Notes on the Struggle for “Real Fraternity”: The American Youth Congress, 1934–1941

Abstract

In July 1950, two federal government informers gave testimony about the American Youth Congress (AYC) at a session of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). Martha Edminston and her husband John briefly mentioned Lee Lorch, an instructor of mathematics at Penn State College who had been at the forefront of a protest against racial discrimination by white tenants at a privately-owned housing project in New York City where he lived with his family. Four years later, when Lee headed the Fisk University mathematics department in Nashville, Tennessee, he received a summons to appear before HUAC in Dayton, Ohio. At the hearing in Dayton, Lee asked why he was summoned. Committee counselor Frank Tavenner responded Lee had accompanied alleged Communists to an AYC convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in July 1941. After Lee refused to cooperate, HUAC charged him with contempt of Congress. Now largely forgotten, what was the AYC? Practically moribund when Lorch supposedly attended its final conference in 1941, the AYC played a significant role in the Depression-era youth movement and had a reputation as a “party front organization”; this impression persists among historians. The reality was more complex, though. Despite Socialist, Trotskyist, and rightwing accusations that it was a mouthpiece for the Soviet Union, the AYC was an autonomous backer of equal access to educational