The Communist Party USA and African-Americans - The Post World War II Era

The Post World War II Era

In 1946, the NNC and the ILD merged to form the Civil Rights Congress. The CRC continued its activities during the height of postwar attacks on the Communist Party, denouncing discrimination in the judicial system, segregated housing, and other forms of discrimination that blacks faced in both the North and the South.

The party had hopes of remaining in the mainstream of American politics in the postwar era. Benjamin J. Davis, Jr. ran for and won a seat on the City Council in New York City in 1945, advertising his membership in the Communist Party and drawing on both black and white support.

That era did not last. New York City changed the rules for electing members of the City Council after Davis' election and Davis lost the next race in 1949 by a landslide to an anti-communist candidate. The fact that he was under indictment for advocating the overthrow of the United States government did not help his candidacy.

The CRC found itself increasingly isolated in this new climate as former allies refused to have anything to do with it. Represented by William Patterson and Paul Robeson, it attempted to file a petition entitled "We Charge Genocide" with the United Nations in 1949 that condemned the treatment of black citizens in the United States. Patterson was convicted a year later of violating the Smith Act and the Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr. declared the CRC to be a subversive organization in 1954. The CRC received especially hostile attention from state authorities in the South, where it and related organizations were often raided or banned. The CRC dissolved in 1956, just as the civil rights movement in the South was about to become a mass movement.

At the same time the internal turmoil brought on by the Cold War, the Smith Act prosecutions, and the ouster of Earl Browder led to an internal battle in which the Party expelled a number of members who were accused of displaying "white chauvinism". In the grim days of 1949 and 1950, as the CP was about to be driven out of the CIO and much of the U.S. labor movement, many CPUSA leaders now saw their work among the white working class as a failure and the black working class as the "vanguard of the revolution".

The Party therefore directed those unions with CPUSA leadership to take a stance against continued use of seniority systems in those workplaces in which seniority made it more difficult for black workers to break out of segregated job classifications and to advocate "superseniority" for black workers, an early version of the type of measures that came to be known as "affirmative action" twenty years later. Many left-led unions, such as the UE, simply ignored the Party's directive.