Angelo Herndon - Political Activism

Political Activism

Herndon campaigned to organize working-class blacks and whites to become politically active. He traveled from Kentucky to Georgia and solicited blacks and whites alike for membership in an integrated Communist Party of Atlanta. In July 1932, Herndon organized a hunger march and demonstration at the courthouse in Atlanta. On July 11, he checked on his mail at the Post Office and was arrested by two Atlanta detectives. A few days later his hotel room was searched and Communist Party publications were found. Herndon was charged under a Reconstruction era law of insurrection in the state of Georgia.

He was held close to six months in jail and was released on Christmas Eve, after his bail of $7,000 was paid by the International Labor Defense organization. His freedom was short-lived as an all-white jury found Herndon guilty. He was sentenced to 18 to 20 years in prison.

Herndon served only two years of his sentence and was released in 1934. Upon his release from prison he was greeted as a hero by a crowd of 6,000 well-wishers at Pennsylvania Station in New York City. Several leading Communist Party officials were on hand to welcome him. His case was appealed, and Herndon was convicted for the second time by the Supreme Court of Georgia. It was not until 1937 that the decision was finally overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1937, a Supreme Court decision repudiated Georgia, holding that the state's insurrection statue violated the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

He avoided publicity in the latter part of his life but founded the Negro Publication Society of America in the 1940s, which published the radical African-American newspaper The People's Advocate in San Francisco, California, among other works.