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Black and Red, the Untold History Part I: The Fight to Free the Scottsboro Boys
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- 16 February 2024 838 hits
History has segregated the fight against racism and the fight for an egalitarian system, communism. In reality, the two were connected like flesh and bone. Many antiracist struggles were led by, initiated by, or were fought with communists and communist-influenced organizations. Many Black fighters were also dedicated communists and pro-communists of their time.
In turn, the bosses have used anti-communism as a tool to terrorize and divide antiracist fightback. Regardless of communist affiliation, anyone who fought racism was at risk of being redbaited. Why? 1) The ruling class understands the natural relationship between antiracism and communism, and 2) Multiracial unity threatens the very racist system the bosses “work so hard” to maintain.
Below is part I of a series aimed at reuniting the history of communism with antiracism. Robin D.G. Kelley’s book Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression, excerpted throughout this piece, is a good supplement for those who would like to find out more. This series originally ran in May 2017 (volume 49 no.11), and in this period of increasing nationalism and liberal fascism, it’s worth revisiting again!
In the years after slavery, Southern U.S. bosses used racist terror in the form of the Ku Klux Klan, police beatings, and lynching, legal and extralegal, to keep Black workers oppressed and as a source of cheap labor to drive down the wages of all workers Black and white.
Robin D.G. Kelley in Hammer and Hoe described it as the following:
White supremacist groups [including the KKK] organized by some of [Birmingham’s] leading citizens…enjoyed huge numerical and financial support…Klansmen [through intimidation and violence] sought to cleanse their city of Jews, Catholics, labor agitators, and recalcitrant African-Americans who refused to accept “their place” in the hierarchy of race.
The Southern bosses police and kangaroo courts (sham legal proceedings) were the heart of this injustice system.
“Fear [of the Southern injustice system] came from the knowledge that the color of your skin made you a suspect—a suspect that looked just like the prime suspect--every time the police were looking for a black man.” (WNYC 2//1/2013)
When workers united and fought back against this terror, the bosses often used racism and anti-communism to try to divide the working class.
The Scottsboro Boys
On March 25, 1931 nine Black teenagers age 13 to 19 were pulled from a freight car near Paint Rock, Alabama and charged with raping two white women. Within three days, the young men were tried by an all-white jury, convicted and sentenced to death. A lynch mob gathered at the jail in Scottsboro, demanding the young men be turned over to the racist rioters.
Courthouse lynchings like this were common for Black workers and youth living in the Jim Crow south. So common in fact that the local branch of The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the other misleader organizations, focused on helping small business owners, didn’t even respond to the case.
Communists, First Responders
One organization did respond, the International Labor Defense (ILD), a workers’ defense organization initiated by the Communist Party. ILD was made up of communist and non-communist workers, Black and white. Within days of the sham trial, the ILD set up a defense committee, obtained lawyers for the nine young men on death row and built the defense of the Scottsboro Boys into a worldwide cause that saved them from the electric chair and after a many years-long battle eventually won their freedom.
The fight to defend the Scottsboro Boys involved several thousands of people around the world. The ILD organized mass meetings where family members of the wrongly convicted young men would speak alongside members of the ILD.
Bosses Counter with Terror
The Southern bosses were terrified of this multiracial movement against lynchings and responded with a campaign of terror against Black and white supporters of the campaign. Along with the physical terror carried out by the Klan, a campaign of anti-communism was launched to scare workers away from the fight to save the Scottsboro Boys.
The anticommunist campaign took several forms. The kkkops arrested people, and beat people suspected of being supporters of the ILD. Black and white women were arrested and threatened with rape by the police. The bosses’ press spread anti-communism.
The Birmingham Labor Advocate warned its readers to beware of outside agitators who, “under the cover of darkness,” disseminated ”Red literature preaching free love [and] inter marriage.(Hammer and Hoe)
The local NAACP was reluctant to help defend the working-class youth. But a whole year after the arrests, one of the women accusers of rape came forward and admitted there was no rape and that the police had forced her into lying. This created an upsurge in anger about the case and the NAACP finally joined the ILD in the campaign to free the young men.
In spite of the beatings, jailings and threats, the ILD kept both the mass campaign and the legal fight going by organizing meetings, rallies and raising money to pay legal fees and other expenses for the families of the Scottsboro Boys.
‘The All-Southern Scottsboro and Civil Rights Conference was one such mass meeting that went on in spite of Klan and police intimidation. In the days prior to the conference Klansmen organized a twenty-car motorcade through the Black community and distributed leaflets that read “Communism Will Not Be Tolerated.”
Nonetheless some three hundred Blacks and fifty whites packed the meeting room and between 500 and 1000 were turned away because of lack of space and by the military presence of the police who stationed eighty cops equipped with three machine guns in posts across the street from the hall.
…As Hosea Hudson [a Black communist and labour leader in Deep South] recalled many stood up to the intimidation. “[People] just walked all under them rifles, just went on in the door and on to the meeting.” (Hammer and Hoe)
The fight to free the railroaded young men took many years. Charges were finally dropped for four of the nine defendants. Sentences for the rest ranged from 75 years to death. All but two served prison sentences; all were free by 1946.
You Cannot Kill the Working Class
Angelo Herndon, a Black communist labour organizer, summed up the significance of the struggle in his essay entitled “You Cannot Kill the Working Class.”
If you know the South as I do, you know what the Scottsboro case means. Here were the landlords in their fine plantation homes, and the big white bosses in their city mansions, and the whole brutal force of [private security] and police who do their bidding. There they sat, smug and self-satisfied, and oh, so sure that nothing could ever interfere with them and their ways. For all time they would be able to sweat and cheat the [Black] people, and jail and frame and lynch and shoot them, as they pleased.
And all of a sudden someone laid a hand on their arm and said: "STOP." It was a great big' hand, a powerful hand, the hand of the workers. The bosses were shocked and horrified and scared. I know that. And I know also that after the fight began for the Scottsboro boys, every [Black] worker in mill or mine, every [Black] cropper on the Black Belt plantations, breathed a little easier and held his head a little higher.
New York City, February 12—As Israel prepares to massacre thousands more Palestinians in Rafah, on top of the 28,000 already killed, angry protests are building in New York City and around the world. Rafah is the southernmost city in Gaza, where civilians had been instructed to flee, and now the more than one million civilians there are being attacked. The lack of food and clean water is killing thousands more due to starvation and disease. The U.S. government is supplying the weapons and still defending Israel’s genocidal policies.
Last Friday hundreds gathered in front of the Brooklyn Museum and on Monday hundreds met at Union Square in Manhattan and then marched through the city for hours. The police have continually escalated their violence, sometimes charging into the loud but peaceful crowds and pulling someone out for arrest. They are also grabbing speakers and leaders and others who may be on or off the sidewalk or street as an arbitrary excuse to intimidate marchers. But it won’t work because there is too much anger at the mass murder in Gaza.
These demonstrations were heavily Muslim; others have been mainly anti-Zionist Jews. What is needed is unity, not only of these groups but of a broader swath of workers and students. Even more essential is a focus on a class analysis of worldwide capitalist and imperialist murder and the need to build an international working-class communist movement.
The few million Palestinians, who have no pro-worker leaders, cannot defeat the Israeli-American monster unless they are allied with workers in other countries, even some Israelis, in an anti-capitalist struggle. Progressive Labor Party members have distributed hundreds of CHALLENGEs and had some good conversations, and we must continue to mobilize our friends and organizations to build this struggle.
How do you spell fascists? IDF
How do you spell murderers? IDF
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Hey, hey, ho, ho!
The occupation has got to go!
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Joe Biden, you can’t hide!
We charge you with genocide
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They are killing kids overseas...
Shut it down!
They’re killing kids in our streets...
Shut it down!
They’re getting killed by bombs...
Shut it down!
They’re getting killed by police...
Shut it down!
If they keep bombing...
Shut it down!
This racist system
Shut it down!
This genocidal system
Shut it down!
This capitalist system
Shut it down!
Shut this racist system down!
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U.S., Israel hand in hand
racist murder is the bosses’ plan,
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From Palestine to Mexico
The bosses borders, got to go!
Harlem
This past November, we resumed monthly political meetings in Harlem. We are organizing against Mayor Eric Adams' police harassment and fighting for adequate low-income housing for ALL residents and immigrants. We are also joining the Episcopal Peace Fellowship to fight against genocide in Gaza and the West Bank and to fight to end the Occupation, end military funding for Israel, and for a permanent cease-fire. We are organizing to send church and community people to all pro-Palestinian actions in NYC.
In our town, we are joining all demonstrations in support of Palestinians and demanding a cease-fire, ending the occupation, and ending all military funding for Israel. We organize to support a Jewish and Muslim dialogue. and work to involve high school students in it. Also, my grandson just went with his high school group to tour the Holocaust museum in D.C. and I am encouraging him to organize his friends who went (and other students) into a study group about the roots of fascism and how to fight it!
I am leading an online book group discussing "The 1619 Project" and examining what kinds of activism its analysis can suggest for our congregation's Social Action Committee.
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Don’t use ‘ethnic cleansing’
A recent CHALLENGE editorial spoke about horrific mass murder and ethnic cleansing being carried out in Gaza by the Israeli ruling class. It was an excellent editorial - like the rest of the paper too - offering a breath of fresh air, in contrast to all the deadly nationalism underlying the mass murder in Gaza, and also mistakenly upheld by some people participating in the current, widespread protests against that killing.
However, I think we should always refrain from using the expression: ethnic cleansing. The word cleansing, as we know, means to clean. But there’s absolutely nothing clean or positive about genocide. The expression - ethnic cleansing - embodies the intolerable ideology of racists who commit genocide. Let’s not give them an inch, not politically, not militarily, and not linguistically.
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Struggling against nationalist ideas in the movement
Some of us from the Progressive Labor Party went to a Boston Teachers Union teach-in, “Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism.” Since the teach-in, I’ve been thinking about the complexities of raising our line within a movement that’s strongly impacted by nationalism and liberalism.
The movement takes aim at Israel as a settler colonial state rather than as a capitalist (fascist) state, capitalism being at the root of all types of colonialism and imperialism. Settler colonialism is when a colonial power claims the land, not just the resources and labor of an exploited people. This form of colonialism leads to racism and genocide, like what the British and then the U.S. did to Native Americans. But is this worse than “plain old colonialism,” which morphed into imperialism in the 20th century? Both continue to oppress, displace, and murder workers all over the world, for example in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central America, Haiti, and Sudan. Workers in these places all suffer the brutality of imperialism.
When the concept of globalization became popular in the 1990’s, it seemed to reflect new realities in the world making the Leninist concept of imperialism irrelevant. Playing with words in this way is what liberals do when they don’t want to embrace a Marxist analysis. But Marxism-Leninism is necessary for understanding the world today and all its interconnections and necessary because it leads us to a revolutionary solution.
Because of its nationalism, the revisionist left plays up ethnic identity and plays down class. It refuses to condemn capitalism for fear of sounding like Marxists. Their fixation on settler colonialism reinforces the obsession with land that seems to be at the heart of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. They also embrace self-determination for Palestinians (and everyone else) which is also the justification for a Jewish state (self determination for Jews). This places the conflict within the capitalist framework of nationhood and avoids the all-important question of what class the state serves. For the working class, winning your own state (i.e.nationalism) means changing the color/ethnicity of your oppressors, not liberation.
Self determination (embodied in the chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”) assumes that one’s “self” is primarily one’s ethnicity, religion, or gender rather than one’s class. It’s another expression of identity politics. These things are real and important to many people, but when you think of what mainly determines our condition of life, it is our class. The capitalist propaganda machine pulls the wool over our eyes in order to keep the working class divided. Self determination didn’t solve the problems of workers in South Africa, Algeria, Vietnam or scores of other countries in the world when they fought off the colonial oppressors any more than it will solve the problem of workers in Palestine.
Despite our ethnicity or religion or gender, workers suffer from the same capitalist economy that seeks short-term profits above all else and results in high prices, low wages, the marketing of products that harm our lives (for example processed food and pharmaceuticals), racism and sexism. During Covid-19, we were all subject to the same dysfunctional, self-serving capitalist class that put profits over people’s lives.
Capitalist brainwashing causes most people to perceive the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a clash of cultures, rather than a conflict engineered by the imperialist powers to secure their oil interests in the Middle East. With the capitalists controlling the narrative, it seems as though Palestinians and Israelis hate each other because they both want to live on the same land, which fits right into the current movement’s single-minded focus on “settler colonialism.” For those of us working within this movement, we must counter the nationalist chants with the class conscious chant, “Arab, Jewish, Black, and white, workers of the world unite”.
As horrible as wars are, they create opportunities to politicize the working class. They make people want to take a stand and think more deeply about society. Why shouldn’t we build a movement that is anti-capitalist? The working class is ready for it!! Why shouldn’t workers start thinking about the road to real liberation rather than stay mired in capitalist solutions?
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Bosses in Pakistan battle for control
NY Times, 2/10–The party of the imprisoned former prime minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, won the most seats in parliamentary elections this week, delivering a strong rebuke to the country’s powerful generals and throwing the political system into chaos…Never before in the country’s history has a politician seen such success in an election without the backing of the generals — much less after facing their iron fist.
The success of Mr. Khan’s party was a head-spinning upset in an election that the military thought would be an easy victory for Mr. Sharif…Pakistan’s powerful generals had jailed Mr. Khan, arrested candidates allied with him and intimidated his supporters to clear his party from the playing field — or so they thought…the military has wielded ultimate authority, guiding its politics behind a veil of secrecy, and civilian leaders have typically risen to power only with its support…The vote also showed that Mr. Khan’s strategy of preaching reform and railing against the military has resonated deeply with Pakistanis…
FBI and ATF enter fight for fascism in Atlanta
The Guardian, 2/10–Police in Georgia, together with federal agencies, are conducting a crackdown on activists involved in a continuing campaign against a controversial police and fire department training center known as “Cop City” that has included acts of arson and sabotage against equipment being used on the project.
This week alone saw Atlanta-area raids by law enforcement that took a woman out of her house with no shirt, left a naked photo of another woman on display after ransacking a room and dragged a man by his hair – while arresting none of them…The fight against Cop City has attracted national and global headlines, especially after police shot and killed one environmental protester at a campsite in a public park – the first such incident of its kind in US history. At least one of the search warrants for Thursday’s raid…authorized the FBI to confiscate dozens of items from the raided homes – including laptops, cellphones, “Defend the Atlanta Forest” stickers and posters, and personal journals.
Israeli bosses continue the slaughter of children in expanding empire
Al Jazeera, 2/10–The Israeli military has killed at least 28 Palestinians in strikes on Rafah immediately after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signaled that an invasion of the city in southern Gaza may be close…As with many previous Israeli air raids, each attack reportedly killed multiple members of three families, including a total of 10 children, the youngest of whom was only three months old. This came hours after Netanyahu said he had ordered the military to plan for the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of forcibly displaced Palestinians from Rafah in preparation for a ground invasion to accompany the air attacks…Israel’s invasion of Gaza has killed at least about 28,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, with thousands more missing, likely remaining under rubble.
Battle for minerals drives instability in DRC
BBC, 2/11–Emile Bolingo is not sure how long he and other residents of Goma, in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, can hold out. This major city in the region, with about two million people, has been cut off from the farms that feed it for several days. It is the latest episode in a resurgence of fighting that has seen tens of thousands added to the nearly seven million who have been forced from their homes in the country because of multiple conflicts. Rebels from the ethnic Tutsi-led M23 movement are blocking the two main roads into Goma from the north and the west, preventing produce from getting through…Within reach of major mining towns supplying metals and minerals in high demand such as gold, tin, and coltan, Goma has become a vital economic hub. Its road and air transport links, and the fact that it has a huge UN peacekeeping base, have attracted a host of businesses, international organizations, and diplomatic consulates.
