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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 39. Negro Improvement and Protest Organizations - 4. The National Negro Congress Movement
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8i8 An American Dilemma
new organization. Local councils were established in many cities and
seemed, in the beginning, to have been quite active. As late as 1939 and
1940, when the present writer traveled around in this country, the local
councils of the National Negro Congress were the most important Negro
organizations in some Western cities.
In October, 1937, the second National Negro Congress was held in
Philadelphia. The delegates formed a total of 1,149 persons. Nothing
important happened. Account was given of the progress in building up the
organization. It is apparent that a chief difficulty was to get it on a sound
financial basis. The third—and so far, the last—Congress meeting was held
in Washington, D.C., in April, 1940. There were around 900 Negro and
400 white delegates representing organizations from all parts of the
country. At this meeting the Congress sealed its doom by becoming simply
a front organization for the Communist party.^^ Randolph was ushered
from the presidency, and the Congress sank to unimportance, from which
it will probably never rise again.^^
The failure of the National Negro Congress seems due mainly to the
following factors: lack of political training and understanding on the part
of the rank and file of the Negro representatives for the various local
Negro organizations 5
inability to raise even modest funds for the work of
the organization; the skill, determination, and resources of the Commu-
nists, and their success in getting some of their group into the leadership of
the Congress. Since 1940 the Congress has been kept up by the Communist
party as a paper organization with some scattered local following, but it
has largely lost its support from the other Negro organizations which
originally furnished its basis.
The March on Washington Committee
y
led by A. Philip Randolph and
created to voice the Negro protest in the war emergency, is in a sense a
continuation of the nonpartisan general Negro movement represented by
the Congress in its first year. We shall consider this Committee later.
The Southern Negro Youth Congres^^ was organized in Richmond,
Virginia, in 1937, as a federation of Southern youth organizations. A yearly
congress is held, the last one in April, 1942, at Tuskegee Institute.^^ Local
councils are organized to conduct youth forums, work for crime reduction
programs, health projects, vocational guidance campaigns, and similar
activities in the interest of Negro youth. Owing to the ^^special problems”
which face Negroes in the South, the local organizations have usually not
been militant on questions of Negroes’ rights. In spite of this, the author
found that upper class Negroes in the South often considered the move-
ment ^^radical” and dangerous for interracial peace.^® Bunche gives, in
1940, this summary evaluation:
The Southern Negro Youth Congress is a flame that flickers only feebly in a few
Southern cities today. It started with promise but, lacking competent leadership, it
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