Between 7 October and 24 December 1935, fifteen black editorial workers engaged in a bitter dispute with their managers at the Amsterdam News in Harlem. The dispute was the culmination of the attempt by some writers to form a local unit of the American Newspaper Guild (ANG). Attempts to forestall unionization by the newspaper's owners, Sadie Warren Davis and her daughter, Odessa Morse, culminated in Davis's decision on 7 October to dismiss several supposed instigators of union activity. The majority of other editorial workers were also locked out and, in response, picketed the newspaper's offices on 135th Street. The workforce organized a boycott of the weekly editions of the broadsheet which were produced by a skeleton staff of nonunion writers. Editorials in these editions accused the picketing workers of having selfishly gone on strike to challenge a legitimate decision to impose cost-cutting staff reductions. A cross-section of Harlem's community leaders mobilized to support the editorial staff. A Citizens’ Committee was formed which rallied the support of the wider community by publicizing a boycott and attempting to persuade businesses not to advertise in the newspaper. In an apparent demonstration of support from Harlem at large, sales and advertising revenue declined sharply. Davis and Morse were forced to sell the newspaper on 24 December to stave off bankruptcy. The terms of the sale to two entrepreneurial Harlem physicians, C. B. Powell and P. M. H. Savory, included the provision to reinstate all the locked-out workers and grant them a collective-bargaining contract.Footnote ¹

The dispute was reported to be the first instance in US history of black workers engaging in a successful labour action against black employers. Some argued that the event evidenced the growing willingness of black workers to address their grievances through union organization. Labour writer Charles Franklin argued soon after that the event “immediately threw into the realm of ancient history the former attitude of Negroes that Negro workers should not fight against Negro employers.”Footnote ² On the surface, the event appeared to provide a dramatic demonstration of the potential progress that accompanied a leftward shift in Depression-era black politics, but on closer inspection it also shed light on the difficulties faced by black workers and their community leaders in sustaining labour-based strategies of protest.

A case study that emphasizes the problems that attended the rise of organized labour runs against the grain of a well-established revisionist narrative which positions the New Deal as the progenitor of a promising union-based phase of civil rights struggle. The work of scholars including Robert Korstad, Nelson Lichtenstein and Thomas Sugrue has led the rise of organized labour during the 1930s to become central to the notion of a “long” civil rights movement. According to this interpretation, the rise of industrial unionism that accompanied the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1935 and the corresponding “proletarian turn” in black political circles meant that strategies of interracial working-class activism were at the forefront of a “decisive first phase” of civil rights protest that lasted until the antiradical chill of the Cold War in the mid-1950s.Footnote ³

Some dissenting voices regarding the long civil rights movement's interpretation of what was “lost” during the postwar decline of this movement have recently started to emerge.Footnote ⁴ From a different angle, this case study of the Amsterdam News dispute poses questions regarding what precisely was “found” during the formative period of the New Deal. Labour historians have built up a large body of work on the racial practices of union groups in the 1930s, identifying the divergence between the comparatively accepting policies of the industrial unions of the CIO and the more restrictive practices generally associated with the affiliates of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Diverse racial practices have been uncovered but attempts to draw wider meanings regarding the potential of interracial unionism have proved controversial.Footnote ⁵ Studies which switch focus onto black political responses to unionism only partially rectify the divisions and limitations of union case studies. Examinations of black political activists have identified the central importance of labour issues in the 1930s, but a somewhat skewed picture has emerged. Relatively small local groups of activists, often with links to groups like the National Negro Congress (NNC) and the radical left, are now afforded a central role in defining the politics of the era – an era in which, situated within the framework of the long civil rights movement, the whole terrain of black protest underwent a “proletarian turn.”Footnote ⁶

When viewed in terms of the two approaches outlined above, the Amsterdam News dispute initially appears to fit into a long-civil-rights reading of the 1930s. The union the editorial workers sought to join, the ANG, accepted black members in New York and eventually affiliated with the CIO in 1937. Communist Party members, meanwhile, were visible participants on the picket lines while the cross-section of support received from Harlem's political leaders seemed to provide evidence of the pro-labour shift in 1930s black politics. Voices from the left of the political spectrum, such as New Masses, argued, “One of the most encouraging features [of the strike] has been the forging of a united front that is as wide and effective as it is informal; Tammany Democrats, Socialists, Republicans, Communists and people who never worry about politics are offering their services at [strike] headquarters.”Footnote ⁷ In the secondary literature, Mark Naison argued that the boycott played a part in the “growing convergence” in outlook among communists and black intellectuals which reached “full fruition in the Popular Front,” centring around antifascism, support for labour and the advocacy of mass protest.Footnote ⁸ This apparent confluence of interests has been central to long-civil-rights assessments of a period that witnessed, as Jacquelyn Dowd Hall puts it, the rise of “a powerful social movement sparked by the alchemy of laborites, civil rights activists, progressive New Dealers, and black and white radicals, some of whom were associated with the Communist party.”Footnote ⁹ Yet when explored further, rather than operating as a staging post in an alignment of Popular Front interests, the Amsterdam News dispute and its legacies begin to problematize “proletarian turn” readings of the 1930s.

The workers at the Amsterdam News achieved a temporary, albeit dramatic, success in 1935. They galvanized a coalition of leaders to mediate on their behalf between the labour, management and government groups who had a say in the dispute's outcome. Elsewhere, the requirement of concentrations of willing workers who enjoyed support from a coordinated group of leaders to pressurize the powers who controlled (and often limited) black employment – unions, management and government alike – constituted a difficult set of conditions to satisfy. Disagreements within Harlem's diverse pro-union left-wing groups (often regarding relationships with the Communist Party), with noisy street-level nationalists and among liberal groups like the NAACP were all in evidence beneath the surface unity of the Amsterdam News dispute; all remained part of Harlem's landscape of political protest and undercut subsequent coordinated protest efforts. At first glance the dispute appears to uphold the long civil rights movement's reading of a left-leaning moment of opportunity, but when assessed in the longer term it foreshadowed difficulties that not only survived, but also became a fundamental part of, the political upheavals of the late 1930s.

The editorial workers’ decision to attempt to form a local unit of the ANG sprang from two main sources: first, the writers’ dislike of their working conditions and the management style of Sadie Warren Davis, and second, their interest in the benefits offered by the growth of organized labour precipitated by the New Deal. The union they sought to join, the ANG, had been formed in 1933 by white newspaperman Heywood Broun in response to the publishing of the NRA codes. A New York Guild was set up in October 1933 which conducted its first picketing on 11 July 1934 at the Long Island Daily Press when writers were dismissed for attempting to organize.Footnote ¹⁰ Around this time, though there was resistance at meetings from some white members, the ANG maintained a relatively accepting stance towards black members.Footnote ¹¹ One writer, Marvel Cooke, recollected that her colleague Ted Poston invited an organizer to come and talk to the staff and they were generally “very receptive.”Footnote ¹² Cooke added that when it came to trade unionism, “All of us, I think everybody on the staff, was pretty excited about the possibilities you might have in being a trade unionist … We had never thought about it before,” attributing this enthusiasm to dissatisfaction with their salaries and a dislike of Davis's propensity to bypass the editorial department when making decisions.Footnote ¹³

The workers’ interest in union membership, which led to the dispute and boycott, reflected the personal political persuasions and the somewhat unusual backgrounds of those involved. Ted Poston and another union instigator, Henry Lee Moon, had had links with the left since their membership of a group who visited the Soviet Union as part of a film project in 1932.Footnote ¹⁴ Poston and Moon took a lead in speaking on behalf of the workers throughout the dispute and went on to have careers as spokesmen for black rights during the war years.Footnote ¹⁵ Part of Cooke's political outlook had been inherited from her father, who had been a supporter of the socialist ticket under Eugene V. Debs.Footnote ¹⁶ Cooke had previously written for the official publication of the NAACP and described her social life as “an extension of working at the Crisis.” Involved in this set were W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and Aaron Douglas.Footnote ¹⁷ In many ways, then, key editorial workers at the Amsterdam News moved in an atypical social world whose intellectual milieu corresponded with a general affinity with the political causes of the left.

On one level, these workers provided an unusually direct example of the “proletarian turn” so prominent in the secondary literature, but a clear-cut allegiance to the left did not define the motivations or the outcome of the dispute. Communist Party membership was a deeply ambiguous consequence of the event, rather than an underlying cause. The New York Age reported the presence on the picket lines of Benjamin Davis and Abner Berry, who formed part of an interracial cast of CPUSA members. The recently freed Angelo Herndon, a famous cause célèbre in black left-wing politics, was also reported to have visited strike headquarters.Footnote ¹⁸ Poston recollected that the CP's desire for recruits was part of their motivation for supporting the editorial staff.Footnote ¹⁹ Cooke reported that Benjamin Davis was at their strike headquarters “every day,” and, as well as addressing rallies in support of the editorial staff, played a personal role in helping recruit Cooke and some others to the party.Footnote ²⁰ Cooke stated that her experiences reporting on the plight of inhabitants of Depression-era New York meant that she was ready “emotionally” to listen to radical political alternatives, while also recounting that Davis personally approached her on the picket lines. Davis asked, “ ‘Why aren't you a member of the Communist party? You have a much better background for it than I had.’ I said, ‘Because no one ever asked me.’ … He asked me, and I joined.”Footnote ²¹ After this, Cooke played a role in getting some, but not all, of the other editorial workers to join the Communist Party.Footnote ²² The party support described by Cooke characterized membership as a helpful by-product of union activity rather than a universal motivating factor. CP leaders subsequently became frustrated with the ANG group. As Mark Naision put it, branches among educated groups “such as those in the WPA Negro Theatre and the staff of the Amsterdam News … [came] to resemble discussion groups more than units of a revolutionary army.”Footnote ²³ The “proletarian turn” among the staff was a temporary related consequence rather than primary driving cause of the dispute.

It was the contextual factor of an all-black workforce located in the heart of the heavily confined black community in Harlem that was ultimately most crucial to the dispute's outcome. Some, such as owner Sadie Warren Davis and nationalist activists, argued that the intra-racial character of the dispute constituted a reason to decry the influence of unionization. Many more assessed the same situation to draw the different conclusion that as Cooke put it, “The bosses are not necessarily in your corner, even if they are your own color.”Footnote ²⁴ Support for racial self-help and pursuing opportunities “within the race” that were central to the political life of interwar Harlem were not necessarily being rejected in the Amsterdam News dispute. Union membership was being redefined to become a civil right as a result of the legislative work of the New Deal. A majority held that these rights needed to be granted on a uniform basis, including in the unusual intra-racial circumstances thrown up at the Amsterdam News.

This liberal premise and the propitious concentration of an all-black workforce afforded the staff the much-needed support of a coalition of leadership groups. The Negro Labor Committee (NLC), the renamed organizational vehicle for long-standing Harlem labour organizer Frank Crosswaith, was a guiding force behind the Citizens’ Committee which coordinated supportive groups.Footnote ²⁵ The NLC's support took a range of forms. A rally held at the NLC's Harlem Labor Center on 6 November included speeches by strike supporters, including president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, A. Philip Randolph; Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr.; and Carl Randau of the ANG.Footnote ²⁶ One meeting had an estimated five hundred people in attendance where the “audience passed a resolution pledging redoubled support of the strikers,” while it was reported that hundreds sent signed pledges in support of the workers and the boycott to the newspaper's management.Footnote ²⁷ The NLC described how they had “initiated scores of members of unions which participated in (the) Negro Labor Conference (who) cooperated in picketing, literature distribution and other activities.”Footnote ²⁸ Upon resolution of the dispute, the NLC received understandable thanks from the ANG for their assistance.Footnote ²⁹

The NLC proved a well-suited vehicle to coordinate a unified response on behalf of the staff writers, but their success was dependent on the consent of other groups who commanded larger and more stable followings. Like the citizens’ committees formed during the previous year's Don't Buy Where You Can't Work job campaigns, a variety of organizations lent their support.Footnote ³⁰ Included were clergymen like Adam Clayton Powell Jr.; Municipal Court Justice James S. Watson; Elmer Carter, editor of the Urban League's Opportunity; Arthur Schomburg of Harlem's Public Library; and New York NAACP leader James Allen.Footnote ³¹ The unifying principle was the sense of the injustice that had befallen the dismissed workers. The temporary coordination of so many parts of the Harlem community was crucial to the workers’ eventual reinstatement. The circulation of the Amsterdam News fell by 35 percent as a result of the boycott. Key newsstands and merchants who continued to advertise in the paper were picketed on publication days and thousands of pro-boycott leaflets were distributed.Footnote ³² These leaflets were signed by an array of Harlem's leadership, including unionists Frank Crosswaith, Ward Nichols and Ashley Totten; Powell Jr.; Elmer Carter and Lester B. Granger of the Urban League; Walter White, Abram Harris and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP; and artist Aaron Douglas.Footnote ³³ Allen Chase described how, after advertising in the first “scab issue,” the Howard Radio Shop was picketed and within thirty minutes the manager decided to withdraw advertising in the next issue.Footnote ³⁴

Some letters were printed in the Amsterdam News, which, unsurprisingly, endorsed the management's views on the illegitimacy of the workers’ actions. A majority, however, seemed moved by the sense of injustice felt to have been inflicted on the dismissed workers. Chase described how the “women of Harlem dropped notes in their milk bottles to the effect that they would stop taking Sheffield's milk unless the quarter-page ad was removed.”Footnote ³⁵ It was reported that, in just ten days, five thousand sent cards in protest to the newspaper management.Footnote ³⁶ After nearly three months of declining sales and advertising revenue and on the point of bankruptcy, Davis was forced to sell the newspaper on 2 December 1935. As part of the condition of sale, the new owners, Harlem physicians P. M. H. Savory and C. B. Powell, agreed to reinstate the dismissed workers and enter into a collective-bargaining contract with the ANG.Footnote ³⁷ The ability to harness the consumer power of the Harlem population had proved successful in the Don't Buy Where You Can't Work campaigns of 1934. Similarly, the successful mobilization of the community in the Amsterdam News dispute proved capable of helping secure rights of employment and union membership.

The dispute was the highest-profile labour protest in Harlem during the 1930s. The first edition of the paper produced after the settlement cheerily proclaimed, “All Our Labor Difficulties Have Been Amicably Settled.”Footnote ³⁸ Those on the far left like the New Masses heralded the victory as a turning point, arguing that the ground had been laid for a united front in which a Labor Party would “win the basic demands of the American people.”Footnote ³⁹ John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers (UMW) congratulated the Amsterdam News staff, writing that it was “a triumph for organization in the newspaper world.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The event occurred at a formative moment in black America's relationship with organized labour: in a contemporaneous development, the AFL's October 1935 convention resulted in the creation of the Committee of Industrial Organizations (CIO – later renamed the Congress of Industrial Organizations after its split from the AFL), which, under the leadership of Lewis, promised to organize the workers of the USA's mass-production industries across occupational, ethnic and racial boundaries.

Though opposing the unionization of her workforce, Sadie Warren Davis actually identified this central issue of the day. Davis directly challenged the white-led “communist” guild to find jobs for black workers on white newspapers.Footnote ⁴¹ Davis was attempting to sidestep her own responsibility for retarding the efforts of her workforce to improve job security and conditions, demonstrating that black workers would receive little support from employers when seeking to claim the benefits promised by the New Deal. Yet Davis also raised the pertinent question how racial equality for black workers would be secured on white newspapers and how equality would be extended in the other activities of the labour movement. Questions remained how a union like the ANG, willing to accept black members and conduct a high-profile campaign to reinstate existing employees, would act on the critical question of extending black employment on white-owned newspapers in New York.

Events suggested that even unions with a left-wing streak that accepted black members in existing workplaces, like the ANG, did not necessarily act to extend black employment opportunities. In the period from its early formation in 1933 to its affiliation with the AFL in 1936 and then the CIO in 1937, the ANG underwent an internal process of transformation. Some members initially saw the guild as an opportunity to create a professional association, but other elements successfully moulded the guild into an industrial union. Left-wing unionists associated with the “New York crowd” were critical in this process.Footnote ⁴² Yet even though the ANG seemed to be travelling down the path to the industrial unionism of the CIO era, the union's racial record was indifferent, both at the Amsterdam News and elsewhere.Footnote ⁴³

As soon as the three-month moratorium on dismissing union members written into the agreement of sale expired, Henry Lee Moon and Ted Poston were dismissed. These dismissals gave the lie to the supposed pro-union attitude of P. M. H. Savory and C. B. Powell. At a meeting of the NLC, Poston reported that the new publishers were attempting to expunge their workforce of all union members. The NLC voted to support the dismissed workers but, crucially, without the support of the wider coalition, were unable to win reinstatement for Poston, Moon and the others.Footnote ⁴⁴ The dismissals were ruled on by an adjustment committee of the New York's Labor Relations Board where the chairman accepted the legitimacy of the management's decision. Embroiled in a dispute with the Wisconsin News, the ANG acquiesced at this decision though it helped Poston and Moon find alternative work.Footnote ⁴⁵ Others at the Amsterdam News shared a less positive fate. Cooke was one of the few union instigators not initially targeted for dismissal, but she grew tired with the attitude of the new management and went on to work for Powell Jr.'s People's Voice. Through a combination of personal circumstances and Powell and Savory's apparent desire to root out supposed troublemakers, only three of the strike participants were still with the newspaper in 1940.Footnote ⁴⁶

The legacy of the Amsterdam News dispute went beyond these personal stories. The dispute had thrown a spotlight on the wider question of the role that new unions like the ANG would have in extending black employment. The guild tried to deflect these challenges, arguing that the race charge was a “smokescreen” raised by management. In some instances, ANG leaders addressed criticisms more directly, promising to help black writers gain work on white newspapers. Carl Randau was indirectly quoted in a union publication as saying that “the Guild knows no color line” and that they would “work for admission of Negro editorial workers to the staffs of all white newspapers.”Footnote ⁴⁷ There was little visible improvement, however, in black employment in newspaper work. At the time of the dispute, black members were estimated to have represented 2 percent of the total ANG membership. The ANG's most visible racial success story, Ted Poston, became a high-profile exception to a continuing trend of drastic underrepresentation. Twenty years after the Amsterdam News dispute, Ebony magazine counted only thirty-one black writers occupying meaningful roles on white newspapers across the nation.Footnote ⁴⁸

Responsibility for this dismal record of progress did not lie solely at the door of organized labour. Employers bore a heavy responsibility for limiting black employment, while a third influential constituency was the government agencies responsible for ruling in matters of labour law and employment. The intercession of Ellinore Herrick of the New York Labor Relations Board and Fiorella La Guardia, New York's Republican pro-New Deal mayor, demonstrated the occasional interest of New Deal-era agencies in influencing the outcome of labour disputes. La Guardia attempted to force a meeting between the editorial workers, newspaper management and publishers at the Regional Labor Relations Board chaired by Herrick. Davis failed to attend the meeting and Herrick wrote to the mayor with her conclusion that a desire to defeat unionization was the central cause of the dispute.Footnote ⁴⁹ The Labor Relations Board did not, however, intervene directly and it was the consumer boycott that finally forced Davis to sell. The Regional Relations Board, meanwhile, subsequently accepted the decision to dismiss Poston and Moon.

The wider issue revealed by these events was this: even where the conditions for labour–civil rights activism seemed ideal – an accommodating union with left-wing elements, a pro-labour New Deal administration and a group of willing black workers – progress was still dependent on the coordinated support of a cross-section of community leaders. This progress, moreover, was temporary, limited and suggestive of the difficulties likely in other areas where the union concerned was less friendly, the government group less supportive or the management less susceptible to outside financial pressures. In this way, the dispute demonstrated that although the numerical increase in the size of black trade union membership after 1935 was of huge significance, if black workers were to reap the gains promised by unionization then coordinated and multidirectional activism would be regularly required. Contemporaries were not blind to this reality. As union advocate Crosswaith put it some years later, “Negroes must learn the power of organized thinking and organized acting in our struggle to win our full citizenship rights in American life.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Yet rather than being swept away by the tide of industrial unionism, the overlapping personal, political and strategic fault lines in evidence beneath the surface unity of the Amsterdam News dispute were reproduced and undercut coordinated activism on several occasions.

The seemingly most unified part of the Amsterdam News coalition, the “Popular Front” of Harlem's black church, trade union community and radical left, subsequently ran into disagreements that hampered coordinated protests. The two leading lights of the Amsterdam News Citizens’ Committee, Frank Crosswaith and Adam Clayton Powell Jr., came into conflict just over two years later, during Harlem's next attempt at community-wide activism. Between March and April 1938, Powell Jr. led a renewed campaign to extend black employment. Forming the Coordinating Committee of Greater New York, Powell Jr. led protests which targeted merchants in Harlem and public utilities companies who had black consumers but few black employees. Mass meetings were held and Harlem customers were encouraged to pay utility bills in small change to protest.Footnote ⁵¹ Limited successes were made at Consolidated Edison, who employed four new black workers and promoted four more, while the New York telephone company employed more clerical staff. The biggest victories were at concerns in Harlem, with around three hundred more white-collar jobs resulting from the protests. These agreements, however, were accompanied by public friction with Crosswaith, who deemed the campaign antagonistic to companies with union contracts. Resenting the competition and committed to furthering black progress through “legitimate” trade unionism, Crosswaith, Harlem's most influential labour leader, was a telling absentee from the biggest attempt at community-wide protest since the Amsterdam News in 1935.Footnote ⁵² Though it succeeded in opening up some new jobs, the brief 1938 jobs campaign was unable to apply pressure to the many unions who had come to share responsibility for employment alongside management. This disagreement between Powell Jr. and Crosswaith reflected a divergence between the energetic and militant protest style of Powell Jr., of which support for unionism was just one part, and the more rigid platform of Crosswaith which remained focussed on the promotion of “legitimate” unionism.

The failure of Powell Jr. and Crosswaith to collaborate meant that Harlem had no mass base for activism that dealt fully with the new position of organized labour. It had been clergymen who had helped the 1935 Citizens’ Committee to harness the collective power of the Harlem community. Powell Jr. had drawn on his experience as a leader of the Don't Buy Where You Can't Work campaigns of 1934 and became one of the most vocal advocates of the workers’ rights to reinstatement and to organize.Footnote ⁵³ Other ministers, including Shelton Hale, David Licorish and Charles Byrd, joined Powell Jr. and participated in a mass picket at the end of November 1935.Footnote ⁵⁴ Elsewhere, however, leadership in the field of labour in Harlem continued to be dominated by the work of Crosswaith, whose NLC did not have the same wider support as the black church. Unlike Powell Jr., who launched protests on a range of issues, often in spontaneous fashion, Crosswaith and the NLC remained focussed upon growing black union membership.Footnote ⁵⁵

The NLC emphasized the importance of breaking down discriminatory barriers from within the ranks of “legitimate” unions, promising to “use its influence to weed out of the ranks of labor, racial and other prejudices that are harmful to the best interest of the working class [using] … the civilized weapons of education, fraternization, persuasion and organization.”Footnote ⁵⁶ This emphasis on “civilized” education, persuasion and support for the “legitimate” unions of the AFL and CIO corresponded with a wariness of collaborating with more restive leaders on the radical left and nationalist ends of Harlem's political spectrum. This division was illustrated by the comparative lack of impact of New York's branch of the National Negro Congress (NNC). Writing to national secretary John P. Davis in 1938, Crosswaith argued that while he supported the premise of the NNC, “the Congress must be eternally on guard against anything that would justify the charge of splitting the ranks of labor by advocating and promoting so called independent unions.”Footnote ⁵⁷ For this reason, the NLC resolved at a meeting before the second NNC that they would not endorse or send delegates to the conference because it conflicted with their policy to endorse only official trade unions.Footnote ⁵⁸

The split between the NLC and NNC also reflected Crosswaith's wariness of collaborating with the Communist Party. Though not a simple front organization, prominent CP members like James Ford, as in other cities, were influential in forming the NNC in Harlem. Ford quoted Crosswaith as having said, “I have been forced to advise a number of trade unions not to participate in the Negro Congress movement, not that I am against the Congress in principle.”Footnote ⁵⁹ A conference was held between NLC and Communist Party members that attempted to smooth out some of the problems raised by Harlem's competing left-wing factions. This meeting reflected a temporary willingness to collaborate during the CP's Popular Front-era policy to organize within existing union structures. Despite the genial tone recorded in minutes of the meeting, Crosswaith and the NLC remained wary of communist influence and motives.Footnote ⁶⁰ The underlying antipathy between the various “lefts” of the Popular Front was revealed in stark fashion following the Nazi–Soviet Pact in 1939. Crosswaith said he was encouraged to see that “since Stalin and Hitler affected a ‘united front’ we notice a decided change in the tenor and tempo of Negro journalists and others who heretofore were obviously under Communist influence.”Footnote ⁶¹ The Communist Party achieved some organizational successes during the first Popular Front in unions such as the Transport Workers’ Union (TWU) and the National Maritime Union (NMU), as well as helping push the ANG towards an industrial union structure.Footnote ⁶² As far as activism under the more broad-based NNC was concerned, however, leaders were frustrated at the lack of progress in New York. Writing in an internal memo, William Gaulden and John P. Davis attributed the NNC's relative lack of impact to the fact that “under the presidency of A. Philip Randolph our efforts to accomplish [a union committee in New York] were thwarted, inasmuch as his close friend, Frank Crosswaith, had already developed a similar idea which had won the support of a small section of the labor movement.” Gaulden and Davis lamented, “Trade union organization among Negro workers in the city of New York lags appreciably.”Footnote ⁶³ Left-inspired activism in the late 1930s was not a total failure, but beneath moments of apparent unity like the Amsterdam News dispute, personal, political and strategic differences left activists of various persuasions similarly frustrated.

The Amsterdam News dispute revealed even more irreconcilable differences between pro-union and nationalist groups. Nationalists offered vociferous criticisms of the editorial workers’ actions, while rejecting the wider principle of interracial unionism. Some attacked all white-led unions and argued that the editorial workers’ actions hindered efforts to sustain businesses within the race. Julia E. K. Clarke, secretary general of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), wrote in a letter, “Can't those black members [of the ANG] see that they don't really ‘belong!’ That their union can't place them on white newspapers!”Footnote ⁶⁴ By 1935 the UNIA was a peripheral part of Harlem's political life in comparison to its heyday in the early 1920s, but a strong legacy of nationalist thought survived into the New Deal era. Editorials in the Amsterdam News attempted to draw on these sentiments, emphasizing racial pride and self-help to rally the readership to their cause.Footnote ⁶⁵

A new group, the Harlem Labor Union (HLU), was formed during the dispute which fused the emotional resonance of nationalism with a rejection of black participation in organized labour. The HLU was led by two former Garveyites and members of the 1934 jobs campaigns, Ira Kemp and Arthur Reid.Footnote ⁶⁶ During October 1935, Kemp, Reid and other nationalists spoke on street corners and organized a boycott of Italian-owned stores in protest of the invasion of Ethiopia, a contemporaneous event which stirred feelings of racial awareness across the community.Footnote ⁶⁷ Attempting to conflate domestic and international issues, Kemp parked a truck carrying Ethiopian and American flags in front of the strike headquarters. On top of the truck was a “big sign demanding to know why white Communists and Socialists were helping the white, outlaw, dues-collecting guild to wreck a great non-commercial Negro institution.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Though unsuccessful in opposing the ANG, Kemp and Reid became convinced of the potential of a nationalistic rival union. Their group, the HLU, became a relatively small but militant presence in Harlem, picketing businesses to employ black workers and opposing interracial unionism.Footnote ⁶⁹ The NLC expended much energy trying to derail the HLU; its 1938 annual report detailed how “many conferences were held during the year and plans formulated to combat this ill-begotten organization.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Many observers accused its leaders of racketeering, probably with some justification, but the group's message of racial solidarity resonated “on the street.” After conducting a personal investigation, the NAACP's publicity director, George Murphy, adjudged that the group's membership was between two hundred and three hundred members. Though Harlemites were divided on the group's legitimacy, the average “man in the street” took the view that it “makes very little difference to me whether the Harlem Labor Union is a legitimate labor union or not. I know this – they have been able to get several jobs for Negroes in Harlem where organized labor has been unable to do so.”Footnote ⁷¹ The resonance of the HLU's message was suggestive of the limitations of pro-union politics among the community at large, while the HLU hindered the efforts of the NLC to promote “legitimate” trade unionism.

Moreover, many of the criticisms made by nationalists struck a chord with more mainstream opinion in the NAACP. Most adjudged opposition to unionism as unwise, but many were anxious that the ANG, as all unions, be held to apply their stated principles of equality in practice. This issue was raised even by younger members of the “new crowd” rising through the ranks of the NAACP during the 1930s, like lawyer Charles Houston. Houston was contacted by Moon to serve on the Citizens’ Committee. Houston replied, “I support the fight to unite black and white labor … but … [i]s the Guild just as ready to fight for the eradication of the color line on the metropolitan dailies as it is to unionize the Amsterdam News?”Footnote ⁷² Moon lashed back at Houston in response to his qualified support, withdrawing his request for Houston's participation, arguing that his position was “that traditionally ascribed to the fence-straddling liberal.”Footnote ⁷³ This was a harsh accusation. Houston was by no means an advocate of the gradualism associated with the NAACP's “old guard,” going on to play a key role in the labour litigation embarked upon by the NAACP in the 1940s.Footnote ⁷⁴ Moon dismissively wrote that the guild did not “employ newspaper men,” downplaying the role played by new unions controlling the gates to employment.Footnote ⁷⁵ Moon and Houston had crucially different perspectives. Moon was not naive regarding unions’ often poor records on racial equality but still had real enthusiasm for union causes. Houston, like many others who employed a national frame of reference, gave a more practically edged endorsement of unionism that came with caveats.

This latter position, based upon an assessment of the wider role of unions in controlling black employment, shaped the stance of many NAACP leaders. When field secretary William Pickens wrote to national secretary Walter White to explain his position, he argued,

Pickens challenged the ANG to concentrate on securing employment opportunities for black writers on white newspapers with no black employees.Footnote ⁷⁷ Walter White, in response, attempted to get Pickens to make clear that his strident views did not represent the official position of the NAACP.Footnote ⁷⁸ This official position was discussed during a special committee meeting in November. Demonstrating the divisive nature of the issues involved, it was decided that “there was no special demand for a pronouncement of policy in relation to the Amsterdam News strike.” The committee argued that although the “Association's platform has been, in theory, pro-labor,” there was a “strong feeling on the part of many persons outside of New York” that the dispute was a union-inspired “assault upon a Negro business.”Footnote ⁷⁹ It was left to national secretary Walter White to diplomatically position the NAACP so as not to antagonize those of opposing views. White made two radio broadcasts in programmes which were supportive of the editorial workers.Footnote ⁸⁰ In the first, White spoke alongside ANG president Heywood Broun.Footnote ⁸¹ White emphasized that his was a personal stance, arguing, “one issue to me is crystal-clear – namely, shall workers have the right to organize and bargain collectively.” As union membership became an established right during the New Deal, it logically followed for the liberal White that black Americans also be afforded this right. White did not, however, shy away from the question of the ANG's racial policies, adding, “I sincerely hope that the Newspaper Guild … will devote … considerable effort towards breaking down the present barriers on white newspapers to employment of competent Negro writers and mechanics. This is not going to be an easy task.”Footnote ⁸² In this way, White's stance illuminated continuities in liberal political principles that underpinned the NAACP's position on unionism – continuities all too easily overlooked in the narrative of the “proletarian turn.” The rise of industrial unionism forced the NAACP to offer a more unequivocal endorsement of black union membership, but any shifts in stance during the 1930s were conducted, as Manfred Berg has recently argued, “without sacrificing its identity on the altar of working-class unity.”Footnote ⁸³

The impact of these continuing differences, drawn out by a study of the Amsterdam News, was illustrated by several concurrent events in 1941. Walter White endorsed the United Auto Workers (UAW) in the Ford strike of 1941 in a move seen as a pivotal development in the NAACP's adoption of a “labor-oriented agenda.” Yet just as in 1935, he followed a practically edged endorsement with a challenge to the UAW to finally prove that they were “straight on the race question.” Furthermore, following the resolution of the dispute, he moved to marginalize John P. Davis and the NNC when planning conferences between labour and government groups over black employment in Detroit. White attempted to maintain the NAACP's position as a leader in black protest by accusing Davis and the NNC of being communists.Footnote ⁸⁴ That same month, nationalists proved their ongoing capacity to help make, but more often break, coordinated protests in Harlem. Some newer leaders of the HLU offered rare support for a protest that extended black job opportunities on buses. A community boycott was led by a committee involving Powell Jr., Hope Stevens of the NNC and elements of the HLU, which gained a reported extra seventy jobs in maintenance and a hundred as drivers for black workers on city buses. Elements of the HLU subsequently attacked the agreement reached with the bus company and the Transport Workers’ Union, however.Footnote ⁸⁵ One former officer of the HLU, Carlos Cook, rejected the agreement, branding it a sham designed to temporarily appease the community and save the faces of TWU leader Michael Quill by Stevens and Powell, viewed as fellow left-wingers determined to preserve each other's reputation at the expense of black workers’ best interests.Footnote ⁸⁶

Finally, though many identified the imperative for coordinated protest heralded by the USA's growing involvement in the world war, a trend embodied by the formation of the March on Washington Movement (MOWM), Harlem's pro-union left remained fractured in ways unacknowledged by Cook. In particular, Crosswaith remained wary of cooperating with radical groups and nationalists alike, writing that he wished “to see an organized campaign for jobs for Negroes throughout Greater New York but [did] not feel that such a campaign will get far at this time under the auspices of any left-wing group.”Footnote ⁸⁷ These necessarily brief examples from 1941 are not intended to suggest that attempts at collaborative wartime protests like the MOWM were irrevocably doomed. These events do indicate, however, that divisions over the thorny question of interracial protest and unionism that are easy to overlook in the neat narrative of the “proletarian turn” had not been decisively overridden by the victories of organized labour.Footnote ⁸⁸

At first glance, the Amsterdam News dispute appears to uphold an existing narrative emphasizing the potential of labour-based protest strategies during the New Deal. On closer inspection, however, the event reveals a less rosy picture, for those directly involved and in terms of the landscape of 1930s protest more generally. Though some instigators of union activity had an existing pedigree in left-wing politics, membership of the Communist Party was a decidedly ambiguous consequence of the dispute rather than a driving cause. Most significant was that the workplace dynamics of the editorial office allowed for the divisive issue of interracial union membership to be temporarily overridden. The appearance of unity did not necessarily constitute evidence of a decisive shift among moderate groups towards the radical left. For key participants, including leaders of the NAACP and the black church, support seemed to be based not upon an acceptance of class-inspired politics but upon a more limited, liberal view that held that as the labour legislation of the New Deal moved to extend rights of collective bargaining to workers, black people were entitled to claim these rights. Meanwhile, fierce public opposition was received from nationalist groups who attempted to offer alternate political visions to interracial activism. The temporary support for the editorial workers voiced by a cross-section of leaders concealed important disagreements on broader questions pertaining to black unionism and protest strategies. These differences resurfaced on several occasions in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

The Amsterdam News dispute provides an example of how, when assessed in detail and with the broadest range of voices possible included, moments of unity that appear to uphold the positive verdicts of the long civil rights movement can reveal a much more fragile picture. Though the intra-racial dynamics made the dispute distinctive, this allowed black responses to unionism to be revealed in the widest possible sense; when assessed with this wide view, a different face to the process of black unionization emerges. Though support for black union participation as a basic principle increased during the 1930s, the critical issue was whether black groups could engage with the multiplicity of groups – management, unions and government – who came to share power over the labour market during the New Deal. This article has not, therefore, sought to deny any and all progress that accompanied increased union membership in the late 1930s and 1940s, nor has it sought to place unfair responsibility on black leaders for failing to agree on a unified and coordinated set of protest strategies in the field of labour. A burdensome demand for coordinated activism was being placed upon civil rights groups. Though temporary effective bridges could be formed, episodes of partial successes in the field of labour activism, as experienced by the workers at the Amsterdam News, often proved difficult to sustain during the transformative years of the New Deal.