Mother Ada Wright and the international campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys, 1931-1934

American Historical Review

Volumn 106, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 387-429

  Miller, James A ^a   Pennybacker, Susan D ^a   Rosenhaft, Eve ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33645166869     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2651612     Document Type: Review

References (324)

1. The two standard histories of the case are Dan T. Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South, rev. edn. (Baton Rouge, La., 1979);
2. James Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro (New York, 1994).
3. Each offers extensive bibliography, but neither pursues the international defense campaign, or its archival sources, which are discussed in Mark Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936 (Jackson, Miss., 1998), parts 2 and 3. Our chronology draws on Carter, 16-20, 22-54, 71; Goodman, 6-9, 24-25; Solomon, 193-94; and the following documents in the NAACP Papers: P. A. Stephens to Walter White, April 2, 1931; White to Stephens, April 20, 1931; Statement of Roy Wright, et al., April 23, 1931; White to "Lud," April 29, 1931; White to Bob and Herbert, May 3, 1931; White to Herb and Bob, May 5, 1931; Notes, "Scottsboro, Ala-Case" [1931], Library of Congress, NAACP Papers, Scottsboro Series, Microfilm Part 6.
4. We note the new narrative presented in Barak Goodman and Daniel Anker's film, Scottsboro: An American Tragedy, Social Media Productions (New York, 2001).
5. The Scottsboro case continues to be routinely invoked by contemporary writers in significantly different contexts. See, for example, Abigail Thernstrom and Henry D. Fetter, "Race and the O.J. Trial: From Scottsboro to Simpson," Public Interest 122 (Winter 1996): 17-27.
6. For the international campaigns outside Europe, too extensive to be covered here, see, for example, RGASPI 500/1/16: 88-89; 539/2/474: 77-86, 97-100; 539/2/488: 85-86, 100, 114; 539/9/501: 4; 542/1/46: 1-2, 7-10; 542/1/51: 101. (The reader will note that individual documents from RGASPI are cited most often by folder and page numbers within the folder. In some instances, a document is titled instead. Where a folder number appears alone, the general contents of the folder are being cited as relevant.) J. Manley, "Document: The Canadian Labour Defense League and the Scottsboro Case," Bulletin of the Committee on Canadian Labour History 4 (Autumn 1977).
7. On antislavery, see, for example, Richard Blackett, Building an Anti-Slavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830-1860 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983);
8. Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York, 1987);
9. Claire Midgley, Women against Slavery (London, 1992);
10. Thomas Bender, ed., Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley, Calif., 1992);
11. Leroy Hopkins, "'Fred vs. Uncle Tom': Frederick Douglass and the Image of the African-American in 19th-century Germany," Etudes germano-africaines 9 (1991).
12. Paul Gilroy, "The Jubilee Singers and the Transatlantic Route," in Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London, 1993), 87-96, cites a case occurring in the period between antislavery and Scottsboro.
13. Two histories that concern other periods, and sustain similar methodological frameworks, are Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997);
14. Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, The Many-Headed Hydra (Boston, 2000). What many other existing studies share is a commitment to an exploration of the contact between "Europeans" and colonial or ex-colonial subjects, or between North Americans and "others" in analogous relationships. Despite a variety of theoretical alternatives and differing interpretations of the notion of a global order, the central axis of this literature remains the exchanges deriving from the exploitative core. "Non-western" histories of "non-white" agency are posed against a racist or anti-racist portrayal of groups of white Europeans, or those of European descent. When African Americans abroad are considered, it is most often as expatriate bohemians, such as the itinerant jazz artist. There are also histories involving "non-whites" who were resident in European contexts during the period prior to 1945.
15. See, for example, Laura Tabili, "We Ask for British Justice": Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (Ithaca, 1994);
16. Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (Boston, 1996);
17. Katharina Oguntoye, May Opitz, and Dagmar Schultz, Farbe bekennen (Berlin, 1986),
18. trans. as Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out, Anne V. Adams, trans. (Amherst, Mass., 1991). While we do not suggest that the central locus of racial antagonism, or of racial terror (prior to 1933), was to be found in the European (even as distinct from the North American) theater of politics, racial interaction, interracial alliances, and the shaping of attitudes, both sympathetic and humanitarian, did occur in some important ways in those theaters.
19. For a highly selective group of documents, placed in a particular interpretive framework, and drawn from the recently opened Russian Federation archives, including many from RGASPI, see Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism (New Haven, Conn., 1995);
20. Klehr, Haynes, and Kyrill M. Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism (New Haven, 1998).
21. Haynes and Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven, 1999), interprets and cites other newly released Russian documents.
22. See note 1, above.
23. James S. Allen, "The Scottsboro Struggle," The Communist (May 12, 1933): 440.
24. "Third Period" was the phrase used by N. I. Bukharin at the Seventh Plenum of the Comintern Executive in 1926 to denote an impending epoch of international ferment and revolutionary struggles. See Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew, The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin (London, 1996), 68-119;
25. McDermott, "Stalin and the Comintern during the 'Third Period,' 1928-33," European History Quarterly 25 (1995): 409-29. The NAACP and other organizations dealing with racial issues had decisive ties to the parties of the Second (Socialist) International, a contributing factor in their inclusion in the list of "reformist" and "social fascist" organizations by Comintern-affiliated parties.
26. On the CPUSA and the case, see, for example, Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Depression (New York, 1983), chaps. 3-5;
27. Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990), 77;
28. Solomon, Cry Was Unity, 300-01.
29. On the case as racial spectacle, see, for example, Gilbert Osofsky, The Burden of Race: A Documentary History of Negro-White Relations in America (New York, 1967), 359.
30. See Hugh T. Murray, "The NAACP versus the Communist Party: The Scottsboro Rape Cases, 1931-32," Phylon 28 (1967): 276-87;
31. "Aspects of the Scottsboro Campaign," Science and Society 35 (Summer 1971): 177-92.
32. On Walter White, see Robert L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade against Lynching, 1909-50 (Philadelphia, 1980), 100;
33. White, "The Negro and the Communists," Harper's Monthly 164 (December 1931);
34. White, A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White (Athens, Ga., 1995).
35. See also Roy Wilkins, Standing Fast: The Autobiography of Roy Wilkins (New York, 1982).
36. On "authenticity," see, for example, Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies (Madison, Wis., 1997), 3-23;
37. Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 28-29, 41.
38. See esp. James R. McGovern, Anatomy of a Lynching: The Killing of Claude Neal (Baton Rouge, La., 1982).
39. The Communist 9 (February 1931): 153-67,
40. cited in Philip S. Foner and Herbert Shapiro, eds., American Communism and Black Americans: A Documentary History, 1930-34 (Philadelphia, 1991), 36-50.
41. See Mark I. Solomon, Red and Black: Communism and Afro-Americans, 1929-35 (New York 1988), 153-67.
42. The Communist 9 (February 1931),
43. cited in Foner and Shapiro, American Communism, 50.
44. On analogies between Russian minorities and "racial and ethnic minorities" in other contexts, see, for example, RGASPI 515/1/2338; 539/2/488: 291: "[all over the world] the coloured races are coming to recognize only in the Soviet Union have their problems been solved"; Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, The Great Challenge, Nationalities and the Bolshevik State, 1917-1930 (New York, 1992).
45. See, for example, Solomon, Red and Black, 180-81.
46. "Some Experiences in Organizing the Negro Workers," The Communist (January 1930): 51-52.
47. RGASPI 495/154/425, "Resolution of Eastern Secretariat - Statement of Comrade Ballam," September 11, 1930;
48. "Ballam's Statement," December 21, 1929.
49. RGASPI 495/154/425: 49-51. Ballam survived these charges. See Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 33-34, 177-78.
50. "For National Liberation of the Negroes! War Against White Chauvinism!" The Communist 11 (March 1932),
51. cited in Foner and Shapiro, American Communism, 185-86. In a typical white chauvinism case, a party member was charged in Chicago: "Mrs. Estran had for some time expressed herself that the bringing in of Negro workers to the Jewish Workers Club headquarters will spoil the business of the Club [Restaurant] and drive away the children of the schools (schools where the little children are being taught in Jewish)." RGASPI 515/1/2021: 22. She was ultimately rehabilitated.
52. "For National Liberation of the Negroes!" 187;
53. Solomon, Red and Black, 222-24.
54. See Francis Beckett, Enemy Within: The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party (London, 1995), 1-89;
55. Kevin Morgan, Against Fascism and War: Ruptures and Continuities in British Communist Politics, 1935-41 (Manchester, 1989), esp. chap. 1;
56. Stuart MacIntyre, A Proletarian Science: Marxism in Britain, 1917-33 (Cambridge, 1980).
57. On black Left circles, see Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London, 1984), chap. 10;
58. Hakim Adi, West Africans in Britain, 1900-1960: Nationalism, Pan-Africanism and Communism (London, 1998);
59. Black and Asian Studies Association Newsletter (Institute of Commonwealth Studies), entire run;
60. and especially Stephen Howe, Anti-Colonialism in British Politics: The Left and the End of Empire, 1918-64 (Oxford, 1993).
61. On Saklatvala, see Joyce M. Bellamy and John Saville, eds., The Dictionary of Labour Biography, vol. 6 (London, 1982), 236-41;
62. Sehri Saklatvala, The Fifth Commandment, Biography of Shapurji Saklatvala (Salford, England, 1991), esp. chap. 24;
63. Mike Squires, Saklatvala, A Political Biography (London, 1990).
64. On the NWA and Arnold Ward, see, for example, RGASPI 542/1/66: 1-43; on Bridgeman, see Bellamy and Saville, Dictionary of Labour Biography, vol. 7 (1984), 26-40.
65. RGASPI 495/100/938: 206-07.
66. RGASPI 495/154/425, "Letter to the CPGB," August 16, 1930; 495/100/710: 142.
67. See, for example, RGASPI 495/100/938. On the South African Party, see, for example, RGASPI 495/100/91; 495/155/83: 38-52, 56-67; 495/155/86: 440-45; Colin Bundy, The History of the South African Communist Party (Capetown, 1991), 19.
68. See Fryer, Staying Power, 298-321. Dutt was resident in Vienna during most of the events of the early Scottsboro campaign;
69. see John Callaghan, Rajani Palme Dutt: A Study in British Stalinism (London, 1993).
70. On Padmore, see James R. Hooker, Black Revolutionary: George Padmore's Path from Communism to Pan-Africanism (London, 1967), chap. 3.
71. On Kenyatta, see Jomo Kenyatta, Suffering without Bitterness: The Founding of the Kenya Nation (Nairobi, 1968), 33-43, 192;
72. Woodford McClellan, Africans and Black Americans in the Comintern Schools, 1925-1934," International Journal of African Historical Studies 26 (1993);
73. P. Mockerie, An African Speaks for His People, with a foreword by Julian Huxley (London, 1934), 11-21.
74. On Kenyatta and Malinowski, see the Archives of the London School of Economics, British Library of Political and Economic Science, IAI 629, 39/129; and Malinowski Africa I, 15/496, Malinowski Students 5 (538). See, for example, Ralph Bunche Papers, "General Correspondence," Box 10b, Schomburg Center, New York Public Library, for his associations with Padmore. An important strand of anti-racist organization existed among the Quakers (Friends) in Britain.
75. When Arnold Ward approached the CPUSA, asking for help in London Negro work, he was referred by William Patterson to Padmore as the leading figure in this work in Europe (see RGASPI 515/1/3373: 30). Padmore (Malcolm Nurse) was born in 1902 in Trinidad, the grandson of a slave. He worked and lived in the United States in the late 1920s, traveled to Russia, and edited Negro Worker briefly from Hamburg thereafter, was deported to Britain in 1933, and he mainly resided in London until his departure for Ghana in 1957, two years before his death (in the UK).
76. On the ITUCNW, see RGASPI 495/155/87, "First International Conference," August 14, 1930;
77. 534/3754: 1; 534/3/744: 92, 149; Hooker, Black Revolutionary, 26. Its roots lay in the LAI and the Red International of Labor Unions (Profintern), and it was founded at Hamburg in 1930, after Prime Minister Ramsay McDonald barred it from meeting in London. The Executive included African-American trade unionists, the Senegalese activist Garan Kouyatté, and the trade union leaders Frank Macauley of Nigeria and Albert Nzulu of Johannesburg. Negro Worker claimed 4,000 colonially based supporters, despite imperial bans against its sale, and was sold in many U.S. cities. The ITUCNW was disbanded by the Comintern in August 1933, but Negro Worker continued to be published out of Brussels, Copenhagen, and Harlem from Paris in 1936.
78. The humanitarian roots of Comintern anticolonialism lay in the LAI's forerunner, the League Against Colonial Atrocities and Oppression, founded in Berlin in 1926. LAI presidents included the German physicist Albert Einstein, the French writer Henri Barbusse, and Mme. Sun Yat-Sen, American-educated widow of the first leader of the Chinese republic; its letterhead boasted the writers Upton Sinclair and Maxim Gorky, and the artist Diego Rivera, as well as political activists Augusto Sandino, Georgi Mikhailovich Dimitrov, Harry Pollitt, Jawaharlal Nehru, Shapurji Saklatvala, and Reginald Bridgeman. The British Labour Party left the LAI in 1927 and barred its members from affiliation in it from 1929 on.
79. See RGASPI 542/1/37: 8-10; 542/1/49: 150-51; 542/1/39: 101-02; 542/1/39: 142-43; 542/1/40: 119-23; 542/1/44; 542/1/54: 1-4; GehStA 77/4043/221: 9-17, 29-31. For a tendentious but detailed account of Comintern Negro and anticolonial work, see Rolf Italiaander, Schwarze Haut im roten Griff (Düsseldorf, 1962), 21-72.
80. Willi Münzenberg (1889-1940) was a skilled organizer, propagandist, and political operator whose death by strangulation in southern France in 1940 was probably the work of Soviet agents. See Tania Schlie, ed., Willi Münzenberg (Frankfurt am Main, 1995);
81. Stephen Koch, Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas against the West (New York, 1994),
82. published in Britain as Stalin, Willi Münzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals (London, 1995).
83. On Smedley and Chattopadhyaya, see Janice R. MacKinnon and Stephen R. MacKinnon, Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical (Berkeley, Calif., 1988), esp. 69-117;
84. Jawaharlal Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru: An Autobiography (London, 1936), 148-55.
85. See 10 Jahre Internationale Rote Hilfe: Resolutionen und Dokumente (Berlin, 1932);
86. Hartmann Wunderer, Arbeitervereine und Arbeiterparteien: Kultur- und Massenorganisationen in der Arbeiterbewegung (1890-1933) (Frankfurt am Main, 1980), 98-105;
87. José Gotovitch, Du rouge au tricolore: Les communistes belges de 1939 à 1944 (Brussels, 1992), 15.
88. Resolution of the Secretariat of the International Red Aid on IRA work among Negroes (November 3, 1930), in 10 Jahre Internationale Rote Hilfe, 193-98.
89. Tribunal (Berlin) VI/7 (July 1930): 6;
90. Tribunal VI/8 (August 1930): 2;
91. Tribunal VI/11 (September 15, 1930): 2;
92. Tribunal VII/7 (April 1931): 12;
93. "Gastonia-Arbeiter in Barkenhoff," Tribunal VI/9 (August 15, 1930): 18.
94. See also Bezirksmitteilungsblatt des Bundes der Freunde der Internationalen Arbeiter-Hilfe, Hamburg-Schleswig-Holstein 4 (October 1929), SAPMO RY1/I2/8/87 (Flugblattsammlung der KPD);
95. Lichtbildstreifen Faschismus: Rote Hilfe; Amnestie, SAPMO RY1/I4/4/23 (Rote Hilfe Deutschlands), 347-59.
96. The Gastonia, North Carolina, textile strike occurred during 1929 at the Loray Mills, which had a work force of 3,500. See Liston Pope, Millhands and Preachers: A Study of Gastonia (New Haven, Conn., 1942).
97. RGASPI 534/3/668: 56, 56b. On the Hamburg bar scene and the International Union's work, see RGASPI 534/3/668: 87.
98. RGASPI 495/155/86: 290, 294.
99. See, for example, the remarks of Willi Budich, RGASPI 539/3/525: 49-52.
100. RGASPI 515/1/1966: 31, 53; 515/1/2734: 39. Robert Minor (1884-1952), a former Socialist and editor of the Masses, wrote, "many of the present generation of Negroes learned by the historic Scottsboro struggle that the CP was the ship, and all else was the sea." The Heritage of the Communist Political Association (New York, 1944), 43-44.
101. "Bloody Harlan County," Kentucky, was the scene of a major strike in the U.S. mining industry in 1931 and disputes in 1932. See Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas, eds., Encyclopedia of the American Left (Urbana, Ill., 1992), 753, 815, 873.
102. An anti-lynching conference had been held in Chattanooga in 1925. See James W. Livingood, A History of Hamilton County, Tennessee (Memphis, Tenn., 1981), 341-44, on the earlier Chattanooga lynchings of Alfred Bloun and Ed Johnson. Jail terms were served in Washington, D.C., by the local authorities accused of negligence in the Johnson case. This regional episode may have predisposed the Scottsboro and Paint Rock authorities to bring the defendants to trial in 1931, preventing a lynching episode on the night of their seizure. (Livingood Interview with Susan Pennybacker, Chattanooga, February 1998).
103. On the Johnson case, see Mark Curriden and Leroy Phillips, Jr., Contempt of Court: The Turn-of-the-Century Lynching That Launched 100 Years of Federalism (New York, 1998).
104. See RGASPI 515/1/2285: 6; see also 515/1/2285: 22-24, 26-30, 34a, 35-40, for the Johnson/Browder/Hathaway exchanges of 1931. Harry Jackson replaced Tom Johnson in Chattanooga later in 1931; Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 25.
105. See the appeal of May 6, 1931, in 10 Jahre Internationale Rote Hilfe, 124b;
106. Negro Worker 3 (April/May 1933): 12,
107. Negro Worker 1 (June 1931): 11;
108. Die Rote Fahne (KPD newspaper), April 19, 1931;
109. Polizeidirektion Nachrichtenstelle Bremen, Lagebericht, Number 5/31 (July 8, 1931), StABr 4,65-IV.i.c.11; Arbeiterstimme (Dresden), June 9, 1931;
110. Vorwärts (June 10, 1931), late edition;
111. Die Rote Fahne, July 2, 1931;
112. Chemnitzer Tageblatt, July 12, 1931. Louis Engdahl reported to Moscow that a German worker and Scottsboro demonstrator was later murdered by the police in Chemnitz; RGASPI 539/3/1096, May 17, 1932.
113. RGASPI 539/2/488: 58. For an example of U.S. press coverage, see "The World Looks at Scottsboro," Newport News Star, July 23, 1931, NAACP Papers, Scottsboro Series, Microfilm Part 6, Reel 8, Frame 282. On Wright's remarks, see interview material in the possession of Susan Pennybacker.
114. RGASPI 539/9/501: 23. The African-American writer Lloyd Brown, a CPUSA youth leader in the 1930s, resided in the USSR for part of the 1930s. He wrote Scottsboro pamphlets for the Soviets and recalls traveling widely to collective farms with a young translator, in order to speak about the case (Brown Interview with Susan Pennybacker, London, April 18, 1998).
115. Wright was born close to 1890, the granddaughter of a slave. She also had two daughters: Lucille (who toured in the campaigns as a child) and Beatrice (Emma Maddox). After her tour, Wright remained a domestic, and her employers were fully aware of the case. She had no outstanding political connections, although she remained in contact with various campaign figures and continued to tour in the United States after 1932. She died in 1965. Those who knew her attested to her forcefulness of commitment, depth of character, and her oft-stated desire to "go all the way for her boys" (interview material, 1996-99; in the possession of Susan Pennybacker). For her visit to New York before her departure for Europe and an encounter with the NAACP, see Naison, Communists in Harlem, 60-61.
116. See RGASPI 539/4/54, Louis Engdahl, "Scottsboro in Germany";
117. Elizabeth Lawson, "Scottsboro's Martyr: J. Louis Engdahl" (New York, [ca. 1933]).
118. Hamburger Volkszeitung, May 6-7, 1932;
119. Die Rote Fahne, May 13, 1932; "Abt. IA PKD, 13.5.32," GehStA 219/19, 107b. Wright and/or Engdahl were able to speak in eastern Saxony, the Ruhr, and Darmstadt and were banned from speaking in Berlin, Altona, Hamburg, Hannover, Stuttgart, and Leipzig.
120. See "Die Scottsboro-Kampagne in Europa," MOPR (journal of International Red Aid) VII, 8 (November 1932);
121. J. Louis Engdahl, "Die Scottsboro Europa-Tournee: Eine Großtat," MOPR VII, 12 (December 1932); correspondence between the German Foreign Office, Interior Ministry, and Bremen authorities, StABr 4,65-XXIII.5; Saxon Ministry of the Interior to police authorities, May 21, 1932, Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden (Bautzen), AH Löbau, Sig. 2227: 126; Protest Resolution of RHD Bezirk Hessen-Frankfurt to Prussian Interior Ministry, May 4, 1932, GehStA 77/4043/386: 32.
122. RGASPI 539/4/54: 99. Pressed by the ILD to defend the costs of his presence, he wrote, "As for Mrs. Wright, I am having her write her own statement, as best she can, stating her own viewpoint. My own opinion is that it would have been a catastrophe to have sent her alone," adding that no English was spoken in, for example, southern Saxony. RGASPI 515/1/3017: 130.
123. See RGASPI 539/5/126: 146-52; Protokoll des 1. Weltkongresses der Internationalen Roten Hilfe (Moscow, 1933).
124. On Austria, see New York Herald Tribune, May 24, 1932;
125. New York Times, May 27, 1932;
126. New York World Telegram, May 25, 1932.
127. On Belgium, see New York World Telegram, June 10, 1932; poster for the Brussels meeting, "Une Nouvelle Affaire Sacco-Vanzetti. Au Secours . . . ," ILD Papers, Schomburg Center, Reel 3;
128. J. Ludwig [sic] Engdahl, "Scottsboro, Vandervelde und Belgisch-Kongo," MOPR VII, 8 (August 1932), 13-15.
129. On France, see, for example, Magdeleine Paz to Walter White, June 25, 1932, on Wright's speech in the Salle Wagram, Paris: "Ada's presence and speech produced great feeling . . . In a general sense, this affair has revived a live interest in the race question": NAACP Papers, Scottsboro Series, Microfilm Part 6, Reel 5, Frames 893-94; RGASPI 515/1/3016: 66-70; "French Municipality Demands, 'Free the Scottsboro Boys,'" Daily Worker (London), August 13, 1932. The British government's Foreign Office file for Ada Wright indicates that officials felt that the government ought not to register an official protest to the American government, despite trade union demands, because protests so lodged for Sacco and Vanzetti had been unsuccessful, implying that such government protests in the Scottsboro case might backfire. "A negress named Wright" was on her way to Britain; one official wrote, "I told the HO [Home Office] that I did not think there was any special ground necessitating instructions for her to be refused admission" (25.5 and co-signed 25.6). The CPGB claimed responsibility for fighting the government to victory on this issue, but the file surely indicates a more complex situation. Public Record Office, Foreign Office, FO 371/15875, paper 3038.
130. Daily Worker (London), (July 29, 1932): 2;
131. Daily Worker (June 30): 1-2;
132. Daily Worker (July 2): 2;
133. Daily Worker (July 4): 2;
134. Daily Worker (July 5): 2.
135. The coverage afforded Ada Wright's British tour by Nancy Cunard's Negro seems to have been directly lifted from the Daily Worker (London).
136. See Nancy Cunard, ed., Negro: An Anthology (New York, 1969), 245-69, for a narrative in the self-same words, yet without attribution. Negro was originally published by Lawrence and Wishart in London in 1934. Cunard was not in Britain during the Wright visit.
137. Engdahl wrote to the Red Aid office in Berlin, stating that both De Valera and Irish nationalist James Larkin, Jr., had been approached about the tour; RGASPI 515/1/3017: 288-89. De Valera wished to preserve his American connection and to maintain a policy of anti-Communism. See Tim Pat Coogan, Eamon De Valera: The Man Who Was Ireland (New York, 1995), 414, 424-26, 433, 722 n. 80. Reginald Bridgeman wrote to Padmore: "Valera refuses to allow Mrs. Wright to visit the Irish Free State in order to win a little credit with the United States Government at the expense of the Negroes." RGASPI 534/3/756: 90.
138. See "The Scottsboro Campaign in the Scandinavian Countries," ILD Papers, Schomburg Center, Reel 3;
139. "Über die Scottsboro-Kampagne," MOPR VII, 11 (November 1932), 24-25;
140. "Mor till två dödsdömda barn" (Swedish newspaper clipping, NAACP Papers, Scottsboro Series, Microfilm Part 6, Reel 8, Frames 801-02). The attendance figures published in the Comintern press were certainly inflated.
141. 'Über die Scottsboro-Kampagne," 24-25;
142. Robert Lejour, "Die Aktion der Roten Hilfe während des belgischen Bergarbeiterstreiks," MOPR VII, 12 (December 1932), 16-18;
143. Die Rote Fahne, August 24, 1932.
144. The phrase "moving and often murderous" is that of Camille Lemonnier (1888), cited by Patricia Penn Hilden, Women, Work and Politics: Belgium 1830-1914 (Oxford, 1993), 90.
145. Ada Wright, "Ich gehe ins Gefängnis für meine beiden Söhne," MOPR VII, 11 (November 1932), 23. On her visits to Hungary and Bulgaria, see RGASPI 539/3/1096: 152-54b; 539/2/474: 114, 120, 134; 515/4/7: 41;
146. Engdahl, "Die Scottsboro Europa-Tournee," 11. Wright stated that she was unable to enter Italy, Romania, Poland, Greece, and Finland.
147. Engdahl, "Die Scottsboro Europa-Tournee," 11. Engdahl wrote to Padmore of his fear of sending papers to the Hamburg office, as it was under surveillance and had been raided; RGASPI 534/3/754: 128.
148. Protokoll des 1. Weltkongresses der Internationalen Roten Hilfe (Moscow, 1933), 250, 261;
149. Lawson, "Scottsboro's Martyr," 1-3, 6.
150. See "Story of Scottsboro," March 17, 1934, New York, Richard B. Moore Papers, Schomburg, 6 (14), 11/22. A Bronx Coliseum meeting in 1932 mourned Engdahl's death and was attended by 12,000 people and addressed by Ada Wright and Mother Mooney (see note 96 below).
151. Naison, Communists in Harlem, 74; RGASPI, 539/3/1096: 52.
152. Interview material in possession of Susan Pennybacker. Richard B. Moore, for example, wrote about Ada Wright to John P. Davis of the National Negro Council: "The appeal of a mother is very effective, as you know, and her appearance will help greatly to stimulate that united action." Moore Papers, 6 (14), 6/2, October 6, 1937.
153. Zora Neale Hurston, "Characteristics of Negro Expression," in Cunard, Negro, 46.
154. Lloyd Brown stated that the use of the term "boys" had only belatedly aroused controversy; for those involved in the campaign, the usage was not pejorative, and he recalled that the party's involvement with the defendants was as "cases, not individuals." Brown described them as at the bottom "economically and culturally," members of "the Lumpenproletariat" (Brown Interview). See Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (Bloomington, Ind., 1984), 23-24;
155. Sandra Gunning, Race, Rape and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890-1912 (New York, 1979).
156. On the psycho-sexual origins of the image of blacks as primitives and potential rapists, see, for example, Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968).
157. On the impact of these images on American popular culture and the mass media, see Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York, 1989).
158. On D. W. Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation as a key source of these images, see Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900-1942 (New York, 1977);
159. Michael Rogin, "The Sword Became a Flashing Vision: D. W. Griffith's 'The Birth of a Nation,'" Representations 9 (Winter 1985).
160. Helen Marcy, "Whip Up Lynch Mobs against Nine Negroes in Alabama," Southern Worker, April 4, 1931,
161. cited in Foner and Shapiro, American Communism, 250.
162. "Nine Negro Workers Face Lynch Mob in Alabama as Trial Opens on Horse-Swapping Fair Day," Daily Worker (New York), April 7, 1931,
163. cited in Foner and Shapiro, American Communism, 251.
164. Kelley characterizes the black press as describing the defendants as "poorly-trained . . . primitive when we think of intelligence"; Hammer and Hoe, 80.
165. Goodman, Stories, 5, 91.
166. "Scottsboro Boys Appeal from Death Cells to the Toilers of the World," Negro Worker, May 1932,
167. cited in Foner and Shapiro, American Communism, 292-93.
168. Goodman, Stories, 92, 94, 235, 237.
169. On minstrelsy in Britain, see, for example, Harry Reynolds, Minstrel Memories: The Story of Burnt Cork Minstrelsy in Great Britain from 1836 to 1927 (London, 1928), 39, 15;
170. Ernest Henry Short and Arthur Compton Rickett, Ring Up the Curtain, Being a Pageant of English Entertainment Covering Half a Century (London, 1938), 21;
171. Michael Pickering, "Race, Gender and Broadcast Comedy: The Case of the BBC's Kentucky Minstrels," European Journal of Communication 9 (September 1994).
172. The issue of how African Americans should be represented in speech, literature, the visual arts, and popular culture has long been central to black cultural politics. Most black artists and critics have recognized, or assumed, a connection between these issues of representation and public policy, that is, that there is an integral connection between how black people are seen, heard, perceived, portrayed in various art forms and how they are treated by their fellow citizens. For important early twentieth-century statements on this issue, see the symposium moderated by W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed?" The Crisis (1926), all issues;
173. "Criteria of Negro Art," The Crisis 32 (October 1926);
174. Sterling A. Brown, "Negro Character as Seen by White Authors," Journal of Negro Education 2 (April 1933),
175. cited in Mark A. Sanders, ed., A Son's Return: Selected Essays of Sterling A. Brown (Boston, 1996), 149-83;
176. Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes.
177. On minstrelsy and American culture, see, for example, Joseph Boskin, Sambo: The Rise and Demise of an American Jester (New York, 1986);
178. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York, 1991).
179. Debates about the attempts to recreate African-American vernacular speech have flared up periodically in twentieth-century African-American cultural politics. For a thoughtful recent discussion, see "Black Vernacular Representation and Cultural Malpractice," in Tommy L. Lott, The Invention of Race: Black Culture and the Politics of Representation (Maiden, Mass., 1999), 84-110.
180. For two excellent studies of the ways in which the literary Left grappled with these issues during the 1920s-1940s, see James Edward Smethurst, The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930-1946 (New York, 1999);
181. William J. Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism between the Wars (New York, 1999).
182. The Scottsboro propaganda material used by the "official" (Red Aid) Scottsboro committees - most of it originating with the CPUSA - was literally translated into the principal languages of the Comintern (French, German, Spanish, and Russian) in the Comintern offices and reissued for use internationally. The national sections deployed this material in combination with locally edited text to produce their own leaflets and reports for circulation to the party and non-party press (see, for example, the annual report of German Red Aid for 1932, in GehStA 77/4043/386: 52-54). The Comintern files include numerous examples of this process. Translated versions of texts attributed to the defendants and to Mrs. Wright take no account of the peculiarities of Negro diction highlighted in the American originals, even allowing for the fact that there was not necessarily "authenticity" to the American "originals."
183. RGASPI 515/1/2285: 26. See also 28-30, 34b, 35-40, 59-60. On the half-Negro jury debate, see 515/1/2222: 7-8.
184. RGASPI 515/1/2285: 28: "The bosses and landlords incite the white workers and croppers . . . but they make women and children, white and black, slave long hours in their mills for starvation wages." Johnson would also explain: "Well, these 10,000 whites [mob at the trial], were ragged, many of them had not had a square meal for days. They were poor farmers from the state of Tennessee and yet they constituted a real potential force of fascism because we had never approached these poor farmers with our propaganda, our agitation, and because we have never organized them for the struggle against their present conditions." RGASPI 515/1/2222: 32. Elizabeth Lawson wrote, typically, in contradistinction to Johnson's language: "On April 6, in response to the call of the landlords' newspapers, the little town of Scottsboro held ten thousand mountaineers. The boss-incited lynch-mob of the most backward people packed the court-house and surrounded it." "Scottsboro's Martyr," 3.
185. RGASPI 515/1/2586: 7, draft, "Letter from B. D. Amis to The Liberator," April 21, 1931.
186. RGASPI 515/7/2023: 19. See also Naison, Communists in Harlem, 36-37, 136-37, 259-60.
187. Ann Snitow observes: "the party's allegiance to the Soviet Union, with its sexually repressive policies, fostered a suspicion of any sexual questioning as a symptom of bourgeois degeneracy. Instead, the CP often viewed sexual conservatism as a cultural bridge to the masses." Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds., Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New York, 1983), 19.
188. See also Van Gosse, "'To Organize in Every Neighborhood, in Every Home': The Gender Politics of the American Communists between the Wars," Radical History Review 50 (1991);
189. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 79;
190. " 'Afric's Son with Banner Red': African-American Communists and the Politics of Culture," in Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class (New York, 1994), 103-21.
191. The issue of rape in relation to the Scottsboro case has its most insightful critic in Jacqueline Dowd Hall. See Revolt against Chivalry: Jesse Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign against Lynching (New York, 1979), 197-206;
192. "'The Mind That Burns in Each Body': Women, Rape and Racial Violence," in Snitow, Stansell, and Thompson, Powers of Desire, 328-49.
193. The elimination of a debate on guilt or innocence in the Scottsboro case presumably served to diffuse incipient tensions among the defendants' supporters. But we cannot assume that debate on this issue necessarily subsided entirely, in or outside the Communist movement. (On the methodological contentions, see, for example, Gunning, Race, Rape and Lynching, 3.) In involving the mothers in the case, the CPUSA/ILD/Red Aid campaign obviously sought to soften the image of a "negative" male blackness by promoting "appealing" and "non-sexual" mothers and children.
194. Sol Harper reported on this to the Negro Department of the CPUSA's Trade Union Unity League in 1930 (RGASPI 515/1/2024: 16), and claimed that he complained of this practice to a party strike leader, who replied that "the Klan is working with us"; 19.
195. RGASPI 515/1/4074: 33, citing Labor Defender (July 1937): 6.
196. On the key white anti-lynching organization in the South, whose philosophy accommodated a range of assumptions about white womanhood and rape, see Hall, Revolt against Chivalry. Lady Simon, Kathleen Manning Simon, the Liberal leader of antislavery work, corresponded with Jesse Ames and with the NAACP, hosting Walter White and others in England. See Ames to Simon, February 14, 1935; White to Simon, November 7, 1934, Rhodes House Library, Brit. Emp. MSS S25 K22;
197. White, Man Called White, 96-97.
198. RGASPI 515/1/3016: 48, "Negro and White Workers . . . Save the 9 Scottsboro Boys" (a leaflet from Akron, Ohio, 1932). Lloyd Brown recalled meeting Ruby Bates during the campaign, after she had joined forces with the ILD and the mothers. He said that he was "not impressed by her." He described her as "ignorant . . . uncultured . . . not an admirable person" (Brown Interview with Pennybacker).
199. Walter White succinctly recalled: "tough hard-boiled Victoria Price, a cotton mill worker and part-time prostitute, and a younger mill worker, also free with her favors for a price, Ruby Bates"; White, Man Called White, 126.
200. See Goodman, Stories, 19-23.
201. See Ruby Bates to Richard B. Moore, July 8, 1933, written after the recantation of her earlier testimony and her absorption by the ILD campaign: "I received your letter frieday [sic] and was very glad to hear that you was having good meetings . . . I am at Unity [camp] and I try to read but some how or other I can't get interested in reading but I read the daily worker every day . . . I am going to help carry the fight on here for the freedom of the boys not only the Scottsboro boys but for all other class war prisoners . . . Give my love and best regards to Lester and Mrs. Patterson. I hope our struggle for the boys will be successfull. I close with my love . . . and best wishes for the meetings. Comradely greetings, Ruby Bates." Moore Papers, 6 (14), 6/2.
202. RGASPI 542/1/53: 75-78; Alfons Goldschmidt, "Richter Lynch," Die Weltbühne 28/17 (April 26,
203. See Goodman, Stories, 83, 84, 153, 199, 237. On the use of "motherhood" as a locus of political mobilization in labor, socialist, internationalist, and rightist political movements,
204. see, for example, Amy Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s (Chicago, 1993), 38, 235, 243;
205. Diana Taylor, "The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo," in Alexis Jetter, Annelise Orleck, and Diana Taylor, eds., The Politics of Motherhood: Activist Voices from Left to Right (Hanover, N.H., 1997), 189, 192.
206. RGASPI 515/1/2222: 15.
207. Editorial, Birmingham Post (Alabama), August 24, 1932 (clipping in NAACP Papers, Scottsboro Series, Microfilm Part 6, Reel 8, Frame 724).
208. RGASPI 515/1/2586: 16, "Interacial Protest Meeting," May 30, 1931.
209. Children's protest letter from Wiesbaden-Biebrich, RGASPI 539/3/528: 122; "Les blancs contre les nègres: Le procès de Scottsboro," MS dated March 2, 1936, RGASPI 539/5/195: 16.
210. Daily Worker (London) (June 30, 1932): 1.
211. Daily Worker (London) (June 30, 1932): 1.
212. Daily Worker (London) (July 5, 1932): 2.
213. "Stop the Lynching of Nine Negro Boys," Anti-Imperialist Youth Bulletin, May-June 1931, RGASPI 542/1/53: 75;
214. 8 Negerkinder auf den elektrischen Stuhl (Berlin, 1931);
215. Strijdt met de Roode Hulp voor de Negers van Scottsboro (Amsterdam, 1933). On the appeal of the mothers, see RGASPI 539/2/474: 119-23.
216. See RGASPI 539/3/528: 113-30; Sturmplan der RHD Dezirk Mittelrhein, July-September 1931, GehStA 77/4043/385: 211-38; letter from RHD Berlin to RH-Pioneers in Cannstatt (Württemberg), April 8, 1932, GehStA 77/4043/386: 28-31.
217. RGASPI 539/9/501: 30. See also White, Man Called White, 68.
218. "Scottsboro 'Mother Sympathy' Hoax Pulled Off Again," Omaha Guide, August 1, 1931, NAACP Papers, Scottsboro Series, Microfilm Part 6, Reel 8, Frame 307;
219. and again as William Pickens, Seattle Enterprise, July 24, 1931.
220. RGASPI 515/1/3017: 268.
221. On the Netherlands, see De VARA rede van Ada Wright: Wat de negermoeder in het engelsch sprak en waarom de VARA valsch vertaald heeft (Amsterdam, 1932).
222. On Belgium, see Engdahl, "Scottsboro, Vandervelde und Belgisch-Kongo."
223. On Sweden, see "The Wright-Engdahl Tour," ILD Papers, Schomburg Center. On France, see Magdeleine Paz to Walter White, June 25, 1932, and clippings from Le populaire: NAACP Papers, Scottsboro Series, Microfilm Part 6, Reel 5, Frames 901-07.
224. See Protokoll des 1. Weltkongresses der Internationalen Roten Hilfe, 82, 164. The Executive of the International Red Aid urged "the necessity of ensuring that the leadership of the campaign did not pass into the hands of the Social Democratic and petty bourgeois liberal elements"; RGASPI 539/2/474: 69.
225. See "Scottsboro Special," Anti-Imperialist Youth Bulletin, September 1931, RGASPI 542/1/53: 57 (13);
226. Daily Worker (London) (July 1, 1932): 2; Gillies-Morrison Correspondence, NMLH ID/CI/8; NMLH ID/CI/10;
227. William Gillies, The Communist Solar System, NMLH ID/CI/8/44. In 1931, thirty-three Labour MPs signed a protest letter in support of the defendants.
228. Daily Worker (London), (July 7, 1932): 2.
229. RGASPI 542/1/43. See David Abercrombie to Lonsdale (November 14, 1991): 2, in possession of John Lonsdale. Nancy Cunard played an increasingly active role in the campaign after 1932, although all accounts indicate that she never joined the CPGB. In early 1933, she went to London, and in that period, her Scottsboro defense organization emerged.
230. Daily Worker (London) (July 4, 1932): 2.
231. Power was a professor of economic history; Laski taught political science; Tawney was a reader in economic history. See the Oxford "Boar Hill" petition, in Weekend Review, October 8, 1932, signed by Hugh Walpole, H. G. Wells, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Stephen Spender, Louis Golding, and Bertrand Russell, who subsequently wrote to William Gillies, "I am a Socialist and as much opposed to Communism as you are. I do not intentionally associate myself with any movement inspired by the Communists." September 18, 1933, NMLH ID/CI/39/16.
232. Associated Press report of July 4, 1931 (NAACP Papers, Scottsboro Series, Microfilm Part 6, Reel 8, Frame 248); RGASPI 539/2/474: 27-29. For examples of public interest from the "bourgeois press," see reports in Hamburgischer Correspondent (May 7, 1932), late edition;
233. General-Anzeiger (Dortmund), May 17, 1932;
234. Berliner Tageblatt (June 2, 1932), morning edition, and April 11, 1933;
235. Vossische Zeitung (October 11, 1932), morning edition.
236. Alfons Goldschmidt, 8 Menschen in der Todeszelle (Berlin, 1932); RGASPI 539/3/524: 129-37.
237. On Goldschmidt and the independent Left milieu in which he operated, see Kurt Hiller, Köpfe und Tröpfe: Profile aus einem Vierteljahrhundert (Hamburg, 1950), 273-79;
238. István Deäk, Weimar Germany's Left-Wing Intellectuals: A Political History of the Weltbühne and Its Circle (Berkeley, Calif., 1968).
239. RGASPI 539/3/528: 113-16, 122. Mass signatures were also gathered in the USSR.
240. Komitee zur Rettung von Mooney und Billings to ILD New York, September 12, 1932 (copy in NAACP Papers, Scottsboro Series, Microfilm Part 6, Reel 6, Frames 69-72); "Internationale Hilfs-Vereinigung," Die Weltbühne 28/1 (January 5, 1932): 40.
241. Tom Mooney (1892-1942) was the object of a celebrated labor "frame-up" case. He and Warren Billings (1893-1972) spent 1916-1939 in prison on homicide charges stemming from a bomb explosion in San Francisco. See Esolv Ethan Ward, The Gentle Dynamiter: A Biography of Tom Mooney (Palo Alto, Calif., 1983). After a long campaign, partly involving his mother, who died in the course of it (and whose image and persona were heavily marketed by the Comintern), he was freed in 1939, his health broken.
242. See Buhle, Encyclopedia, 485-87. Mrs. Mooney traveled in the United States with the Scottsboro Mothers. See also Mooney to Engdahl: "[I] highly appreciate efforts on my behalf. However - I object [to] using [my] Mother in factional disputes"; and Mooney to Magdeleine Paz, March 1932, in which he refers to "the nine small young colored (Negro) boys of Scottsboro, Alabama, USA." RGASPI 515/1/3017: 67, 93.
243. See, for example, RGASPI 539/2/474: 274-75. See Charles Martin, The Angela Herndon Case and Southern Justice (Baton Rouge, La., 1976);
244. Angelo Herndon, Let Me Live (1937; rpt. edn., New York, 1969). Herndon was a nineteen-year-old CPUSA member who organized a hunger march in Atlanta involving blacks and whites and was jailed until 1937 for the capital offense of "attempting to incite insurrection."
245. Buhle, Encyclopedia, 307; RGASPI 515/1/3754: 64-65; 70-72; 515/1/3933.
246. See Der Weltkongress der internationalen Wassertransportarbeiter und seine Beschlüsse (Hamburg, 1932), 4;
247. Hamburger Volkszeitung, May 21-22, 1932. Police correspondence and reports on the meeting do not mention Ada Wright; GehStA 77/4043/427: 52-56.
248. On the Amsterdam Anti-War Congress, see "Über die Scottsboro-Kampagne," 119.
249. Keesings Contemporary Archives, entries for July 21-22, August 6-8, and September 6-7, 1932; "Der Ausstand in Belgien," Gewerkschaftliche Monatshefte 42, no. 31 (July 1932): 485-87.
250. On Kladno, see The Times (London), March 26, 30, and 31, April 2 and 14, 1932;
251. J. Steiner, "Uhelné dolovani na kladensku za prvni republiky," Slezky Sborník 79 (1981): 1-27. On Scandinavia, reports refer to "the strike area of Söderhamn [Sweden]."
252. See "Scottsboro Campaign in the Scandinavian Countries."
253. Die Rote Fahne, June 4, 1931. The veteran of the Bavarian Soviet Republic was either Erich Mühsam or Ernst Toller; both regularly appeared on Scottsboro platforms. The 1931 murders were those of the police captains Anlauf and Lenk, a crime for which Erich Mielke, minister for State Security of the German Democratic Republic from 1957 until 1989, was sentenced to six years' imprisonment in 1993.
254. See Eve Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists: The German Communists and Political Violence 1929-1933 (Cambridge, 1983), 113-14;
255. Heribert Schwan, Erich Mielke: Der Mann, der die Stasi war (Munich, 1997), 159.
256. Abt. IA PKD 13.5.32, GehStA 219/19: 107-08; "Die Scottsboro-Kampagne in Europa," 14-16.
257. Daily Worker (London) (July 7, 1932): 2. Hutchinson's mother, Gladys Knight, also spoke at the Anti-War Congress, in Amsterdam, as did Wright (RGASPI 495/72/218: 37-39). The celebrated conspiracy trial was held at Meerut, a rural seat outside Delhi, in order to isolate its defendants. Thirty-three trade union and Communist leaders were on trial for treason, charged with conspiring to deprive the king of his sovereignty by overthrowing British rule in India. English trade unionist and Communist Ben Bradley of the Amalgamated Engineers, a member of the CPGB, and Hutchinson were two of three British defendants (RGASPI 495/100/938). The Comintern organizations and the LAI were named as parties to the conspiracy. In 1933, twelve of the defendants received transportation sentences; one received life imprisonment and others, two-year terms. The appeal of the decisions was ultimately successful. The British Meerut National Appeal Committee was part of an international Comintern campaign, very often linked with Scottsboro. Chattopadhyaya, Bob Lovell, Willi Münzenberg, Harry Pollitt, Saklatvala, Agnes Smedley, Einstein, Romain Rolland, and Rabindranath Tagore were Meerut campaign signatories.
258. See the letter signed by Wells, Laski, and Tawney, Manchester Guardian, December 8, 1929; RGASPI 542/1/51: 55, 64-72; 495/100/717: 17-20; 495/100/911: 42-43.
259. For an irreverent critique of the campaign, the largest such in Britain until those around Spain and the German refugees, see Left Review 2 (July-December 1931): 161.
260. See Devandra Singh, Meerut Conspiracy Case and the Communist Movement in India, 1929-35 (Meerut, 1995);
261. Lester Hutchinson, Conspiracy at Meerut (London, 1935), dedicated to Gladys Knight;
262. Philip Spratt, Blowing Up India: Reminiscences and Reflections of a Former Comintern Emissary (Calcutta, 1955).
263. Daily Worker (London) (July 8, 1932): 4. Mann led the 1889 London Dock Strike and was a founder of the CPGB in 1920, along with Pollitt, general secretary and chair from 1929. Pollitt addressed the Red Aid World Congress (RGASPI 538/1/12).
264. See Kevin Morgan, Harry Pollitt (Manchester, 1993), 60-88.
265. For a related argument, see Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 71, 89.
266. Goldschmidt, 8 Menschen, 10.
267. See "Commemoration of Negro Emancipation, 1834," for the midnight service of July 12, 1934, held at St. Botolph's, Bishopsgate: "All Coloured People, British Citizens, are cordially invited." Rhodes House Library, Brit. Emp. MSS S25 K13/1.
268. RGASPI 539/3/1096: 140. See also, for example, Moord: Redt de jonge negers van Scottsboro (Amsterdam, 1932);
269. "Justice pour les huites nègres innocents de Scottsborough!" Le populaire, June 23, 1932. India overshadowed all other imperial issues addressed by the CPGB.
270. Josef Bile was a protégé of Münzenberg and a frequent speaker for the LAI; see Abteilung I, A.D. II2, Berlin, 21.1.1932, GehStA 219/19: 45-48; RGASPI 534/3/754:179b, 186; Katharina Oguntoye, Eine afro-deutsche Geschichte: Zur Lebenssituation von Afrikanern und Afro-Deutschen in Deutschland von 1884 bis 1950 (Berlin, 1997), 67, 98-99.
271. (July 9, 1932): 3, a syndicated piece. Golding was a fellow traveler of the CPGB.
272. See, for example, 8 Negerkinder auf den elektrischen Stuhl, esp. p. 6, which makes pointed use of jazz imagery. For LAI attitudes to the notion of Germany as a colony, see RGASPI 542/1/49:150, 202; 534/3/546.
273. On the KPD and reparations in the "Third Period," see "Resolution des ZK der KPD zum Kampf gegen den Young Plan," October 1929, rpt. in Dokumente und Materialien zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, vol. 8 (East Berlin, 1975), 902-10.
274. On German post-World War I Americanism and anti-Americanism, see, for example, Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh, eds., America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three-Hundred-Year History, vol. 2 (Philadelphia, 1985);
275. Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New York, 1994);
276. Alf Lüdtke, Inge Marßolek, and Adelheid von Saldern, eds., Amerikanisierung: Traum und Alptraum im Deutschland des 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1996).
277. See also Lawson, "Scottsboro Martyr," 4: "As they stood there and gave their message, the curtain of ignorance and illusions concerning America was rent asunder and millions of European workers saw the Black Belt! They saw that Uncle Sam was a twentieth-century slave-driver - a modern Simon Legree."
278. See "Sondernummer Leben und Kampf der schwarzen Rasse," in Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung 26 (1931);
279. Die Rote Fahne, August 25, 1932;
280. RGASPI 539/5/835. See the covers of Moord: Redt dejonge negers van Scottsboro, Strijdt met de Roode Hulp voor de Negers van Scottsboro. The International suggested to the American ILD "the creation of postcards incorporating gramophone records with the demands of Negro workers, possibly of relatives of the young Negro workers and prominent personalities in the Scottsboro and Harlan cases." RGASPI 539/3/1094: 5.
281. See Protokoll des 1. Weltkongresses der Internationalen Roten Hilfe, 191;
282. New York Times, May 27, 1932. On the Continent, black men often spoke for Ada Wright, but never in terms or from a position that could claim the moral authority of a struggling parent; occasionally, they presented their accounts of colonial atrocities in childhood memories. See, for example, notices of meetings in Paris (Le populaire) and Chemnitz (Der Kämpfer, August 20 and 25, 1931). At the Anti-War Congress in Amsterdam, a "Dutch colonial worker" told the story of Scottsboro, although Wright was on the platform ("Über die Scottsboro-Kampagne"). In Britain, these practices pertained, but non-white CPGB members and supporters did speak, including Saklatvala, Padmore, and Ward. Ward also stated that he could not convince blacks to speak on the platforms for Scottsboro. See RGASPI 534/7/50:
283. Modotti, "Die deutschen Kindergruppen und Scottsboro," MOPR VIII, 1 (January 1933): 21-22.
284. "Politik im Flüsterton / ein sensationeller Theatercoup / Unfug um eine Negermutter," Der Angriff (May 1932).
285. RGASPI 534/3/754: 200.
286. On African distribution, and the bans imposed, see RGASPI 534/3/754: 27-29, 171, 186, 197, 200; 534/3/755: 2-3, 53, 68-69, 110, 200. James Maxton, ILP, took the case of bans in Trinidad to the floor of the House of Commons in 1932 but failed to overturn the ban (RGASPI 534/3/755: 100-100b, 169-169b). Maxton and Padmore became close allies in the mid-late 1930s. On Padmore in London, see RGASPI 534/3/754: 9, 9b, 30.
287. RGASPI 534/3/756: 28.
288. RGASPI 534/3/755: 73.
289. RGASPI 534/3/755: 89.
290. RGASPI 534/3/755: 101.
291. See RGASPI 534/3/755: 148-148b, "Ford to Padmore."
292. RGASPI 534/3/756: 6-7.
293. RGASPI 534/3/756: 29; George Padmore, The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers (London, 1931).
294. RGASPI 534/3/756: 58.
295. RGASPI 495/100/938: 208. On the Reichstag Fire campaign, see The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror and the Burning of the Reichstag (London, 1933);
296. The Reichstag Fire Trial: The Second Brown Book of the Hitler Terror (London, 1934);
297. Simone Walther, "Dokumente der internationalen Solidaritätsbewegung zum Reichstagsbrandprozess," Beiträge zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung 30 (1988).
298. Koch, Double Lives, 45-74. Anson Rabinbach (Princeton University) is currently engaged on a study of the Reichstag fire case. In 1934, the mothers of both Georgi Dimitrov and Ernst Torgler, the defendants in the case, were asked to ally themselves with the Scottsboro Mothers campaign and the Mooney case.
299. RGASPI 495/100/938: 208.
300. RGASPI 515/1/2222: 15.
301. See, for example, Weser-Zeitung (Bremen), April 8, 1933;
302. Berliner Tageblatt, April 11, 1933.
303. For the Nazi use of imagery after 1933, see clippings from Der Schwarze Korps (1935)
304. Neues Volk (1939), NAACP Papers, Anti-Lynching Series, Part 7A, Reel 21, Frames 411-15 and 436-42.
305. See RGASPI 495/100/911; 495/100/658; 539/3/309: 42. On CPGB attitudes toward WASU, see RGASPI 495/100/985. On the League of Coloured Peoples, a respectable, liberal black organization headquartered in London and led by Harold Moody, see Fryer, Staying Power, 326-34, 357-58, and Moody to White, November 4, 1931, and December 12, 1931, NAACP Papers, Scottsboro Series, Microfilm Part 6.
306. On Labour Party proscriptions, see William Gillies, The Communist Solar System, NMLH ID/CI/8/44.
307. On the campaigns around Abyssinia/Ethiopia, see, for example, RGASPI 495/100/985; 495/100/1069; 495/30/1034: 50-51; and Naison, Communists in Harlem, 155-58, 174-76, 195-96, 262. In 1932, Padmore wrote about the need to begin to decentralize the LAI, mentioning comrades who were ready to go to Liberia and Haiti; RGASPI 542/1/54: 80. This plan may have been at variance with Comintern objectives. Padmore's departure from the Communist movement is a subject of protracted debate among historians and activists.
308. See Hooker, Black Revolutionary, 31-36;
309. Howe, Anti-Colonialism in British Politics, 209-10.
310. On the Relief Committee of Victims of Fascism, see RGASPI 495/100/911. On the CPUSA's 1935 United Anti-Nazi Conference, the Thälmann campaign, and the aid to concentration camp victims campaign, see, for example, RGASPI 515/1/3754: 48-51, 114-16, 200-07; 515/1/3939: 1-6. On the Popular Front, see, for example, McDermott and Agnew, The Comintern, 120-57;
311. Helen Graham and Paul Preston, eds., The Popular Front in Europe (Basingstoke, 1987);
312. David Blaazer, The Popular Front and the Progressive Tradition (Cambridge, 1992), 147-92;
313. Morgan, Against Facism and War, 33-302, esp. 51-52;
314. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London, 1996).
315. Manchester Guardian, August 22, 1932.
316. See, for example, the list of the members of the October 9, 1935, Scottsboro Joint Committee that met in Benjamin Kaplan's offices in New York, including Robert Minor, Walter White, and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP. Wilkins later became a leader of the modern Civil Rights movement (RGASPI 515/1/3933: 17).
317. See Goodman, Stories, 252;
318. William G. Ross, "The Constitutional Significance of the Scottsboro Case," Cumberland Law Review 28 (1997);
319. Gerald B. Horne, Powell versus Alabama: The Scottsboro Boys and American Justice (New York, 1997). See, for example, "Report initialled FAK," on the "Meeting held at the Aubette, Strasbourg, called by the International Red Aid on August 19, 1932," in which Ada Wright is described as speaking in English with a translator to a crowd of 250 mostly workmen. Engdahl's speech in German is described at some length. U.S. National Archives, Dept. of Justice Central Files, No. 158260, Sub. 46.
320. On Roosevelt's attempt to intervene, see Carter, Scottsboro, 392, 392 n. 55, 394, 397 n. 67.
321. Interview material in the possession of Susan Pennybacker. When Wright was interviewed at a London press conference chaired by Reginald Bridgeman, a Daily Herald journalist asked if she "had ever spoken before," meaning, before her tour. She replied, "No, not even in church. I does the best I can." "Scottsboro Lads' Mother Interviewed," Weekly Worker (July 9, 1932): 7.
322. Interview material in the possession of Susan Pennybacker; "Wright Family Correspondence," ILD Papers, Schomburg Center, Reel 6, Box 5, 0303.
323. See note 122, above.
324. In 1933, Ward wrote wistfully to William Patterson of the CPUSA: "I don't get the Liberator no more and I am isolated over here. The ILD here seems to drop the Scottsboro campaign and they are all such a stir in the colonies at the moment and we can't get a single thing going . . . so comrade where do I come in comrade write us a line and cheer us up. Let's know about Scottsboro and also Ada Wright." RGASPI 534/3/895: 122. See also the notice: "United Aid for Peoples of African Descent, Inc., Present Mrs. Ada Wright, Mother of Scottsboro Boys, Andy and Roy Wright. Monday evening, September 20, 1937. St. James Presbyterian Church. Richard B. Moore, Boston Scottsboro Defense Committee, Rev. Wm. Lloyd Imes, Chairman. Be Sure to Hear of the Chain-Gang 'Sufferings' of the Scottsboro Boys. Organization Meets Every Monday Night." Moore Papers, 6 (14), 6/1, September 20, 1937.