Negro Labor Committee Marks Tenth Anniversary
The Herald Tribune reported that the Negro Labor Committee, with headquarters at 312 West 125th Street, was marking its tenth anniversary with an announcement from its secretary Frank R. Crosswaith that more than 50,000 African Americans had found union jobs since 1935. More than 12,000 had entered the garment industry, including menswear manufacturing which previously had been closed to them.
The organization had been founded by several unions affiliated with the AFL, although some CIO unions subsequently had joined. The goal was to increase earnings within the African American community by building solidarity between white and black workers. The organization's logo showed the clasped hands of a black and a white worker. The legislative branch was made up of three delegates from each of the member unions with the stipulation that the delegations be racially mixed.
Crosswaith, who was West Indian, said that one of the greatest obstacles had been the competing all-Black unions operating in Harlem whose leaders “are constantly pressing Harlem merchants to hire only Negroes but who don’t stop to realize that if the whites downtown were to adopt similar tactics all of Harlem would soon be starving.” He also acknowledged troubles with Communist-dominated unions. which at every meeting wanted resolutions endorsing actions in Moscow. “We were seldom able to transact orderly business until we put them out,” he said.
The article noted that Crosswaith, a native of the Virgin Islands who had been in New York since 1910, had pursued his education at night school while working as a porter and elevator operator. He graduated from the Rand School of Social Science, where he later taught. He had spoken to groups across the country as a lecturer for the Socialist Party and the League for Industrial Democracy. He took pride in pointing out that the organization’s Harlem headquarters was once the municipal court where he had been arraigned for disturbing the peace for organizing tenants against a rent increase. He ran for several state offices as a Socialist Party Candidate. He had been appointed by La Guardia to the New York City Housing Committee and was recently reappointed for a five year term by Mayor O’Dwyer. He also served as a general organizer for the ILGWU.
In Or Does it Explode? Black Harlem in the Great Depression, Cheryl Lynn Greenberg cited a report from a mayoral committee in 1935 that found that there were no black members in the New York locals of the electrical workers, commercial telegraphers, Railway Express employees, printing pressmen, bill posters and bartenders. African Americans also were excluded from clerical unions and made up less than three percent of the membership of the building trades locals and under four percent of the clothing and textile unions, where they were found almost exclusively in the ILGWU. This was the situation that the Negro Labor Committee was formed to address.
Crosswaith's alma mater, The Rand School, was founded by the Socialist Party in 1906. It was at 7 East 15th Street in a building formerly occupied by the YWCA. Crosswaith attended on a scholarship from the Jewish Daily Forward. The school had been the target of red baiters at the time of the First World War and again in the 1950s. It closed in 1956.
Crosswaith was an opponent of both the Black Nationalist movement, which had established the rival Harlem unions, and the Communists, who dominated the leadership of several CIO unions and locals at this time.