Ernest Thompson collection

1950-1970

Ernest Thompson was a labor leader and one of the founders and the director of organization of the National Negro Labor Council. From 1951-1956 he was also the Fair Employment Practices Committee director for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, a multi-racial trade-union expelled from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) on charges of communist infiltration. Thompson later became involved in efforts to gain African-American political representation in Orange, New Jersey and in improving education in the state and the elimination of segregation within the school system. The Ernest Thompson Collection consists of printed matter and publications of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America on blacks, women, urban renewal, and the labor movement in the 1950s. There is also printed material on the student movement of the 1960s, publications of communist youth organizations, and on segregation and discrimination in public schools in Orange, New Jersey in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as well as a speech by Henry Winston about the founding of a Marxist-Leninist youth organization.