National Negro Labor Council

The National Negro Labor Council (1950–1955) was an advocacy group dedicated to serving the needs and civil rights of black workers. Many union leaders of the CIO and AFL considered it a Communist front. In 1951 it was officially branded a communist front organization by U.S. attorney general Herbert Brownwell.

From the early 20th Century, the American radical movement attempted to build bridges to the African-American working class as a potentially revolutionary force — isolated from mainstream middle class life by racism, excluded for the same reason from membership in many trade unions, and consigned as a social caste to the most menial occupations at inferior wages. The forerunners of the Communist Party, USA made early connection with the African Blood Brotherhood, lending that organization financial support, and fully sponsored its successor in 1925, the American Negro Labor Congress.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s and the years of World War II, great advances were made by American organized labor in quantitative terms. From just over 3.7 million unionized workers in 1935, the ranks of organized labor swelled to 8.94 million in 1940 and approximated 15 million in 1950 — nearly a third of the entire national work force. Black workers made a significant part of this growth, thanks in measure to the more open industrial unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), with an estimated 1 to 1.5 million black Americans in union ranks by 1950.

During the years of World War II, black union workers joined nationally in support of the American war effort in the Negro Labor Victory Committee, founded in February 1941 under the direction of Ferdinand Smith, head of the National Maritime Union (NMU) of the CIO. This organization attempted to build a network of black union officials for joint action on behalf of the war and held mass meetings in Madison Square Garden in 1943 and 1944 to publicize black labor's support of the American government's cause.

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