efforts. In the SWOC, for example, the Party's organizers suppressed their identity as communists and much of their politics in order to avoid political differences with Philip Murray, who headed the organizing the campaign, and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which was financing it. Those organizers rarely were able, in any case, to stay in an area long enough to allow them to cultivate the relationships that would have allowed them to bring individual workers into the party. In other industries from which blacks were excluded or made up a small part of the workforce, CPUSA-led unions had a mixed record. The Transport Workers Union of America, which denounced segregation but took only halting efforts to oppose it during its early years, formed coalitions with Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the NAACP and the Negro National Congress in the early 1940s to eliminate occupational segregation and to require ambitious affirmative action goals in New York City public transit. The TWU also fought against employment discrimination in public transit in Philadelphia in 1944, during which time the federal government ordered the private transit company to desegregate its workforce, provoking a wildcat strike of many of the union's newly organized members that was ended only when the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration sent troops to guard the system and arrested the strike's ringleaders. On the other hand, the record of other left unions was not as positive. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union, with its power over the workplace exercised through its hiring hall, eliminated formal barriers to black employment, although a degree of informal segregation returned through the institution of casual employment. The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (or UE) ignored party directives to confront the issue in its industry, calculating that any challenge to the principle of seniority by pursuing affirmative action remedies for black workers would prove immensely unpopular among white workers. Communists and black culture During the Popular Front era the party attracted support from a number of the brightest lights in African-American literature, including Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, some of whom joined the party, only to break with it in later years. Paul Robeson, a vocal defender of the Soviet Union, apparently never joined the party, but was loyal to at least a few of its members including Benjamin J. Davis Jr. who was jailed under The Smith Act. The Communist Party