The Angelo Herndon Case and Southern Justice

This well known civil rights case involved a nineteen year old black youth arrested by Atlanta authorities in the 1930's in the midst of the Great Depression where fear of the crumbling color line joined fear of the unemployed in a business oriented city, for possession of literature--seized without warrant--advocating the Communist party line of Negro "self determination" and for allegedly soliciting recruits for the party. A party member himself and the chief organizer of the unemployed Herndon was held incommunicado for eleven days and then charged under a Georgia anti-insurrection law, though he had done nothing at all. Charles H. Martin gives a full narrative of this "trial of Southern justice," from the lower State court to Supreme Court. He corrects some widely held misapprehensions about the Communist legal arm, the International Legal Defense, and about the party itself. He draws in a positive light on their tireless efforts on behalf of Herndon and his narrative tells us something about radicalism in the 1930's, black ressentiment and phobic anti-communism.