This article is Part II of a four-part series on the Scottsboro Boys. In 1931, during the Great Depression, nine young Black men were falsely accused of raping two white women on a freight train in Scottsboro, Alabama.  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.  Part II coincides with the 160th anniversay 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 1600s at the transatlantic 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. 

”This series of articles will analyze the role of the two major defense strategies in this case, the International Labor Defense (ILD), the legal arm of Communist Party USA (CPUSA) 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.

Dividing Black and white workers

Political questions were extremely important throughout the entire course of the trials. The extreme economic deprivation, the minimal level of subsistence for tens of thousands of Black and white farmers and sharecroppers at this time had resulted in a growing radical anti-hunger movement in the south symbolized by a communist-led hunger march in Atlanta in 1930. 

From the 1600s, when white indentured servants were told they were “better” than the newly created Black slaves, through the time of the Black Codes, the Ku Klux Klan, and the racist Post-Reconstruction governments, maintaining differentials in living standards as well as civil and political liberties between Blacks and whites was crucial in convincing white workers and farmers that the struggle for their common good lay in unity with “their own race” instead of their own class. 

The Central Committee of the Communist Party U.S.A. adopted this theory in their analysis of the Scottsboro case: The “parasite landlord and capitalist classes of the South” concocted the trial and sentence, they said, because they saw a movement among Black people and whites in backward Southern communities which threatened their ''super-exploitation.'' By enlisting the white workers in their “beastly lynching crimes,” Southern capitalists could effectively split the working classes of the region.

The “trial” then, was political -- little more than window dressing for legalized murder. There was substantial testimony to indicate the two white female complainants had crossed state lines to engage in sexual intercourse, a violation of the Mann Act. Their position when they were taken into custody was extremely vulnerable, and they could easily have been forced into bringing the charge. 

Finally, the state insisted on continuing the prosecution, even when one of the trial judges was informed by a doctor who had examined the women that it was physically impossible that they had been raped. 

ILD begins defense strategy 

The International Labor Defense (legal arm of the Communist Party) accepted the fact that the state had made the case a political trial. This point of view shaped the entire strategy employed by the ILD from 1931 through 1935. This strategy was grounded on three fundamental principles: 

• the absolute commitment of the defense committee to the total innocence and necessity of total freedom for the defendants; 
• the assertion that only primary reliance on mass international protest, through meetings, demonstrations, petitions, telegrams, fund-raising, forums, press releases, etc. could eventually secure the freedom of the defendants; 
• using every single legal avenue available within the court to argue for the defendants' freedom.  The ILD was undoubtedly influenced in adopting this strategy by its political outlook. 

The ILD further argued that only fervent efforts directed at building a mass movement against the convictions would finally force release of the defendants. Since the trial was a vicious political attempt by the Southern ruling class to split Black from white workers, the ILD said, then it followed that only the mass unity and struggle of Black and white against the system which caused the racist trial to happen could win the freedom of the Scottsboro boys.

Working in bosses’ court vs with working class

The contradiction that troubled the ILD the most was that between mass protest and legal reform (short of the defendants' freedom). If large numbers of people accepted the idea that the courts could administer justice, mass protest would be limited. During this period, the ILD saw the contradiction between using the best lawyers and all legal techniques versus fostering “democratic and legalist illusions among the masses”  as the most fundamentally dangerous part of the defense.

The question of winning legal reforms did not arise until after the initial trial in 1931. On appeal to the Alabama and U.S. Supreme Courts, the questions of right to counsel, and denial of fair trial through exclusion of Black jurors were raised and became a much more central part of the ILD strategy. ILD publicity at first placed little emphasis on this part of the strategy because they feared this would cause workers to place faith in the courts and neglect the class struggle.

No alliances with reformist groups

Outside the courtroom, the ILD repudiated alliance with any of the leadership of the various “leftist” and civil rights groups, including the Socialist Party, the Socialist Labor Party, the NAACP, the American Workers Party, the American Federation of Labor  and other union leaders, major church leaders or the capitalist press. The ILD argued that the leadership of these groups were reformist, and would inevitably “sell out”and lead any struggle into reliance on the capitalist system and its laws. 

Instead, the emphasis was on a “united front from below,” which would hopefully involve huge numbers of rank-and-file members of these groups in a defense committee under the leadership of the ILD. These rank-and-file members would not necessarily agree with the ILD program. But by tireless work and linking of the Scottsboro case to local demands and struggles (for jobs, food, etc.), ILD members would bring more and more people into the ILD, and eventually force the freedom of the defendants through continued demonstrations, rallies, and mass actions.

The first trial ended in death sentences for all but the youngest of the Scottsboro boys. The ILD objective then became to get the case moved to a court in Birmingham, an industrial city with white and Black workers. The ILD was unable to overcome the tremendous racism and antagonism among the population directed against the defendants and their lawyers. The change of venue was granted, but to Decatur, a town fifty miles west of Scottsboro and “a center of Klan strength in ... the 1920's” instead of Birmingham. 

The denial of change of venue to Birmingham made the ILD courtroom strategy much more difficult. Some reliance would have to be placed on appeal proceedings around the issues of exclusion of Black jurors and fairness of the trial. 

The ILD retained Samuel Leibowitz, a New York Democrat. Although Leibowitz was a famous trial lawyer, he was an anti-communist and close to the Democratic Party, the party of Southern segregation. Before long he would attack the CP. 

According to one source, “Leibowitz also demanded from Patterson (of the ILD) a tacit agreement that political activities would be soft-pedaled until after the trial.” In reality, the period from March 1933 to July 1933 was one of tremendous numbers of mass protests.

The defense opened the trial by challenging both the grand and petit juries on the ground that qualified Blacks were available, and that exclusion violated the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment. 

The ILD decided that the benefits gained from attacking the jury system and raising the whole question in a mass way of Black exclusion from the jury outweighed any additional antagonism generated within the all-white jury. The ILD also hoped to link up the exclusion of Black people from juries and voting to the same restrictions placed on poor whites such as requirement of property ownership and the poll tax. 

After the initial motions were denied, the ILD courtroom battle was largely confined to vigorous cross-examination of state witnesses through an effort to show the physical impossibility of many of their assertions, combined with calling several defense witnesses who contradicted the prosecution, including one of the former complainants, Ruby Bates.

The prosecution appealed to racism. Attorney General Knight constantly insulted Black witnesses. He ended with this plea to the jury: ''Show them that Alabama justice cannot be bought and sold with Jew money from New York.” 

One of the chief reasons for this approach was the political beliefs of Leibowitz. After the first trial was over, he made a statement to the press indiscriminately condemning Southern whites as “lantern-jawed creatures ... whose eyes pop out like frogs ... whose chins drip tobacco juice, bewhiskered and filthy.”  His general attitude, like that of the NAACP, was that poor whites were hardened racists and only the civilized (rich) whites could be relied on for justice. 

This was entirely opposed to the ILD philosophy that the Southern ruling class was responsible for and benefited from deep divisions among the Southern poor and that only Black and white unity could gain the ends the poor desired.

KENTUCKY – Progressive Labor Party members attended a two-day rally in Corbin organized by a liberal-led reformist, KY Resist. The liberal group, formed in the past couple of weeks as a response to the fascist attacks carried out by the Trump administration, is trying to form a movement which aims to “fight back against this administration” and “protect democracy.” It is mostly made up of LGBTQ workers who have been under the gun of sexist anti-trans attacks. However, the organization is still following the dead-end politics of the Democratic Party in its phony resistance against Trump, which is nothing but controlled opposition to redirect workers back into supporting the same fascist system that under the Big Fascists has been supporting genocide, pushing for more war, and has already been carrying out deportations for some time now. These workers need liberation through communism, and not some milquetoast liberals who will inevitably lead us to the slaughter.

Fascist “democracy” means death for workers

Amongst speeches calling to protect the “promise of America” and using the same nationalism that the small fascists use to build consent for their atrocities against workers, PLers went up and gave speeches talking about how the Democrats have played a huge role in building fascism, mentioning how the ongoing genocide against Palestinians was wholeheartedly supported by the Biden administration. The main focus of our speeches, however, was to demonstrate that fascism is when the bosses who already hold state power can no longer use the false banner of democracy to carry out their interests and continue making profits. We explained that capitalism is where the majority of property and wealth in society is owned by the capitalists, while workers own nothing. At the end of the day, workers are forced to sell their labor, bodies and time to the property-owners in exchange for a small portion of the wealth they create through their labor, while the capitalists take what’s left in the form of profits despite not doing any work. 

Bosses need racist, sexist divisions

What results from this everyday relationship is that those same property-owners need a state to protect their wealth and keep workers from resisting this exploitation, which is why even under liberal democracy the question of solving hunger, ending homelessness, or stopping unemployment is never really addressed. It’s also why racism, sexism, and transphobia go on unchecked, because these are tools that serve to divide workers, maintain gender roles and force women to have children in order to replace the workforce, and make more profits off of the backs of Black and brown workers, super exploiting the marginalized. When this exploitation can no longer be carried out through democratic means, the bosses switch to using more openly violent tactics and no longer hiding their racism. 
Bringing militancy into the fold

After our speeches, we marched together out into the streets of Corbin. On the first day of the rally, we handed out CHALLENGE and had some conversations with people who were interested in our politics, as well as introduced some more internationalist chants such as “From Palestine to Mexico these racist borders got to go!” We noticed that nobody was really talking about Palestine, likely due to the fact that most of the genocide has been carried out under the Biden administration. 

The next day, we spoke again and then marched to a local restaurant known as Snappy’s Pizza, who had previously harassed one of the trans organizers when she tried to use the bathroom there. While in front of the pizza shop we were confronted by fascists who drove by yelling slurs at us, and then parked across the street holding signs and heckling us. One of the fascists even held their sign upside down without realizing it, and still didn’t notice after all of us turned ours upside down mocking them! The liberal chant leaders started a chant of “Love not hate” to encourage fighting fascism with kindness, to which we countered with “Fascism means — we got to fight back!” And eventually we were able to turn the heat up, chanting more militant chants until finally the fascists drove off, realizing that we weren’t going to back down and that we weren’t afraid of them. 

Nonviolence a losing strategy 

Proving our Party’s line when standing face to face with open sexism has helped us learn that the only way to fight fascism is with militant working-class solidarity that knows no race, gender, or nationality. The fascists expect us to follow suit with the Democratic Party and put up a lackluster resistance that preaches love and peace, but when they see genuine communist antiracist resistance they run and hide. Workers know that there can be no peace with fascists when they see the willingness of this system to protect the police and their buddies when they try to smash us with violence. There can be no peace under a sexist system with a state that uses kkkops to protect it. The whole damn system’s gotta go!

NEW YORK CITY, April 17—On the anniversary of the first encampment of Students in Solidarity with Gaza at Columbia University— the Coalition for Action in Higher Education (CAHE) sponsored a National Day of Action. More than 20,000 people participated in almost 200 campus events in 47 states ranging from rallies, protests, teach-ins, walkouts, banner drops, art installations, anti-fascist office hours, flash mobs, and watch parties.  CAHE also hosted a day-long series of 14 live-streamed webinars devoted to the genocide in Gaza, the ICE deportations, spiraling student debt, coercive control by boards of trustees, and the collapse of academic freedom in the face of anti-war protests.

The first of these virtual sessions— which attracted 245 registrants—was sponsored by the Radical Caucus of the Modern Language Association (MLA), in which members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) have been active for many years. The focus was on the keyword “Displacement,” which draws together a range of capitalist-caused crises: the massive uprooting,  theft of land, and genocide in Palestine, the increasingly horrific ICE deportations, precarious labor, in the academy and beyond, racist urban gentrification, and the super-exploitation and forced emigration of entire populations by war, climate crisis, and the imperialist competition for rare earth resources. 

While most of the live-streamed panels had a single-issue focus, the many meanings associated with “displacement” enabled the Radical Caucus session to draw connections between different features of the current crisis. Capitalism needs to be understood in its totality; only then can the common interests uniting the global working class be understood. Only then can working-class revolution be seen as not just one option among many, but an absolute necessity for the survival—and flourishing—of life on the planet.

Fighting for communist ideas in the universities

The Radical Caucus has emerged from the April 17 events with a refreshed sense of our mission. While in past years we have focused primarily on waging class struggle within the MLA, many of our leftist friends have quit in disgust at the conservatism of its leadership, which in 2024 brazenly sabotaged an attempt to bring up a Boycott, Divest, and Sanction resolution supporting divestment in Israel (see CHALLENGE, 1/29/25). But our continuing series of “keywords” virtual mini-conferences on Zoom has involved a broad range of people—many unconnected to higher education—who are interested in examining how language functions ideologically to shape consciousness. They have also begun a series of reading groups investigating the nature of Israeli “scholasticide” and the history of the Palestinian left.

We will, however, continue to fight the MLA bosses, because communist work in academic professional associations remains a crucial component of the fight against fascism. A recent article in Foreign Affairs—a major mouthpiece of the finance capitalist wing of the U.S. ruling class—bemoans the fact that the Trump administration, in launching its all-out attack on higher education, is destroying the decades-old “soft power” role played by universities in furthering the interests of U.S. imperialism (Sarah Kreps, “An Attack on America’s Universities Is an Attack on American Power: How Academia Bolsters National Security.” Foreign Affairs, April 29, 2025). Clearly the ruling class itself is torn by its own version of the question, “What Is to be Done?” For the working class, the fight to oppose the current attacks on colleges and universities has to move beyond the slogan of “Save Higher Ed” to “Smash Higher Ed for a Communist World.” That is what we have to do. While anxiety and fear permeate many campuses, the fightback is also growing. The viciousness of capitalist power becomes clearer every day; these are times not to surrender, but to build the movement for communist revolution.

Breaking Silence & ICE, PL’er lays foundation for fightback

Two weeks ago, two other teachers and I led a Know Your Rights training at our school for the majority of students. We distributed “red cards” (Know Your Rights cards), flyers in five different languages, and a list of resources.

The culture at my school tends to be one of silence in the face of injustice—a culture that pretends we don’t all, on some level, feel the rise of fascism or hear the drums of world war growing louder. While the content of our training stayed within the bounds of legal rights, it was a significant step toward confronting that silence and beginning to build a culture of resistance. It sent a clear message to students: we care.

After the session, several students shared personal stories with me about seeing ICE in their neighborhoods. Just one week later, ICE detained Dylan, a high school student in NYC. Because of the training, it felt natural to hang a sign in my classroom with Dylan’s picture and the caption: “Free Dylan.” Another teacher joined me at the protest for Dylan—a small but meaningful step toward building a base for resistance within our school.

The other two teachers involved in the training have both received CHALLENGE, and one has participated in study groups and May Day. As I presented to different grade levels, I found myself thinking about students in the audience who had received CHALLENGE over the past few years.

We have a long way to go in our school. This was just a small step. But the experience reminded me of the power of staying in one place over time and consistently building a base. It also reinforced our responsibility, as communists, to actively shape the culture of the spaces we are in.
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Free Dylan! Fight fascism

Another line was crossed on the road to fascism recently when racist Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in New York City arrested a public school student. The student, Dylan, is the first reported case of this happening during Donald Trump’s second term. He was taken after reporting for an asylum hearing.

Hundreds of workers and students around the city quickly mobilized to support him. This included hundreds turning out for a protest and more than $27,000 being raised for his family. More on Progressive Labor Party’s organizing efforts in the next issue. 
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Lesson from student protester: patriotism & reform won’t save us

Recently, I, along with some of my peers, attended a student-led protest against the Trump administration. Although it was somewhat comforting to see other youth take a stand against fascism, the movement’s liberal outlook ultimately watered down this message and its impact. 

Beyond the collective loathing for Trump’s regime, there was a great fear amongst the organizers to mention anything past that. Unlike during the May Day rally I attended with the PLP, words like Palestine and genocide were replaced with more vague descriptions, as people like Mahmoud Khalil were portrayed simply as protesters, not Palestinian activists. Although one of the speakers did express disapproval for Khalil’s capture, he refused to use any buzzwords that would trigger Zionists in the audience. It was disappointing to see the momentum against Trump halted in the face of other controversial subjects. Out of fear of losing their base, they glossed over genocide to protect the image of student unity. The liberal approach of the protest accommodated other forms of fascism to avoid inevitable conflict. 

The sheer patriotism expressed by the protesters was also especially notable, with red, white, and blue face paint being shared around the second groups congregated. Students walked proudly with American flags draped along their backs, and chants expressed this same pride. Signs and speakers both emphasized the message that we must save the country through voting, implying that life under leaders like Obama and Biden was the ideal, despite the continued suffering of workers under their leadership. More radical approaches to ending fascism were so discouraged that some signs even blatantly stated “I am not radical…” and “I pledge allegiance to the law.”

Even though this experience demonstrated the flaws of liberal reformism, I was able to reflect on how it varied from approaches that aim to make definitive change. Attending events with the PLP and reading CHALLENGE has allowed me to see beyond the illusion that solutions can only be made under capitalism. Being united with others who aren’t afraid to call out fascist attacks has brought me much hope, and I want my peers to be able to embrace justice without fear, too.
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