National Student League

The National Student League was a Communist led organization of college and high school students in the United States.

The organizations founding came about as a result of a case of censorship on the campus of the City College of New York in 1931. The Social Problems Club had begun publishing a new magazine, Frontiers, in March 1931 that contained an anti-ROTC editorial. College president Frederick C. Robinson had copies of the magazine confiscated and suspended the charter of the Social Problems Club. When Club members published a leaflet protesting this, he suspended them as well.

The students formed a broad alliance with left leaning groups in other New York colleges to form a broad protest and letter writing campaign in favor of the suspended students, who were eventually reinstated. They organized themselves permanently as the New York Intercollegiate Student Council, composed of eleven student groups on seven local campuses. Later that fall they reorganized as the New York Student League and finally as the National Student League over the 1931-1932 Christmas break.

Unlike other "mass organizations" of the time, the initial impetus for the NSLs creation did not come from Communist Party or Young Communist League leadership, but began as a "grassroots" effort of Communist and Communist sympathizing students at CCNY and the other New York colleges. The YCL was focusing more on blue collar youth at the time and was hesitant about recruiting among "bourgeois" college youth. The YCL approved the groups creation, however, and provided some of the initial contacts to create an inter-campus organization.

The NSL began making a name for itself by involving itself in the TUUL led Harlan County miners strike. Inspired by the example of Waldo Frank and Theodore Dreisers writers delegation, the group decided to send a student delegation to Harlan County to provide relief for the striking miners and to investigate conditions in the area. About eighty students departed New York for Kentucky by bus on March 23, 1932. The students were met by angry crowds and police embarrassment and were unable to aid the strike, though the trip generated a large amount of publicity for the strike and the NSL.

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