NEGRO AMERICAN LABOR COUNCIL (NALC) (1960–72), labor rights organization that sought to end racial discrimination within unions. Largely left out of the history of the Civil Rights Movement, the NALC is credited with initiating the 1963 March on Washington, a watershed moment that ultimately secured the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) was formed in 1955, and inaugural AFL-CIO President George Meany markedly failed to support the burgeoning Civil Rights movement. In 1959 African American labor unionist and vice president of the AFLCIO A. Phillip Randolph (1889–1979) introduced a resolution at a convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) calling for a black organization to remedy the lack of civil rights leadership within the AFL-CIO.
Randolph was a veteran organizer, having founded the first successful African American–led union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), in 1925. In the following decades, Randolph worked at the forefront of efforts to improve working conditions and increase pay for railroad workers. He was also a key figure in the Civil Rights movement, campaigning against war-industry discrimination and lynching and supporting free speech and the desegregation of schools.
The NALC was formed by a group of African American labor leaders, including Randolph, who was named the inaugural president during the opening convention attended by over a thousand people. Cleveland Robinson, secretary-treasurer of the District 65 Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Workers Union, was named vice president. Historian William P. Jones notes that the NALC saw their campaign against discrimination and segregation in the AFL-CIO as “a critical component to the broader ‘civil rights revolution’ that was ‘sweeping the continents of America and Africa with ever increasing force and challenge.’”
Immediately after being named president, Randolph called for the desegregation of AFL-CIO locals; Meany and the executive board refused. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other African American leaders publicly decried the AFL-CIO’s decision, while the NALC continued its efforts to reform organized labor and increase outreach. By the end of 1960, NALC chapters had been established in twenty-three cities. Local groups spearheaded movements against employment discrimination, advocated for job creation programs, and protested police brutality. That year, the NALC also saw national success, organizing a national conference that led President John F. Kennedy to issue an executive “affirmative action” order to federal employers.
In 1963 the NALC initiated the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Despite the lack of official approval from the AFL-CIO, numerous unions supported the event, which saw a turnout of 200,000 to 300,000 at the nation’s capital. The march secured the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which granted African Americans better voting rights and prohibited segregated education and workplace discrimination.
In 1966 Robinson succeeded Randolph as president of the organization. Under his leadership the NALC failed to sustain national reach. Robinson partnered with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to organize workers in Baltimore and Memphis for the Poor People’s Campaign initiated by King. A proliferation of radical groups around this time caused NALC participation to drop as organizations competed for membership. In 1972 Robinson shifted his involvement to the new Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, formed in collaboration with younger labor activists.
Despite its outsized political impact, Jones notes, the NALC “remains virtually invisible in the vast body of scholarship on the civil rights movement that has been produced in the past two decades.” The NALC’s history demonstrates the ideological linkages between labor and civil-rights struggles, charting continuity between the various strains of African American activism.