We’re pausing our series on the groundbreaking 1975 Boston Summer for this issue to bring you the conclusion of our luminous four-part series on the defense of the Scottsboro Boys. 

In 1931, during the depths of the Great Depression, nine young Black men were falsely accused of raping two white women aboard a freight train in Scottsboro, Alabama. In response, the U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA) initiated and led a worldwide campaign involving millions of people to prevent their execution and demand their freedom. In Part III we learned about how the ILD (the legal arm of the CPUSA) sharpened their strategy to combat racism in the racist kkkourts largely by building a multiracial campaign and rejecting unity with reformists like the NCAA. In Part IV the CP abandons this strategy and dilutes the fight by forming a United Front against fascism.

We launch Part IV in the thick of our annual summer project and in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Boston’s 1975 Summer Project. That summer, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) played a pivotal role in defeating Restore Our Alienated Rights (ROAR), the local Nazis and their racist political allies, and in stopping their campaigns of racist violence against young Black students who were being bused in an effort to desegregate Boston’s all-white schools. The movement mobilized working-class youth and community members in an unforgettable, militant struggle against gutter racist capitalism and state-sanctioned violence.

This series analyzes the roles of the two major defense strategies in the Scottsboro case: the International Labor Defense (ILD), the legal arm of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), and the NAACP. We will examine how their differing strategies addressed the questions of mass protest, institutional racism, the fight for legal reforms, and the use of the courtroom as a site to elevate political consciousness and struggle.
Please stay tuned for Part II of the Boston ‘75 summer project series in the next issue of CHALLENGE available online and in print  July 31st. 

United front strategy undermines communist politics

Soon after the trial the defense strategy changed radically. The roots of this change were contained in a pronounced shift in the line of the Communist International in the summer of 1935. To fight the rise of worldwide fascism, the International said, it was necessary to make alliances with the organizational leadership of the Social Democrats, formerly considered to be “bourgeois reformists.” In the U.S., this meant such groups as the Socialist Party, the NAACP, and the Urban League.

The key to this “United Front Against Fascism” was common unity around “democracy” and against fascism. As this theory related to the practice of the Scottsboro case this meant forming a united front defense committee very different from the ILD. On the initiative of the ILD the Scottsboro Defense Committee (SDC) was formed in December 1935, consisting of the ILD, the League for Industrial Democracy (a Socialist Party-led group), the ACLU, the NAACP, and the Episcopal Federation for Social Service. On the initiative of Norman Thomas of the Socialist Party, the Reverend Allan Knight Chalmers was appointed chairman of the SDC. The new defense committee immediately ruled out mass demonstrations as contradictory to the freedom of the defendants.

The memorandum of agreement between the organizations gave the Executive Committee of the SDC, which consisted of one representative of each organization, full power to make decisions in publicity and hiring of counsel. No organization in the SDC could publicly criticize SDC policies.

The ILD pamphlet, Scottsboro: Shame of America, which attacked the racism in the case, was not republished.

The ILD agreed with this arrangement. Despite the ILD assessment that mass protest had saved the defendants from the electric chair and won significant legal reforms while involving millions of people in struggle and the raising of antiracist consciousness, it now indirectly accepted the argument that injecting radical politics into the case would only hurt the efforts of the SDC.

In effect, the ILD was succumbing to the politics of Chalmers, the NAACP, and others. Chalmers exercised substantial control over day-to-day decisions of the SDC. Chalmers' strategy was to form a local defense committee in Alabama composed of “distinguished good people” and “respectable” citizens of Alabama (i.e., newspaper editors, lawyers, ministers, businessmen, and college deans).

In an initial agreement between Chalmers and the ASC, it was stipulated that “control of the case by the communists makes acquittal impossible” and “Communist propaganda can be held up during the conduct of the case.”
The fact remains that by October 1937, because of the SDC strategy, Scottsboro was not the mass issue it had been from 1931 until 1935.

Conclusions from the Scottsboro battleground

The ILD proved in four years the strength of mass protest and the tremendous effect it had on the racist courts. Although the ILD in 1931-1935 was unable to free the defendants, they made tremendous inroads worldwide against the factors that caused the Scottsboro case to happen in the first place, racism, and economic exploitation. They alone saved the defendants from the electric chair. The total of the ILD work was a formidable display of legal and political brilliance which has since rarely been outshone.

The Scottsboro case played a key role in both attracting, recruiting, and giving leadership opportunities in the CP and the broader workers' movement of the time to Black workers, and particularly young and Black women workers, including the parents of the defendants themselves. This led to a qualitative change in the CP membership, from being a mostly white and European immigrant party, to being a genuine multiracial party.

The Scottsboro case also contributed to the rapid growth of the CP in the U.S. from a party of thousands to a party of tens of thousands. The Scottsboro case, along with all the other Depression-era struggles they were part of or led, put the CP on the “political map” in the U.S., particularly in the U.S. South.

One of the most exciting things about the Scottsboro case was that, after the initial conviction and sentencing to death of the Scottsboro Boys by the racist Jim Crow system, one of the original accusers, Ruby Bates–– who of course was white ––decided to tell the truth about what really happened. She admitted she had lied– there was no rape, only sex with white youth before the nine defendants got on the train.
This subjected her to vicious attacks by the entire legal and political establishment behind Jim Crow, which she withstood. She traveled to other countries with the Scottsboro parents, speaking at rallies, denouncing Jim Crow, and praising the Communists. She was a splendid example for unity between white and Black workers, especially as the Depression deepened and unemployment and evictions soared.

Finally, the two U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the Scottsboro case, Powell v. Alabama (on ineffective assistance of counsel) and Norris v. Alabama (on the systemically racist jury pool) were decided by a conservative-dominated Court, clearly to try and quell the mass outrage and mass movement that had built up around the case and helping the CP grow dramatically. This helps us undermine the argument that the solution to attacks on “civil rights” is to get more liberals in the U.S. Supreme Court, instead of seeing this case as an example of how the ruling class uses the Courts to serve its purposes and to maintain racism.

PLP carries antiracist torch of communist movement 

PLP stands on the shoulders of giants. Since our founding in 1965, we have always made the fight against racism in all its many forms key to our political program. We could not have taken that struggle to the point where it is now without the courageous and death-defying efforts of Black and white workers who fought Jim Crow in the 1930s. We continue to fight for the communist revolution which will eventually destroy racism and consign its sordid past to the dustbin of history.