
workers, from barbers and ash-cart laborers to newsstand employees and
stove renovators.

Crosswaith was sometimes hampered by a reflexive anti-Communism that
was reinforced by bad personal experiences.

Crosswaith was sometimes hampered by a reflexive anti-Communism that
was reinforced by bad personal experiences. During the campaign to
organize the sleeping car porters, Communists had virulently attacked
the Socialists Crosswaith and Randolph in a bid to discredit the
effort. As an ILGWU organizer, Crosswaith had a front-row seat to the
factional infighting of Communist organizers. He never trusted the
Communist Party’s motives, despite their often-impressive record
[[link removed]] of
fighting
[[link removed]] for racial
justice
[[link removed]] in
the United States.

In 1938, when Communists launched a New York City campaign to open up
employment opportunities for black workers — building on the
“Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns of the mid-1930s
— Crosswaith remained distant from the endeavor, dismissing it as a
Communist power grab.

Such anti-Communism remained an unfortunate obsession of Crosswaith
for the rest of his life. He saw with absolute clarity the
antidemocratic shortcomings of the Communist Party. He was less
willing to acknowledge its significant achievements compared to his
own Socialist Party, particularly among black workers
[[link removed]].

Crosswaith’s Later Years and Legacy

In the early 1940s, as Randolph’s March on Washington Movement
[[link removed]] gained
steam, Crosswaith reached the zenith of his political influence. He
was part of the early planning committees and encouraged the NLC to
endorse the effort, which was aimed at ending discrimination in
defense production and segregation in the military. It was fitting
that Crosswaith’s appointment to the New York City Housing Authority
was announced at the massive MOWM rally in June 1942.

As his star was rising, Crosswaith was growing more distant from the
Socialist Party. The New Deal’s success in delivering working-class
gains
[[link removed]],
along with increased factionalism in the party, triggered a long
decline in Socialist Party membership. And as World War II continued,
Crosswaith found himself at odds with the party’s pacifist position.

In May 1940, he officially broke with the party, writing, “I am
deeply convinced that the outcome of the present war will determine
whether the labor movement and political democracy will survive or
perish.” Crosswaith would always remain a socialist but could not
continue to carry the Socialist Party banner, as he went on to
explain: “In my loyalty to Socialism and to my Socialist working
class comrades and brothers of Europe and of the world, I am compelled
to request that my name be dropped from the Party membership.”

A. Philip Randolph, socialist, labor leader, and cofounder of the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. (New York Public Library)

In the early 1940s, as Randolph’s March on Washington Movement
gained steam, Crosswaith reached the zenith of his political
influence.

Crosswaith kept the NLC alive, but the organization failed to develop
new leadership and was running out of financial support. Factional
disputes between Communists and anti-Communists limited the amount of
involvement and support coming from the CIO. Though a shell of the
organization remained, the NLC was never able to recreate the momentum
it had attained in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Crosswaith served on the New York City Housing Authority board from
1942 to 1958, the only black member throughout that period. On the
board, Crosswaith was the most active and outspoken when it came to
discrimination. At a 1955 housing conference in Washington, DC, he
boasted, “With seventy-four projects now in operation, I am proud
that we can say there is not a single one occupied exclusively by
Negroes, not a single one occupied exclusively by whites.”

Recognizing that labor unions were not the only area where black
people could make progress, he wrote for the NYCHA bulletin in 1955,
“These housing programs represent one of the most important gains in
the Negro’s struggle for equality since the Civil War.”

He remained an active member of the labor–civil rights coalition
[[link removed]] that
he helped construct, acting as chairman of Randolph’s Youth March
for Integrated Schools in Washington, DC, in 1958. Until his death on
June 17, 1965, Crosswaith always asserted that black people could
never have true freedom with economic liberation.

By the time of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the
support and involvement from organized labor 
[[link removed]]would
not have come as a surprise to activists living at the time. However,
that deep connection between the labor movement and black workers
could not have happened without figures like Frank Crosswaith.

Through talent and sheer force of will, Crosswaith pioneered the early
organizational links that would become critical to the success of the
civil rights movement. His life’s work should not be forgotten by
those trying to build an interracial working-class movement today.

_PAUL PRESCOD is an organizer with Teamsters for a Democratic Union
and Jacobin contributing editor._

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