Fascism with a Jim Crow Face: The National Negro Congress and the Global Popular Front

This dissertation documents the central contribution made by African Americans to the transnational anti-fascist movement known as the Popular Front. The Popular Front refers to a coalition of various leftist organizations and individuals spread throughout the globe who coalesced in 1935 in order to halt the spread of fascism and its imperial designs. Under the leadership of the National Negro Congress, black activists insisted that the overthrow of Jim
Crow, labor exploitation, and extralegal violence was vital for halting the spread of fascism in the United States. Black Americans, thus, joined the anti-fascist movement in order to globalize their own demand for equality. Organizers for the NNC determined that fascism masked capitalism’s deficiencies by scapegoating racial, ethnic, and religious minorities as the true culprits of workers’ bleak material conditions. To combat such tactics during the Great
Depression, the NNC determined to bridge these divisions by appealing to the self-interest shared by all minorities as well as the working class. By forming a black popular front, the NNC argued that racial egalitarianism, industrial democracy, and human rights were the key instruments to defeating fascism at home and abroad.