FCivil Rights Congress (CRC), civil rights organization founded in Detroit in 1946 by William Patterson, a civil rights attorney and a leader of the Communist Party USA. The organization’s membership was drawn mainly from working-class and unemployed African Americans and left-wing whites.
Civil Rights Congress
QUICK FACTS
DATE
1946 - 1956
HEADQUARTERS
Detroit
AREAS OF INVOLVEMENT
Civil rights
At its creation, the Civil Rights Congress had as its goal the “defense of the constitutional rights and civil liberties of the American people, including Communists and Negroes.” Patterson and its other early members intended the organization to fight discrimination with whatever weapons were available but particularly by legal means.
Among the greatest concerns of the Civil Rights Congress was the plight of blacks who had migrated by the thousands from the rural South to the major cities in the North during and after World War II. One of the organization’s main goals was to protect blacks from police brutality and injustice in the court system. In 1948, for example, the congress intervened in the case of the so-called Trenton Six, a group of six black men in Trenton, New Jersey, accused having murdered an elderly white shopkeeper. Although the men did not fit the descriptions of the killers given by witnesses, they were convicted and sentenced to death by an all-white jury. The Civil Rights Congress entered the case after the sentences were imposed and began a protest that drew national attention. In 1949 the New Jersey Supreme Court reversed the sentence and ordered a new trial; two of the six were found guilty, and the others were acquitted.
In addition to focusing on African Americans, the Civil Rights Congress was concerned with protecting any Americans who had been charged under the Smith Act, a federal law making it a criminal offense to call for the overthrow of the U.S. government or be an active member of any group or society that supported such a cause. The act was aimed at anarchists and at groups such as the Communist Party USA and the Socialist Workers’ Party.
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The Civil Rights Congress continued to be involved in legal cases until 1956, when it was investigated by the federal Subversive Activities Control Board and labeled a communist front group. Faced with increasing federal scrutiny and possible actions against it, the organization was dissolved.
National organization established in 1946 to, among other things, "combat all forms of discrimination against ... labor, the Negro people and the Jewish people, and racial,political, religious, and national minorities." The organization folded in 1955 under pressure from the UnitedStates Attorney-General and the House Un-American Activities Committee, which accused the organization of being subversive.
Records represent the files of the national office of the Congress, based in New York City, including several hundred case files; publications produced and received by the Congress; files of the Literature Department; Executive Director William Patterson's correspondence files; correspondence and other materials from Civil Rights Congress chapters around the country, including case files of the New York chapter; and files of the New York headquarters of the Communist Party of the United States of America, created during the trial of twelve Communist leaders, 1948-1949, including two black members,Benjamin J. Davis and Henry Winston, consisting of correspondence, transcripts, legal briefs, and printed material.
The Civil Rights Congress (CRC) was founded in 1946 with the merger of the International Labor Defense, the National Negro Congress, and the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties—three organizations closely associated with the Communist Party, U.S.A. During the late 1940s and early 1950s the CRC fought for the civil rights and liberties of African Americans, labor leaders, and suspected communists. They believed that the defense of communists was the first line in the defense of civil liberties generally and sought to overturn the Smith Act (1940) and the McCarran Act (1950), both designed to stifle dissent and harass left-wing organizations.
Like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the CRC pursued legal cases to challenge the racism and inequality in American society. However, the CRC did not rely on legal strategy alone but combined it with political agitation, massive publicity campaigns, and large demonstrations to mobilize public opinion to demand an end to racist attacks. In the early 1950s the CRC launched a campaign to raise public awareness about the systemic violence and segregation that African Americans faced by presenting a petition to the United Nations that charged the U.S. government with genocide.
In one of the CRC's earliest cases, Rosa Lee Ingram, a black tenant farmer and widowed mother of twelve children, together with two of her sons, was convicted in 1947 of the murder of John Stratford and sentenced to death. Stratford, a white tenant farmer, had been sexually harassing Ingram when her sons came to her defense and hit Stratford on the head. The CRC, under the leadership of its women's auxiliary, Sojourners for Truth and Justice, fought a public battle to free the Ingrams. They filed a petition with the United Nations, named Rosa Ingram Mother of the Year, started the National Committee to Free the Ingram Family, which raised money for family members, and sent a delegation armed with 100,000 signatures to the Department of Justice and the White House. As a result of the CRC's efforts and the resulting press coverage, Rosa Ingram and her sons were freed in 1954.
In another well-publicized effort the CRC defended the Martinsville Seven, seven young black men in Virginia sentenced to death in 1949 by an all-white jury for raping a white woman. Civil rights organizations were outraged by the harshness of the sentence as well as the judge's refusal to grant a change of venue to ensure that the men received a fair trial. Deferring the legal case to the NAACP, the CRC focused on the publicity campaign. They conducted a massive international letter campaign, organized a prayer vigil, picketed the White House, held demonstrations in Richmond, and demanded a pardon from the governor. Although the NAACP and the CRC failed to save the lives of the Martinsville Seven, they succeeded in exposing the racism of the legal system in the United States.
The CRC fought tenaciously to defend the civil rights of the persecuted. They were not, however, strict civil libertarians. For example, they opposed free speech for the Ku Klux Klan and other racists, which brought them into conflict with an organization such as the American Civil Liberties Union. In addition, recurring tension with the NAACP made an alliance difficult, but at times the two organizations were able to achieve behind-the-scenes cooperation. Nevertheless, the CRC's unyielding opposition to racism won it support among some sectors of the African-American community. At its peak, the CRC reached a membership of ten thousand, with its strongest base in large cities. William Patterson, a lawyer and Communist Party leader, served as executive secretary of the organization during its existence. Other prominent leaders included Paul Robeson, Dashiell Hammett, and Louise Thompson Patterson.
The CRC was active during the McCarthy period, and the U.S. government tried persistently to repress the organization. In the mid-1950s the organization was under investigation by the Internal Revenue Service, New York State, and the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Government officials impounded CRC records, conducted an audit, and demanded lists of contributors. In 1954 the organization's leaders refused to give up the names of supporters and were arrested on contempt charges. Two years later, the Subversive Activities Control Board concluded that the CRC was "substantially controlled" by the Communist Party, U.S.A. Although many Communist party members and sympathizers were active in the CRC, the organization was always independent of the party. Nevertheless, in 1956 the CRC was forced to close its doors because of the increasing legal costs of the government investigations and a decline in the number of contributors. Despite its short-lived existence, CRC succeeded in bringing to international attention the injustice prevalent in the American legal system and the racism endemic to American society.
ounded in Detroit, Michigan in 1946, the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) arose out of the merger of three groups with ties to the Communist Party USA: the International Labor Defense (ILD), the National Negro Congress, and the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties. Embodying the spirit and tactics of all three of its predecessors, the CRC concentrated on legal defense and mass political action on behalf of victims of legal frame-ups. It briefly became a major force in post-WWII battles for civil rights for African Americans, and civil liberties for white and black labor movement radicals, before becoming a victim of Cold War anticommunism and government repression. Former ILD secretary William Patterson led the group throughout its existence.
Major Civil Rights Congress campaigns on behalf of black defendants included the cases of Willie McGee, the Martinsville Seven, the Trenton Six, and Rosa Lee Graham. The CRC was also instrumental in publicizing the lynching of Emmett Till and pressing authorities for prosecution of his murderers. CRC campaigns helped pioneer many of the tactics that civil rights movement activists would employ in the late 1950s and 1960s. Beyond this, the CRC was among the first organizations to expose American racism in the international arena and to connect it to United States Cold War foreign policy in the decolonizing world. In 1951 these efforts climaxed when William Patterson presented his landmark study We Charge Genocide to the General Assembly of the United Nations.
Civil Rights Congress “red” cases centered largely on victims of various legislative efforts to suppress suspected members of the Communist Party such as the Smith Act, the McCarran Act, and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Throughout its campaigns the CRC often clashed with mainstream civil rights and civil liberties groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The CRC also battled internally over the issue of prioritizing “black” vs. “red” cases and endured charges of sectarianism on the Left for its perceived unwillingness to defend accused Trotskyists. By the mid 1950s the CRC was increasingly forced to defend its own members and affiliates against government prosecution. The financial strain of these efforts ultimately brought about the organization’s dissolution in 1956.
The Civil Rights Congress (CRC) was a United States civil rights organization, formed in 1946 at a national conference for radicals and disbanded in 1956. It succeeded the International Labor Defense, the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties, and the National Negro Congress, serving as a defense organization. Beginning about 1948, it became involved in representing African Americans sentenced to death and other highly prominent cases, in part to highlight racial injustice in the United States. After Rosa Lee Ingram and her two teenage sons were sentenced in Georgia, the CRC conducted a national appeals campaign on their behalf, their first for African Americans.
The CRC coordinated nationally, with 60 chapters at its peak in 1950. These acted on local issues. Most were located on the East and West coasts, with only about 10 chapters in the states of the former Confederacy, five of them in Texas.
Contents
1 Overview
2 Organization
3 Legal defense cases
3.1 Resisting anti-communism
3.2 Death penalty cases in the South
3.2.1 Rosa Lee Ingram
3.2.2 Martinsville Seven and Willie McGee
4 Other issues
5 Actions
5.1 Freedom Crusade
5.2 We Charge Genocide
6 Labeled as Communist
7 Publications
8 See also
9 Footnotes
9.1 Sources
10 Further reading
11 External links
Overview
The CRC used a two-pronged strategy of litigation and demonstrations, with extensive public communications, to call attention to racial injustice in the United States. A major tactic was publicizing cases, especially in the South, such as those of Rosa Lee Ingram and her two sons in Georgia, the Martinsville Seven in Virginia, and Willie McGee in Mississippi, in which Black people had been sentenced to death; in the last two cases as a result of questionable rape charges. Given the disenfranchisement of blacks in the South at the turn of the century, all-white juries were standard, as only voters could serve.
The CRC succeeded particularly in raising international awareness about these cases, which sometimes generated protests to the president and Congress. They also represented defendants in legal appeals to overturn convictions or gain lesser sentences.[1] At that time in the South, when cases were tried by all-white juries, some of the defense team believed that gaining a life sentence instead of capital punishment was akin to acquittal, where social pressure was high for juries to find blacks guilty. The CRC also defended political dissidents, including Communists. The group conducted high-profile protests in Washington, D.C., and at the United Nations. It brought world attention to racism in the United States by presenting the U.N. with a petition titled "We Charge Genocide," detailing the abuses of African Americans in the US, including continuing lynchings in the 1940s.
The CRC was perceived as an alternative or competitor to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) because it worked on similar issues in representing African Americans in legal cases and suits. The CRC believed that it embraced a wider range of issues and a larger coalition.[2] It became involved in the defense of Rosa Lee Ingram and her sons, and Willie McGee.
In 1950, while the NAACP was working on appeals of the Martinsville Seven, who had all been convicted and sentenced to death in speedy trials, the parents of one defendant, DeSales Grayson, appealed separately to the CRC to defend their son. The NAACP contended that the organizations had different approaches; it spent more of its funds on direct defense of clients, including appeals, whereas the CRC mounted a public campaign, complete with distribution of pamphlets and advertising on billboards.[3]
Because the CRC had attracted adverse attention from the government, with the potential to negatively affect reception of appeals in the Martinsville Seven case, the CRC withdrew from direct defense of Grayson in July 1950. But, the NAACP was unable to succeed with its appeals. All seven of the men were executed in February 1951.
During the years of the Red Scare, due to its Communist Party affiliations, the CRC was classified as subversive and described as a communist front organization by US Attorney General Thomas Clark under President Harry S. Truman, as well as by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Targeted by the U.S. government, the group was weakened in 1951, and it finally disbanded in 1956.
Organization
The group was formed at a radical conference in Detroit held on April 27–28, 1946.[1] Early goals included abolition of HUAC and protecting southern workers' right to unionize.[4] In December 1947, the National Negro Congress merged into the group. International Labor Defense (ILD) national secretary William Patterson led the group throughout its existence.[5] Frank Marshall Davis served on the organization's National Executive Board.[6] Patterson also headed the Abraham Lincoln School in Chicago, with Davis also on the faculty and Board of Directors.[7]
The group gained about 10,000 members at its peak.[8] It was generally stronger on the coasts and weak in the South, but it did conduct several major campaigns to defend the legal rights of Southern Blacks.[1] Its largest and strongest chapters in the South were in New Orleans and Miami.[1] Altogether, the CRC founded more than 60 local chapters which sought to combat racial discrimination, racist stereotyping, and legal injustice in their communities.[1][9]
The U.S. Congress and courts weakened the group with legal restrictions in 1951. In 1956, members voted to disband.[8][10]
Legal defense cases
The CRC took up legal causes of those they considered unjustly accused. In addition to pursuing legal campaigns, often alongside the NAACP, the group sought to raise awareness outside the courtroom with demonstrations, propaganda, and high-profile events. As these campaigns gained popular awareness, the CRC received many letters from prisoners requesting legal assistance.[11]
Resisting anti-communism
The CRC opposed the 1940 Smith Act and 1950 McCarran Act, both of which expanded government powers to prosecute domestic dissent.[8] It generally came to the assistance of individuals targeted by HUAC, particularly the "Top Eleven" communist leaders tried in 1949 under the Smith Act.[1]
The CRC was also active in the defense of Harry Bridges, a union organizer and leader of the California chapter of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. The government had long sought his deportation, and Congress passed the Smith Act to provide a means to accomplish this. After Bridges became a naturalized US citizen in 1945, the government prosecuted him for perjury for having failed to acknowledge being a member of the Communist Party in his naturalization application. The conviction was overturned due to a statute of limitations in the law.[12]
Death penalty cases in the South
Rosa Lee Ingram
Mother's Day card to President Truman, part of the CRC's campaign to free Rosa Lee Ingram
Main article: Rosa Lee Ingram
The CRC campaigned for Rosa Lee Ingram and her two teenage sons (Wallace and Sammie Lee Ingram) against a death penalty murder charge in Georgia, the first African Americans for whom they campaigned on a national level for an appeal.[13] The Ingrams, who were sharecroppers, were accused of murdering their white neighbor, John Ethron Stratford, in 1947 over an argument about animals on his land and his sexual harassment of the mother, Rosa Lee. They had been convicted—on the basis of circumstantial testimony, with no eyewitnesses—by a jury of twelve white men after a one-day trial in January 1948. The Ingrams had no access to lawyers before the trial.[14][15]
The Ingram appeal campaign was orchestrated by the Women's Committee for Equal Justice, a CRC subdivision led by the nationally known leader, Mary Church Terrell.[14] As its predecessor, the ILD, had accomplished with the Scottsboro case, the CRC hoped to use the Ingram case to draw national and international attention to racial inequality in the United States. Pressure from the CRC and the NAACP led to a new hearing in March 1948. In this hearing, the judge denied requests for a new trial, but used his discretion to reduce the sentence from death to life in prison.[15]
The NAACP and CRC came into occasional conflict over the case because of differing goals and strategy. By the wishes of the Ingrams, the NAACP generally handled the legal side; the CRC worked mostly on publicity. It raised $45,125 for the Ingram Defense Fund and held annual Mother's Day rallies. On 21 September 1949, Terrell led a group to the United Nations to demand that officials address the Ingram case. Little progress was made in the case, but both the NAACP and the CRC continued to support Ingram during her imprisonment.[1][15] Ingram and her sons were all released on parole in 1959, cited as "model prisoners."[16]
Martinsville Seven and Willie McGee
As in the Ingram case, both the NAACP and the CRC rallied to the cause of the Martinsville Seven— seven black men all sentenced to death in Virginia in 1949 for the rape of a white woman. Only black men received the death sentence in Virginia in rape cases.[according to whom?] Martin A. Martin, the chief lawyer hired by the NAACP from a major Richmond law firm, refused to work with the CRC because the government had classified the group as subversive and as a Communist front.[1]
Again excluded from the legal process, the CRC launched a national campaign based on injustices in the cases of Martinsville Seven and Willie McGee in Mississippi. McGee was also sentenced to death for conviction of rape of a white woman. The CRC created national attention and coordinated mailing campaigns to the government in Washington, DC, but the appeals failed. The US Supreme Court refused to hear the Martinsville Seven case, and all the men were executed in February 1951. McGee was executed in May 1951.[1]
In this period, the CRC was defending Communist officials known as the Top Eleven against prosecution under the Smith Act. This drew attention to their communist affiliation and people worried that the CRC endangered the outcome of the appeals for that reason. It withdrew from representing one of the Martinsville Seven directly.
Other issues
The CRC took stances on many issues related to political freedom and the rights of African Americans. It supported anti-lynching laws,[17] and condemned the use of the Confederate flag at many government and school facilities in the South.[18]
It opposed U.S. intervention in the Korean War.[19] The CRC opposed the Taft-Hartley Act and offered assistance to the Congress of Industrial Organizations and to the American Federation of Labor.[20]
In Louisiana, a local chapter launched a major campaign to convict the white police officer who shot Roy Cyril Brooks. The Brooks case began a larger effort against police brutality and demands to hire more Black police officers in cities such as New Orleans.[1]
Actions
Freedom Crusade
In January 1949, the group held a "Freedom Crusade" in Washington, D.C., right before the re-inauguration of President Truman. Before the demonstration, the group had a public exchange with Congressperson John S. Wood. Wood accused the group of threatening "violence and riot" in the capital; the group responded that the white supremacy of the status quo "is constantly the scene of 'violence and riot' against Negro citizens."[21] The Freedom Crusade was ultimately an orderly demonstration in which several thousand people visited elected politicians to demand action against lynching, freedom for communist leaders imprisoned for subversion (known as the Top Eleven), and implementation of the Fair Employment Practices Commission.[22]
We Charge Genocide
In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress issued its petition to the United Nations entitled "We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People".[23] This document collected diverse instances of violence and mistreatment against African Americans, and argued that the United States government was a party to genocide in its own country. After William Patterson presented the document to the United Nations assembly in Paris, his passport was revoked by the State Department. Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois were blocked from traveling, and went to the U.N. offices in New York.[24]
Labeled as Communist
Soon after it was founded, the CRC became a target of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and the Internal Revenue Service.[8] A 1947 report to HUAC charged: "Having adopted a line of militant skullduggery against the United States with the close of World War II, the Communist Party has set up the Civil Rights Congress for the purpose of protecting those of its members who run afoul of the law."[25] The group denied these charges and provided a list of sponsors, including Representatives Adam C. Powell, Senator Glen H. Taylor, and Atlanta University President Rufus Early Clement.[26][27] Patterson called the group "non-partisan" and described it as "the Red Cross of the defenders of peace, constitutional rights, justice and human rights".[28]
The 1950 McCarran Internal Security Act increased government persecution of the group, and many of its leaders were jailed. The group's power weakened in 1951 when the federal government barred it from posting bail for communist defendants in the resulting trials.[29][30] During the Second Red Scare, many Americans wary of the group because of its communist connections.[1] In 1956, the CRC was declared a communist front by the Subversive Activities Control Board. It disbanded the same year.[8][10]
The CRC was also infiltrated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. FBI agent Matthew Cvetic, who had joined the Communist Party, testified to HUAC in 1950 that the CRC was Communist-controlled and that Patterson was a Communist. He also identified a long list of politicians as Communist, as well as celebrities and community leaders.[31] Various other agents surfaced to testify at anti-Communist trials.[32][33][34] Association with the Civil Rights Congress served as justification for FBI surveillance of Lena Horne and Paul Robeson.[35] One agent later described breaking into the CRC's Chicago offices, saying "Anything that had the name 'committee' or 'congress' the FBI assumed had to be subversive."[36]
David Brown, secretary and then chair of the Los Angeles chapter of the CRC, served as an FBI informant from 1950-1954. He disappeared in January 1955 and tried to fake his own kidnapping.[37][38] Soon after, he unsuccessfully attempted suicide in a hotel room.[39] He later said he felt ashamed and suicidal for being a "stool pigeon".[40][41][42] He testified that his pay varied from $25/week to $250/month, and that he routinely lied to FBI contacts.[37][43]