Frank Rudolph Crosswaith
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Frank Rudolph Crosswaith (1892-1965) was a longtime socialist and labor leader in New York City. He was the founder and chairman of the Negro Labor Committee, which was established on July 20, 1935 by the Negro Labor Conference. The NLC emerged out of the Harlem Labor Committee, formed in 1934, as well as Crosswaith's earlier work to establish a committee to organize black workers begun in 1925 but suspended the following year when Crosswaith became a full-time organizer for A. Philip Randolph's Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Randolph and Crosswaith maintained a long association and Randolph served as an officer with the Negro Labor Committee in the 1930s and 1940s.
Crosswaith was born on July 16, 1892 in Fredericksted, St. Croix, Danish West Indies (the island was sold to the United States in 1917 and became part of the U.S. Virgin Islands), and emigrated to the United States in his teens. While finishing high school, he worked as an elevator operator, porter and garment worker. He joined the elevator operators' union and when he finished high school, he won a scholarship from the socialist Jewish Daily Forward to attend the Rand School of Social Science. After graduating, he became a lecturer at the Rand School and also a soapbox orator on the streets of Harlem. After working as an organizer for the fledgling Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porter, he was hired in the early 1930s as an organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, which became one of the major supporters of the Negro Labor Committee.
Frank Crosswaith ran for Congress twice and he ran for New York City Council in 1939 on the American Labor Party ticket. He was an anti-communist and believed that the best hope for black workers in the United States was to join bona fide labor unions just as the best hope for the American labor movement was to welcome black workers into unions in order to promote solidarity and elimate the use of black workers as strike breakers. He believed strongly that "separation of workers by race would only work to undermine the strength of the entire labor movement." Crosswaith spent much of his energy in the late 1930s and early 1940s battling a rival labor orgization called the Harlem Labor Union, Inc., which was run by Ira Kemp and had a black nationalist philosophy. He accused Kemp of undermining the interests of black workers by signing agreements with employers that offered them labor at wages below union rates.
Crosswaith also worked with A. Philip Randolph during World War II in organizing the March on Washington Movement, which was called off when President Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed to sign Executive Order 8802, which prohibited racial discrimination in defense industries.
[edit] References
- John C. Walter, Frank R. Crosswaith and the Negro Labor Committee in Harlem, 1925-1939,.Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, Vol. 3, No. 2 (July, 1979).
- Negro Labor Committee records, 1925-1969, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, New York.
- A Soldier of Black Labor - Frank Crosswaith
