This article is Part I of a four-part series on the Scottsboro Boys. Parts I and II coincide with the 160th celebration of Juneteenth—the day enslaved Black workers in Texas finally learned they were “free”, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. The racist travesty of the Scottsboro case is part of a long, unbroken chain of racist violence, forged during the transatlantic chattel slave trade, and is inseparable from the capitalist system itself.

Parts III and IV will help us get ready for our annual summer project. This year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Boston’s 1975 Summer Project. That summer, the communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) played a pivotal role in the struggle against local Nazis and their racist political allies from attacking young Black youth who were being bussed in effort to desegregate, all-white schools in Boston. The movement mobilized working-class youth and community members in an unforgettable, militant struggle against gutter racist capitalism and state-sanctioned violence.

In 1931, during the Great Depression, nine young Black men were falsely accused of raping two white women on a freight train in Alabama.  The two poor white women were pressured into lying against the Black youths by the local racist bosses and their cops. One of these women later recanted and actually joined the Communist Party and the struggle against racism. The youth, ages 13 to 19, were riding the rails looking for work.They were quickly convicted by an all-white jury. Eight were sentenced to death— another cruel episode in a long history of lynchings and frame-ups. However, the U.S. Communist Party (CP) initiated and led a world-wide struggle involving millions of people fighting to prevent their execution and to free the “Scottsboro boys.”

NAACP ramps up anti-communism

The parents of the nine jailed youths appreciated the way Party members treated them with respect and equality, in contrast to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which tried to take over the case and called the parents “ignorant” when they rejected their anti-communist pleas. The parents spoke at dozens of CP-organized rallies in a worldwide campaign to win freedom for their children.

At the exact same time that these Black youth were being railroaded, an intense internal discussion was taking place within the Communist Party of the United States. The goal of that struggle was to unify Party members to make fighting racism a mass issue, and to lead multiracial class battles to counter its use by the bosses to divide the working class. The communists knew, in the wake of the worldwide economic depression, that unity of Black and white workers was critical to any revolutionary movement to overthrow capitalism, the source of mass economic misery for all workers.

CPUSA hits back against gutter racism 

The reds also knew that, historically, the use of racism, both before and after slavery, had always been the key to the existence of extremely low living standards for white workers and unlivable standards for Black workers. A week after CP organizers in the South learned of the Scottsboro arrests, the CP newspaper, the Daily Worker, editorialized that the frame-up was “part of a campaign of terror against the Negro workers and impoverished farmers and sharecroppers of the South, to ‘teach the n——- his place,’ lest he join with his natural comrades, the white workers and poor farmers of America in their struggle against starvation and boss rule.”

To its credit, the CP did use the case to expose the system of racist oppression in both the South and the North, including the racist “justice” system. It also used the case to advance Black-white unity in the fight against a capitalist system that had thrown millions onto the unemployment lines and into dire poverty. The CP pointed out that capitalism had created and benefited from the racist hell suffered by millions of Black workers and that the fight to free the Scottsboro boys was just one battle in the war to end capitalism and build a society without racism.

The CP explained to white workers that class solidarity was necessary to fight capitalist exploitation, and that the first step in forging this solidarity was to fight against the special oppression of Black workers. Every Party member was responsible for raising the Scottsboro case in whatever union, neighborhood group, or unemployed council he or she belonged to. 

Hundreds of these organizations passed resolutions and donated money in support of the struggle. The CP’s focus on the case was highlighted during a confrontation between a CP-led Unemployed Council and a Bronx, NY property owner who exclaimed, “I’ll fix the plumbing and paint the halls, but I can’t free the Scottsboro boys!”

The odds against stopping the legalized murders and freeing the nine youth were enormous. Almost every Southern newspaper in the region had joined in the effort to condemn the Scottsboro defendants before they were put on trial. An example of the “objectivity” of racism is the following description of the “crime”: “the most atrocious ever recorded in this part of the country, a wholesale debauching of society” The report went on to say that the rape “savored of the jungle” and the “meanest African corruption.” 

Black liberal misleaders fail Scottsboro boys

This series of articles will analyze the role of the two major defense strategies in this case, the International Labor Defense (ILD) and the NAACP. We will study the different strategies as they relate to the questions of mass protest, institutional racism, the fight for legal reforms, and the use of the courtroom to raise the level of political consciousness and struggle.

The CP-led International Labor Defense (ILD) organizers had to first befriend and then convince the parents (mostly mothers) of the teenage boys to support a strategy of mass struggle to demand freedom for their sons. They had to overcome the fear that lynch terror had inspired, particularly amongst Black workers in the South. But these brave parents enthusiastically embraced the ILD. One Scottsboro mother said that what she liked best about the reds was their promise to “get rid of this so-called government and the big boss.”

The ILD also had to fight the sell-out misleaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), who fought the ILD for political and legal leadership of the case. Walter White, national secretary of the NAACP, promised the parents “the support of the wealthiest [white] people in” Alabama. White defended the do-nothing alcoholic defense lawyer, claiming that he made “an honest defense of the boys.”  

The differences between the NAACP and the ILD were basic. In the first place, the NAACP tried to ignore the case, because “rapists give the race a bad name” and only became interested in it when the ILD began working on it. Second, the NAACP and the ILD had a totally different class line on the case. White of the NAACP told the boys that it was a “working class mob of whites” which almost lynched them at Scottsboro, and promised them that if they allied with the NAACP they would have “the support of the wealthiest people in the state.” The ILD stressed both the class and racial repression in the case, and brought it to the attention of workers all over the world. 

The NAACP’s contempt for the Black working class shaped their contacts with their parents, just as the respect of the Communists for workers shaped their contacts. When the Black workers chose the ILD over the NAACP, NAACP leader Pickens described the parents as “the densest and dumbest animals it has yet been my privilege to meet.” 

The parents responded, both to personal kindness and to political ideas. “I can’t be treated any better than the Reds have treated me,” Janie Patterson wrote one of the ILD lawyers. Her letter was signed “From one of the Reds, Janie Patterson.” Another parent, Mrs. Montgomery, wrote that the part she liked best about the Communist program was the promise to “get rid of this so-called government and the big boss.” 

The parents responded angrily to the NAACP smears against them. “We are not too ignorant to know a bunch of liars and fakers when we meet up with them, and are not too ignorant to know that if we let the NAACP look after our boys, that they will die.” 

The key difference between the ILD and the NAACP strategies was that the NAACP opposed all political struggle, both inside and outside of the courtroom. They opposed rallies in defense of the framed Black youth, on the grounds that this would just alienate the liberal Southern elite, the so-called “best people” on whom the NAACP relied.