John P. Davis and the Joint Committee

Pamela A. Izvănariu January, 2025

Abstract

This Article uses archival research and social movement theory to recover a critical but untold story about how John P. Davis innovated novel modes of organizational mobilization and multidimensional advocacy to build power and movement at the intersection of race and the economy in the Jim Crow and New Deal era. It examines Davis’s mobilization of the Joint Committee on National Recovery (JCNR), recovers the mobilization and advocacy models Davis engineered, and tells of the fight Davis and the JCNR waged to achieve racial and economic justice and effect a new— and truly emancipatory—New Deal.

Introduction

In recent years, scholars of law, history, and social change have recovered the labor-focused work of civil rights advocates in the 1930s and 1940s. This literature has highlighted how Black progressive lawyers of the era¹ — like Charles Hamilton Houston and William H. Hastie—adopted multimodal models of advocacy that combined race uplift initiatives, legislative advocacy, and court-centered reform to combat segregation and racism, advance racial and economic justice, and effect social change.² Scholarship reconstructing the origins of contemporary movement lawyering have traced its roots back to these earlier approaches to lawyering for transformative change.³

This Article advances these trends as the first to reconstruct the work of John P. Davis and the Joint Committee on National Recovery (“JCNR”) in the Jim Crow, New Deal era. Here, I recover the novel modes of organizational mobilization and multidimensional advocacy Davis innovated to build power and movement at the intersection of race and the economy in response to the southern industrialist countermovement against Black labor and liberation, the New Deal administration’s support of Jim Crowism, and discriminatory practices of white organized labor after the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA).⁴ In doing so, I respond to recent calls for scholars of law and social change to reconsider the civil rights movement by looking to the pre- Brown era and examining “a larger cast of lawyers and lay activists” using a “ground level view of legal history,”⁵ and to “bring labor back” into the study of social movements by using a socio-historic approach to the study of movement lawyering and law and social movements.⁶

In a recent article, I explored the legal history of the National Industrial Recovery Act (“NIRA”),⁷ the first national effort to regulate minimum wages and maximum hours and the first federal attempt to provide legal protection for workers’ collective action,⁸ by recovering the early work of the lawyer, journalist, and public intellectual John P. Davis. Davis was the first person to recognize the race discrimination being written into federal law through the codes of fair competition, which set industry minimum wage scales and maximum hour limits via occupational minimum wage differentials and exclusions, geographical wage differentials, grandfather clauses, and various other forms of differentials and exclusions.⁹ Ultimately, I showed how Davis, through his work in the organizations he founded— the Negro Industrial League (“NIL”) and the JCNR—exposed and challenged the race discrimination that shaped the National Recovery Administration (“NRA”) codes and broader New Deal.¹⁰ I further revealed how Davis simultaneously underscored the constitutional necessity of federal intervention and pushed for a new New Deal that would combat the oligarchy and racial inequality that placed democracy in crisis.¹¹

Here, I continue this recovery project and attend to the dearth of literature on the JCNR and Davis’s approach to advocacy.¹² Rarely mentioned, the JCNR has been described as a “special interest group”¹³ and “clearinghouse,”¹⁴ with no attention paid to its mobilization, organization, goals, strategies, or tactics. Existing scholarly references to the JCNR are rife with errors concerning its emergence, leadership, form, function, and impact. For example, the creation of the JCNR is credited to the Roosevelt administration or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (“NAACP”), rather than Davis and his colleagues.¹⁵ Similarly, the names of more established and well-recognized Black leaders—like NAACP president Walter White and George Edmund Haynes— are named as JCNR founders and given precedence over Davis.¹⁶ Moreover, while existing literature examines the models of advocacy adopted by Davis’s friends and colleagues, like Charles Hamilton Houston and William H. Hastie,¹⁷ it altogether fails to consider Davis’s approach to advocacy in any detail.

In this Article, I use archival research and social movement theory to show how Davis created novel modes of organizational and multidimensional advocacy to defend democracy against the interlinking threats of oligarchy and racial inequality and build power and movement at the intersection of race and economy in the Jim Crow, New Deal era. Ultimately, I reveal the JCNR as a Black-led, Black-funded, and grassroots-based movement organization network dedicated to building power, addressing inequities at their roots, and effecting structural change. I introduce Davis’s multidimensional model of advocacy and identify him as a hidden but central figure in the long history of movement lawyering.

Given the often-contentious debates on the legacy of the New Deal for emancipatory politics, prompted by the lasting effects of racial exclusion that limited the horizon of many of its most noted policy achievements,¹⁸ it is surprising that the story of Davis and the JCNR has, for the most part, remained untold and unnoticed. It is thus an understatement to say that historians, legal scholars, and civil society actors have failed to adequately learn from Davis’s record of mobilization, power-building, and advocacy at the intersection of race and class. By recovering Davis and the JCNR from the largely forgotten archive of their visionary and pre-1960s approach to law and organizing, this Article is not only the first of its kind but also just the tip of the iceberg.

The remainder of this Article proceeds as follows. In Part I, I provide a descriptive and analytical account of Davis’s mobilization of the JCNR, using social movement theory to offer a closer look at its organizational structure, leadership, and goals. Pushing past the general tendency in social movement literature to analyze Black insurgency through a state and inclusion focused lens, I uncover the immediate goals of Davis and the JCNR, as well as their broader aim of building power to effect transformative change and defeat the interlocking systems of racial domination, labor exploitation, and white supremacy that placed American democracy under threat.¹⁹ In Part II, I introduce Davis’s multidimensional model of advocacy and the tactical repertoire he crafted to advance JCNR aims. To do this, I first unearth the ways in which Black sociology shaped Davis’s ideological and methodological perspectives, and how Davis, in turn, mobilized Black sociology as a key tactic. Then, I unfold Davis’s multipronged approach tactic by tactic, providing examples of the deployment of each along the way. In the process, I show how Davis adopted many of the ideological and methodological perspectives we associate with movement lawyering today.²⁰ Finally, in Part III, I present a brief case study of the JCNR’s major garment worker justice campaign to showcase the Davis-JCNR advocacy model in action, before concluding the Article and discussing the significance of Davis’s work.

I. Mobilizing the Jcnr

In the United States, legislative and court actions that trigger anticipated or actual advances in racial justice, the expansion of civil rights, and increased interracial contact and competition have often sparked the emergence of anti-Black and anti-integrationist countermovements and racial terrorization campaigns to preserve and restore white supremacy and racialized economic subordination.²¹ This was certainly the case with the NIRA, which was passed on June 16, 1933.²²

The NIRA was the first national effort to regulate minimum wages and maximum hours and the first federal attempt to provide legal protection for workers’ collective action.²³ It allowed both worker and business associations to participate directly in the negotiation and drafting of “codes of fair competition” that set industry minimum wage scales, maximum hour limits, and price codes to compensate for the higher wages.²⁴ The passage of the NIRA—which would later serve as the foundation for the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”) and National Labor Relations Act (“NLRA”)²⁵—prompted the rise of an anticipatory southern industrialist countermovement against Black labor and liberation.²⁶

Fearing that standardized wages and collective bargaining protections would upend the racialized political economy traditionally maintained through segregated wages, southern industrialists mobilized an anticipatory countermovement against Black labor and liberation to preserve their “racially exclusive brand of democracy,” white supremacy, and the existing socio-economic hierarchy dependent on cheap Black labor.²⁷ Southern industrialists banded together to form informal mobilizing structures and countermovement organizations like the Southern States Industrial Council (“SSIC”) to bring these aims to fruition.²⁸

The looming threat posed by the coalescence of the burgeoning southern industrialist countermovement, the NRA and New Deal administration’s willingness to tacitly support Jim Crowism, and the exclusionary practices of organized white labor prompted an immediate need for an organized Black response. This section tells the story of how Davis mobilized the JCNR to meet this need.

A. Origins

The origins of the JCNR can be traced back to the first public hearing for a code of fair competition, the cotton textile code hearing.²⁹ Fresh out of Harvard Law School, John P. Davis attended the hearing with his friend and Harvard roommate, economist Robert C. Weaver.³⁰ As the overwhelming majority of the industry’s Black workforce lived in the South, where Black workers were limited to custodial and service positions,³¹ Davis immediately recognized that the cotton textile code’s explicit exclusions of cleaners and a southern wage differential (that assigned southern workers a lower minimum wage rate than northern workers) were designed to deprive Black workers of the code’s protections and benefits.³² With no traditional racial advancement organization representatives at the hearing,³³ and Davis and Weaver as the lone Black attendees, Davis invented an organization—the NIL—on the spot.³⁴ He introduced himself to the NRA hearing administrator as the NIL’s executive secretary, presented Weaver as its research director, and convinced the administrator to credential them to advocate for Black workers and consumers and allow them to testify on behalf of their interests.³⁵

After Davis spoke the NIL’s name into existence, he moved to bring the organization to life. Immediately after leaving the hearing, Davis recruited the NIL’s first two members: his mother, Julia Hubbard, and sociologist George Edmund Haynes. Haynes graciously accepted Davis’s invitation to become chairman of the fledgling organization. Hurriedly, Davis announced the arrival of the NIL in the Black press.³⁶ Davis described the NIL as an organization “designed to help the man in the street, the laborer” concerned with “the bettering of the labor and economic conditions of Negroes as workers and consumers.”³⁷ Specifically, the NIL aimed to “organize Black labor,” increase wages for Black workers, secure unemployment relief for Black workers, organize cooperative groups of Black consumers, and improve the economic conditions for Black workers and consumers.³⁸

Only two days after his improvisational creation of the NIL—and after much work alongside Weaver—Davis addressed the hearing attendees.³⁹ He delivered a blistering indictment of the mechanisms of race discrimination being embedded in the cotton textile code—for example, through the incorporation of the occupational exclusions and southern differential—supporting his case using statistical analyses prepared by Weaver.⁴⁰ Despite the efforts of Davis and Weaver, the cotton textile code was approved with the discriminatory provisions intact, while similar discriminatory provisions were incorporated into the codes that followed in its wake. While the two men continued to track the development of new codes and contest the discriminatory devices contained in them at public hearings,⁴¹ Davis quickly recognized that a different set of tactics was necessary to respond to the crisis at hand.⁴²

Less than a month after the ad hoc construction of the NIL, and before the cotton textile code went into effect on July 17, 1933,⁴³ Davis sent out a “Suggested Plan for Coordination of Negro Organizations for the Purpose of Integrating Interests of the Negro in All Federal Recovery Projects” to Black organizations in a call for mass mobilization.⁴⁴ Seeking to transform the NIL into a national network of organizations that would pool their resources and expertise to form a “powerful Negro lobby,”⁴⁵ Davis called for the mobilization of an interracial “joint-committee . . . controlled by cooperating Negro organizations.”⁴⁶

B. Mobilizing Structure

The expanded vision of the NIL did not appear out of thin air. Throughout the summer of 1933, Davis, Weaver, and Haynes dedicated themselves to building interorganizational relationships.⁴⁷ By the fall of 1933, Davis and his colleagues mobilized the JCNR.⁴⁸ Existing scholarship tends to describe this transformative period as the NIL being replaced by the JCNR. While NIL leadership—Davis, Haynes, and Weaver, in their respective positions—did become JCNR leadership with a simple name change,⁴⁹ organizationally the NIL was incorporated into the JCNR as one of its independent member organizations.⁵⁰ In practice, the NIL functioned as the nerve center of the JCNR, with almost everything running directly through Davis, who at times operated as something of a one man show.⁵¹ By December of 1933, the JCNR had twenty-one national member organizations.⁵² Established racial advancement organizations like the NAACP and the Urban League were later counted among its organizational members.⁵³

From the vantage point of the contemporary legal sociologist, the NIL appears unmistakably like a movement organization network that was mobilized in response to the multifaceted threat posed by the coalescence of the southern industrialist countermovement mobilized against Black labor and liberation, the NRA and New Deal administration’s willingness to underwrite Jim Crowism and white supremacy, and the exclusionary and discriminatory practices of organized white labor. In that the NIL served as a collective vehicle through which Davis, his colleagues, and their growing cadre of individual and organizational supporters could mobilize Black resistance efforts to this multipronged threat, the NIL is best understood as a loosely structured social movement organization (“SMO”).⁵⁴ In contrast, as an organization of organizations, the JCNR is most accurately described as a social movement organization network.⁵⁵ More specifically, the JCNR was formed as an agglomeration network, in that it combined preexisting local, regional, and national groups and organizations that affiliated themselves with the JCNR’s national movement organization network by becoming JCNR member organizations.⁵⁶

The NIL referred to the organizations with which it established interorganizational relationships as “member organizations.” Decisionmaking and leadership power in the nascent organization was vested entirely in Davis, Haynes, and Weaver, with no formal accountability to NIL organizational members. As he formed the JCNR, however, Davis adopted a distinctly democratic mobilizing structure which reflected his dedication to transparent, democratic decision-making and collaboration.⁵⁷ For Davis, every decision along the way presented itself as an opportunity to build and exercise democratic leadership.

Davis wrote and distributed regular reports to JCNR members that provided details about emerging instances of race discrimination in New Deal programs, updates about new and ongoing JCNR work in different areas, and the pressing needs of the nascent movement organization network.⁵⁸ Representatives of JCNR member organizations served on the JCNR board and met regularly to discuss and vote on a broad spectrum of issues, including the strategies and tactics that would be used to respond to particular problems, what research would be conducted, and how JCNR finances would be spent.⁵⁹

The JCNR was much more than an interest group or clearinghouse. It was a pioneering SMO network model—a democratic, systems-oriented, grassroots-based, Black-led, Black-Funded, antiracist, interracial, labor-focused movement organization network—that served at the forefront of the fight for economic and racial justice at the dawn of the New Deal.⁶⁰ Under Davis’s leadership, the JCNR used a myriad of strategies and tactics to improve wages and working conditions for Black workers, organize the unorganizable to build power among workers, and transform the processes, policies, institutions, structures, and narratives that created and maintained the interlocking systems of labor exploitation and domination based on race, class, and gender. To a great extent, contemporary worker centers and worker center networks bear a remarkable resemblance to the JCNR, pursing similar goals and deploying similar strategies and tactics in present day.⁶¹

Davis went on to use the JCNR as the foundation upon which to build an even larger movement organization network, the National Negro Congress (“NNC”).⁶² That Davis improvised the creation of a paper organization (the NIL), which he then utilized to mobilize and lead a movement organization network (the JCNR), which he then used to launch an ever larger movement organization network (the NNC) with millions of members that “fostered and tried to sustain . . . strategic alliances, which crossed class, gender, and racial lines to generate the most militant interracial freedom movement since Reconstruction” is nothing short of extraordinary.⁶³ Yet, existing scholarship has neither recognized nor explained this trajectory. Reconstructing Davis’s work—from his formation of a single and narrowly focused organization toward his creation of a sustainable movement organization network that pursued long-term initiatives, research, culture shifting, and narrative change to influence decision-makers on a myriad of issues over time—allows us to appreciate how Davis generated durable power by crafting and implementing novel approaches to mobilization and advocacy.

C. Explaining the Emergence of the JCNR

Davis, Weaver, and their colleagues had precious little financial resources, and Jim Crow reigned supreme across the South and in Washington, D.C. As such, neither resource mobilization nor political opportunity structure can fully explain the emergence of the NIL and JCNR, or the later NNC and interracial freedom movement.⁶⁴ Instead, three key factors explain the emergence, growth, and trajectory of the NIL and JCNR: (i) Davis’s ability to immediately diagnose the problem, frame the situation, take advantage of a fleeting opportunity bubble, and improvise a vehicle of collective action into being; (ii) the capacity of Davis and his colleagues to rapidly activate their expertise, limited resources, and preexisting organizations and networks, and set their objectives; and finally, (iii) Davis’s ability to craft innovative models of mobilization and advocacy.

To the first point, Davis used the absence of traditional racial advancement organizations from the early code of fair competition hearings as an opportunity to demonstrate the pressing need for a more radical, democratic, and activist movement organization that was both focused on the needs of the Black community as defined through grassroots participation and capable of quickly and adeptly responding to the growing crisis at hand.⁶⁵ What is more, he used the NRA code hearings and broader code development and implementation process—a pivotal historical moment that social movement scholars might call a focusing event, which attracted “an unusual amount” of “intensive, substantive, and relatively sustained” public attention⁶⁶—as a resource.

The public code hearings were “formal events . . . presided over by an NRA deputy or assistant deputy administrator” and covered in detail by the media.⁶⁷ When the NRA took a permissive stance toward racism and industry—when it failed to implement procedures and practices to guarantee collective worker participation, prevent racial discrimination, and enforce industry compliance, for example—the world was watching.⁶⁸ Recognizing the “opportunity bubble,” Davis expertly took advantage of the “promising, yet fleeting, opportunity to shape the course of subsequent events.”⁶⁹

With charisma, creativity, and enthusiasm, Davis immediately diagnosed and framed the problem. At code hearings, in publications, and in press releases, he exposed the race discrimination embedded in NRA codes and framed the NRA codes, as well as the code development and implementation processes, as hostile to Black and white workers alike. He demonstrated that the deteriorating conditions for the most disadvantaged workers—in this case, Black workers—would necessarily erode working conditions for all workers. Improving pay and working conditions at the bottom of the labor market, Davis made clear, would improve opportunities for all workers.⁷⁰ In doing so, Davis was able to gain support for the NIL and JCNR and build solidarity between Black resistance efforts and organized white labor, laying the groundwork for the NNC and interracial freedom movements that came later.⁷¹

In the Sections that follow, I expand on the latter two factors. The remainder of this Section brings JCNR leadership, mobilization, and objectives into view, shedding light on how Davis and his colleagues activated their expertise, limited resources, and networks and defined their ultimate aims. Then, in Part II, I elaborate on Davis’s innovative model of advocacy.

D. JCNR Leadership

Given that Davis sounded the call for the organizational mobilization that led to the emergence of the JCNR and the NNC less than a month after he launched the NIL, it is safe to say he was thinking big from the start.⁷² Accordingly, he built a leadership team capable of bringing his aims to fruition. Complementing his own role as Executive Secretary was Weaver as Director of Research and Haynes as Chairman. To complete the leadership team, Davis brought Nannie Burroughs on as JCNR treasurer. Later, he would recruit technical experts like Rose Coe to assist with statistical analyses and empirical research after Weaver left the JCNR for a federal appointment as assistant advisor on the economic status of Negroes.⁷³ Davis’s strategic vision and leadership acumen come into view when one considers the areas in which the assembled leadership team boasted specialized knowledge, experience, and social resources—organization development, politics and government, journalism and public relations, and research and education—which proved critical to the JCNR’s emergence, growth, and trajectory.

1. Organization Development and Social Networks

At the time of his improvisational creation of the NIL, Davis had little organization development experience himself. His decision to appoint Haynes and Burroughs, then, serves as a clue to the seriousness with which he approached building an organization of organizations. Haynes was the co-founder and first executive director of the National Urban League (“NUL”), which aimed to remove barriers to racial equality and achieve economic empowerment for Black citizens.⁷⁴ He had served as the director of the Race Relations Department at the Federal Council of Churches in New York City prior to the NIL’s founding.⁷⁵

Burroughs had founded the National Training School for Women and Girls, National Association of Wage Earners, International Council of Women of the Darker Races, and the National League of Republican Colored Women (of which she was later elected president).⁷⁶ She had also served as chairman of the business department of the National Association of Women’s Clubs and a member of the board of directors of the NAACP.⁷⁷ Like Haynes, Burroughs had deep roots in the Black church. She had served as the secretary of both the National Baptist Convention’s Women’s Convention and the Colored Baptist Convention Woman’s Auxiliary.⁷⁸ Furthermore, she had proven herself as a successful fundraiser for both organizations.⁷⁹ Clearly, then, Davis was intentional about plugging any gaps in his own experience by recruiting individuals well-versed in bringing his broader vision to fruition. The wisdom of Davis’s strategic appointment of Haynes and Burroughs was made evident by the rapid expansion of the JCNR over the first few months of its existence.⁸⁰

At the same time, what Davis himself may have lacked in organization development experience, he made up for with a rich social network, dynamism, and charisma. A writer in the Harlem Renaissance, Davis brought the ideology and social network of the “New Negro” movement of which he was part to the JCNR.⁸¹ Davis counted Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Richard Wright, and Margaret Walker among his friends and called on them to help with publicity and fundraising events.⁸² His close friendships with Weaver, William Hastie, Ralph Bunche, and Charles Hamilton Houston— and the many other professional and personal relationships he developed— provided the JCNR with opportunities to collaborate, build partnerships with other organizations, and create networks of social scientists, lawyers, organizers, activists and other problem solvers who contributed different types of expertise and support to the JCNR.⁸³

2. Politics and Government

Davis, like many Black progressives of the era, made no distinction between law and politics. He was a known political figure before his graduation from Harvard Law. He had held an administrative post in the Republican National Committee (“RNC”) and was recognized by the RNC as the most important young Black political figure in America the year before Roosevelt introduced the New Deal.⁸⁴ Davis had stumped for incumbent Congressman Fiorello LaGuardia in Harlem, engaging in political canvassing and the supervision of hundreds of campaign workers across the United States under campaign supervisor Vito Marcantonio (who later became a member of Congress and friend to Davis).⁸⁵

Haynes and Burroughs came to the JCNR with even more experience. Haynes had been the Director of the Division of Negro Economics in the Department of Labor during World War I, where he worked on issues of racial conflict in employment, housing, and recreation. In 1921, Haynes served as a member of the President’s Unemployment Conference.⁸⁶ Nannie Burroughs had served as the president of the National League of Republican Colored Women and chair of the fact-finding commission on Negro housing under President Hoover.⁸⁷ Burroughs and Davis had worked together on the Hoover campaign.⁸⁸

3. Journalism and Public Relations

JCNR leaders also had significant ties to Black press and publication networks. Prior to creating the NIL, Davis was a journalist who had worked as the editor of the Capital News Service , occasional staff correspondent for the Washington Tribune , and head of the National Negro Republican League office, simultaneously.⁸⁹ He had served as the editor of Crisis magazine and publicity director for Fisk University.⁹⁰ Haynes and Burroughs were both prolific writers, with Haynes publishing academic and popular pieces, and Burroughs serving as a frequent contributor to the nation’s leading Black publications for more than a decade.⁹¹

4. Research and Education

From its inception, the NIL proved research ready, which Davis and Weaver made evident through their deployment of both legal and statistical analyses in the brief they submitted at the first code hearing.⁹² Davis offered the JCNR a keen set of legal research skills, working knowledge of administrative law, and field research experience, having previously published his own empirical work examining the effect of segregation and racism on Black university students in the United States and Britain.⁹³ Weaver, the first Black graduate of Harvard’s doctoral program in economics, specialized in applied economics and wrote his dissertation on the relationship between labor and capital and the effect of improved wages on economic instability.⁹⁴

Haynes was a pioneer in the field of sociology—the nation’s first Black sociology Ph.D.—and the founder and director of Fisk University’s Department of Social Sciences and applied sociology program (one of the earliest applied sociology programs in the country).⁹⁵ Like W.E.B. Du Bois, Haynes used social science to study and devise solutions to the problems of segregation and racism.⁹⁶ Much of Haynes’ research focused on Black labor, examining the impact of segregation and discrimination on the wages, working conditions, and employment opportunities of Black workers; the exclusion of Black workers from labor unions; interracial workplace conditions; and child labor.⁹⁷ While Haynes offered the JCNR years of experience as an educator and administrator at the university level, Burroughs brought decades of experience as an esteemed educator and administrator in industrial education schools. Burroughs had pioneered the creation of a Black history informed curriculum—in collaboration with Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson—for the National Training School for Women and Girls, of which she had been the principal for over twenty years.⁹⁸

E. Black-Led, Black-Funded, and Grassroots-Based

Importantly, the JCNR was not only Black-led, but also Black-funded and grassroots-based. It drew from the resources and networks of its own leaders, the Black church, and Black fraternal and sororal organizations to mobilize the masses, demand racial and economic justice, and effect transformative change. Marguerite Demond Davis, secretary to Carter G. Woodson at the African American Historical Society and Davis’s wife, was the first funder of the NIL and JCNR.⁹⁹ Her income afforded the NIL the ability to rent office space at her husband’s old CNS news office.¹⁰⁰ Eager to supplement his wife’s financial contributions, Davis worked for the Barber’s Association, negotiating pay raises for Black barbers to cover a portion of the rent.¹⁰¹ Together, the couple financed much of the organizational work for the NIL and JCNR when external contributions were slow, covering ordinary expenses and the cost of Davis’s travel and field research.¹⁰²

Davis, Haynes, and Weaver worked determinedly over the summer of 1933 to develop interorganizational relationships and additional funding streams, with Burroughs later joining in their efforts. As Davis battled new codes and discriminatory devices, and Black workers and leaders faced increasing intimidation and terrorization, established civil rights activists and organizations began to join forces with Davis, with the JCNR boasting twenty-two national member organizations by February 1934.¹⁰³

Haynes and Burroughs mined their respective Black church and Black fraternal and sororal organizations to drum up institutional support. Their connections to the Black church proved invaluable to mobilizing and funding the fledgling movement organization network. Black religious organizations, fraternities, and sororities soon signed on as the NIL’s first institutional sponsors.¹⁰⁴ The Federal Council of Churches, African Methodist Episcopal, and the AME Zion Church boards emerged as the earliest supporters of the NIL.¹⁰⁵

Black churches functioned as the organizational center of Black life and teemed with the potential for political action.¹⁰⁶ Their support provided access to preexisting informational, social, and financial resource networks developed and controlled by the Black community. These networks kept the JCNR informed of the pressing problems and needs of Black communities and leaders across the nation. They also provided the JCNR direct access to safe, Black-controlled communication networks that could be used for data collection and community mobilization without exposing or endangering the lives of individuals who reported legal violations, discrimination, or terrorization, or engaged in organizing activity.

Black organizations contributed three-quarters of the JCNR’s budget.¹⁰⁷ The NIL’s financial documents offer evidence of the critical financial role Black churches, fraternities, and sororities played in its development and work.¹⁰⁸ Historically Black Colleges and Universities (“HBCUs”) and individual Black donors funded some of Davis’s travels, allowing him to conduct field work, present JCNR research, and mobilize support for the JCNR’s work through networking and speaking engagements.¹⁰⁹

Despite this rich community support and constant fundraising attempts by Davis and Haynes, the JCNR was still perpetually underfunded.¹¹⁰ Davis went uncompensated for a great deal of his work. This resulted in DeMond and Davis footing the bill for much of Davis’s work, including several data collection trips across the south.¹¹¹ Even though Davis himself was not remunerated for much of his work, JCNR reports demonstrate that Davis was meticulous in his efforts to recognize the work of his collaborators and pressure the JCNR board to raise and approve funds to compensate them for their work.¹¹²

That the JCNR was born of and shaped by the Black community is significant. While the JCNR was Black-led from the point of its inception and primarily funded by the contributions of Black organizations and individuals for the duration of its existence, the same was not true of more established civil rights organizations like the NAACP and the Urban League.¹¹³ That the JCNR was not beholden to elite white funders may have provided Davis with the freedom to take a more confrontational and militant approach and demand an immediate end to segregation, discrimination, and formal and substantive inequality of citizenship for Black Americans.¹¹⁴

To be sure, the issue of funding, as well as Davis’s “growing expertise, altruism, and militancy,”¹¹⁵ were sources of tension between Davis and the leadership of JCNR member organizations like the NAACP.¹¹⁶ To some extent, Davis was perceived as a potential threat by the NAACP’s Walter White and other traditional civil rights figures. While White recognized Davis as “the genius of the Joint Committee,” he also contemplated replacing Davis with Haynes or Hastie to “keep John in check.”¹¹⁷

F. Organizational Connections, Collaborations, and Coalitions

The JCNR’s mobilization capacities were vastly extended by the leadership’s refusal to countenance any failure in forging strategic connections and collaborations with other organizations, institutions, and individuals, including organized white labor, government, and industry. Davis and his colleagues worked hard to build alliances and coalitions.

The NIRA, as Davis asserted in a JCNR memorandum, “has given great impetus to the development of organized labor and there are fundamental mutual interests between white and Negro labor.”¹¹⁸ The JCNR, Davis pressed, would make a concerted effort to build relationships with white organized labor leaders—like American Federation of Labor (“AFL”) president William Green, United Mine Workers of America president John L. Lewis, Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America founder and president Sidney Hillman, and AFL Metal Trades Department president John P. Frey—engaging them in discussions on race discrimination in the labor movement and urging them to end discrimination against Black workers “on the account of race or color” and support “the equality of status for these workers in the labor movement.”¹¹⁹

Davis made clear that these white labor leaders “should be pressed to the end that Negro workers shall be fairly treated by organized labor.”¹²⁰ These efforts bore fruit. Green, for example, agreed to support equal wages at the hearing for the Steel Code and later highlighted the plight of Black women working in the laundry industry in his presentation at the code hearing, endorsing the JCNR’s brief and speaking out against racial wage differentials.¹²¹ Lewis’ backing of Davis’s demands for equal wage rates at the Bituminous Coal hearing helped deliver success in the JCNR’s campaign against the discriminatory differentials in the coal industry,¹²² which ultimately provided equal wage rates and hours to Black and white coal workers in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia.¹²³ These early conversations with Davis also nudged Lewis in a direction that eventually led to him spearheading a revolt against the AFL and racist craft unionism and collaborating with Davis and the NNC a few years later to launch the first CIO drive aimed at bringing Black workers into the union, which Davis himself kicked off by organizing steelworkers in Youngstown, Ohio.¹²⁴ By any measure, the CIO drive was a success. In Chicago alone, the drive resulted in 25,000 Black workers becoming union members.¹²⁵

Davis and the JCNR also developed relationships with government officials by sharing their research with, and preparing research for, the New Deal administration. For instance, after a meeting with Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, Davis delivered her a detailed memorandum on Black labor at her request and offered her suggestions for immediate action to assist Black domestic workers and place a Black representative on the Labor Advisory board.¹²⁶ Even prior to meeting Davis, Perkins was not totally unfamiliar with NIL leadership; she had been classmates and acquaintances with Haynes at Columbia’s New York School of Philanthropy in 1910.¹²⁷ Davis’s constant correspondence with key administrators, enthusiastic engagement, and willingness to share information likely helped the JCNR gain occasional support from administrators at code hearings and reciprocal access to information. Such was the case when Perkins advocated for the NIL’s position at the Steel Code hearing and relied on NIL statistical analyses to allege that the code’s southern differential was racially discriminatory.¹²⁸ Similarly, Davis’s correspondence with Harry Hopkins, administrator of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (“FERA”), led to Hopkins eventually granting Davis full access to FERA’s data and records.¹²⁹

Davis and his colleagues worked hard to build connections between the JCNR and a diverse and interracial set of organizations. They transformed these early connections into short-term, issue-specific campaign coalitions and long-term, multi-issue political partnerships. For instance, an impactful speech by Davis addressing the need for an NRA code for domestic workers served as the catalyst to generate relationships with a network of women activists, including the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), the National Consumers League, the Southern Commission on Interracial Cooperation, and the Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau.¹³⁰ Later, with an eye towards collaboration, coalitionbuilding, and resource mobilization, Davis shared the JCNR brief for the laundry code with the Consumers’ League, Women’s Bureau, and AFL, consulting with representatives from each to identify the key points that needed to be addressed at the hearing. Ultimately, all three organizations used the JCNR brief, which contained fifty-seven statistical tables and a map, to prepare their hearing statements.¹³¹

NAACP president Walter White presented the JCNR brief at the Laundry Code hearing. While presenting their own briefs, William Green from the AFL, Marie Correll from the Women’s Bureau, and Lucy Randolph Mason from the Consumer’s League all publicly condemned the racial wage differentials. Then, Labor Advisor Rose Schneiderman read telegrams of protest that denounced the Laundry Codes’ discriminatory differentials into the hearing record.¹³² While the Laundry Code was ultimately approved with the discriminatory differentials intact, the constant efforts of JCNR leadership to build and deepen organizational relationships set the foundations upon which Davis would later advance his grander goals.¹³³

G. Goals of the JCNR

It is impossible to grasp the significance of the JCNR’s character as a social movement organization network without taking stock of the goals it set for itself. Indeed, the JCNR aspired to make good on Davis and Weaver’s original aims of exposing race discrimination in the development and implementation of the NRA codes, securing racially just labor laws, and improving wages and working conditions for Black workers. It thus pushed for the abolition of occupational exclusions and differentials, geographical differentials, gendered wage differentials, and other discriminatory devices.¹³⁴ The JCNR called for a minimum wage for all workers set at a living wage that would increase in direct proportion to the cost of living;¹³⁵ racially just, interracial, and democratic unionization and the protection of labor’s collective freedoms against corporate domination;¹³⁶ labor’s right to propose codes and amendments; and mandatory public code hearings.¹³⁷

Davis and his colleagues advocated for agricultural, domestic, and other excluded workers to be covered by New Deal labor and social security protections.¹³⁸ They pushed for equitable treatment and an end to discriminatory policies and actions in the broad Public Works Administration, Homestead Subsistence, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, and Emergency Relief Administration.¹³⁹ Davis and the JCNR demanded Black representation in the NRA and its investigatory and enforcement efforts, as well as in other New Deal agencies and programs, the Labor Department, and the federal government.¹⁴⁰ As part of this work, Davis and his colleagues pushed toward co-enforcement by collaborating with government and labor unions to encourage code compliance and proper investigations and prosecutions of violations.

Yet, it would be misleading to imagine that Davis and the JCNR, not to mention the movement they were proliferating, were simply targeting the State and focusing on formal legal change and institutional politics in hopes of a mere aim of increasing inclusion or securing a place at the table of institutional politics. Davis and his colleagues sought a much deeper restructuring of the country’s political economy and an expansion of the range of values informing its political ethos, especially through a greater recognition of human rights above property rights, free labor above slavery, and democracy above Jim Crow.¹⁴¹

Taking a page from Eric Foner’s recent notion of Reconstruction as a “Second Founding,” I argue that Davis and his colleagues looked back to Reconstruction to wage a battle for a “Second Reconstruction” through a new and more genuinely emancipatory New Deal premised on a broader project of redistributive political-economic restructuring to secure Black liberation.¹⁴² They were, in short, pushing for major structural and cultural change through the defeat of white supremacy, racial domination, and labor exploitation, all of which Davis emphasized were inconsistent with the principles of democratic government embedded in the Constitution and its amendments.¹⁴³ For Davis, major structural change and federal intervention to enact and enforce legislation—to curb excessive concentrations of economic and political power, ensure the broad and just distribution of power among all Americans, and guarantee formal and substantive equality of citizenship for all Americans—was thus a constitutional necessity.¹⁴⁴

Davis and his colleagues appreciated that formal legal change alone would not deliver social transformation.¹⁴⁵ Nor would court-centered reform when the Supreme Court was committed to “nullif[ying] the constitutional rights of Negroes and depriv[ing] them of the full stature of citizenship.”¹⁴⁶ Recognizing that powerlessness was at root of these structural issues, Davis understood that long-term power-building and mass mobilization were necessary to transform the processes, policies, institutions, structures, and narratives that created and facilitated the unfair and unequal distribution of social, economic, and political power.

The mobilizing structure of the JCNR, as well as its alliance and coalition building strategies, both reflected and advanced its goals. SMO and SMO network formation and power building within and among Black communities, organizations, and networks and labor organizations were central to Davis’s approach to achieving a truly emancipatory New Deal. These strategies were critical to generating and sustaining a long-term struggle capable of holding decision-makers accountable and securing substantive, durable, systemic change. It was in an effort to achieve these aims that Davis formed the NIL, JCNR, and NNC. Using the JCNR as a foundation to build the NNC, Davis echoed Frederick Douglass’s call for the mobilization of an interracial coalition “to dismantle[e] . . . the Southern slave-based oligarchy,”¹⁴⁷ as he called for the mobilization of an even larger Black-led interracial, antiracist, labor-focused movement and organization network that would “emancipate blacks [and] also liberate working class whites from the economic system of oppression that Jim Crow had sustained for the past half century.”¹⁴⁸

II. THE Davis-JCNR Model of Advocacy

Against the backdrop of organizational structure and capacities reviewed in Part I, the JCNR’s advocacy model becomes easy to understand. To achieve the organization’s objectives, Davis crafted an approach that called for the strategically integrated deployment of six key tactics: (1) research, (2) administrative, policy, and legislative advocacy, (3) educational publicity, (4) organizing and leadership development, (5) disruptive tactics, and (6) claim-centered legal work. For Davis, effecting transformative and sustainable social change—specifically, defeating white supremacy, racial domination, and labor exploitation —required coordinated empirical research and legal and political advocacy; contemporaneous grassroots organizing, power-building, and accountability; federal intervention and major, structural transformation; and long-term substantive efforts to support implementation and norm change. To be sure, the ideological and methodological perspectives and integrated approach to advocacy Davis adopted are those we associate with movement lawyering today.¹⁴⁹

This core set of tactics reflect Davis’s particular set of skills, experience, and social resources, influenced as he was by Black resistance movements and the work of Black progressives of the era. Davis drew special inspiration from Frederick Douglass and Reconstruction-era perspectives, grassroots mobilization,¹⁵⁰ and the New Negro Movement of the Harlem Renaissance of which he, as an author, had taken part.¹⁵¹ His influences also included his friends and frequent collaborators Charles Hamilton Houston and William H. Hastie, who combined race uplift initiatives, legislative advocacy, disruptive tactics, and court-centered reform to effect social change.¹⁵²

Drawing from his experience working as a volunteer with the radical lawyers of the International Labor Defense (ILD), who had handled the Scottsboro case, which involved the 1931 trial and conviction of nine African American teenagers accused of raping two white women in Alabama, Davis’s incorporated labor movement tactics into the JCNR model.¹⁵³ The JCNR, like the ILD, would use legal channels in combination with mass pressure by way of petitions, telegrams, and demonstrations.¹⁵⁴ Finally, as a mentee of Du Bois with several field research projects and empirical publications under his belt, Davis was significantly influenced by Black sociology and used it as one of the JCNR’s core tactics.¹⁵⁵

The tactical repertoire of the JCNR underwent a marked expansion in late 1933. Around that time, the JCNR started to incorporate disruptive tactics and field research into its tactical toolkit.¹⁵⁶ This tactical expansion can in large part be traced to two causal factors. The first was the failure of the New Deal agencies to combat Jim Crowism in the federal workplace. As JCNR members like Weaver, Hastie, and Mabel Byrd were hired by the NRA and New Deal agencies in response to demands for Black representation, they began to use disruptive tactics to combat segregation in the federal workplace.¹⁵⁷ The second was Davis’s procurement of the NRA Special Industrial Recovery Board’s September 18, 1933 transcript, which prompted him to incorporate field research methods into his tactical repertoire.¹⁵⁸

The September 18 transcript provided direct evidence of race discrimination by NRA administrators in decision-making, revealing their candid dismissals of organized Black demands for representation in the agency and the blatantly race-based reasoning behind the NRA’s decision to cancel a trip by Black field investigator Byrd to the South to investigate NRA code violations hours before her departure.¹⁵⁹ This discovery of the transcript prompted Davis to embark on a trip across the Jim Crow South in November 1933 to conduct the prohibited investigation himself.¹⁶⁰ It also led Davis to adopt Black sociological methodologies as a central tactic in his multidimensional model of advocacy.¹⁶¹ Below, I evaluate each of the six key dimensions of Davis’s tactical repertoire on a more granular basis, beginning with his pioneering deployment of interdisciplinary research and Black sociology as a tactic.

A. Interdisciplinary Research and Black Sociology

From his initial intervention in the cotton textile code hearing onward,¹⁶² Davis stressed that the NRA code development and implementation process was mired in a deficit of accurate and reliable data which necessitated research, the first of his six key means of organizational action.¹⁶³ Davis noted that the Bureau of Labor had insufficient information on the Black cost of living in the South and prevailing wages paid in the occupations in which the majority of Black workers labored.¹⁶⁴ Industry-packaged data, which the NRA relied upon to set minimum wage rates and inform minimum wage calculations, was often inaccurate, incomplete, or manipulated.¹⁶⁵

The testimonies, statements, data, and research southern industrialists submitted to support their petitions for reduced minimum wage rates for Black workers were also inaccurate and unreliable sources of information, as they were grounded in preexisting beliefs and theories of biological difference between the races and the inherent inferiority of Black labor in relation to white labor in terms of efficiency, productivity, skill, intelligence, and value. For example, to support their petitions for racial wages, southern industrialists submitted eugenics research and eugenics-based IQ tests, their own (fundamentally racist) southern industrialist employer survey research, and erroneous or manipulated company-packaged data citing an inability to pay standard wages for “inefficient” [Black] labor, that reinscribed ideas of white supremacy.¹⁶⁶ The NRA was sympathetic to companies that argued they would be put out of business if they had to pay higher wages to Black workers, who they claimed were “inefficient.”¹⁶⁷ Southern industrialists also supported their petitions for racial wages with anecdotal claims citing the sufficiency of existing wages and working conditions; misrepresenting true levels of the cost of living, well-being and contentedness; and attesting to the nonexistence of racism and discrimination.¹⁶⁸

Accordingly, an organized Black response to the crisis demanded research. Under Davis’s leadership, the JCNR deployed interdisciplinary approaches to data and Black sociology to bring this aim to fruition. Existing scholarship acknowledges the NIL’s interdisciplinary approach from the point of its intervention in the cotton textile code hearing;¹⁶⁹ indeed, the first ever NIL brief for the cotton textile code hearing deployed both legal and statistical analyses.¹⁷⁰ However, even as scholars have noted that Davis and the JCNR produced empirical and analytical research,¹⁷¹ there has not generally been the same acknowledgment of the fact that Davis and the JCNR were using methodologies developed and refined by the Black pioneers of sociology.

The selection and deployment of the specific research methods and insights of Black sociology as a social movement and movement lawyering tactic, therefore, is particularly significant and deserving of elaboration. Indeed, I contend, it was one of, if not the , most powerful and valuable tactics in the Davis-JCNR repertoire.

1. Black Sociology as a Tactic

When southern industrialists petitioned for racial wage differentials, they marshalled the tools of social science to “prove” Black inefficiency, deficiency, and dependence to legitimize racial wages, deprive Black workers of wage and hour protections, and preserve the racialized political economy and white supremacy. Unfortunately, southern industrialists were not using fringe science. Until the mid-1900s, “the white American sociological enterprise,”¹⁷² like all social sciences, “collectively created and sustained a body of racist scientific literature that largely supported existing beliefs of whites” and promoted scientific racism, theories of Black inferiority and subordination, racial inequality, and segregation.¹⁷³ To counter southern industrialist petitions for racial wages, abolish the discriminatory devices embedded in NRA codes, and impel an honest reckoning with white supremacy, then, Davis and JCNR needed to dismantle the anecdotal evidence and scientific foundations on which they were based.

The methodologies developed and refined by the Black pioneers of sociology at the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory (ASL) and Fisk University—under the leadership of W.E.B. Du Bois and JCNR chairman Haynes, respectively—provided the tools to do just that.¹⁷⁴ In contrast to their white counterparts, early Black sociologists viewed sociology as a tool of emancipation that could be used to challenge racist, unscientific studies, “improve th[e] social, economic, and physical condition” of Black people, and “eradicate the harmful injustices” they faced.”¹⁷⁵ The ASL was the first American sociological unit to institutionalize mixed method data collection (method triangulation), the use of insider and citizen researchers, and “public acknowledgement of the limitations of one’s research,”¹⁷⁶ all of which are important tools in modern sociology.¹⁷⁷ It called for the use of mixed methods empirical investigations into the conditions and experiences of Black people to identify and explain the particular social, economic, and political problems they faced. The ASL then utilized the scientific findings to inform the development of solutions—including, but not limited to, the enactment of law and policy—to address the problems identified in the research.¹⁷⁸ Fisk, under Haynes’ leadership, developed a new model of applied sociology and race relations research that served as “a forerunner to what we now call community-based participatory research.”¹⁷⁹ The Fisk model emphasized the use of community-based research to learn directly from Black communities and work collaboratively with them to identify and devise solutions to the problems the community faced.

Nowhere in the archival records is there an explicit statement by Davis addressing that his methodological approach was inspired by the work of early Black sociologists. However, the fact that Davis was already an author of empirically based social scientific work and had direct personal relationships with both Du Bois and Haynes is undeniable. Even more compellingly, one can point to the NIL and JCNR briefs and statements, Davis’s field notes, his reports as executive secretary to the JCNR, and publications.¹⁸⁰ Through a close reading of all of these sources, it becomes plain that Davis and the JCNR were, in fact, deploying Black sociology as a tactic.

Consider Davis and Weaver’s early briefs, which used statistical analyses to demonstrate that the exclusions, differentials, and grandfather clauses embedded in NRA codes had been purposefully designed to discriminate against Black workers. These strongly resemble work that Du Bois and Augustus Granville Dill had produced at the ASL twenty-two years earlier.¹⁸¹ In his many research trips across the South,¹⁸² Davis used method triangulation, surveys, in-depth interviews, and observational research.¹⁸³ Just as Du Bois and Haynes had done thirty-five and twenty-one years earlier, respectively,¹⁸⁴ Davis engaged with Black workers directly, spending time with them at their jobs and in their homes and attending their organizing and union meetings.¹⁸⁵ Davis collected paystubs, grocery bills, and rent receipts from workers and visited company stores and town centers to document the cost of produce in each.¹⁸⁶ He took detailed field notes and photographs and prepared in-depth case studies of individual workers using rich description.¹⁸⁷ After completing his first research trip across the South to study the conditions confronting Black workers in the textile mill industry, Davis made a pit stop at Atlanta University to present his research findings at a seminar taught by Du Bois, the previous director of the ASL.¹⁸⁸ Tracking the ASL model, Davis acknowledged the limitations of the data when he later published his research.¹⁸⁹

Likewise, Davis and the JCNR also engaged insider, citizen researchers¹⁹⁰—Black “community members who had good reputations and high community status”¹⁹¹—as data collectors who were critical to JCNR research processes.¹⁹² Davis described one such collaboration with Dr. W.A.C. Hughes, director of the Bureau of Negro work of the Board of Home Missions and Church Extension of the Methodist Episcopal Church.

He [Dr. Hughes] has had mimeographed a [questionnaire] prepared by me to be presented by him to some four hundred Negro ministers in Southern communities. He will be personally present to explain these questionnaires and see them filled in. When returned these questionnaires will give us a general picture of the conditions facing Negro labor in several hundred Southern communities.¹⁹³

Two months later, Davis reported on the findings borne out by an analysis of the questionnaire data collected in Mississippi:

It shows that the prevailing wage of Negro domestics is less than $2.00 weekly; that there is widespread discrimination against Negroes in the distribution of relief and of jobs. Striking evidence was given in the questionnaires that Negro sharecroppers who plowed up their cotton in agreement with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration last season were robbed of their pay checks by unscrupulous landlords.¹⁹⁴

2. The Utility and Significance of Black Sociology as a Tactic

Davis’s deployment of Black sociology as a tactic paid real dividends. This is for at least several reasons. First, because the Black sociological tradition pioneered more methodologically rigorous approaches than the prevailing white social scientific methods of the time,¹⁹⁵ it established Davis and the JCNR as dependable sources for highly reliable, valid, and analytically generalizable data.

Second, the ASL and Fisk models provided Davis and the JCNR with a framework for conducting large scale empirical investigations in the Jim Crow South with a small staff on a shoestring budget that made full use of the preexisting social networks and representatives of JCNR members and allied organizations. By using citizen researchers – namely Black church leaders who were already highly respected and trusted members of the community – Davis and the JCNR were able connect to preexisting extensive social networks and collect data that white researchers (whether they were, for example, southern industrialist countermovement actors, New Deal investigators, doctoral students, or Communist-leaning labor organizers) would not have been able to access or procure. Furthermore, Black church leaders provided Black workers and families the safety and freedom to openly discuss, answer questions, and register complaints about the racial discrimination, oppression, and economic exploitation they experienced with trusted religious leaders in their communities.

Third, the use of insider, citizen researchers and extensive field research, kept Davis and the JCNR grounded in grassroots. Like Haynes and other researchers at Fisk,¹⁹⁶ Davis and the JCNR were able to learn directly from, and collaborate with, Black workers, families, and communities to develop a ground-level understanding of the mass of problems they faced under the NRA and broader New Deal legislation, programs, and agencies. This constant contact and collaboration with the communities whose interests they aimed to represent, in combination with the JCNR’s democratic process, ensured greater levels of grassroots engagement, solidarity, and accountability.

Fourth, Black sociology afforded Davis and the JCNR critical opportunities to fill the urgent need for accurate and reliable data on Black labor. Importantly, it also provided objective, methodologically rigorous, non-deficit-centered tools to vanquish colorblind and scientific racism, performative neutrality, and white supremacy on the empirical facts in the same institutional spaces within which white supremacy and Jim Crowism were formalized and strengthened. For instance, Davis used field data and company records to beat back the claims of a Southern garment factory that submitted comparative productivity records of its Black and white workers as evidence of Black inefficiency to justify its demand for a code exemption which, if granted, would have permitted the company to pay Black workers subminimum wages. Davis’s field data revealed that the difference in productivity was due not to race, but to the fact that Black garment workers had been segregated from their white counterparts and provided inferior machinery and conditions.¹⁹⁷ In another code exemption case, Davis used observational, interview, and company data to expose fatal flaws in a comparative analysis of two plants, one that employed predominately Black workers and the other whites, that had been submitted as evidence of the relative inefficiency of Black labor.¹⁹⁸ In both cases, Davis’s superior analysis and data won the day and the exemptions were ultimately denied.¹⁹⁹

Similarly, Davis used his research to repudiate the testimonies in favor of wage differentials delivered by southern industrialists and Congressmen, who claimed that southern workers were content, earned sufficient wages, and enjoyed a low cost of living, generous employee benefits, and discounted prices at company stores.²⁰⁰ Davis’s field data revealed that Black workers in the South were, in fact, earning starvation wages, enduring brutal working conditions,²⁰¹ and battling unduly inflated staple goods and rent prices in company commissaries and company housing in the face of rising inflation.²⁰² In this way, Black sociology provided Davis and his colleagues with the means to undermine the specious ways in which whites used their instrumental control of the state, legal system, institutionalized scientific knowledge, and other prevailing institutions to preserve the existing order of majoritarian racial supremacy.

A fifth way Black sociology paid real dividends is that it provided Davis and the JCNR with the tools it needed to replace the dominant narrative—that explained Black inequality as the result of pathological Black culture or biological inferiority and justified inequities by degrading, vilifying, and dehumanizing Black people—with a dignified and accurate counternarrative that redefined the parameters of public debate and reshaped societal values.²⁰³ Southern industrialists and New Deal administrators, who implied that Black workers were the “problem” and stressed that requiring business to pay Black workers standard wage rates would put companies out of business, devised discriminatory devices in the NRA codes to secure segregated wage rates and solve “the Negro labor problem.”²⁰⁴ Davis and his colleagues used Black sociology to negate these racist claims and redefine the problem. They demonstrated that in failing to account for the racialized political economy, the NRA codes and broader New Deal had reproduced the economic and racial inequality inherent in the system; the problem was white domination and systemic racism.²⁰⁵

Finally, Black sociology provided Davis and his colleagues a framework for using social scientific evidence as a tool alongside law and policy arguments to “eliminate or reduce the extreme levels of inequality”; challenge segregation, racialized economic subordination, and racial terrorization; and “improve the condition of Blacks in the United States.”²⁰⁶ To be sure, scholars have tended to credit legal realism rather than Black sociology as the inspiration behind Black lawyers’ strategic use of social scientific evidence, law, and policy arguments in the Progressive and New Deal Eras, pointing to law school coursework as the primary archival basis for such inferences.²⁰⁷ However, the rich and varied body of archival evidence showcasing the embeddedness of Black sociology in Davis’s multidimensional approach to advocacy is hard to ignore.²⁰⁸ Certainly, finding that Davis and other Black lawyers of the era likely drew more directly from Black sociology than legal realism can hardly prove counterintuitive. Black sociology, which predated legal realism by at least twenty-one years,²⁰⁹ was unbound from white, deficit-focused social science research and its underlying commitments to scientific racism, eugenics, and white supremacy in a way that legal realism and its antecedent were not.²¹⁰

3. Mobilizing Research

By following in the footsteps of the Black trailblazers of sociology, Davis was able to provide the JCNR with accurate data on a litany of topics: prevailing wages and working conditions, wage theft and other code violations, workplace discrimination, employer retaliation, and job loss, cost of living, living conditions, access to federal relief, and food security of Black workers and families in the South.²¹¹ The repeated research trips David conducted across the South enabled him to supply extended case studies and longitudinal evidence concerning the impact of discriminatory NRA codes and broader New Deal programs and policies on Black workers and families. His field research showcased the persistent problems that resulted from starvation wages, flagrant code violations, lack of code enforcement, and the denial of federal relief for Black workers and families amidst rising inflation, irregularity of work, outright joblessness, food insecurity, and racial terrorization.²¹²

The wealth of field data, community-based survey data, and statistical analyses of secondary data pulled from the Department of Labor and other sources that the JCNR amassed was unrivaled. It filled a void, attending to the deficit of data on Black labor and life that Davis and Weaver identified as a pressing problem when they first intervened in the cotton textile code hearing.²¹³

JCNR research directly informed strategic decision-making. Consider, for example, how Davis and his colleagues determined which code hearings to present at, what demands to make, which industries and employers to target in worker justice campaigns, and whether organizing workers in a particular sector would be feasible. The research processes that informed these strategic decisions also provided a practical way for the JCNR to involve member organizations and allied individuals in mapping out the problems Black people faced under the New Deal and coordinating and directing advocacy and organizing efforts to address them.

Beyond its role in strategic decision-making, the data was also widely propagated. Davis and his collaborators published their research in academic journals and leading Black magazines to increase public awareness, pressure employers, the NRA, and other New Deal agencies, and create strategic opportunities for coalition building.²¹⁴ Davis asserted their research findings could be used to bolster “intelligent protest to proper officials” and “as means of awakening public sentiment against these abuses.”²¹⁵ In turn, these publications became essential documents that the JCNR drew on for appearances at administrative and legislative hearings, interactions with New Deal agencies, and public education efforts. Practically, the research also provided JCNR membership, local leaders, and workers with much needed data and authority.

The widespread dissemination of JCNR data established the organization and its leadership as reliable and expert sources of information. Black workers, allies, and New Deal administrators alike referred worker complaints to the JCNR and relied on the organization for information on Black labor, the NRA, and broader New Deal programs and legislation.²¹⁶ With methodologically rigorous research coming at them from closer to the grassroots, New Deal administrators and agencies, including the NRA, had little choice but to look to and rely upon the wellsprings Davis and the JCNR opened. What is more, JCNR research helped generate opportunities for collaboration and engagement between the JCNR, Labor Advisory Board, and New Deal administration.²¹⁷

The research Davis and his colleagues produced was inextricable from their broader advocacy efforts. It connected to, and supported progress toward, their organizing and movement-building efforts aimed at achieving racial and economic justice and effecting systemic change. As Davis thus declared after the conclusion of a field research trip across the South:

[t]his trip strengthened my conviction that we must have more field investigation in order to accomplish our tasks well. Not only must we concretize theories with actual facts, but as well these trips must be made the occasion of selling the Joint Committee to thousands of influential persons, who would rally to us if made aware of our work and financial problem.²¹⁸

And, only then, could the path toward truly transformative thinking and action begin.

B. Administrative, Policy, and Legislative Advocacy

Beyond its innovative use of research tactics and the concomitant innovations in data collection, the marshalling of Black sociology enabled the JCNR to “ma[ke] the fullest use of pressure politics.”²¹⁹ Davis and his colleagues targeted public officials by engaging with them directly, presenting at public hearings, and mobilizing constituents of JCNR member and allied organizations to influence administrative, legislative, and executive decisions.

Administrative, policy, and legislative advocacy featured prominently in the JCNR’s tactical repertoire, taking three principal forms: (1) fighting to eliminate the race discrimination embedded in the NRA codes and processes and raise minimum wage rates for Black workers in the codes (2) organizing for the passage of new legislation to raise wages, improve working conditions, and more broadly improve the social, political, and economic position of Black workers and families; and (3) targeting and collaborating with government agencies, and even industry, to improve code compliance and enforcement. This work was strategically integrated with the JCNR’s organizational relationship building, as well as its research and other tactics.

Davis tirelessly appeared at more than a hundred NRA code hearings.²²⁰ The NIL and JCNR, more broadly, made appearances at or filed written briefs for hundreds.²²¹ This work was central to critical, though limited, improvements in labor market outcomes for Black workers and NRA code enforcement against employer violators targeting Black labor.²²²

Davis and the JCNR demanded antidiscrimination provisions in wage and hour and collective bargaining law, as well as the abolition of geographical differentials, economic grandfather clauses, and occupational exclusions and differentials which excluded or set lower wages for occupations and sectors predominated held by Black workers, including agricultural, domestic, laundry, hotel, barber shop, restaurant, and other service work.²²³

Davis and his colleagues also appeared at various code exemption hearings to oppose the granting of code exemptions to companies that claimed such exemptions were warranted based on the inefficiency of Black labor.²²⁴ At these hearings, Davis questioned company representatives and submitted statements and testimonies supported by the JCNR’s empirical and analytical research to quash the racist petitions for code exemptions which, when granted, served to legitimize the super-exploitation of Black workers via the payment of subminimum wages.²²⁵

What is more, Davis and the JCNR conducted legislative analyses, drafted proposed legislation, and organized for the passage of legislation that would raise wages and improve working conditions of Black workers, recognize the collective bargaining rights of all workers, and more broadly improve the social, economic, and political position of Black people to secure Black liberation. In one instance, Davis and Charles Hamilton Houston collaborated to produce a proposed resolution for the investigation of the status of Black labor under the New Deal.²²⁶ They intended to put the resolution before the House of Representatives with the help of Representative William P. Connery.²²⁷ While the resolution was not expected to pass, Davis and the JCNR aimed to “agitate” through a public hearing and “projec[t] upon the national conscience of the plight of the Negro.”²²⁸

The resolution called for the compilation of all the surveys and investigations the federal government had made on the status and conditions of Black workers over the last decade; the funding of additional independent investigations on the status and conditions of Black workers in industry, public works projects, and organized labor; and the production of a series of reports on the findings that provided recommendations for necessary legislation.²²⁹ Recognizing the power and relevance of worker testimony as it related to the identifying key issues, building campaigns, and effecting narrative change, Davis marshalled opportunities for workers to give public testimony and address decision makers directly. For instance, Davis prepared a list of suggested witnesses who should appear at the hearing for the proposed resolution that included garment, tobacco, auto, and steel industry workers; workers employed with the Tennessee Valley Authority dam project; and sharecroppers who could testify about wages and working conditions including the exploitation, discrimination, and poverty they endured, as well as the need for further legal protections.²³⁰

Public hearings offered the JCNR the opportunity to publicly confront southern industrialists, NRA administrators, and white organized labor with the real-life effects of New Deal-sponsored racism and race discrimination. Davis and his colleagues consistently centered and amplified the voices and experiences of Black workers in their presentations at public hearings.²³¹ In his hearing statements, testimonies, and briefs, Davis drew from the case narratives he collected in the field, quoted workers he had interviewed, and read worker letters detailing the rampant code violations, discrimination, exploitation, and terrorization they experienced at the hands of their employers and New Deal administrators directly into the record.²³² He provided empirical and analytical evidence of widespread code violations, as well as the grinding poverty, food insecurity, and starvation forced upon Black workers and families that came as a direct result of depriving Black workers of wage and hour and collective bargaining protections.²³³

Davis revealed how New Deal-sponsored racism and race discrimination worked to crush Black workers who attempted to protest these conditions, using JCNR research to show how they were fired from their jobs if they complained,²³⁴ blocked from obtaining work with the Civil Works Administration,²³⁵ stripped from relief rolls,²³⁶ and killed for attempting to organize to improve their wages and working conditions.²³⁷ Armed with longitudinal data from his repeated data collection trips across the South, Davis was even able to demonstrate the effect the discriminatory NRA codes and New Deal policies had over time, specifically, how they deepened the depression and segregation for Black workers and families,²³⁸ and increased irregularity of work, joblessness, food insecurity, and retaliation and racial terrorization.²³⁹

This approach accentuated the southern industrialist, NRA, and New Deal administration’s embrace of Jim Crowism as much as it did the widespread refusal of southern industry to comply with NRA codes and the NRA’s utter lack of a reliable enforcement mechanism.²⁴⁰ At the same time, it emphasized the JCNR’s capacity for research and grassroots monitoring and enforcement, while demonstrating the unique capabilities of workers to monitor changes in working conditions and employer practices over time and sound the alarm on code violations and lack of enforcement.

In their efforts to improve code compliance and enforcement, Davis and the JCNR both directly targeted and mobilized their research to create opportunities to collaborate with southern industrialists and the NRA. Davis engaged with southern industrialist trade association representatives and employers to compel them to improve Black workers’ wages, working conditions, and treatment, and pay back wages, at times attempting to encourage them to become “high road” employers and industries that set the trend for integrity, respect, and good working conditions.²⁴¹ Davis’s engagement with George Sloan, president of the Cotton Textile Institute, serves as an illustrative example.

After Davis prepared a supplemental brief for Sloan to assist the cotton textile code drafting committee in its revisions,²⁴² he attempted to leverage the connection to create an open line of communication between him and Sloan to urge code improvement and compliance in the industry, pressing the code supervisor to speak up for the protection of workers excluded from coverage under the industry code by way of occupational exclusions.²⁴³ Essentially, Davis attempted to inspire the mills to become high road employers, pressuring Sloan to push employers in the industry to “employ a fair allotment of unemployed colored men and women” and “make public announcement of this fact.”²⁴⁴ While these attempts do not appear to have been successful, that Davis sought to develop relationships and work with southern industrialists to change the behavior of industries and employers is particularly noteworthy as a creative tactic and as it represents Davis’s diplomatic but direct defiance of Jim Crowism and white supremacy.

Davis no doubt also had Sloan and the cotton textile industry in mind when he embarked on his 3,000 mile field research trip across the South in November 1933; he visited 200 cotton mills and talked to more than 1,000 Black textile workers.²⁴⁵ When he returned to Washington D.C. in December, he penned a letter to Sloan demanding the public hearing be held to set minimum wage rates for the textile code’s excluded occupations.²⁴⁶ Davis wrote that unless the Code Authority provided for such a hearing where labor interests could be represented, the “only recourse would seem to be widespread publicity of my [research] findings” which he revealed provided “undeniable proof of violations of the existing code by cotton textile mills, thoroughly demonstrated evidence of the total inadequacy of present wages, and of discrimination against Negro workers in these mills.”²⁴⁷ When Sloan did not budge, Davis made good on his word, and put the spotlight on both the plight of Black workers and the predacious law-breaking employers in the industry, disseminating a JCNR report on the abysmal conditions Black workers faced in the textile industry to Sloan, NRA Administration General Johnson, and Chairman of the Labor Advisory Board Leo Wolman.²⁴⁸

Davis and the JCNR also publicly criticized and challenged the NRA and New Deal administration while working in cooperation with federal agencies and administrators to enforce the codes of fair competition. For instance, Davis directly confronted NRA officials with the September 18, 1933, transcript and published it in the newspapers to expose the racism and discrimination that infected the agency and its decision-making, as well as the NRA’s hesitance to investigate violations and enforce the code in the south.²⁴⁹ At the same time, Davis and the JCNR eagerly collaborated and shared research and information with the NRA and its compliance officials. As a result, they were ultimately able to catalyze administrative action to investigate violations and enforce the NRA code against employer violators targeting Black labor.²⁵⁰ As I will demonstrate in the case study in Part III, where southern industrialist employers supplied falsified or incomplete records, or altogether refused to turn over information to the NRA, Davis and the JCNR swooped in to provide the information and research needed to push investigations forward, with Davis even serving as a special prosecutor for the NRA in one case.²⁵¹

C. Educational Publicity

Under Davis’s leadership, the third key tactic the JCNR deployed involved a well-developed outreach and media strategy. As Davis attested, “an important part of the work of the [JCNR] must necessarily be to inform public opinion about the inequitable status and treatment of Negro labor under the various Federal plans for national economic recovery as they are applied.”²⁵² He referred to such work as “educational publicity.”²⁵³ Davis and the JCNR used this tactic to empower and mobilize Black workers and member organizations by providing them with critical information about code development, implementation, and enforcement processes and a course of organized action with a clear path to claims-making and justice in the case of code violations and discrimination. This educational messaging resonated with Black workers, communities, and organizations, connected them to the key issues, and inspired them to take action.

Davis’s educational publicity tactic also functioned to put public pressure on the NRA and southern industrialists to respond to JCNR demands. Press releases were strategically deployed to pressure industries, employers, and the NRA to improve minimum wage provisions, bring exempted occupations under code, ensure code compliance, and prosecute code violations. For example, this approach was used to pressure the lumber industry to increase the minimum wage in the south, with twenty-six Scripps-Howard newspapers publishing an article on the labor conditions of Black saw-mill workers. The article was circulated nationally, in both the b lack and white press.²⁵⁴ t his pressure resulted in a ½ cent increase from the initial proposed minimum wage of 22 ½ cents an hour to 23 cents an hour in the approved code. While still appallingly low, the organization concluded that the ½ cent increase would mean an additional $125,000 of added weekly income for the workers in the industry.²⁵⁵

Likewise, JCNR staff made regular appearances at forums, conferences, meetings of member organizations, and union meetings across the country to raise awareness about the NRA codes, share information, bring the concerns and experience of Black workers into focus, and put pressure on employers and the NRA. The JCNR also used these opportunities to mobilize the community and expand membership. For example, after completing fieldwork with workers at southern textile mills, Davis went to Atlanta University to present his findings at a seminar taught by Du Bois on “Karl Marx and the Negro,” and later presented his research at Charles H. Wesley’s history class and Ralph Bunche’s government class.²⁵⁶ Davis spoke at lodges and church gatherings in Washington, D.C., an NAACP convention in Oklahoma, a forum on the NRA in Harlem, and at Wilberforce University in Ohio.²⁵⁷ At the Tuskegee Institute’s 1933 regional conference on “The Negro and National Recovery,” Davis served as a speaker, and “distributed fifteen hundred leaflets describing its [the JCNR’s] mission and sponsored a roundtable discussion on the New Deal” with the help of volunteers.²⁵⁸

The JCNR also held its own conferences. At its National Conference in 1934, the JCNR brought together leading academics, lawyers, organizers, activists, union leaders, Black workers, and leaders of its member organizations to present on and discuss the NRA codes and their effects on Black workers. With all of these constituencies, the JCNR also sought to identify workers’ immediate needs, areas of future research, and the direction of the JCNR’s ongoing work.²⁵⁹

D. Organizing and Leadership Development

To achieve their objectives, Davis and the JCNR also utilized organizing and leadership development tactics, centering worker voices and engaging Black workers and leaders in efforts to change their circumstances. As the JCNR came to prominence, workers sent letters directly to Davis and the JCNR to report firsthand accounts of starvation wages, abysmal working conditions, wage theft, misclassification, code violations, and employer suppression of worker organization. Davis and his colleagues incorporated these letters into public hearing statements, research briefs, and publications and served as the basis of legal mobilization efforts and worker campaigns. Davis and the JCNR, taking a note from the ILD, also ran frequent telegram campaigns, mobilizing individual and organizational JCNR members to flood the administrative offices of the NRA with telegrams of protest against discriminatory NRA codes.²⁶⁰

JCNR research, organizing, educational publicity, and advocacy efforts were strategically integrated. The movement organization network’s work in the tobacco industry serves as an illustrative example. In late 1933, Davis rallied the support of Black business owners to fund a tobacco industry-mapping field research trip by Weaver; the final report—which revealed that even though the industry had the capacity to pay living wages to Black tobacco workers, who accounted for 75% of the industry’s total workforce and endured irregular work and poor labor conditions—was used alongside Davis’s field research to inform the JCNR brief presented by Charles Hamilton Houston at the August 21, 1934 tobacco code hearing.²⁶¹ After the hearing, the tobacco industry dragged its feet to avoid the adoption of a code; Black tobacco workers wrote more than twenty urgent letters to the JCNR requesting help.²⁶²

In response, the JCNR expanded its research efforts. Rose Coe collaborated with former NRA Bureau of Research and Planning employee C.J. Coe and former chief statistician of the NRA Labor Board A.G. Silverman to design a worker questionnaire. Davis then traveled to the South to administer the questionnaire to Black tobacco workers and collect narratives concerning racial discrimination by employers and white labor organizations, anti-union employer activity, and the deployment of white foremen by employers to physically search Black female employees’ clothes and harass them if they went near a union hall.²⁶³ As a result of these efforts, Davis was named the NRA co-labor advisory for the tobacco code, which provided him access to all government papers on the code and the authority to be present at all private conferences on it.²⁶⁴ In subsequent code conferences and hearings, and in a direct wire to the President, Davis used the research on labor conditions and organization among Black tobacco workers to advocate for living wages and improved working conditions in the industry.²⁶⁵

As Davis explained in a report to JCNR members, field research provided the JCNR with strategic opportunities to advance JCNR organizing and alliance building efforts:

[W]e must have more field investigation to accomplish our tasks well. Not only must we concretize our theories with actual facts, but as well these trips must be made the occasion of selling the joint committee with thousands of influential persons, who would rally to us if made aware of our work and our financial problems.²⁶⁶

While traveling throughout the South conducting research on labor conditions and organization among Black tobacco workers, Davis connected with Black and white union representatives in the industry, with whom he later shared his research findings and offered suggestions on how to organize workers.²⁶⁷ He also worked to publish and distribute a pamphlet on the tobacco code to Black and white tobacco workers with the help of sociologist, social worker, and minister Richard R. Wright Jr.²⁶⁸

These labor organizing-focused efforts were not limited to the tobacco industry. Under Davis’s leadership, the JCNR strengthened and supported the organizing efforts of Black workers. In one instance, Davis attempted to help a group of Black textile workers form a union.²⁶⁹ He would later focus more heavily on building interracial labor power and catalyze interracial labor organizing.²⁷⁰

Importantly, the JCNR fostered collaborative environments for Black workers to engage in efforts to change their circumstances and educate and work alongside JCNR leaders and allied practitioners, scholars, and organizers. For example, in May 1935, Lea Duncan, the garment worker who filed the initial complaint that led to the Maid-Well case and garment worker justice campaign, was a featured speaker at the JCNR’s “National Conference on the Economic Crisis and the Negro.”²⁷¹ She served on an all-worker panel that day and was joined by a tobacco worker from North Carolina, a domestic worker from New York, a laundry worker from Washington, D.C.,²⁷² a Black farmer who was nearly lynched after he got into a dispute with white farm agents over his cotton check, and a sharecropper from “one of the most vicious plantations in Alabama” who had to be “taken from the plantation in the dead of night to prevent his apprehension and possible physical violence to him by the plantation overseer.”²⁷³ The workers shared their experiences and insight, as well as the stage, with other conference presenters and attendees, including several of the Black pioneers of sociology, W.E.B. Du Bois, E. Franklin Frazier, Abram Harris, Charles S. Johnson, and Ira De Reid.²⁷⁴

In some instances, individual Black workers became more involved in JCNR objectives through organizing.²⁷⁵ For example, Duncan helped build grassroots support in her hometown of Forrest City for the burgeoning NNC. When Davis authored the “Let us Build a National Negro Congress”—the pamphlet that served as the NNC’s call to action, 50,000 copies of which were distributed in Black communities nationwide to mobilize support for the mass mobilization effort—Duncan sold more than 426 pamphlets, recruited another worker to sell them with her, and succeeded in getting scholars, pastors, leaders, and workers to endorse the budding NNC.²⁷⁶

E. Disruptive Activities

Indicative of the JCNR’s boldness and fluency in the ways of the labor movement, Davis, member organizations, and individual members never lost sight of the importance of disruptive activities as a fifth key tactic to advance their aims. In one particularly creative instance, Davis masterminded a plan designed to make A. Philip Randolph’s annual (and up until that point, ineffective) verbal appeal to white union leaders to prohibit race discrimination and segregation in labor unions and bring Black organizers into the union more effective.²⁷⁷

After Randolph petitioned the NAACP’s Walter White for help, Davis stepped in to provide tactical ingenuity. Davis devised an unprecedented plan to picket the white labor union leaders at their union hall and hotel convention center by descending upon entrances with leaflets and surrounding the building with trucks laden with loudspeakers and bearing billboards that declared:

“Unions should be color blind. Organize the American Negroes,” “White Labor Cannot Be Free While Black Labor is Enslaved, and “White Unions Make Black Scabs” . . . in the most audacious public challenge to racism in its ranks the union movement had ever seen.²⁷⁸

Davis’s plan brought the exclusion of Black workers from trade unions to the attention of the A.F.L. convention delegates and helped prompt the passage of the A.F.L.’s “Randolph Resolution” that called for an investigation into discrimination within the union.²⁷⁹ The JCNR aided in the investigation, presenting research documenting racial discrimination by union leaders, and mobilizing Black and white witnesses to testify. While the JCNR successfully convinced the A.F.L. committee to sustain all of its recommendations, the union subsequently refused to support a resolution to break down the color bar.²⁸⁰

Individual JCNR members also engaged in direct action and supported allied organizations as they pursued similar tactics. For example, after Davis helped Weaver secure a federal position,²⁸¹ Weaver, Hastie, and Byrd engaged in sit-ins at their respective federal workplaces. Weaver and Hastie defied the Interior Department’s segregated lunchroom rules by eating with their white colleagues in the whites only area, which led to the integration of other federal lunchrooms.²⁸² After Byrd was let go from the NRA and brought on as a researcher at the Consumer Advisory Board, she promptly challenged segregation by going to eat with her white friends in the Senate’s whites only dining room, whereupon she was forcibly removed by the police.²⁸³ After Byrd’s forceful ejection from the dining room, the Senate Rules Committee denied that the dining room had ever been segregated in the first place.²⁸⁴ Davis also provided support to allied organizations engaging in direct action. For instance, Davis provided support to his friends William H. Hastie and John Aubrey Davis of the New Negro Alliance (“NNA”) by attending NNA meetings and lending legal advice to the organization in relation to a restraining order filed by a department store against the NNA after its successful “don’t work where you can’t buy” economic boycott campaign.²⁸⁵

Davis and the JCNR also used media and communications tactics as a form of direct action. For example, after obtaining a copy of the September 18, 1933 Special Industrial Recovery Board transcript which contained direct evidence of race discrimination by agency administrators in NRA decision-making,²⁸⁶ Davis interrupted a secret meeting the NRA had arranged to convince Black leaders of the merits of supporting racial wages.²⁸⁷ He confronted the NRA with its own racism by reading directly from the transcript and producing the pay envelopes of Black workers he had collected during his field research as evidence of starvation wages and code violations, demanded the NRA “crack down” on code violators, and published the transcript in the newspapers for the world to read.²⁸⁸

Davis’s dramatic public confrontation of the NRA and use of the media can be viewed as a nonviolent direct action tactic, which Martin Luther King later described as an a action that “seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue . . . and dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.”²⁸⁹ Indeed, Davis’s actions created conditions that made it increasingly difficult for the government to sidestep issues of racism and race discrimination and maintain moral legitimacy in the eyes of the public. Labor Secretary Frances Perkins acknowledged as much in a memo to Harold Ickes as she called for an investigation to uncover the secret source that provided the transcript to Davis and warned that “we [the NRA] may be caused considerable embarrassment” with further “irresponsible” publicity.²⁹⁰

F. Legal Mobilization, Worker Justice Campaigns, and Other Assistance

Finally, the JCNR’s tactical repertoire cannot be fully understood without considering the roles that legal mobilization, worker justice campaigns, and other forms of worker assistance played in the movement organization network’s effort to build power, catalyze collective action, and achieve its broader aims. Black workers across industries responded to the JCNR’s explicit calls for workers to take action and report their experiences with discrimination and code violations to the JCNR, sending letters containing their firsthand accounts of the starvation wages, abysmal working conditions, wage theft, misclassification, code violations, suppression of labor organizing, discrimination, and racial terrorization they endured.²⁹¹ As Davis and his colleagues built relationships across organizations and institutions, JCNR member organizations, the Women’s Bureau at the Department of Labor, and New Deal administrators began forwarding the complaints they received from Black workers directly to the JCNR.²⁹²

These complaints formed the basis of JCNR legal mobilization efforts and worker justice campaigns. Davis filed more than 150 complaints with the code authorities on behalf of workers.²⁹³ He secured official investigations of code violations for a number of complaints, including the Southland Pecan Company in Georgia, the Southern Cotton Oil Company in Georgia, the Caroll Turner Saw Mill in South Carolina, and the Maid-Well Garment Company in Arkansas.²⁹⁴ Davis provided both individual workers and groups of workers with help pursuing misclassification and wage theft claims.²⁹⁵ As I will explore in the following case study, Davis sometimes represented workers directly, while also leveraging the legal resources available within the JCNR’s member organization network and bringing in NAACP attorneys to help secure the restitution of workers’ back wages. These were not stand-alone legal mobilization efforts. They were part and parcel of broader worker justice campaigns.

JCNR worker justice campaigns employed a series of organized actions and coordinated legal mobilization efforts with research, media, employer negotiation, and other tactics. Through these campaigns, the JCNR put public pressure on code violating employers and industry leaders to comply with the codes; compelled the NRA to investigate allegations of wage theft, misclassification, and other code violations, and hold employers accountable for such violations; and pushed industry, government, and the public to reckon with the ways in which racism had shaped the development and implementation of the NRA codes and broader New Deal. To supplement these efforts, the JCNR connected workers to other services and assistance programs, including federal relief.²⁹⁶

III. The Maid-Well Case & Garment Worker

Justice Campaign

To illustrate what Davis’s mobilization and multi-pronged advocacy models looked like in action, this Section provides a case study of the JCNR’s major garment worker justice campaign. The nearly two-anda-half-year campaign represents the most significant example of the JCNR mobilizing the full expanse of its movement organization network and creatively targeting both a single employer and broader industry though the use of Davis’s multidimensional and strategically integrated advocacy model.

A. The Cotton Garment Code

The cotton garment code, which went into effect on November 27, 1933, contained the types of discriminatory devices Davis had previously identified and contested in other code hearings.²⁹⁷ The text of the code included a southern differential of $12 for a 36 hour work week in the South and $13 for the same work week in the North.²⁹⁸ By the time the garment code was passed, Davis and his colleagues had already publicly exposed southern differentials as intentionally discriminatory and negated the various justifications southern industrialists and the NRA offered to support them: that historical, segregated wage differentials were a southern tradition deserving of preservation and protection; that the climatic conditions of the South made labor less efficient; and that the South had a lower cost of living.²⁹⁹ Using empirical data, Davis had shown that the geographical boundaries of the “South” were gerrymandered by code authors and authorities to include any region where Black workers predominated in order to deny Black workers the benefits of minimum wages.³⁰⁰ The shifting of southern borders within and between the different codes, Davis argued, constituted an “economic Mason-Dixon line” that “had a way of extending itself to prevent Negro workers from receiving high wage minimums.”³⁰¹

Notably, the cotton garment code provided a definition of the South that seems to have been written with Davis’s criticisms in mind.³⁰²

The South which is entitled to a differential is not the historic South, the climatic South, or the Solid South. It is the South in which labor is less productive than in the North. A line can be drawn intelligently only if data on lower productivity are available. If Southern manufacturers present adequate data to the Administrator, then the Administrator can eliminate any injustices which now exist. On the basis of the sentimental and historic arguments which were made at the hearings, it was impossible to act.³⁰³

The injustices the cotton garment code intended to avoid were those that claimed southern industrialists as their victims.

To this point, the code allowed southern industrialists to petition for exemptions from the cotton garment code, or seek substitutions to the minimum wage provisions, “in cases of individual hardship.” The exemptions and substitutions provided relief to companies “because of peculiar situations” that put them at a disadvantage; southern industrialists were relieved of the obligation of having to pay standard minimum wage rates to workers they claimed were inefficient.³⁰⁴ Code provisions also allowed employers to pay “substandard employees” and workers classified as “learners” subminimum wages.³⁰⁵ Thus, by allowing for exemptions and substitutions to minimum wage provisions and using proxies for race, the cotton garment code preserved the southern tradition of racially segregated wages and allowed southern industrialists to pay Black workers less than minimum wage.³⁰⁶

B. Origins of the Maid-Well Case and Worker Justice Campaign

The origins of the Maid-Well case and garment worker justice campaign can be traced to January 1934, when the DOL received a letter from Lea Duncan.³⁰⁷ Duncan, a Black garment worker employed by the Maid-Well Company in Forrest City, Arkansas, accused Maid-Well of failing to pay Black workers the minimum wage rates established by the Cotton Garment Code.³⁰⁸ Prior to the NRA code going into effect, Maid-Well had been paying its 200 Black workers $6.16 per week and paying its white workers $7 per week.³⁰⁹ After the code was put into effect, Black workers continued to be paid the same wage for ten weeks, $6.00 less per week than they were entitled to receive under the code.³¹⁰

After receiving the complaint letter, the DOL referred it to the Women’s Bureau, which forwarded it to the JCNR. After looking into the case, Davis filed a complaint with the NIRA Compliance Division on behalf of the Maid-Well employees on January 13, 1934, seeking approximately $4,000 in back wages for 143 Black female garment workers at the company’s Forrest City plant.³¹¹ On January 30, 1933, after Maid- Well received notification by the NRA that it been accused of a violation, the company fired all of its Black employees at the Forrest City plant.³¹² The company’s owner Ed Ash—who had petitioned for an exemption to the cotton garment code to evade approved minimum wage rates and been denied—told the NRA the Black workers had been fired due to their inefficiency.³¹³ In a seeming attempt to suppress worker organizing, Maid-Well told its employees that the women had been fired because they lodged a complaint with the NIRA Compliance Division.³¹⁴

Davis and the JCNR protested the wage theft, retaliatory termination, and inept investigation and enforcement machinery by confronting officials at the Compliance Division, calling for a telegram protest that inundated the office of the President and NRA Administrator, and testifying at administrative hearings.³¹⁵ At the NRA complaint hearing in February 1933, Davis presented empirical and analytical evidence that exposed the existence and impact of the discriminatory devices embedded in the codes, before drawing attention to the NRA’s failure to investigate the Maid-Well case.³¹⁶

Now let us see what happens when a Negro complains to the compliance machinery of the NRA. On January 13, on thoroughly investigated evidence, I notified the National Compliance Board that a cotton garment factory was violating its code. On January 30, one hundred and ninety-four Negro women at this plant lost their Jobs. To this day nothing has been done. Now if that is the type of enforcement we are going to have, I see little need of forwarding the dozens of complaints I receive dally to the compliance board.³¹⁷

Davis pressed the NIRA Compliance Division in Washington, D.C. to investigate the flagrant code violations and wage theft, but had to redirect his efforts a few months later, when he was advised that he would need to refile the complaint with the state compliance director in Arkansas.³¹⁸ He did so two days later.³¹⁹

C. Educational Publicity, Written and Telegram Protests, and Field Research

On June 2, 1934, Davis received a letter from the Acting Chief of the NIRA Compliance Division, J.H. Ward, as to the status of the investigation.³²⁰ Ward’s letter confirmed Maid-Well had violated the cotton garment code when it paid twenty-five Black women employed as trimmers less than they were owed for one week, “unless the women were to be classified as learners.”³²¹ However, the letter indicated that the plant had been closed during the other weeks for which Davis was seeking restitution for the terminated workers.³²² The NRA’s unpaid wage calculations ignored the majority of the wage theft victims. According to the NRA, the workers were owed $149.90 in back wages, not $4,000 as Davis claimed in his complaint.³²³ Davis and the JCNR were informed that the orders for restitution for unpaid wages had been entered, but payment would be delayed several months until Maid-Well’s owner returned from international travel.³²⁴

Davis immediately realized that the NRA had failed to adequately review his complaint or investigate the violation. First, the wage rate paid to workers, which he had included in the complaint, was far below that allowed for “learners.” Second, all of the dismissed workers had been employed by Maid-Well for far longer than the time period allowed under the code provisions concerning workers classified as “learners.”³²⁵ He lodged a complaint with the Washington D.C. Compliance Division, arguing that the state office in Little Rock had delayed the case, disregarded the rights of the workers, neglected to confirm the actual rate of pay received by the workers during the relevant period, and failed to conduct an investigation.³²⁶

To ensure that Maid-Well was properly investigated and held accountable for violating the code, Davis pushed toward co-enforcement by collaborating with the NRA while simultaneously exposing its failures. To that end, he provided the NRA with the names and addresses of more than half of the terminated Maid-Well employees to aid in its investigation.³²⁷ He then put educational publicity, telegram protest, and mixedmethods research tactics to work to call attention to the inadequate NRA investigation and demand justice for the women of Maid-Well. ³²⁸

On June 16, 1934, the JCNR put out a press release containing the full text of the June 2, 1934, letter Davis received from Ward. It also included Davis’s public response to the letter. In his response, Davis asserted:

[O]ur [the JCNR’s] evidence indicated that the company has failed to pay several thousands of dollars in wages to its Negro women employees. When all the evidence is in, the JCNR will insist that the back wages be paid to these employees…[and] that the Federal District Attorney for that District Immediately prosecute the office of the company. This company is liable to a fine of $500 a day for each day’s violation of the cotton garment code and its officers may be placed in jail for a period of six months for each day’s violation.³²⁹

After demanding that the employer be compelled to pay the full amount of back wages due, criminally prosecuted, and fined daily for noncompliance, Davis called for a letter writing and telegram protest and a united front of mobilized Black organizations to demand that Maid-Well be held accountable.

It is up to Negro citizens everywhere to insist that this company be punished to the full extent of the law and to make themselves felt by writing to General Hugh Johnson of the NRA on the matter. It is almost impossible to get an air tight case against NRA violators who discriminate against Black workers. Now that we have one, I hope that Negro organizations will help us make the most of it so that it will be a shining example to other employers who think it an easy matter to discriminate against Negro [employees]. I hope further that our success in this case will lead colored workers everywhere to write us about their complaints, so that we may seek justice for them as well.³³⁰

To further inform the investigation and enforcement efforts and substantiate workers’ claims, Davis went to Forrest City and used the tools of Black sociology to conduct mixed-methods field research on issues relevant to the case.³³¹

The trip was part of a larger 4,000-mile multistate data collection expedition that included field research stops in Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Alabama. This time, Davis brought NAACP attorney Charles H. Houston, NAACP Secretary Walter White, and teacher and NAACP youth organizer Juanita Jackson along with him, as well as the NAACP’s video camera to help with evidence collection and publicity for the case.³³² As part of the JCNR’s innovative educational publicity efforts, Davis later published the Forrest City research and the JCNR displayed the film reels at a dinner meeting featuring prominent New Deal speakers, “showing in graphic manner the Negro worker and his problems in the South.”³³³ Davis shared the information he collected on the trip with the NRA.³³⁴

D. Opposing Racist Petitions for Code Exemptions in the Garment Industry

While the Maid-Well case was stuck in a holding pattern, Davis and his JCNR colleagues made appearances at NRA conferences and hearings to oppose Southern garment manufacturers’ petitions for code exemptions made on the basis of worker inefficiency.³³⁵ Davis’s opposition to the exemption petition of Southland Manufacturing Company of Montgomery, Alabama serves as an illustrative example. Southland applied for an exemption on the basis that the workers in its Alabama plant were inefficient.³³⁶ It was granted a stay of enforcement in November of 1933 pending a hearing for exemption and then granted another stay on March 9, 1934, to allow for further investigation.³³⁷

Davis traveled to Alabama to aid the NRA in its investigation and enforcement efforts concerning Southland. He conducted field research; investigated the Southland plant, spoke with the plant manager; inspected the plant’s records; and talked to many of the plant’s workers.³³⁸ On October 9, 1934, Davis participated in the hearing on the Southland exemption.³³⁹ At the hearing, Davis peppered the Southland plant superintendent with a series of questions that ultimately led the superintendent, as he was describing Southland workers, to declare that “the negro girl is a little more helpless than a majority of the white ones.”³⁴⁰ The admission revealed the racist undergirding behind Southland’s exemption petition and claims of worker inefficiency.

Davis further showed that the data Southland submitted to the NRA as evidence of the comparative inefficiency of its worker—which had been used by the Labor Advisory Board to prepare an comparative analysis of productivity rates between different plants—had used an inappropriate comparison between Indiana and Georgia plants that operated on two different systems and failed to take into account the differing quality of machinery used by Black and white workers.³⁴¹ Using the productivity data from Southland and a nearby cotton garment plant that operated under the same system as Southland, company records provided to him by a Southland manager, and his own observational and in-depth interview data, Davis furnished an alternative analysis based on an appropriate comparison of plants operating on the same system.³⁴² Davis’s analysis indicated that the difference in productivity between white and Black workers was due to the fact Black workers were provided with older machinery, which the President of Southland Manufacturing admitted were 25-35% slower than the new machinery provided to white workers.³⁴³ Perhaps as a testament to Davis and his colleagues’ focus on building horizontal relationships and establishing the JCNR as a source of credible data, both Department of Labor Secretary Frances Perkins and the Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau Director Mary Anderson submitted letters opposing the Southland exemption.³⁴⁴

E. Using Law and Black Sociology to Present a Case Study of Maid-Well

In December 1934, with Maid-Well not yet held accountable for its actions, Davis published an article in The Crisis that used critical, legal, and Black sociological research to present a case study on Maid-Well.³⁴⁵ The study presented data derived from letters, surveys, and ethnographic interviews with Maid-Well workers and their families.³⁴⁶ It illustrated the real-life impact of the NRA’s deference to Jim Crow, “the seeming breakdown of the [NRA] compliance machinery,” and “the slowness and inadequacy of the relief machinery in meeting pressing conditions of need” on the everyday lives and work experiences of the Black women against whom Maid-Well had discriminated, committed wage theft, and retaliated.³⁴⁷ Davis used the publication to address the immediate problem of Maid-Well in a way that could empirically inform and put pressure on NRA and New Deal officials to take remedial action.³⁴⁸

The article revealed that although both Black and white female operators at Maid-Well were assigned the same work, white women worked on the upper floor with superior working conditions and machinery, while their Black counterparts were relegated to inferior conditions and antiquated machinery.³⁴⁹ That fact, rather than race, explained any difference in productivity between the groups. The article demonstrated that even Black workers who had previously and consistently received the highest rating given by the employer on performance evaluation—those who had been classified as “Class A” and had no record of tardiness or absence—had been misclassified, paid subminimum wages, and terminated for alleged inefficiency.³⁵⁰

Furthermore, the article showed that Maid-Well had exploited the industry’s code provision that allowed an employer to pay “learners”—workers who had been employed at the company for less than six weeks—80% of the code’s minimum wage rate. Maid-Well had purposely misclassified Black women who had worked at the company for longer than six weeks—and in many cases had worked at the company for years—as learners.³⁵¹

Davis reported that a majority of the Black women that Maid-Well fired were the primary earners in their households.³⁵² Thus, the employer’s wage theft, discrimination, and wrongful termination, as well as the NRA’s lax investigations and inadequate enforcement machinery, placed workers and their families in a state of immediate need of relief.³⁵³ Despite this, the majority of these workers had been denied the relief they were qualified to receive from the Federal Emergency Relief Administration.³⁵⁴ For the few workers that were granted relief, it barely covered necessities for their families.³⁵⁵

Davis had tracked the efforts of the women to secure alternative employment and his study reported that most of the women were still unemployed eight months after their termination.³⁵⁶ Those who were employed labored in occupations and sectors not covered by the NRA codes, worked more than sixty hours a week, and earned starvation wages (as little as $4.50 per month).³⁵⁷

F. Legal Mobilization and Other Assistance

When the Maid-Well owner, Ash, finally returned to the United States, he refused to comply with the NRA’s request for company payroll records and likewise declined to pay back wages. Instead, he destroyed the company records relevant to the period in question.³⁵⁸ The Arkansas office, then, relied on the data and materials collected by the JCNR and found, just as Davis had alleged in the complaint, that Maid-Well owed approximately $4,000 in back wages.³⁵⁹ According to the NIRA Compliance and Enforcement Director, Ash “absolutely refused to make restitution in accordance with the figures compiled by the Arkansas office.” ³⁶⁰ The Arkansas office was then ordered to transmit the case to the Dallas Regional Council,³⁶¹ as only regional offices at that point “had the power to remove the Blue Eagle and select cases to be referred to the Department of Justice for prosecution.”³⁶² Even as a hearing was scheduled in Dallas and after “15 months of constant efforts,” Davis suspected that a triumph in Dallas would ring hollow as the NRA had little way to compel the actual payment of back wages.³⁶³ “In order to secure the back wages in this case legal action may be necessary,”³⁶⁴ Davis concluded in his February 9, 1935 Report to JCNR members, explaining that he had already “suggested a course of legal action to the NAACP.”³⁶⁵

Davis returned to Forrest City with C.J. Coe, an occasional technical analyst for the JCNR.³⁶⁶ The two spent several days talking with workers and collecting evidence for the Dallas hearing.³⁶⁷ When Davis found the dismissed garment workers were eager to sue, he conferred with Little Rock NAACP attorneys who intended to use Maid-Well as a test case and file suit in the federal district court to recover unpaid wages.³⁶⁸ Before heading to Dallas, Davis secured affidavits from almost all of the Black garment workers fired by Maid-Well, as well as several white workers “who proved anxious to cooperate” with their Black coworkers in fighting for their back wages.³⁶⁹

In his testimony at the Investigation of the National Recovery Administration hearings a month later, Davis stated that he risked his life to get the affidavits.³⁷⁰ This was no embellishment. Deadly tensions had arisen between employers and employees in Arkansas as a result of recent labor organizing activity among Black sharecroppers, which prompted white employers to form Klan-inspired group called the “nightriders.”³⁷¹ Black industrial and agricultural workers and Black leaders were being targeted with racial terrorization across the South. Davis monitored the intimidation and killings of Black industrial and agricultural workers for exercising their collective right to organize against southern industrialist domination and demanding their employers be held accountable for their lawbreaking actions.³⁷² Testifying before the Senate Committee on Finance, Davis underscored that “he had his every move monitored by the Forrest City Chief of Police and others, who hound[ed] [Davis and Coe] to prevent [them] from seeing these workers.”³⁷³

In March 1935, Davis appeared at the hearing on the Maid-Well case before the NIRA Dallas Regional Compliance Council and served as a special prosecutor in the case.³⁷⁴ With Maid-Well records destroyed, the compliance officers had “no concrete evidence on which to base their case.”³⁷⁵ As such, the case against Maid-Well was built using the research and affidavits Davis had compiled. Ultimately, Davis’s mobilization and multidimensional advocacy models helped deliver a more than $6,000 verdict in favor of the Black garment workers.³⁷⁶ The decision closely tracked the claims Davis had made in his December publication.³⁷⁷ Based on the arguments and data presented by Davis, the NRA’s Regional Compliance Council found that Maid-Well had misclassified their workers, exceeded the maximum number of learners designations permitted, and committed wage theft in violation of the minimum wage provisions of the Cotton Garment Code.³⁷⁸ Maid-Well was ordered to discontinue use of the NRA insignia and sale of garments with the NRA insignia attached.³⁷⁹ It was further recommended that the Regional Director refer the case to the appropriate U.S. Attorney and that a grand jury investigation be instituted immediately to determine if the owners of Maid-Well had committed a criminal offense.³⁸⁰

Discussing the Dallas decision in a report to JCNR members, Davis underscored that the JCNR would seek to provide garment workers with additional services and support:

Our aid to the workers of Forrest City is not finished. We have yet to seek for them some type of self-help project, work relief, and other federal aid which will free them from the almost utter destitution in which most of them find themselves today.³⁸¹

Davis’s research in Forrest City had already revealed that the workers had been denied both restitution and relief by FERA. So, the JCNR focused their efforts on securing workers access to federal relief. Davis sent copies of the research report to FERA officials.³⁸² Myra Callis, a YWCA representative, had conferences with the FERA officials and authored a research-based analysis that documented the steps necessary to mounting a self-help project for the workers.³⁸³ When FERA completed its investigation, it found 123 families with complaints whereas the NRA found only a handful.³⁸⁴ Though Davis concluded that it was still “impossible” for Black workers to access adequate relief from local, state, or federal sources at the time of the Dallas decision, he maintained the JCNR would continue working to secure relief, writing that it would “be the task of the Joint Committee to insist on adequate relief and rehabilitation for these distressed families as soon as relief agencies begin again to function in Arkansas.”³⁸⁵

G. A Hollow Victory?

After the Dallas decision, the District Attorney promptly called witnesses to Little Rock to appear before the federal grand jury to seek an indictment in this case,³⁸⁶ with fifteen witnesses recommended by Davis appearing before the federal grand jury to testify against the company.³⁸⁷ With witnesses already appearing before the federal grand jury,³⁸⁸ Judge S.H. Mann—who was acting as Ash’s lawyer while simultaneously serving as the head of NIRA compliance in Forrest City—traveled to Washington, D.C. to get the proceeding dismissed.³⁸⁹ Mann relied on the authority of a NRA Office Memorandum released less than a week before the hearing, which stated that the “[I]ndustrial Appeals Board may hear complaints on all final administrative actions of NRA.”³⁹⁰ As a result of Mann’s efforts in D.C., the proceeding was dismissed, an entirely new investigation was ordered, and the case transferred to D.C. for a rehearing before the Industrial Appeals Board.³⁹¹ Davis protested the move, arguing that the action contravened the Board of Industrial Appeals’ procedural rules that prevented it from taking a case in which litigation had already begun or was imminent.³⁹²

With a brand-new investigation ordered, Mann, Ash, and Arkansas state compliance personnel were provided the information deemed necessary to conduct a fresh investigation, including the signed affidavits of the Maid-Well garment workers Davis had secured and provided to the NRA.³⁹³ Sixty Black women who had signed the affidavits were brought in for questioning by the six labor compliance officers who arrived in Forrest City to conduct the new investigation.³⁹⁴ One by one, the women were brought into a room with Mann and Ash and asked about the wage rates they had been paid, the amount of back wages owed to them, and the name of the woman who made the initial complaint.³⁹⁵ The NIRA Division of Compliance authorities wired the Arkansas office with blunt instructions:

Re Maidwell Garment investigation charges made, you are taking testimony of employees in presence of Ash and Mass/Mann. You are to follow regular compliance procedure in not disclosing name of complainants. Testimony of employees must not be taken in presence of respondent or his attorney.³⁹⁶

The Director of the NIRA Division of Compliance insisted that “absolutely no deviation from normal procedure in Maid-Well.”³⁹⁷

Despite these directions, Mann, Ash, and their representatives intimidated the women into signing statements repudiating the previous affidavits Davis collected and blacklisted the workers from finding work at nearby garment factories.³⁹⁸ Duncan, who had been identified during questioning as the initial complainant, fled the state in fear for her life.³⁹⁹ Davis compiled a list of the blacklisted workers and collected affidavits concerning their experience, demanded the names of the compliance agents who colluded with Mann and Ash, and called for a hearing in D.C.⁴⁰⁰

Davis and the Maid-Well workers got their hearing. The Board of Industrial Appeals ultimately issued a decision in favor of the garment workers and ordered they collectively be paid nearly $7,000 in back wages. However, a week later, on May 27, 1935, the Supreme Court decided Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States ,⁴⁰¹ which invalidated Section 3 of the NIRA in violation of the nondelegation doctrine, making it impossible for the JCNR to collect the money owed to the Maid-Well workers.⁴⁰²

H. Seeing Success

Just as Davis and his colleagues understood that formal legal change and court-centered reform alone were incapable of delivering social transformation and systems change, they appreciated that the effectiveness and impact of their movement organization network and broader movement could not and should not be measured by focusing on state-focused outcomes. As they understood it, the Maid-Well campaign, which “required thousands of miles of travel, hundreds of dollars, [and] months of work (conferences, preparation of briefs writing letters, securing independent investigation of the refusal to give women relief by F.E.R.A),” was not for naught.⁴⁰³ While Davis and his colleagues lamented that they were unable to recover workers’ wages, they recognized the Maid-Well case and garment worker justice campaign as a triumph:

[I]n the end the victory was never translated into cash because of the Supreme Court decision, [b]ut it did establish the fact that stubborn and intelligent fighting of the Joint committee did and can win justice for Negro workers; and, it is typical of scores of other cases handled by the committee.⁴⁰⁴

The garment worker justice campaign demonstrated that the organizational mobilization and advocacy models Davis crafted—that prioritized the formation of movement organization networks and the use of emancipatory social science in combination with legal, policy, and organizing tools—could be highly effective.

It showed that the Davis-JCNR approach could be used to repudiate the racist narratives and scientific evidence used to justify racial inequities and underscore the problems that resulted from white domination and systemic racism. What is more, the Maid-Well case and garment worker justice campaign evinced that the Davis-JCNR approach could be leveraged to build momentum through collective action and catalytic campaigns; reframe the public narrative; influence and make demands of those with power and authority; hold decision-makers accountable for their actions; and set the agenda to push for racial and economic justice and deep structural change. Moreover, Davis and the JCNR’s work on and beyond the Maid-Well case and garment worker justice campaign proved that the mobilization and advocacy models Davis engineered could successfully be used to build and activate an organized, interracial base and increase the pool of resources, expertise, and partnerships among and between racial justice organizations, organized white labor, religious and fraternal organizations, allied groups, and government agencies.

IV. Conclusion

My reconstruction of Davis’s work with the JCNR recovers the novel modes of organizational mobilization and multidimensional advocacy Davis crafted to build power and movement at the intersection of race and class in the Jim Crow, New Deal era. In the preceding pages, I have revealed the JCNR as a Black-led, Black-funded, and grassroots-based movement organization network that served as a leader in the struggle for economic and racial equity and justice in the 1930’s. In the process, I have accentuated the importance of resisting the tendency in social movement literature to analyze Black insurgency through a state and inclusion-focused and white-centered interpretive lens.⁴⁰⁵

In recovering Davis’s mobilization and advocacy models, I showed how Davis centered power-building, movement building, and SMO formation; decentered litigation; and established a framework for using emancipatory social science in combination with legal, policy, and organizing tools to advance racial and economic justice and effect transformative change. In doing so, I emphasized the ways in which the ideological and methodological perspectives Davis adopted resemble what we associate with movement lawyering today.⁴⁰⁶ So too did I underscore the need for scholars to reconsider the impetus for the strategic mobilization of social science in combination with legal and policy arguments by Black progressive lawyers in the Progressive and New Deal eras.

The mobilization and advocacy models I have illuminated in this Article served Davis and his colleagues long after the JCNR was gone. While still working as the executive secretary for the JCNR, Davis called for the formation of the NNC.⁴⁰⁷ The organizational mobilization model introduced in this Paper served as the blueprint for the formation of the NNC; the JCNR served as the foundation upon which Davis built the new SMO network.⁴⁰⁸ Davis and his NNC colleagues largely relied on the tactical repertoire Davis had shaped in his work with the JNCR (though organizing, leadership development, and disruptive tactics featured more prominently, and educational publicity and communication efforts expanded to include more artistic mediums).⁴⁰⁹ The mobilization and advocacy models Davis crafted in the early New Deal through his work with the NIL and JCNR fueled the formation, work, and trajectory of the NNC.

In this way, from 1936 to 1947, Davis and the NNC organized Black workers and pushed for racially just, democratic unionization; worked toward the abolition of peonage, police brutality, lynching, and various other forms of racialized violence; and demanded and attempted to enact a “second emancipation” for African Americans.⁴¹⁰ The tactical repertoire Davis created facilitated the later successes of Davis and the NNC, including attaining “the unprecedented goal of interracial union membership,”⁴¹¹ a rarely surpassed and little noticed achievement in remaining cognizant of both the distinction and overlap between class and race in navigating emancipatory struggle.

In the face of rising corporate power, persistent racial and economic inequality, weakened labor protections—and amidst widespread efforts to deny the existence of systemic racism and ban fields of study that provide theoretical and empirical tools for its examination—the work of Davis and the JCNR provides important historical context and a source of inspiration as we continue the fight to expose and defeat systemic domination and exploitation, confront untruth, and achieve a more democratic and racially just political economy.

“[F]ailure to act to the utmost of our ability on an issue we know to be sound, is itself a compromise…Deep rooted in our struggle are the seeds of economic equality for Negro people. That fact is enough to make us stay in the fight. It will not be over soon; but it will be won there is no doubt.”- John P. Davis⁴¹²