As with many other anti-Communist opponents of the IWO, the testimony of the government’s star witness alleging that the Order had stirred up racial animosity posits an irenic America of racial harmony that would have been news to many black and white members. What Powers did get right, though, was the rapidity with which the IWO took independent initiative in cham-pioning racial equality. This indeed was first exhibited in campaigns on be-half of the Scottsboro defendants. As early as May 1931 the IWO and foreign-language newspapers serving its members were mobilized in fund-raisers on behalf of the Scottsboro defense team led by the ILD. This was to be expected, for one of the cocounsels in the case was Brodsky, lawyer for both the ILD and IWO. Radical ethnic communities such as Latvians and Slovaks organized mass demonstrations and editorialized in newspapers for the defendants’ freedom. The Slovaks also raised funds for the ILD and wired protest telegrams to Alabama governor Benjamin Miller denouncing the legal lynching. It was reported, “The I.W.O. is taking steps to mobilize all of its branches to participate in this campaign led by the League of Struggle for Negro Rights [LSNR] and the International Labor Defense.”23
Local lodges pitched in with this campaign, too. In July 1931 The Spark noted that the Providence, Rhode Island, youth branch was “aiding the Scottsboro defense with all its might.” As Dan Carter notes, the ILD and its
radical supporters were not squeamish about denouncing the legal lynching orchestrated by sham bourgeois justice in Alabama’s courts. The LSNR ad-vertised a “Save the Scottsboro Nine” rally planned for Cleveland with flyers featuring a cartoon of a black lynching victim hanging from the torch of the Statue of Liberty. That the case was more a racially tinged rape allegation, possessing little class-based element, was ignored by the ILD and other Communist-affiliated organizations. Haywood Patterson, Clarence Norris, and the other Scottsboro defendants were recast as stand-ins for all racially oppressed workers.24
As the nine young defendants faced retrials in Alabama, the IWO con-tinued to demonstrate for the teens’ release. In May 1932 Slovak lodges or-chestrated protest meetings “against the lynch verdict in Scottsboro.” The party instructed the IWO to coordinate mass meetings with other organiza-tions such as the ILD and the LSNR. “Especially in Negro neighborhoods,”
the IWO was additionally told, “streets [and] buildings should be painted at night with slogans against lynching, ‘The Scottsboro Boys Shall Not Die,’
‘Death Penalty to the Lynchers.’” The Party carefully planned its spontane-ous demonstrations denouncing lynch justice.25
While this directive gives the appearance that the IWO was merely the recipient of top-down instructions from the Party, at other times the Order’s members needed little prompting in supporting the defendants. A 1934 Philadelphia regional convention passed a resolution for the release of the Scottsboro teens, Tom Mooney, a labor leader who had wrongfully been im-prisoned for the 1916 bombing of a San Francisco Preparedness Day parade,
“and all class-war prisoners.” Black and white IWO members in Portsmouth and Norfolk, Virginia, raised funds and protested to aid the ILD defense campaign. As other racist cases caused scandal in the 1930s, the IWO linked them to the ongoing Scottsboro travesty. In New York in September 1935 Shaffer reported that the IWO had raised $1,000 for the defendants in Scottsboro as well as Herndon, who had been imprisoned for leading an interracial unemployment campaign in Atlanta. The convention of the IWO’s Russian lodges heard reports of the eighteen recorded lynchings that had occurred in the first four months of 1933. A representative of the ILD congratulated the Russians for their “valuable assistance” and asked them to continue with their generous support for the ILD’s expensive legal work in Scottsboro.26
Not every lodge was always as supportive of the ILD’s defense campaign.
Gardos complained that “the artificial throwing in of the Scottsboro boys”
was doing a lot “to ‘cool off’ people” in the Hungarian Workers’ Sick Benefit and Educational Federation.27 Some Hungarians who had joined the IWO for the instrumental protection it offered may have regarded the plight of Patterson, Norris, and the other defendants as irrelevant to their lives. Gar-dos’s letter suggests, too, a resistance from some Hungarians to constant
directives streaming from Party headquarters. Other ethnic lodges, however, continued to rally and raise funds on behalf of the defendants.
James Miller, Susan Pennybacker, and Eva Rosenhaft have demonstrated that the ILD organized international support for the freeing of the “class prisoners” in Alabama. While Carter argues that the case never became as celebrated a rallying cry as the earlier campaign on behalf of the executed anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, an international speaking tour was arranged by the ILD, in which Ada Wright, mother of two of the defendants, traveled with Party functionary J. Louis Engdahl to address crowds in England, Germany, and other parts of Europe. Her denunciations of the racism and class oppression of the American South resonated with radicals but vexed the U.S. government and more conservative figures in Europe. When Irish president Eamon de Valera refused to permit Wright and Engdahl entry to the Free State, the Irish Workers’ Club of New York, an IWO lodge, sent a resolution to de Valera condemning his actions: “You are influenced by and obey the order of American and British Imperialism. This is typical of your betrayal of the cause of the Irish workers and of all work-ers.” While J. J. Mullally was congratulated on expressing the general IWO line supporting the Scottsboro defendants, he was taken to task by Party officials for labeling de Valera “an agent of British imperialism” as unlikely to gain a hearing with Irish workers in America or the Free State. The subtle-ties of Irish politics bedeviled the Irish Workers’ Clubs, as other letters docu-menting attempts to enlist Irish Republican Army supporters in the IWO attest. The Irish intervention on behalf of the Wright tour, though, demon-strates an autonomy of action by IWO members, as did Gardos and the Hun-garians’ resistance to “the artificial throwing in” of Scottsboro. Order members chose to act—or not—in ways that made sense to their communi-ties, not simply as receptors of Party instructions.28
International solidarity developed around Scottsboro, especially among colonial subjects. Arnold Ward of London wrote to ILD president Patterson noting that I.T.A. Wallace-Johnson, a Gold Coast activist-journalist, had taken an interest in the case and requested “more material on Scottsboro, but there are new laws just [being] enforced in West Africa. Muzzling the press.
So if you send it on to us he might get it safer.” Adi notes that Wallace-Johnson, like other African radical nationalists, often chafed at the insensi-tivity of the British CP, and Communists generally, toward the salience of racial liberation. Indeed, Ward also wrote to Patterson criticizing the activi-ties of Trinidadian-born Communist apostate George Padmore, who “has sown the seed of dissension among the colonials here.” The condescension of Ward and white British Communists such as Reginald Bridgeman, secretary of the League Against Imperialism, is suggested by Ward’s slighting com-ment to the African American Patterson that in London “all the so-called
Negro leaders here are busy advocating some kind of race policy for Africa and the Africans.” Such comments indicate, as Adi argues, that some Com-munists could often demonstrate a tin-eared, unsympathetic attitude to the racial oppression of black workers. Still, Bridgeman reached out to the ILD’s Patterson to develop African American support for African colonial inde-pendence. Wallace-Johnson’s call from West Africa for more Scottsboro material likewise marks an international solidarity among people of color that developed around this case.29
During the decades-long campaign to save the Scottsboro Nine, compet-ing defense strategies of the tenuously allied ILD, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and other legal teams were often on display. Nonradical lawyers argued that strident rhetoric of the kind exhibited at ILD rallies was less helpful than careful preparation of a defense in court, while the ILD argued that a “bourgeois” court could only side with the bosses and invariably deliver a legal lynching. It held that only militant demonstrations by the proletariat masses could “force” the courts to free the defendants. Samuel Leibowitz and other non-Communist defense counsel grew frustrated with these tactics, which they believed antagonized Alabama officials and caused them to dig in their heels rather than be perceived as surrendering to Communist pressure groups.30
After the state hastily freed four of the defendants in 1937, officials ada-mantly refused to parole or pardon the remaining five convicts. The case, Carter notes, faded from public consciousness, with even the ILD devoting less time to the matter. When the final convict was released in late 1950, little public notice was made of the event.31
The IWO, however, continued to display its Scottsboro militancy as a badge of honor. In 1948, the Order’s office staff newsletter, The Paper, noted that shop chairman Grace Johnson had “served on the Scottsboro Defense Committee in Buffalo and was active in International Labor Defense and League of Struggle for Negro Rights.” Already in the mid-1930s, New York City Council candidate Israel Amter noted that “the Communists made a national issue of the Scottsboro case, and the case of Angelo Herndon.” Such militant activism, he argued, had saved the teens from the electric chair, but for their efforts “the whites have been branded ‘Reds.’” As persecution of the IWO ratcheted up, members did not apologize for their stance on Scottsboro and support for antilynching campaigns but embraced them as emblems of true Americanism. Greene in 1950 addressed a Brooklyn rally, offering praise for embattled African American activist-entertainer Robeson, recom-mitting the Order to Negro-Jewish unity to end Jim Crow and lynching, and embracing “our honorable title of ‘premature anti-fascists’” earned during campaigns such as Scottsboro. Greene pledged his organization to continu-ing fightcontinu-ing for more recent victims of racism such as the Trenton Six,
convicted of murder by an all-white jury, and Willie McGee, a black man on Mississippi’s death row for a rape conviction.32