19    THE REST OF LIFE

We have an interval, and then our place knows us no more.

—Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance

For most district 17 Reds, black and white, the years spent in the South proved to be pivotal. Like returning combat veterans many would have difficulty integrating what they’d experienced into the years to come. What, after all, could compete with larger than life confrontations with security guards, police officers, and southern judges? What could ever feel as good as even temporary victories gained over those who wanted you dead? Staying alive, especially in Alabama, came with an adrenaline rush.

While working for the party they’d admittedly often felt terrified, enraged, exhausted, or disgusted, but their mission infused their lives with the sort of meaning that conventional lifestyles could never deliver. Some would spend years reflecting on the choices they’d made, many continued to work for social justice in other venues, and still others strove to re-create themselves and win social acceptance.

In 1937, Mack Coad, first liaison to the Tallapoosa County sharecroppers, enlisted in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. He served with the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion to defend the Spanish Republic, under attack by General Francisco Franco’s fascists. Blaine Owen (Boris Israel) and Harold Forsha, comrades from the Memphis organizing campaign, also volunteered for America’s first (unofficial) integrated fighting unit. Harry Haywood (Haywood Hall), who’d served in France during the first World War, enlisted in the International Brigade’s 15th Brigada Mixta unit at about the same time.

By the time Spain fell in 1939, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade had suffered a casualty rate greater than 50 percent, but Corporal Mack Coad, Private Harold Forsha, and Regimental Commissar Harry Haywood all made it home. Twenty-seven-year-old Blaine Owen, however, who’d been beaten and jailed in Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis and shot in Harlan County, Kentucky, was reported missing in action. He was believed to have been sent to a hospital near Barcelona, but there is no record of what happened to him after that.1

Mack Coad eventually returned to South Carolina and worked as a crane operator, a train fireman, and a coalminer. He was killed in a mining accident in 1967, still working at the age of seventy-three. Harold Forsha returned to Pennsylvania in 1939, served in World War II, raised a family, and died in Pittsburgh in 1977 at the age of seventy-one.

Harry Haywood served in the merchant marine during World War II; in 1956 he married historian Gwen Midlo and they had two children. Haywood had always been critical of Earl Browder’s Popular Front policy and in 1957 began speaking out against both the CPUSA’s decision to formally disavow the policy of self-determination in the Black Belt and Khrushchev’s destalinization revolution. The party expelled him in 1959 and he later aligned with the new Chinese Communist Party. In 1978 he published his autobiography, Black Bolshevik. Haywood died on January 4, 1985, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

In 1932, Lowell and Jesse Wakefield left Chattanooga to establish a regional ILD office in Seattle, Washington. Wakefield, who was not an attorney, made a bad judgment call that year in the case of Iver Moe, leader of a hunger march in Anacortes, Washington, which was coincidentally Lowell’s hometown. During the march, Moe was arrested for raiding a grocery store. Wakefield believed that media pressure would be sufficient to get the charge dismissed and he did not get Moe a lawyer. Ultimately, Iver Moe went to prison.

Wakefield was replaced by Morris Rappaport.2 He subsequently wrote for the Daily Worker and edited the Voice of Action until 1936, when he apparently left the party. In 1939 he enlisted in the navy; after the war he returned to Anacortes to manage the family salmon cannery business. He began experimenting with canning king crab, eventually making a fortune. After retiring in the early 1970s, Wakefield helped to develop quality-control legislation for the Pacific Northwest fishing industry. He and Jesse raised three children and Lowell died in 1977 at the age of sixty-eight.3

Jim and Isabelle Allen (Solomon Auerbach and Ida Kleiman/Helen Marcy) published the Southern Worker from July 1930 until autumn 1931. Allen replaced Harry Haywood as chair of the party’s Negro Commission in 1938 and in 1941 was appointed foreign editor of the Daily Worker. Drafted in March 1944 at the age of thirty-eight, Allen was honorably discharged seven months later, as he was too old to be sent overseas and, as he often joked, too risky to be assigned to the Office of Strategic Services.

In 1946, he chaired the CPUSA Veterans’ Commission, and from 1958 to 1966 served as general secretary of national programs. For fourteen years, Allen was executive editor of International Publishers, a Marxist press, where Isabelle served as educational director. They had one son, Jesse. After Isabelle died in 1972, Jim retired. Having written more than twenty books on black history, philosophy, and political science, he died in 1986 at the age of eighty.4

In 1939 Sid Benson (Solomon Bernstein/Ted Wellman) returned to his native New York City to work with the Group Theater Collective. His colleagues there included Lee Strasberg, Clifford Odetts, and Elia Kazan. Kazin recalled that Benson (who he knew as Ted Wellman) looked “like a boxer whose sole purpose in the ring was to be the punching bag for one opponent or another.”5

Benson married Elizabeth Savage in the 1940s; they made their home in Greenwich Village, where he taught at the Communist Workers School on East Fourteenth Street.

Nat Ross (Rosenberg) left district 17 in 1935 to become secretary of district 9 (Minnesota, North and South Dakota), where he organized for the Farm Labor Party while his wife Janet worked with the Minneapolis Theater Union. In 1939 they moved to Moscow, where he worked for the Comintern and she wrote for the Daily Worker under the name Janet Weaver. In 1946, they returned to the States and Ross went back to Birmingham as the party’s southern director. He resigned from the party in 1954 and subsequently became a successful businessman.6

Rabbi Benjamin Goldstein (George B. Stern/Ben Lowell) left Montgomery in 1932. Three years later, still unable to find a congregation in New York City, he took his family to Los Angeles, where he got work as a film distributor for Artkino Pictures.

In 1945 the Goldsteins divorced. Two years later he married Juliet Lowell and took her surname. They moved back to New York, where in 1948 Ben Lowell was appointed administrative assistant for the B’Nai Brith Hillel Foundation. That year he spoke at a Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee testimonial dinner honoring Dr. Edwin Barsky, who’d been director of International Medical Services during the Spanish Civil War. Barsky was subpoenaed by HUAC and ordered to turn over not only the names of Americans who’d donated to the Lincoln Brigade, but also of those still working underground in Spain. He chose to go to prison in 1950 rather than release the files. Goldstein’s tribute to Barsky cost him his job.

After a failed second marriage, the rabbi found a congregation in Elmhurst, Queens, but his contract was not renewed. He briefly led another congregation in Cuba before moving to San Francisco in 1953 to live with his sister. He died there of leukemia at the age of fifty-two.7

In 1936, Jane Speed attended the Communist National Training School in upstate New York, where she met and fell in love with Cesar Andrew Iglesias, president of the Puerto Rican Communist Party. In 1937, they married and in 1939 Jane, Cesar, and her mother moved Puerto Rico.

Using the surname Speed de Andreu, Jane worked in the rural districts with Partido Comunista Puertorriqueno, an underground women’s organization. Fluent in Spanish, she would identify herself as a Tampax sales representative in order to scatter the men and give her time alone with the women.

In 1954, Jane and Iglesias were briefly imprisoned after four members of the Puerto Rican National Party demanding independence for Puerto Rico opened fire in the U.S. House of Representatives and wounded five members of Congress. The Puerto Rican territorial government subsequently ordered mass arrests of local nationalists and Communists; Jane and her husband were among them. They had one son, Nicholas. Jane died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1958 at the age of forty-eight. Her mother, Darlie, died four years later. Caesar Iglesias worked in Puerto Rico as a journalist, novelist, and playwright and lived there until 1970.8

In 1937 the ILD dispatched William Patterson to Chicago to establish the Workers’ School. A decade later he returned to New York City to serve as national secretary for the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), successor to the merged ILD and National Negro Congress.

Patterson led his staff in defending controversial clients like Willie McGee, a black man accused of raping a white housewife in Laurel, Mississippi; the Martinsville Seven, seven young black men accused of raping a white woman in Martinsville, Virginia; and the Trenton Six, six black men alleged to have beaten William Horner, a white small-business owner, to death in Trenton, New Jersey.

The outcomes were universally tragic. By 1951, Willie McGee and the Martinsville Seven had been executed. On August 6, 1949, Patterson appealed to the New Jersey Supreme Court in the Trenton Six case after four of them were declared guilty. He managed to get the lower court decision reversed and deferred to his nemesis, Walter White. They agreed that the NAACP would handle the new trial. HUAC had cited the CRC as a disloyal and subversive organization and Patterson feared that would negatively impact the appeal. Three years later, on June 14, 1951, all four were exonerated.

Patterson subsequently took the CRC into the international arena when he indicted the United States for genocide. Arguing that the postwar Nuremburg Trials had established the principle of collective guilt, he applied it to the U.S. government.9 He delivered his petition, “We Charge Genocide” to United Nations delegates at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris on December 17, 1951. His friend and colleague Paul Robeson simultaneously delivered a copy to the United Nations in New York City.

“The federal government claimed it had nothing to do with lynchings,” one CPUSA official commented, “but the petition said, you knew about it and you did nothing.” Patterson had documented nearly every lynching since the Civil War and he’d cited ongoing conspiracies to deny blacks the right to vote by using poll taxes, literacy tests, and terrorism. He maintained that by the United Nations’ own definition, “any intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, racial or religious group is genocide.” Patterson’s passport was subsequently revoked, he was charged with disloyalty and subpoenaed to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In 1956 the CRC was dissolved. When Patterson was again summoned before HUAC in 1959, he calmly responded, “Let me assure you that your hatred for what I represent can never equal my contempt for that for which your committee stands.”10

Defiant to the end, he died on March 5, 1980, at Union Hospital in the Bronx at the age of eighty-nine.

Al Murphy (Albert Jackson), former president of the Alabama Share Croppers’ Union, returned from an assignment in the Soviet Union in 1937 to work with Harlem’s Scottsboro Defense Committee. A year later he was sent to St. Louis, Missouri, as a National Training School instructor. In January 1939, he and Owen Whitfield, black former vice president of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, organized the Committee for the Rehabilitation of Sharecroppers to assist 1,700 displaced croppers who were living in makeshift tents, improvised shelters, church basements, and abandoned barns along Highways 60 and 61 around Swamp East, near Sikeston, Missouri. Securing funding from the CIO, the Urban League, and the Federated Council of Churches, by June Murphy and Whitfield had purchased ninety acres near New Madrid, Missouri, where they relocated many of the families.11

In 1940, Murphy ran (unsuccessfully) for lieutenant governor of Missouri on the CPUSA ticket. Two years later he protested the lynching of Cleo Wright, a young black Sikeston, Missouri, man arrested for attempting to rape a white woman. Although the police repeatedly shot him, Wright survived, only to be kidnapped from his jail cell, tied to the bumper of a pickup truck, and dragged to the center of town, where a mob literally burned him alive. His gruesome murder was one of the many cases that fueled the “Double V” campaign during the Second World War—the demand that victory over European fascism abroad include victory over racism at home. Murphy later worked in St. Louis as a porter, a sheet metal worker, a meat-packer, and a night watchman before returning to Sikeston in 1951. He died there in 1978.12

Hosea Hudson began working for the CIO Steel Workers’ Organizing Committee in 1936. From 1942 to 1945 he served as president of the Steel Workers Local in Ensley, Alabama, and as a delegate to the Birmingham Industrial Union Council. After his appointment to the National Committee of the Communist Party in 1945, he lost his job at the Alabama Foundry Company and his position on the union council. His wife, Sophie, divorced him the following year, and he moved to New York City in 1954, where he found work as a mason and a janitor. Hudson remarried in 1965; he and his wife made their home in Atlantic City, New Jersey, until 1984, when they retired to Florida. He died there in 1988.13

Rob Hall, discharged from the army in 1946, was appointed managing editor of the Daily Worker that year. He later became its Washington correspondent. Hall resigned from the party in 1954 after reports of Stalin’s atrocities were confirmed. He subsequently moved to the Adirondack region of New York state with his wife Euphemia (Mickey) and their five children, joined the Republican Party, and in 1962 began publishing Adirondack Life magazine. Eight years later, Hall was named editor of the Conservationist, a journal of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. He also served as publicity director for the Essex County Republican Committee.14

In 1987 he completed an oral history with professor Robin Kelley. Hall, who virtually never expressed regret, shared with Kelley some of the guilt he felt about the Tallapoosa County sharecroppers. He said that before being appointed to district 17, he’d worked in Kansas and Nebraska and had written extensively about how the wheat and dairy farmers there suffered from the unintended consequences of the Agricultural Adjustment Act. They’d impressed him with their battles against foreclosures and with their willingness to disrupt law enforcement and bypass the judicial process by setting up “penny auctions.” They would show up at a farm auction holding pitchforks and shotguns to discourage outsiders from bidding on the property, then buy it back themselves for one cent.

Almost fifty years later, Hall still wondered if enthusiastic party comrades like his younger self, overly encouraged by the success of the farm holiday movement, hadn’t set up the Camp Hill and Reeltown croppers to openly defy southern planters. The midwestern farmers could count on local support, something that was never available to the Alabama sharecroppers. They were on their own in the Black Belt, and the failed 1935 strike had proved devastating. Hall was still haunted by the possibility that Al Murphy had been right all along when he argued that the ASCU should remain an underground movement.15

Hall died on August 27, 1993.

Joe Gelders was discharged from the army after World War II and moved his family to California, where he became an instructor at the UC Davis while he completed his PhD in physics on the GI Bill. In 1949 the university implemented a loyalty oath, and Gelders was fired the following year for refusing to sign it. He died a year later at age fifty-two after suffering a series of heart attacks. An autopsy revealed that the 1935 flogging he’d suffered in Birmingham not only damaged his heart muscle but had also crushed his chest. Long-term complications from those injuries had shortened his life.16

Joseph Brodsky, chief counsel for the International Labor Defense during the Scottsboro trials, became a founding member of the National Lawyers’ Guild in 1937. An alternative to the American Bar Association, the guild was the first racially integrated attorneys’ organization in the nation.

In April 1946, Brodsky was appointed to the National Board of the Civil Rights Congress, where he worked with his old friend William Patterson. When Brodsky died on July 28, 1947, Vito Marcantonio, member of Congress from East Harlem, eulogized him as “my friend whose name is a synonym to many of devotion to the common people. We will carry on the fight he left us to finish.”17

Brodsky’s sometimes-partner Samuel Leibowitz, lead counsel for the Scottsboro teens’ appeals, was elected justice of Kings County (Brooklyn) Court in December 1940. Reelected in 1954, he was appointed to the New York State Supreme Court in 1962. Justice Leibowitz developed a reputation as one of the toughest judges in the city. He would often berate prosecutors, defense attorneys, police officers, and sometimes other judges and was an outspoken advocate for the death penalty. Leibowitz ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York City twice, retired in 1969, and died on January 11, 1978, at the age of eighty-four. He lived to see Alabama governor George Wallace pardon Clarence Norris, the last living Scottsboro defendant, in 1976.

Finally, and ironically, on election night 2008, the African American Macedonian Church of God in Christ in Springfield, Massachusetts, burned to the ground. Two months later, three white men were charged with arson. They said they’d been enraged by the election of Barak Obama.

The church’s seventy-four-year-old pastor, Bishop Bryant Robinson Jr., was the grandson of Preacher Tom Robinson, who’d been murdered by a white posse in Emelle, Alabama, in 1931. He was also the grandnephew of Esau Robinson, who’d been lynched there. Bishop Robinson’s parents had moved the family to Massachusetts over seventy years earlier to ensure their safety.18