The 1933 Conference That Helped Forge Civil Rights Unionism
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 help topple Jim Crow.
A group portrait of men and women attending the NAACP-sponsored Amenia Conference in Amenia, New York, posed in front of tent, August 1933. (Library of Congress)
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” 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.
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