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With no Black members to speak of, the Communist Party spent its first years in the United States trying to make good on Vladmir Lenin’s challenge to support national liberation movements, chasing causes and constituencies to champion in much the same fashion as lawyers chase ambulances.
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The party found it in the depths of the Great Depression when nine black teenagers were arrested in 1931 following a fight with some white men on a railroad car, only to be arrested outside Scottsboro, Alabama for raping two white women on the same train.
The Communist Party’s International Labor Defense was the first on the scene, offering legal assistance to the indigent youths. Initially reluctant to accept the case for fear of tarnishing their brand, the NAACP finally relented and agreed to join the case as co-counsel.
But their legal strategies couldn’t have been more different.
Fearing Jim Crow justice, the NAACP was timid, preferring to fly under the radar, afraid, perhaps, to antagonize whites.
The Communist Party, on the other hand, was bold, aggressive, even loud. Their intention from the start was to put racism itself on trial, turning the case into an international cause celebre, organizing rallies for the Scottsboro Boys across the nation and as far away as London, Moscow, and Johannesburg, and even flying the mothers of the defendants to Europe to speak to audiences about the perils of being Black in the Jim Crow South.
Conversely, the NAACP took a rather condescending approach, fearing that their Southern dialect and nativist manner of speech might be confused for stupidity, or worse, meet the disapproving eye of whites.
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The co-counsels fought bitterly: the NAACP accused the Communists of recklessness and irresponsibility, while the Communists, in turn, thought the NAACP too accommodationist and petit bourgeois to be effective.
When a jury initially convicted and sentenced all but one of the defendants to death, the NAACP pulled out, leaving the ILD to single handedly spearhead the defense, overturn the men’s acquittals, and ultimately win the release of all nine men, though it took nearly 20 years to free the last man.
The Communist Party’s involvement in the Scottsboro defense was the beachhead of a grassroots liberal assault that created the single greatest achievement of the Industrial Age: the middle class in the U.S. So impressed was the Black working class with the Communists’ energy, passion and solidarity – and so frustrated were working class Blacks with the Black elites’ bloodless efforts at racial management, that the ensuing racial coalition fueled labor organizing that turned bad jobs into good ones, and pressured the FDR Administration into implementing some of the most radical policies of the New Deal era.
It is no accident that the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act sought to demobilize the labor movement by driving a wedge between Communists and Blacks. The act established loyalty boards to weed out suspected Marxists but the questions it insisted labor leaders use in doing so couldn’t be more telling.
“Have you ever ever entertained Blacks in your home?” read one question that union leaders were instructed to ask suspected communists. “Have you ever danced with a white woman?” read another.
The effort ultimately worked, sapping unions’ strengths. Still, Adam Clayton Powell, Harlem’s longtime representative in Congress would later say: “No group has demonstrated a greater commitment to the Black Community than the Communist Party.”
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