The National Negro Congress was founded by the Communist Party in the 1930s during its Popular Front period to unite leftists, liberals and African American leaders ostensibly to fight racial discrimination and Fascism. Many of the non-Communist civil rights leaders left the organization after the Hitler-Stalin pact when the Communist Party under Kremlin directive abruptly recanted the doctrine of the Popular Front and abandoned the fight against Fascism to join the America First crowd in peace marches until the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union precipitated another overnight reversal of dogma and allies as the Party put full energy into getting the US to join the war against Hitler. Many disillusioned leftists, progressives, and liberals turned on the Party and the Soviet Union during this period and many Party members resigned in disgust. By 1946, as the Party attempted to rebuild itself by reclaiming the progressive mantle, the Congress was widely perceived as a Communist front.
The situation of The Committee for Russian Relief, which sponsored many benefit concerts, was more nuanced. The organization was accused by the right-wing, as well as by some anti-Communist liberal groups such as the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, of being virtually a Communist Party front due to the prominent role played in its leadership on the national and local levels by Communist Party members, crypto-Communists and Communist sympathizers. From the testaments of people who grew up in Communist families at the time, true believers and sympathizers back then brought the kids to these concerts for an evening of uplifting, doctrinally correct family entertainment, in the same way that committed Evangelicals patronize “Christian music” concerts now. This was not the only similarity between the dogmatic Political Left of the period and the dogmatic Religious Right of today. On the other hand, the organization’s board at one time or another also included prominent non-Communists such as former Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith, Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie and IBM president Thomas J. Watson. The Russian relief effort also had the support of a number of religious organizations. Some performers were not Communist Party members or supporters and the audiences were diverse as well. The organization provide much needed humanitarian aid to the war ravaged Soviet Union to which only the most hard-hearted America Firsters could object but it also propagandized at times on behalf of Stalin’s brutal dictatorship, more tolerated during the war, when the USSR was an ally, than it would be in postwar United States.