Establishment
The founding convention of the American Negro Labor Congress opened on the evening of Sunday, October 25, 1925, with a mass meeting which heard the reports of national organizer Fort-Whitman and national secretary H.V. Williams Fort-Whitman’s keynote speech declared that the new organization was established “to gather, to mobilize, and to coordinate into a fighting machine the most enlightened and militant and class-conscious workers of the race” in support of concrete objectives
Approximately 40 delegates attended the founding congress of the ANLC, which was organized around the slogan “Organization is the first step to freedom.” Delegate Otto Huiswood, a prominent black Communist party activist from New York, emphasized the need to bring black workers into the trade unions of the American Federation of Labor, declaring that if the established unions could not be racially integrated, it would fall to black workers to establish parallel unions of their own
The October 1925 founding convention passed resolutions demanding “the full equality of the Negro people in the social system of the United States, and everywhere.” An end to Jim Crow laws, segregation, electoral discrimination, and discrimination in public education was demanded and discrimination in housing and public accommodation duly noted as part of a demand for “full social equality for the Negro people. The Ku Klux Klan was condemned and the exclusion of black jurors from the juries picked for the trials of black defendants was sharply criticized, as was continued segregation in the United States military.
The officialdom of the American Federation of Labor was hostile to the new ANLC, which AFL President William Green cautioning black unionists that they were “being led into a trap.” Green charged that the Communists were attempting to foster “race hatred into the lives” of African-Americans and to trick blacks into believing that the revolutionary overthrow of the American government and its replacement with a Soviet republic was the sole solution to their social ills.
Green’s attitude drew return fire from the ANLC, which called the AFL chief’s position “clearly erroneous, harmful, and prejudicial to the best interests of the American labor movement.” spite such protestations, the mainstream press of America echoed Green’s hostile sentiments, with the Chicago Tribune accusing the Communists of attempting to “stir up race hatred and disorder” and the Philadelphia Record pooh-poohing the entire idea that American blacks could be “bolshevized” as “ridiculously childish.”