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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 39. Negro Improvement and Protest Organizations - 3. Business and Professional Organizations - 4. The National Negro Congress Movement
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Chapter 39. Improvement and Protest Organizations 817
among the younger Negro intellectuals. When they are studied one by one
and measured by their rather limited accomplishments, this view seems to
be justified. Taken together, however, they mean that Negroes have
increasingly become organized in natural social groups for concerted action,
have become trained in orderly cooperation, and have become accustomed
to plan and work together. All of them give an institutional sanction to
protests against various kinds of discrimination. When seen in perspective,
they represent bases for attempts at broader organizations.
To this category of Negro organizations belong Negro trade unions, but
we have considered them in Chapter 38 and in Appendix 6.
4. The National Negro Congress Movement
The Joint Committee on National Recovery was formed in the early
days of the New Deal to watch out for Negro rights in the policy-making
at Washington. Under the chairmanship of George Haynes, and with
John P. Davis as executive secretary, it protested against wage differentials
in industry and discriminatory administration of the agricultural programs,
and it upheld the interests of Negroes in the code hearings under the
N.R.A. It was supported financially by some twenty-two independent
Negro organizations, though its major support came from the N.A.A.C.P.^®
The National Negro Congress grew out of a conference in the spring of
1935 held at Howard University under the joint auspices of its Division
of Social Sciences and of the Joint Committee on National Recovery. The
idea was born that a national Negro agency, embracing all the existing
Negro trade unions, religious, fraternal, and civic bodies, could give more
strength and unity to all those organizations and, particularly, help awaken
a response from the Negro masses. Stress was laid upon economic and social
betterment as well as upon justice and citizens’ rights.^® For a time the
National Negro Congress, which emerged out of these deliberations, actu-
ally showed prospects of becoming a strong Negro movement, though it
finally failed.
The first National Negro Congress met in Chicago in February, 1936,
for a three-day session. It was attended by 817 delegates, representing 585
organizations from 28 states and the District of Columbia. In a great
number of resolutions, the Congress expressed the Negroes’ dissatisfaction
and protest and made practical proposes for change. Heading the list of
resolutions was the general one to the effect that the Congress was not,
and would never be, affiliated or dominated by any political faction or
party A. Philip Randolph—^the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping
Car Porters, who is not only the most prominent Negro trade unionist but
one of the wisest Negro statesmen in the present generation—^undertook
the presidency and John P. Davis, who had been the secretary of the Joint
Committee on National Recovery, became the executive secretary of the
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