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FREEDOMWAYS                             SECOND QUARTER 1973
  
the delegates to seek an answer to three quesions:

1. In the light of social research what do we know now about Negro life and race relations as affecting both white and black in the United States?

2. What significance has this knowledge for the programs of social organizations whose purpose it is to improve these conditions?

3. What gaps in knowledge are revealed, calling for further study by universities and research organizations?

One of the primary issues facing the conference was trade union exclusion of Negro workers. There was grave concern about the growth of prejudice and discrimination in the North and the difficulties black workers had with the trade union movement.

  President Hoover appointed a fact-finding commission in 1929 to study the problem of law enforcement in the United States. No Blacks were included on the commission and one member, George Wickersham, had been president of the National Bar Association when it refused membership to Blacks.

[[/Bold italic font]][[protests involve many groups]]

The United Colored Socialists of America was organized in Harlem in 1929 for the purpose of the "unification and education of that large mass of intelligently discontented Negroes who recognize the fact that both Republican and Democratic parties stand actively alike as two peas in a single pod on the pressing problems of Race." Marching to the tune of "John Brown's Body" and jazz tunes, three hundred tenants and scores of children marched in the streets of Harlem to protest the expiration of rent control laws led by the Harlem Tenant's League, the Council of Working Class Women, the American Negro Labor Congress, and groups from the Communist Party.

  The Urban League organized a "Jobs for Negroes" movement in 1929 to boycott merchants whose customers were Negroes but who did not hire Negroes. Boycotts took place in St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Cleveland and other midwestern cities. During the same year Albon Holsey of the National Negro Business League formed the Colored Merchants Association whose aim was to establish Negro cooperative stores to help combat the effects of the Depression. Unemployment had affected black workers all over the nation.

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