As Negro unemployment statistics skyrocketed in the early thirties, The-Jobs-for-Negroes Movement strove to alleviate the crisis. It was begun by the Urban League in St. Louis. A boycott was organized against white-owned chain stores which catered to Negroes, but refused to employ them. The movement spread throughout the Midwest and had some success in "persuading" white-owned stores in the heart of the ghettoes to hire Negro employees. When the idea reached Harlem, it resulted in the establishment of the Greater New York Coordinating Comittee. One of its founders and organizers was the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and the Comittee received considerable support from his church, the Abyssinian Baptist Church. It was Powell's claim that the Comittee was shunned by most "respectable" Negroes but that its supporters included an unusually wide variety of radicals. The group referred to its members as antebellum Negroes by which, Powell said, they meant before Civil War II. Some of them, he claimed, favored repatriation to Africa; others were for black capitalism; still another group, including Powell himself, wanted the Negro to achieve full dignity within the American system. In spite of the variety of their objectives, all of them believed that the Afro-American must first achieve economic security before any of these specific goals could be attained. It was on this primary tactical necessity that they were able to coordinate their activities. They picketed white-owned stores on 125th Street. They carried signs advocating, "Don't buy where you can't work," and Powell maintained that they were able almost to stop trade totally at any target they chose to picket. He claimed to be able to call a meeting with only forty-eight hours notice and have 10,000 persons in attendance. The 125th Street stores soon negotiated and began employing Negro employees. Next, the Comittee hit the city's utility companies. They urged Negroes not to use electricity on specified days. They harassed the telephone company by urging Negroes to demand that the operator place their calls instead of their dialing the number and utilizing the automatic exchanges. Both companies changed their employment patterns in response. The Comittee also boycotted the bus company until it began employing Negroes as drivers as well as on other levels of the company's staff.