The National Negro Labor Council (1950–1955) was an advocacy group dedicated to serving the needs and civil rights of black workers.
[2] 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.
[4] 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.
[6] The wartime gains of black workers were largely erased during the second half of the 1940s, with the principle of "last hired, first fired" having drastic effect with the return of millions of American men from war to the work force.
[12] The relationship of the new organization to white workers was extensively discussed, and a commitment was forged to black leadership of the black workers' organization — a departure from the racial composition of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which historically featured a disproportionately large number of whites among the ranks of its top leadership.
[15] Victoria Garvin, a vice president of the Distributive, Processing and Office Workers of America, another CIO union, spent several months arranging hotel rooms, finding housing in private homes, and negotiating with a hostile city government over the forthcoming convention, the convocation of which was publicized with 15,000 printed copies of a call sent out to union locals around the country.
In October of that same year, representatives from all 23 chapters met again in Cincinnati, Ohio and founded the National Negro Labor Council.
The NNLC carried out many things such as militant strikes, campaigns to acquire more jobs for Afro-Americans, gain the right to vote or to use public facilities.