Committee, who wrote a series of articles in the party magazine The Liberator which were consistent with the analysis contained in the theses. The Comintern directed the American party in 1924 to redouble its efforts to organize African Americans. The party's earliest efforts focused on struggles in the Chicago area where it was initially headquartered, carrying out solidarity work for a strike by black female garment workers, and organizing the Negro Tenants Protective League in the city in order to stage rent strikes against exploitative landlords. The party subsequently created the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC) in 1925. That organization was also a failure: although the black press greeted the organisation enthusiastically, the labor movement generally ignored it, aside from a few party-controlled unions that had few black members. The Congress' efforts were also stymied by the party's chaotic organization in the mid-1920s. The ANLC, for its part, became isolated from other leading black organizations. It attacked the NAACP and related organizations as "middle-class accommodationists" controlled by white philanthropists. The ANLC and the Party had a more complex relationship with Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA); while the party approved of Garvey's fostering of "race consciousness", it was strongly opposed to his support for a separate black nation. When the party made efforts to recruit members from the UNIA, Garvey expelled the party members and sympathizers in its ranks. 1928–1935: Third Period and national self-determination The 6th Congress of the Comintern held in 1928 changed the party's policy drastically; it adopted theses proposed by Haywood and Charles Nasanov, who claimed that blacks in the United States were a separate national group and that black farmers in the South were an incipient revolutionary force, due to their being oppressed by economic underdevelopment and segregation. Despite this theory dividing the American party, including African American communists - notable opponents included Haywood's brother, Otto Hall, who felt it ignored class differences in the black community and was not appropriate for American conditions, and James W. Ford, who believed that the theoretical debate about whether blacks constituted a distinct nation was a distraction from building black membership - the Comintern ordered the party to press the demand for a separate nation for blacks within a swath of counties with a majority-black population extending from eastern Virginia and the Carolinas through central Georgia, Alabama, the delta regions of Mississippi and Louisiana and the coastal