The Communist Party USA and African-Americans - The Scottsboro Boys and The ILD

The Scottsboro Boys and The ILD

The party's most widely reported work in the South was its defense, through the ILD, of the "Scottsboro Boys", nine black men arrested in 1931 after a fight with some white men also riding the rails, then convicted and sentenced to death for raping two white women later found on the same train. None of the defendants had shared the same boxcar as either of the women they were charged with raping.

The International Labor Defense was the first to offer its assistance. William L. Patterson, a black attorney who had left behind a successful practice to join the Communist Party, returned from training in the Soviet Union to run the ILD. After fierce disputes with the NAACP, with the ILD seeking to mount a broad-based political campaign to free the nine while the NAACP followed a more legalistic strategy, the ILD took control over the defendants' appeals.

The ILD successfully overturned their convictions on appeal to the United States Supreme Court, which held in Powell v. Alabama, 287 U.S. 45 (1932) that the State's failure to provide the defendants with counsel in a capital case violated their rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. The ILD's battles with the NAACP continued when the cases returned to Alabama for retrial, when the NAACP blamed the ILD for the conviction and death sentence handed down by the jury in the retrial of the lead defendant. While the NAACP later backtracked and agreed to join with the ILD in defending the nine after other black organizations and a number of NAACP branches attacked it for that position, the tensions never disappeared and the ILD retained control of the second round of appeals. It won reversals of these convictions in Norris v. Alabama, 294 U.S. 587 (1935) on the ground that the exclusion of blacks from the jury pool had violated the defendants' constitutional rights. Even so, all of the defendants were convicted on their third retrial.

The Scottsboro defense was only one of the ILD's many cases in the South at that time: it also defended Angelo Herndon, a Communist Party activist sentenced to death by the State of Georgia for treason for his advocacy of national self-determination for blacks in the black belt, while demanding retribution for lynching and due process for criminal defendants. For a period of time in the early and mid-1930s the ILD was the most active defender of blacks' civil rights in the South and the most popular party organization among African-Americans.

The League of Struggle for Negro Rights, founded in 1930 as the successor to the ANLC, was particularly active in organizing support for the Scottsboro defendants. It also campaigned for a separate black nation in the South and against police brutality and Jim Crow laws, while also advocating a more general policy of opposition to fascism and support for the Soviet Union.