Sufi Abdul Hamid, an American-born black nationalist orator and organizer who claimed Egyptian ancestry, organized the Negro Industrial and Clerical Alliance in Harlem in 1934 to demand white-collar and clerical jobs for African Americans in white-owned neighborhood stores. He had earlier been part of a similar movement in Chicago, where his efforts helped produce three hundred such jobs. But black nationalist and anti-white rhetoric alienated others in the Chicago campaign, and his provoking strategies and divisiveness followed him to Harlem.
Harlem became the site of a national effort, often called “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” or “Jobs for Negroes” campaigns, during the Great Depression to win employment opportunities for African Americans. At first, the Alliance worked alongside the Citizens’ League for Fair Play, which launched an effort to win jobs for local black residents. But differences soon emerged. The Citizens’ League was not nationalist in orientation and, according both to nationalists within the League and to Hamid, its success in winning employment extended only to skilled and light-skinned women. Hamid insisted that jobs ought more properly to go to darker-skinned blacks, and to members of his own organization. Nationalists within the Citizens’ League then broke away and formed their own organization, the Harlem Labor Union, which made the same demands.
The Alliance then launched its own picket lines around businesses, demanding they hire Hamid’s people or face a renewed boycott. Clashes with other groups, including the Harlem Labor Union and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, and confrontations with store owners and would-be patrons were frequent, provoking condemnation by the black press and the Citizens’ League, and occasionally police intervention and arrests. Several store owners complained of bribery attempts by the Alliance, and they reported virulent anti-white and anti-Semitic invective from Hamid and his lieutenants. A few black employees reported that Hamid threatened them if they did not join his group and pay membership dues. These charges, many confirmed by the Amsterdam News and other Hamid opponents, were firmly denied by Hamid and his supporters, and, despite the controversy and accusations, the Alliance continued its pickets and protests. Finally, one target, A.S.Beck Shoe Company, won a state court injunction at the end of 1934 forbidding pickets on the ground that there was no formal labor dispute.
Hamid then reorganized the Alliance into the Afro-American Federation of Labor, hoping the title suggested a union whose picket might therefore survive legal scrutiny. But the court rejected this argument and Hamid left the organization and the jobs campaign in 1935 to marry Madame Stephanie St. Clair, a successful “policy” or numbers banker, and he founded the Temple of Tranquility. He died in a plane crash in 1938, the same year the Supreme Court overturned the antipicketing injunction and others like it. The decision permitted race-based picketing to protest racial discrimination in hiring. A new campaign, this time under the direction of Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, rejoined the battle and won employment concessions from local and municipal businesses.
FURTHER READINGS
Greenberg, Cheryl Lynn. “Or Does It Explode?” Black Harlem in the Great Depression. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Greene, Larry. “Harlem in the Great Depression.” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1979.
Hunter, Gary. “Don’t Buy From Where You Can’t Work: Black Urban Boycott Movements During the Depression, 1929–1941.” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1977.
McKay, Claude. Harlem, Negro Metropolis. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1940.
Muraskin, William. “The Harlem Boycott of 1934 and Its Aftermath.” M.A. thesis, Columbia University, 1966.
Naison, Mark. Communists in Harlem During the Depression. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983.
