In the spring of 1933, Haywood Patterson of the Scottsboro Boys was declared guilty by a court in Decatur, Alabama, hollowing his conviction, a wave of indignation swept Black communities across the country. Mass protest rallies, demonstrations of all sorts and parades culminated in the Free the Scottsboro Boys March on Washington on May 7-9, 1933.
The right danger took concrete form when the ILD leadership allowed themselves to be suckered into an agreement with the NAACP leadership. These leaders made overtures to the ILD, offering to help raise funds for the mounting legal defense expenses and particularly for those of the Patterson appeal.
This offer, however, was made with conditions which amounted lo giving the NAACP veto power over all expenditures of defense funds, and thus over defense activities. It was a ploy which would nllow NAACP leaders such as Joel Spingarn and Walter White to regain their position in the defense campaign and appear before the masses as leaders in this campaign.
Since the beginning of the campaign two years before, the Spingarn-White crowd had used every possible means to wrest the defense from the ILD. Their efforts were in vain, but they continued to attack—not the lynchers—but the defense. For example, shortly after the Patterson verdict, the NAACP board of directors stated that the only hope for the boys was to “remove ...the additional burden of communism.”1
Now these leaders, largely discredited and isolated, attempted to get back into the defense. The sharp rise in the movement under the leadership of the ILD, which followed the Patterson verdict, forced them to make a tactical retreat. Realizing they had misjudged the temper of the masses they now attempted to regain a place within the defense in order to more effectively sabotage it. To this end they made overtures to the ILD, offering to help raise funds.
In an ILD staff meeting which I attended as head of the Party’s Negro Department, the NAACP offer was discussed favorably by most of the staff. George Maurer, who played a leading role in organizing the Scottsboro defense, and myself were the only ones to object. William Patterson, national secretary, argued that there was no alternative if the organization were to gain the financial support we needed for the Haywood Patterson appeal and the future trials of the other boys.2 As I recall, our objections were to no avail and the agreement was carried through.3
The deal was obviously set up by Samuel Leibowitz, one of America’s leading criminal lawyers, who had become quite well known for his defense of certain gangster types. He had volunteered his services free of charge to the ILD and was accepted as the chief defense lawyer in the trial of Haywood Patterson. He won national acclaim by his brilliant conduct of the defense and emerged as a hero of that trial. On his return to New York from Decatur, Alabama, more than 3,000 people poured out of Harlem to greet him at Pennsylvania Station.
Leibowitz was a man of great personal ambition. (He later became a justice of the New York Supreme Court.) He was clearly uncomfortable in the company of revolutionaries and sought to avoid too close identification with the ILD. He brought the ILD and the NAACP together, ostensibly to achieve unity, but in reality to weaken the hold of the ILD on the defense and pave the way for an eventual takeover by the NAACP leadership.
The ILD went on to compound this original mistake. They not only accepted the deal but hailed the NAACP leaders for their “changed attitude.” In fact, the agreement reflected no change of heart by NAACP leaders. They continued to draw a line between
defense in the courts and the mass movement. They tried to confine their support to the courts and moved to sabotage the mass defense movement, both from within and from without. They refused to support the Free the Scottsboro Boys March on Washington, but this proved to be a serious blunder for the already crisis-ridden and isolated NAACP.
Shortly before the march on Washington, our right opportunist mistakes were continued in the Scottsboro Action Committee, a broad united front which was under the leadership of the ILD. The NAACP had become largely discredited and “left” reformists like William H. (Kid) Davis, publisher of the Amsterdam News, tried to Ntep into the vacuum. Davis, along with Black politicians who served as fronts for New York’s Tammany Hall, attempted to set tip a new so-called non-partisan defense committee for the purpose of the march. This was part of their effort to seize the leadership of the growing mass movement that was calling for a inarch on Washington. Davis attempted to divert it from a mass march into a committee of representative citizens who would present a petition to the president.
At the beginning of this move, the Scottsboro Action Committee tailed after the reformists. They failed at first to see through the left rhetoric of the group’s criticisms of the NAACP. But within a short time, we corrected this mistake and regained leadership of the movement. We did the actual organization and formulation of the proposals for the march, which went over successfully.
I participated in the organization of the march on Washington along with Patterson, Ford and others—helping to prepare the program and working out technical details. The march involved people mainly from the cities of the eastern seabord; there hadn’t been time to organize a truly national demonstration. The demand of the march was “Freedom for the Scottsboro Boys,” which was tied in with demands in the area of civil rights: an end to discrimination in voting, jury service, schools, housing, public accommodations, trade unions and the death penalty for lynching.4
These demands were summed up in the Bill of Rights put forward by the LSNR. The 3,000 marchers, led by Ruby Bates,
Mrs. Jane Patterson (mother of Haywood Patterson) and William Patterson of the ILD, demanded to meet with President Roosevelt.5 Roosevelt was in conference with Dr. Hajalmar Schacht, the special German envoy, and refused to meet the marchers.
We did visit various congressmen who all said it was a matter for the courts, they could do nothing. Oscar DePriest, a Black congressman from the Thompson machine in Chicago, showed his true colors—declaring that we weren’t going to get him into this mess! We left the petitions with Louis Howe, the president’s secretary; saw Vice-President Garner and the Speaker of the House. We then paraded through the streets of Washington and headed home.
After the march, the Poliiburo of the Party reviewed the Scottsboro campaign since the Patterson verdict. The right mistakes before the march arose from a basic misconception of the united front. Behind this was the idea that a united front meant unity with everybody, under any conditions. Involved here was a definite underestimation of the class role of the Black reformist leaders as agents of the ruling class in the ranks of the Afro-American people. Their influence could only be destroyed in the course of building a united front with the masses from below. It was the same as the situation in the labor movement with regard to the labor bureaucracy.
We decided that a resolution should be developed in the light of our discussions; the Negro Department was given the task of drafting such a resolution. We summed up these mistakes in a resolution which was adopted by the Politburo. In its criticism of the ILD’s deal with the NAACP, the resolution stated that the ILD should have offered the NAACP a “straight forward and clear proposal of mass struggle and mobilization of the masses against the capitalist frame-up courts and Jim-Crow legal system.”
If the NAACP had accepted this program, it would have clearly discredited their past policy of relying on the courts. “If they had refused such an offer, this also would have cleared the issues before the eyes of the masses.”
The resolution went on further to state:
In such a broad mass struggle as that of the Scottsboro conscious agents of the ruling bourgeoisie endeavor to come into the united front for the purpose of smashing the mass movement and thus serving the bourgeoisie....It is necessary... to warn the masses constantly of the class role of these elements....Under all conditions it is necessary to maintain the independent role of the Party and of the revolutionary forces in such a united front both in regard to our agitation and our actions.6
SOUTHERN TOUR
Our line, projecting the question of U.S. Blacks as essentially that of an oppressed nation, called for making the South the “center of gravity” for work among them. Though I had spent a brief period in North Carolina, it was not the deep Black Belt South, the focus of the Party’s concentration. I was eager to visit the area, to see how our theory regarding the national question and the role of the “Black peasantry” were being worked out in practice.
The opportunity came in the early part of 1933. In consultation with the Alabama district organizer, Nat Ross; Elizabeth Lawson, acting editor of the Southern Worker (the Party’s Southern newspaper); and A1 Murphy, secretary of the Sharecroppers Union (all of whom were in New York at the time), it was decided that I should spend several weeks in the Alabama district.
Arriving in Birmingham, I had no difficulty in finding the hotel where the comrades had arranged for me to stop. It was on Fourth Avenue, downtown in a small Black business area, near the Birmingham World, the city’s Black weekly.
When I registered, the owner and desk clerk said, “Oh, yes, Mr. Haywood. We’ve been expecting you. Your friends will be here shortly.”
I was shown to my room and a few minutes later two young Black comrades, Hosea Hudson and Joe Howard, came to my
room. Both were unemployed steel workers. They had been assigned as my liaisons to the local Party organization.
In Birmingham, the South’s greatest industrial center, the ruling white supremacist oligarchy expressed the interest of local capitalist Black Belt planters of the adjacent counties, local representatives of northern based industrial and financial corporations. Most of these latter merged socially with their Southern counterparts. At the top of the corporate list was the gigantic U nited States Steel Corporation, sprawling over a section of the town itself. The Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1877 remained in full force.
The principle enunciated by Judge Taney in the Dred Scott decision that the Black has no rights that the white man is bound to respect was still fully operative. Jim Crow laws in public places were strictly enforced. The purpose of it all was to preserve a cheap, subservient, divided and unorganized labor force of degraded, disenfranchised Blacks and poverty-ridden whites. The latter were psychologically compensated by being accepted as members of a superior race.
In Birmingham, racism was all-pervasive and blatant. One could feel it in the atmosphere. Birmingham was a mean town, a place where the police periodically shot down Black people to “keep them in line,” the latter being mostly young and unemployed.
When we walked down the street, Hosea and Joe told me, “If you expect to work down here, you gotta look like the rest of us. You gotta cut out that fast walking with your head up in the air— or these crackers’ll spot you. Get that slouch in your walk. Look scared, as if you are about to run,” he joked. These were big tough men talking now. Of course they were kidding—still, there was a grain of truth in these remarks.
Now a new element had entered the picture—the Communist Party. Formed in 1930 by organizers from the north, the Party in Birmingham took the first steps towards building a union of steel workers, laying the groundwork for building the CIO Steel Workers Union in 1935. It had initiated a movement of unemployed which organized a demonstration of 7,000 people on the steps of the Jefferson County Courthouse in November 1932.7
Though the numbers were not large, the Party grew rapidly
during the 1932 election campaign. Three hundred Blacks and fifty whites gathered to greet William Z. Foster at an election rally. Foster, however, failed to appear because of illness. The following week, 400 Blacks and 300 whites attended a meeting to hear Hathaway; this meeting was broken up by vigilantes throwing Ntink bombs from galleries. There were also a number of mass meetings called on the Scottsboro issue, including one of 3,000 people at the Black Masonic Temple.
The Party had chosen Birmingham as the center for its drive into the deep South and as the logical jump-off place for the development of a movement among the small Black farm operators.
The most dramatic struggle was the movement of tenants, Nharecroppers and farm laborers centered in Tallapoosa County, southeast of Birmingham. The area bordered on the Black Belt plantation region and resembled the latter in respect to farm values, types of tenancy and racial composition. The first local of the Sharecroppers Union was organized there in 1931. That was before the Federal Relief Crop Reduction Program had been instituted. The small owners, tenants, croppers and farm laborers were hit the hardest by the crisis. Merchants and bankers had refused to “furnish” or provide them credit. Mortgages left them at the mercy of their creditors. Small operators lived under constant t hreat of foreclosure and eviction. The wages for farm laborers ran as low as fifty cents a day for men and twenty-five cents for women.8
The close proximity to the Party organization in Birmingham facilitated the organization of these poor farmers in the area. A number of them had worked in mines north of Birmingham and in Nteel plants and factories in the city itself, returning to the land to eke out a living during the Depression. There was a continuous movement to and from the city, and those who didn’t make the move themselves had close relatives who did so. Thus the development of the sharecroppers’ struggle in Alabama, in contrast to other regions of the Black Belt where oppression was equally intense (for example, South Carolina or Mississippi), took a more organized and consciously revolutionary form. This accounts for
what struck me as the relatively high political development of union members.
Local farmers sent a letter to the Southern Worker in Chattanooga, asking that organizers be sent to help them build a union. The Party responded and sent several people, among them Mack Coad, a Black steelworker. Coad, arriving at the scene, met with the Gray brothers—Ralph and Tom—and other local leaders. It was decided that a meeting should be called for July 16, at Mary’s Church near Camp Hill, to protest the Scottsboro convictions. Included in the agenda of the meeting would be plans for organizing a union around the minimum demands of the tenants. The most immediate aim was to force the landlords to increase the quantity of “furnishings” through the winter, and double the wages of the plantation laborers. A last minute arrangement committee of the leaders met the night before, on July 15.
- The county sheriff and local gentry were aware of the defiant moods among the sharecroppers. The sheriff had been tipped off by a local stoolpigeon that an outside agitator was in the area and that radical meetings were being held. The same stoolpigeon informed them about the meeting of leaders on July 15. He and his deputies, seeking the “outsider,” raided the meeting. They found that they were all from Tallapoosa County, and they convinced the sheriff that the meeting was just a harmless get-together and that they knew nothing about an outside organizer.
The next night, July 16, the sheriff and his deputies approached the meeting, where they were confronted by Ralph Gray, who had been posted as a picket. Shots were exchanged in which both Gray and the sheriff were wounded. The sheriff and his deputies fled back to town, where a posse was formed amidst cries of “communist-instigated Negro rebellion,” and a manhunt began.
In the ensuing battle, five Blacks were wounded in addition to Ralph Gray. A Black cropper helped carry him to his home, where Coad and several other armed Blacks had gathered. The posse approached Gray’s home and a battle ensued. The croppers, faced with overwhelming odds, decided to disperse. Gray, however, refused to be removed to safety and insisted upon “dying in his own home.” The croppers insisted that Coad must flee and helped
him to escape to Atlanta. Gray’s home was riddled with bullets by I he posse and when they broke in, he was found dead.
In addition to the wounded, thirty more Blacks were finally rounded up and arrested in the manhunt that followed.
The brutal repression following Camp Hill did not crush the movement; the union regrouped underground and continued to grow. By spring 1932, the union claimed 500 members, mainly in Tallapoosa and Chambers Counties.
In December 1932, there were shoot-outs in Reeltown in Tallapoosa County involving Cliff James, a union leader in the area. The sheriff had tried to serve a writ of attachment on James’s livestock as a result of his landlord’s refusing him an extension on a year’s rent.
The sharecroppers elected a committee to meet the sheriff and when the latter arrived to seize the property, he found union members armed and barricaded in the house. In the ensuing battles, the sheriff and two deputies were wounded, one sharecropper killed and several wounded, including James and Milo Bentley. The sharecroppers scattered through the woods. James and Bentley made it to Tuskegee Institute, where according to several accounts, a Black doctor turned them over to the sheriff. They were then taken to Kilby Prison where both men with their wounds untreated were forced to sleep on the cold floor; both subsequently died from exposure.9
This shoot-out was followed by mob action and violence exceeding that of the previous year after the Camp Hill affair. A posse of more than 500 men went on a manhunt for Black farm operators and “communist agitators.” Mobs raided homes of union members; several were reported to have been killed or beaten. Many union members fled to the woods for safety and the number of Blacks killed in the four-day rioting was not known.
I was told that some white farmers had hidden Blacks in their homes during the rampages of the sheriffs mobs. At the time, I was told by someone that the racists had trouble getting enough men for their posses from Tallapoosa County and had to go outside the county to recruit vigilantes.10
The bodies of the two men were laid out in Birmingham, draped
in broad red ribbons decorated by the hammer and sickle. The Daily Worker reported:
Day and night, a guard of honor, composed of Negro and white workers, stood at attention by the coffins. The funeral home was filled with flowers and wreaths....Thousands of workers filed past the coffins to pay tribute to the martyred leaders of the sharecroppers.11
Some 3,000 people attended the funeral, 150 of whom were whites.
Again terror failed to suppress the union. Despite the arrest of some of its most active members, union members and sympathizers poured into Dadeville (the county seat) before dawn on the day of the trial of those arrested. The courtroom was filled and the crowd overflowed into the square. On the second day of the trial, roadblocks were put up and whites filled the courthouse to prevent Blacks from attending. Nevertheless, Blacks came along the by-passes and across streams, demanding to be seated. The judge was put on the spot and requested the whites to clear half the courtroom. The trial resulted in the sentencing and conviction of those accused.12
The union nevertheless continued to grow and by 1933 had
3,000 members, including a few whites. Its membership and influence was extending to neighboring counties. The shoot-outs at Camp Hill and Reeltown brought into focus the explosive character of the struggle of the region’s Black soil tillers. It revealed that the fight for even the smallest demands by the sharecroppers and tenants could lead to armed conflict. In fact, any demand that would give Blacks a voice in renting and determining wages was regarded as insurrectionary by the local gentry.
It was this explosive feature which distinguished the movement. of Black soil tillers from that of the white farmers in the rest of the country or even the South itself. The demands of the Blacks were more revolutionary than those of the whites for they represented the demands of the agrarian and democratic revolutions, left unfinished by the betrayal of Reconstruction.
Following all this in New York, I was eager to visit Alabama and the sharecroppers. I was curious to know how the union had grown in the face of all that terror. What were the methods of
organization they used? A1 Murphy told me to go down to the area itself.
Murphy was a tall, jet-hued Black, an ex-steelworker and the most important organizer of the sharecroppers. Soft-spoken and modest to the point of self-effacement, he had given me a rundown on the Sharecroppers Union, playing down his own role and disclaiming credit for its achievements. Murphy was a self-educated Marxist, a genuine worker-intellectual.
He praised the local leaders and their high level of political development. He said the people built the organization from their own experience and that the croppers had a tradition of underground organization. Any people who had experienced that kind of oppression, he said, would have done the same thing.
Discussing the matter with local comrades in Birmingham, it was agreed that I should go to Tallapoosa County, but I had to wait for them to arrange security. The opportunity came when I ,em Harris and Hal Ware, leaders of the Party’s national farm work, passed through Birmingham on their way to an executive board meeting of the Sharecroppers Union. They were heading for Dadeville.
We left Birmingham at dusk, driving at night so as not to attract attention. The car was a Chevrolet coupe—the two-door model with a fold-down rumble seat in the back. I sat in the rumble seat. When we got to Dadeville it was dark. Hal turned to me saying, “You’d better pull down the top of the rumble seat over you.” I hastily complied as we were in enemy territory and didn’t want to attract attention.
We soon passed the lights of Dadeville. A short distance out, we came to a farmhouse and stopped. This was Tommy Gray’s place. He was a small independent farm operator and like most of his fellow operators in the area, he was deeply in debt. Greeted by Ciray who had expected us, we went into the house. He had met Hal and Lem at the Farmers’ National Relief Conference the year before. He took our coats and put them in the bedroom which looked like a small arsenal.
There were guns of all kinds—shotguns, rifles and pistols. Sharecroppers were coming to the meeting armed and left their
guns with their coats when they came in. Everyone came and left at night; the meeting lasted, as I remember, two days. There were fifteen or twenty people there, members of the executive board. I was impressed by the efficient manner in which Gray conducted the meeting; they were an impressive group overall.
I was introduced as a member of the Party’s Central Committee. As I recall, I spoke about the international situation and the Scottsboro and Herndon cases. Hal and Lem said a few words about the farmers’ movement in other parts of the country and the follow up of the National Farmers Conference.
I was most impressed by the reports of the leaders of locals about their areas. They described conditions, how they were preparing for a strike, and gave reports on different landlords. I was also impressed that they could spread a leaflet over four counties inside of fifteen minutes. They had a tight underground organization.
I learned there of an attempt to assassinate Tommy Gray. It seemed that Tommy was fishing at the creek, when he heard a shot and a bullet whizzed past his ear. He turned quickly and saw a man running whom he recognized as Charles Harris, a cropper and union member. The union had set up a committee to investigate the incident and they brought a report back at the meeting I attended. One of the reporters told the group that they had visited the accused man and uncovered other information. He had evidently been hired by somebody from the town, a sheriff or landlord, to kill Tommy Gray. They had bribed the man with a promise not to call his loan in if he would do their work.
A discussion followed the report, as people wondered what to do with the turncoat. Some argued he should be permanently got. rid of. But other, cooler heads, argued that this would only play right into the hands of the sheriff. He would use it as an excuse to come down on the whole group. The sober point of view prevailed. It was decided a committee would visit the man and tell him to get out of the area; if he didn’t, then they would deal with him. I heard later that this tactic was successful, and the man and his family left after the delegation’s visit.
I left Dadeville in high spirits, more than ever convinced of the
correctness of our line; that the Black Belt peasantry under the leadership of the working class and the Communist Party was the motor of Black rebellion in the deep South. I felt that the Sharecroppers Union was definitely a prototype for the future organization of the Black, landless, debt-ridden and racially persecuted farmers of the area.
The union continued to grow after I left. By the fall of 1935, it claimed 12,000 members, including some poor whites; 2,500 of these were scattered in Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia and North Carolina. In 1936 it was liquidated—a victim of Browderism.
On my return trip to the national office in New York from Birmingham, I decided to stop over in Atlanta for a few days. This would be a chance for me to check on the. Party’s activities in this Important city and to see Ben Davis, Jr. Ben was the young Black attorney who had courageously and dramatically defended Angelo Herndon in the famous “insurrection” case. It was this case which brought young Davis national attention. Along with Scottsboro, it had become a symbol of the fight for Black rights.
As I neared Atlanta, I tried to recall what I knew of Ben. All hough we had never met, I had learned about his background from friends who were active with him in the Herndon defense. Ben’s father was a self-made man from a poor Georgia family. He had worked his way into prominence and some wealth in Atlanta, and was high in the councils of the Republican Party, once having Nerved as a national committeeman. An old-style Republican in (lie tradition of Frederick Douglass, he was a determined fighter lor civil rights, voting, education and opportunity for Black business.
He had become owner and publisher of the Atlanta Independent, an influential Black newspaper. He was also the district grand secretary of the Negro Odd Fellows, the largest fraternal order in the state. From this position, he was able to build the Imposing Odd Fellows business block on Auburn Avenue. Ben Senior had had ambitious plans for his only son. He had sent him to exclusive New England schools—Amherst and Harvard Law School. But the Depression had interrupted these plans.
The Depression had an especially devastating effect on the Black
community. Not only were poor and working class Blacks driven into deeper poverty, but the small and growing Black middle class, which was already on marginal foundations, was almost completely wiped out. Ben Davis, Sr., became a victim of the Depression. He lost the newspaper and the business block passed into the hands of an insurance company.
Coupled with economic decline was the inauguration of Hoover’s “Southern Strategy” of replacing Black Republicans with a lily-white faction. Ben Senior was removed from his post as Republican national committeeman, with a corresponding loss of his powers of patronage.
Young Davis returned from his Ivy League education to find this devastated situation. A young Black attorney in the South was forced to work in a very narrow field. It was unheard of for a Black to argue a case against a white attorney. This left Ben Junior with drafting deeds, wills, contracts, divorces and other such matters relating only to Blacks—a severely restricted arena for his Harvard Law School training. Ben hung up his shingle in the old Odd Fellows building, and soon formed a partnership with another Black attorney, John Geer.
He was soon dissatisfied and angry; however, as his frustration grew, he found himself “challenged by the thought of what could be done if one put up a really tough fight for the constitutional rights of Negroes in a Georgia court.”13
The Herndon case provided Ben with just such an opportunity. Effectively employing a working class policy in the trials, Ben conducted a militant and aggressive defense. He appeared before the court as a tribune for Blacks and poor whites against Georgia’s white supremacist oligarchy. The trial had been a high point of class militancy.
Arriving in Atlanta by car on a Sunday morning, I went directly to the Davis home. Ben, his father and sister (his mother had died the year before) lived in a large house on Boulevard off Auburn Avenue in a Black middle class neighborhood. The family’s past affluence was evident by the five-car garage in the rear of the house. I was warmly greeted by Ben, who had been expecting me. He was a huge, dark-skinned young man. Six feet two inches tall
with the bull shoulders of a football lineman, a position he had played at Amherst.
Ben showed me into their large living room. We had a long talk before his father and sister joined us. He filled me in on what was happening in Atlanta. By this time he had joined the Party and a considerable movement had developed around the Herndon case. An ILD office and organization had been established. The Party was still quite small, though there were a number of white members.
The next day Ben took me down to his office on the fifth floor of the Odd Fellows building. He spoke about the threats against him by the authorities and the Ku Klux Klan, which was virtually an arm of the state. Men took off their police uniforms to put on the robes of the Klan. He talked of the hounding and the threats as a result of his fight in the court.
He showed me a hole in the door between his office and an adjoining room. Just a few weeks after the trial, he was sitting at his desk and noticed a kind of tube sticking out of the hole in the door. Ben went up to examine it and discovered it was the barrel of an empty revolver which was set up against the door. He pulled a paper out of the barrel and read the message: “The Ku Klux Klan rides again. Georgia is no place for bad niggers and red communists. Next time we’ll shoot.”
He also told me about what had happened downtown, at the ILD office on Peachtree Street. A white comrade, the wife of ILD attorney Irving Schwab, was in charge of the office. Ben came into the office, which was in a white neighborhood downtown, fairly often. Once, as he was coming out of the door, a whole gang was waiting for him. He thought they were from the neighboring offices in the building. He was backed up against the wall, into a corner. No one touched him, but they shouted at him, calling him a nigger son-of-a-bitch, threatening to get him or run him out of town.
With the jailing of Angelo Herndon, the authorities assumed they had disposed of one enemy. They now found themselves faced with another one—Ben Davis. In addition, the Atlanta movement had begun to grow. There were mass meetings around the
Scottsboro and Herndon cases which had drawn many Blacks.
The ILD was militant and growing along with a small but active Communist Party. While I was in Atlanta, I visited a meeting or two of the ILD and the Party. I recall a Party meeting that was held in the home of the Leathers, an old white Southern working class family, long active in radical politics.
There seemed to be about three generations of the Leathers living in that house. This included Nannie Washburn who was then a young mother. Otto had recruited her into the Party and she played a leading role in the Herndon and Scottsboro defense. She was to remain active in the struggle long after the Party’s desertion of the South. Jailed in the civil rights and anti-war movements, Mrs. Washburn remains today a staunch fighter in the cause of proletarian revolution.
I was worried about Ben Davis, about his safety. I didn’t think the threats were idle—they could be carried out—especially after the trial, when there was a lull in the movement. Worries I had had in New York about the situation in the South were borne out by what I now heard in Atlanta. The more I thought about the matter, the more I felt Ben should be pulled out of there—for a time, anyway.
I had sized him up as an up-and-coming young communist, with great leadership potential. He would be a good addition to our growing body of cadres—we didn’t need another martyr, we needed living activists. He was such a dynamic aggressive person; if we got him to the center and national work, he would develop more fully as a communist.
So upon my return to New York, I presented my opinions to the Politburo—we should draw him out of Atlanta. He agreed to come to New York, where he was first made editor of the Liberator, relieving Maude White; he later worked on the Daily Worker. He became a city councilman in the forties and a member of the Politburo of the Party after Browder’s demise.
He grew into an important Party leader with whom I was to have strong political differences in later years.
In March 1934, I was back in Birmingham, Alabama. On my previous visit Nat Ross, the district organizer, had talked about
building the revolutionary movement in Memphis, along with New Orleans, the great financial and commercial center of the lower Mississippi Valley. I had agreed on the necessity of such a step.
Memphis, however, would be a hard nut to crack. Twice the Party had tried to build an organization there. Twice our organizers had been run out of the town by the Memphis police. First it was Tom Johnson, then I believe, Mack Coad.
In those days Memphis had the reputation of being the murder capital of the nation. It boasted the country’s highest homicide rate and had attained the distinction by police murders of Blacks.14 In this respect, it was worse than in Birmingham where the growth of the communist movement had resulted in curbing police killings, to some extent.
In Memphis, the police were unrestrained; it was open season on Blacks, especially on weekends. Victims were usually among the lowest strata, unemployed, friendless and homeless migrants from the countryside seeking employment in the city. They fell into the catch-all category of vagrants, persons with no visible means of support.
Clearly a breakthrough in Memphis required careful planning and most of all, capable organizers. Now, according to Nat, these requisites were present. He had received word from members of a Jewish branch of the International Workers Order (IWO) in Memphis that they were willing to subsidize an International Labor Defense organizer. The IWO was a left-wing insurance organization among whose members were a number of communist and Party sympathizers. I knew the organization, but did not know it had a branch in Memphis.
Nat also informed me that there were two young comrades from New York available for the project—Forshay, an ILD organizer, and Boris Israel, a young communist journalist who was writing a series of articles on the South for the New Masses. Israel offered to accompany Forshay.
“Now,” Nat said, “if we could only find a good Negro comrade.”
“When do we leave?” I asked.
He looked at me with feigned surprise and said, “You really
think you should go, Harry? And that it would be alright with the Central Committee?”
“Of course,” I replied. I was anxious to undertake this assignment, my first organizing job in the South. I could stay there a little while to help get things started and help make contacts with the Black population.
I was then introduced to the young comrades and at midnight we were on our way to Memphis.
My two young friends, who shared the driving, were in the front seat. When I woke up it was dawn with the Mississippi countryside all around.
It was Saturday morning and we passed a number of trucks loaded with Black sharecroppers and their families, apparently on their way to buy “stores” in Oxford. Some of the trucks were driven by white Simon Legree-looking characters, whom I assumed to be plantation riding bosses or planters.
We drew up to the gas station to fill our tank, just outside of Oxford. The attendant, a native cracker type, peered in at me with an expression of curiosity on his face. Then, as if he had figured it all out, he drawled, “What’re yo-all doin’ with that boy—taking him home?”
“Yeah,” said Boris, with a mock Mississippi drawl, “takin’ him on home.”
Then turning to me the guy said, “Yo glad to be home, boy? ”
Falling into my “field-nigger” drawl, I replied “Yahza, cap’n, I shore am.”
We pulled away and drove through the town of Oxford, passing the old state capitol and courthouse, dating from ante-bellum times. (Oxford’s only claim to fame was that it was the home of William Faulkner and the University of Mississippi, “Ole Miss.”)
A short distance out of town, we pulled up at the home of a comrade named Ufe, whose address had been given us by Ross. Ufe’s wife and sister-in-law were the owners of a small plantation.
As a young man, he had emigrated from his native Denmark and settled in the South, where he married into a former slaveholding family. By this time, the plantation had been hard hit by the crisis and mortgaged up to the hilt. There were, I believe,
live sharecroppers on the place. I was to learn that they considered life a fair-minded man. Their contracts included the right to sell their own crop and the right to plant gardens. The homes were equipped with electricity and running water. Recruited by Ufe himself, they were all members of the Sharecroppers Union.
Despite his wife, Ufe had never imbibed the white supremacist doctrine and he insisted that he was not a planter but a farm manager. A member of the Socialist Party of Denmark, he had begun to read socialist papers in the U.S., then the Daily Worker, and was finally recruited into the Party by the Birmingham comrades.
I pondered this unusual story which I had heard from Ross and others as we entered the driveway to his home. It was an old rundown ante-bellum structure with columns and all. Ufe, a small wiry man, had been expecting us, and led us into the big living room where a dozen or so sharecroppers and field hands were sitting before a large open fireplace. It was March cold and a huge log was burning. Ufe introduced us to the sharecroppers.
As we talked, I told them about my visit to Dadeville and other things in the outside world. They all listened attentively. We had supper and stayed overnight. His wife was strangely absent, although I’d seen her puttering around in the kitchen.
We left the next morning for Memphis. Arriving there in the afternoon, we drove directly to the house of a Jewish friend, where the IWO was meeting. Our hostess interrupted the meeting, introduced us, and suggested that the matter concerning our visit be discussed presently, under “good and welfare.”
Israel, Forshay and I sat in an adjoining room to wait. I picked up a newspaper lying on the table, I believe it was the Commercial Appeal, one of the city’s big dailies. A front-page article—no more than three or four paragraphs long—caught my attention. It was a story about a young Black man named Levon Carlock who had been killed by police the night before, after allegedly attempting to rape a white woman.
According to the story he had been shot while attempting to escape the scene of the crime. The article listed prominently the names of the officers involved and also the name and address of the
alleged rape victim. The murder of Blacks by the police had apparently become such a routine matter that the latter didn’t bother to present even a plausible story.
I passed the paper over to Israel and Forshay, exclaiming, “Here’s our issue! Let’s get to work.”
After reading it, they simultaneously declared, “Jesus Christ! That’s made to order.”
By this time, the meeting in the adjoining room had come to our point on the agenda. I looked over the group. They were middle class people, storekeepers and the like, several professionals, and, as I later learned, one wealthy jeweler. I was surprised that the majority of the group were young couples, some of them born in the South and speaking with Southern drawls. They were very definitely revolutionary in sentiment.
Some were readers of the Freiheit (the Yiddish language communist daily) and the Daily Worker. Several of them, I was to learn, had participated in the two previous attempts to form a revolutionary organization in Memphis. They represented the left wing of the Jewish community in Memphis and reflected the hatred of an entire community for Boss Crump’s reigning political machine in Memphis. Crump was not only a rabid racist, but a Jew-hater as well.
As regarded our mission, there was nothing much to be said. We had come there at their invitation. So they proceeded to the immediate question of the subsidy for Forshay, as the ILD organizer. They had agreed on a salary of sixteen dollars a week, with room and board. He was to stay with the jeweler, who had a large house.
Boris also was to stay with Forshay at the jeweler’s and I with a young couple—storekeepers who lived close to the Black neighborhood. That settled, I informed the group about the news article concerning the alleged rape.
Their response was “this happens every day”—it was a common thing. They described the beating and killing of Blacks in the station house, of young Black boys disappearing after they were taken to the station by police, about Blacks being beaten unconscious right out on the street.
We were anxious to pick up on the issue while it was hot. We sent Boris Israel to check on the story while Forshay and I remained at the house, where we set up temporary headquarters. We were quite fortunate to have on our team a man like Boris, with his experience and training as an investigative reporter.
Several hours later he returned, having uncovered a shocking story of racism, murder and police brutality. He had gone directly to the address of the “rape victim,” whom he had found to be a prostitute living in the red light district that adjoined the Black neighborhood. Interviewing her, he had found gaping irregularities in her obviously rehearsed story. At first she had talked openly, unrestrainedly about her “horrendous experience.” Then suddenly she clammed up, blurting out, “The police cap’n said I was not to talk to anybody.” Then she closed the door on Boris.
Boris then interviewed the widow of the murdered man. She lived in a rooming house not far from the scene. She was just a slip of a girl—sixteen she said—but looked even younger. The incident had left her in a state of shock. Sbe was being consoled by an older woman, who turned out to be a maid who lived in the whorehouse.
She began to tell her story. She and her seventeen-year-old husband, Levon Carlock, were newly married and had just come up from Mississippi, where both their families were ruined sharecroppers. She had gotten a job as a maid in one of the white whorehouses. Levon, who was still unemployed, would come to pick her up every* night at about 2:00 A.M. and escort her home.
On the night of the tragedy, he had been waiting out in the street for her as usual, when the police officers shot him down. Overcome by grief, Mrs. Carlock then burst into tears and could no longer continue. At this point, the older woman led Boris into another room and continued the story. She had seen the whole incident from a second-story window above the alley.
She said four policemen had taken Levon around into the alley. She had heard noises and cursing, cries of “you Black son-of-a-bitch.” “You’re the nigger that raped that white woman.” They were beating the poor youth unmercifully with their clubs and
fists, she said.
Levon kept protesting that he had come to take his wife home. Then, one of the officers appeared escorting a white woman. She said, “I recognized her as one of the prostitutes that lives across the street.”
Then the officers asked the woman if Levon was the one that had tried to rape her, and she said “Yeah, he’s the one.” Then she went back to her house.
They started beating Levon again, knocking him to the ground and pulling out their revolvers. Levon begged for his life, but it did no good. “They shot him down in cold blood, right there in the alley,” she said. As they turned and walked away, one of the cops said, “You know that nigger son-of-a-bitch is still alive?” I guess they heard moaning. They stopped, and one of the officers went oyer and pointed his pistol at Levon’s head and blew his brains out right there in the alley. Then a short time later, a Black undertaker came and took his body. The police must have had him laying in wait.
Mrs. Carlock had heard some of this, but hadn’t seen it. She had fainted and after she had come to, was hysterical. We kept her in the house overnight; the landlady gave her some pills. In the morning, I went with her to the undertaker to identify Levon’s body. Later we got the maid to put her story in an affidavit.
Well, there it was. A perfect issue!
Hoping through such a mass campaign that we could build a Party organization in Memphis, we immediately began our campaign to stir up Memphis. We knew that the issue would take hold of the Black population and we hoped to take advantage of the anti-Crump sentiment among whites to win some of them to our side.
We set out to build a broad united front, under the auspices of the LSNR, which I represented, and the ILD. Then and there we worked out a leaflet, slogans and plan of action. Our slogans were: “Stop Police Murder of Negroes in Memphis!” “Levon Carlock Must Be the Last!”
We called for immediate expulsion of the officers involved, their arrest and prosecution on charges of first degree murder and
indemnity to the widow. Our program of action called for the establishment of block and neighborhood committees and mass protest meetings.
The slogans caught fire. Within two or three weeks we had a considerable movement going. Outside of our Jewish friends, we knew no one in Memphis, but they introduced us to their few acquaintances among Blacks. Our most important contact was the editor of the Memphis World, Memphis’s Black newspaper, and his staff. They were sympathetic and wanted something to be done about the murders. Then we met with a number of lower echelon leaders—ministers, educators, lodge leaders and a few businessmen. We soon had an ad hoc committee going, while we stayed in the background. A number of meetings were called at which Mrs. Carlock appeared, and some neighborhood or block committees were set up as a result.
At the beginning, we had contacted the national office of the 11,D and informed Patterson of our plans. We called for a nationwide support campaign, linked up with the Scottsboro and 11 erndon campaigns. The national office gave us a green light to go ahead with our plans and get a local (white) lawyer to prosecute our case against the police.
A rain of telegrams from across the country poured into the Memphis mayor’s office and the Memphis World carried news of (he campaign. Our Jewish friends succeeded in getting a local luwyer, a white anti-Crump man. “He didn’t care so much about Negroes, but he sure hated Crump!” they said.
The campaign spread. Its effectiveness was confirmed by two incidents. Our friends on the World kept us informed about everything going on in the community. They told us that a delegation of Uncle Tom leaders had gone to see the mayor. They were alarmed by the threat our campaign posed to their leadership—they were unable to keep the Blacks in line. They pleaded for at least some token concession on the part of the police. For example, a statement from the mayor to the effect that an investigation would be held. Something they could use to counter (lie “red invasion” of the Black community.
The mayor not only refused to budge, but told the delegation
that the police were doing their duty—and they had better do theirs! The city and police, he asserted, would brook no rebellion from the niggers—and you’d better tell your folk that, too! As regards the “red invasion,” the mayor said that he was aware that there were a dozen or so reds in the city and that they would be taken care of when the time came. They were apparently waiting for a lull in the movement to move in.
It was also through the World people that we met Robert E. Lee, a lieutenant of Bob Church, the Black Republican National Committeeman from Memphis. Lee himself was a prominent man in the community. He sought us out to inform us (in private) that Bob Church liked what we were doing and wanted us to keep it up. He evidently felt that our campaign strengthened his position vis-a-vis Boss Crump.
Daisy Lampkin, national field secretary of the NAACP, came tg Memphis in the midst of our campaign. She came there to help the local branch in its annual membership drive and was unaware of the growing movement initiated by the ILD. The whole thing was quite an unpleasant surprise for the woman. The Party and the ILD had had run-ins with her regarding Scottsboro, and she became frantic when she found out about our work in Memphis. Her campaign was low key; conducted under the abstract slogans of “Equal justice and opportunity,” which carefully avoided the burning issue of police murders right under our noses.
The NAACP was in an embarrassing spot. They called a mass meeting in one of the largest churches in connection with their membership drive campaign. We invaded it, with Mrs. Carlock dressed in mourning black, and demanded a place on the platform for her. As I remember, she was given the platform and she spoke of the murder, asking for help from the NAACP to prevent anything of this sort from happening again. She proposed a united front of the NAACP, ILD and LSNR against police brutality. The chairman passed it off by referring it to the local board. But after the meeting, Lee told us later, the proposal failed to pass the board by only one vote—he personally had voted for it.
This was to be the beginning of a downturn in our fortunes. Next was the disappearance of our star witness, the maid who
Worked at the whorehouse. The local attorney asked us to bring her up to his office, but when we went to get her, she had gone. She ilidn't work there anymore. We speculated that the police had tl Iglilcned her into leaving town after we sent the affidavit she had Hi veil us to the national office and they had published it—either in I lie Daily Worker or the Labor Defender. We had a weak reed in I hr first place, since she was vulnerable herself to a frame-up.
The legal side of the case was important, but now our attorney wnn helpless without a witness. Without the legal case, we couldn’t tt rep up with the public campaign and it began to lose momentum.
The situation was becoming threatening. The cops were getting ready to move in. We discussed this with our friends and they said we'd made a hell of a good fight, but it would be better to send mmcone else in, now that we were known. So the three of us went III to the office of the Memphis World and the editor said we were lucky, we had just missed the four cops who were looking for us.
We decided it was time to leave town. We first decided to go by I lie telegraph station to pick up some money Patterson had wired iin. Torshay and Israel went in to get the money. I stood outside wniling for them. Two cops came up and looked at the Alabama license plate on the car.
Then Forshay and Israel came out of the office—Boris took in the scene in a glance. He jumped into the car and shouted at me, "< 'mne on, Sam! Let’s get out of heah.”
"Yassuh,” I drawled, and climbed in the back. We kept driving until we got to Mississippi!
It wasn’t a total defeat. Forshay stayed behind and continued to organize for the ILD. Our work put the cops on notice that they couldn’t get away with the kind of crap they had been dishing out. The raw stuff had to stop; otherwise they would have trouble. The Hood of telegrams had an impact. It also helped lay the base for future activity there.