1. (p. 391.) The New York Times, April 12, 1933, as quoted in Carter,
Scottsboro, p. 247.
2. (p. 392.) In 1932 my close friend, William L. Patterson, had been elected national secretary of the ILD at its Cleveland convention. Earl Browder and I attended as delegates from the Party' s Central Committee.
We pushed for Patterson's election, but Pat, a brilliant dynamic man, needed no pushing! He was quite popular, having played a leading role in publicizing the Scottsboro case.
Louis Engdahl, former national secretary of the ILD, was on tour ol Europe and the Soviet Union with Scottsboro mother, Ada Wright, at the time of the convention. He was elected chairman of the ILD at that time, but died while on tour in Europe.
3. (p. 392.) See Carter, p. 248.
4. (p. 393.) At this time, the LSNR and the ILD were involved in a number of local struggles against police brutality and lynching, which raised similar slogans. Most nota bly, we helped to build a broad united front on Maryland's Eastern Shore. A reign of terror had struck the area after the legal lynching of Euel Lee and the lynching of George Armwood. Both men were Black and both were innocent.
At the initiation of the LSNR, we built the Baltimore Anti-Lynch Conference (November 18-19, 1933). Some 773 delegates, Black and white, attended, including Monroe Trotter, who along with DuBois was a co-founder of the Niagara movement, Dr. Harry F. Ward of the Union
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Theological Seminary in New York and Mary Van Cleek ofthe Russell Sage Foundation. Even some of the local NAACP types were forced to attend.
I believe that the widely publicized movement around the conference was successful in bringing a temporary halt to the open terror on the Eastern Shore. Masses of people became aware that the deaths of Armwood and Lee were not isolated incidents. The anti-lynching movement won many new friends and supporters as a result of the conference.
5. (p. 394.) Ruby Bates was one of the two women supposedly raped by the nine youths. She recanted her testimony at the Decatur, Alabama, trial of Haywood Patterson and became an active member of the defense movement.
6. (p. 395.) "The Scottsboro Struggle and the Next Steps: Resolution of the Political Bureau," The Communist, June 1933, pp. 575-76, 578-79.
7. (p. 396.) Rosea Hudson, Black Worker in the Deep South (New York: International Publishers, 1972), p. 57.
8. (p. 397.) The following account of the sharecroppers' struggles is based on what I learned at the time from personal observations and reports of comrades. Much of it is confirmed by Stuart Jamieson, Labor Unionism in American Agriculture, Bureau of Labor Statistics Bulletin No. 836 (1945), pp. 290-98; and Dale Rosen, The Alabama Sharecroppers Union, Radcliffe Honors Thesis(l969), pp. 19-20, 30-41, 48, 56, 130-35.
9. (p. 399.) The Dai/y Worker, December 28, 1932.
10. (p. 399.) Ibid., December 21-22, 1932, and April 17, 1933.
11. (p. 400.) Ibid., January 7 and 9, 1932.
12. (p. 400.) Ibid., April 27, 1933.
13. (p. 404.) Benjamin J. Davis, Communist Councilmanfrom Harlem (New York: International Publishers, 1969) p. 44. See also pp. 27, 34,40, 43, 46-48, 51.
14. (p. 407.) Kenneth E. Barnbart, "A Study of Homicide in the United States," Birmingham-Southern College Bulletin (May 1932), p. 9.
Figures for 1930.