at Chicago, to be held sometime during the summer" and seeking the American party's advice. Convention call The call for the American Negro Labor Congress was issued late in the spring of 1925 with the proposal emanating from the Workers (Communist) Party. Although the convention call vaguely established "some time in the summer" for the time of the gathering, in actuality the founding convention did not take place in Chicago until October 25, 1925. There were 17 signatories of the convention call, of whom six were members of the Workers Party. The communists sought to use front tactics by downplaying their own presence and casting the ANLC as a multi-tendency organization, thereby reducing the chance of the group's ability to challenge the NAACP and the Marcus Garvey's UNIA as the paramount voice of the black working class. The convention call indicated that delegates must represent black or interracial trade unions, farm workers, or unorganized factory workers — although provision was made for participation by "individual advocates" engaged in promoting "the cause of the working class." The man most directly responsible for the idea of the new group, Lovett Fort-Whiteman was named its national organizer. Fort-Whiteman had been a delegate to the 5th World Congress of the Comintern in 1924 and the recipient of a crash course in party organization at the International Lenin School in Moscow and was regarded as one of the party's leading black cadres. American-born and educated at the Tuskegee Institute, the veteran former member of the Socialist Party of America Fort-Whiteman had been selected to lead the new group over other top black Communists, including Cyril Briggs, Richard B. Moore, and Otto Huiswoud. Fort-Whiteman, who sometimes wrote under the pseudonym "James Jackson," was the advocate of the idea of convening an "American-Negro Labor Congress" at Chicago to bring together black workers from around the country and had written to Moscow in an attempt to win support for the idea from the Far-Eastern Section of the Comintern. Fort-Whiteman sought "to approach the negro on his own mental grounds" by concentrating activity on fighting racism in American society, the prevalence of which Fort-Whiteman believed dulled black Americans' sense of class consciousness and immunized them to calls for class struggle. The call for the founding convention consequently touched upon not only matters of importance to labor in general but also spoke to specifically racial interests such as the "abolition