Fighting Jim Crow Fascism

The National Negro Congress (NNC) was one of the most important yet understudied organizations in twentieth-century African American politics. Founded in 1935, the NNC united labor organizers, civil rights leaders, intellectuals, and community activists in a broad movement that challenged both American Jim Crow and right-wing politics abroad. Operating across local, national, and international arenas, the NNC linked struggles against racial discrimination and economic inequality in the United States to global campaigns against rising fascism.

In this new history of the NNC, historian Clayton Vaughn-Roberson shows how the organization’s Black internationalist vision steered its grassroots work. Vaughn-Roberson draws on extensive archival research to argue that the organization helped lay important intellectual and organizational foundations for the postwar freedom struggle while also reshaping Black political thought. Restoring the NNC to the center of the history of Black internationalism and multiracial mass politics, Vaughn-Roberson shows how the NCC was a significant political movement in its own right. In this era when white nationalism, antifascism, and internationalism have acquired such renewed salience, Fighting Jim Crow Fascism offers valuable lessons about the power of antiracist organizing on a global scale.