When Fighting Racism Meant Fighting Economic Exploitation
Though often forgotten today, the National Negro Congress forged a black-led, labor-based coalition in New Deal America that fought white supremacy and the economic exploitation that undergirded it.
July 1946: People marching in a National Negro Congress protest against Georgia lynching cases. Washington Area Spark / Flickr
There’s a tendency these days to pit race against class.
Cracking down on Wall Street, Hillary Clinton famously proclaimed, won’t end racism. Promoting a jobs program, Bernie Sanders’s critics chided, won’t stop racial profiling. Fighting economic exploitation, naysayers maintain, won’t bludgeon the fortress of white supremacy.
None of this would have made much sense to the National Negro Congress (NNC). Founded in February 1936, the NNC sought to build a mass antiracist coalition rooted in the labor movement that could attack racial hierarchy and the economic exploitation that undergirded it. Their goal was nothing less than the evisceration of Jim Crow and the elevation of black Americans to “first-class” citizenship — fulfilling the dreams of an egalitarian, interracial democracy first glimpsed in the Reconstruction era.
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