Under threat from mob violence on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, farmhand Euel Lee was found guilty–by an all-white jury–of murdering his white boss and family and sentenced to death. Defended by the I.L.D., a mass campaign and appeals process failed, with Lee being executed on October 27, 1933.

‘Jim Crow Hands Down His Decision’ by Elizabeth Lawson from Labor Defender. Vol. 8 No. 11. November, 1932.

Euel Lee, 60-year-old Negro farmhand of Maryland, is still in imminent danger of the death chair. The wealthy white farmers of the state; the sheriff’s and police; the judges; and an all-white grand jury and two all-white trial juries, have conspired together to deprive Lee of every human and constitutional right, and to hurry him on his way to the electric chair.

The two trials of Lee have revealed glaringly the manner in which Negroes who come before the courts of the white bosses are brazenly refused even those meager rights still granted to white workers. The atmosphere of race hatred and national oppression hung heavy in the trials of Lee.

The International Labor Defense and the workers, Negro and white, who follow its leadership, came forward boldly in the case of Euel Lee to challenge the denial of constitutional rights; to demand the right of Negroes to sit on juries; to expose the lynch practices of the courts.

In the fall and winter of last year, a wave of boss-incited lynchings swept the Eastern Shore of Maryland, an area populated chiefly by rich white farmers, white merchants, and Negro workers and farm-hands. It was in the midst of this lynch wave that Matthew Williams, an employee in a basket factory in Salisbury, committed the “crime” of opposing a further cut in his already miserable wages. The white business-men of Salisbury formed a lynch-crowd which drenched Williams in forty gallons of gasoline and burned him in the public square before the court-house.

In Taylorsville, Maryland, in October, a white farmer by the name of Green Davis was found dead. His family was found dead with him. Without an investigation, without any inquiries, the police arrested the 60-year-old farmhand, Euel Lee.

Why were the police so quick to arrest Lee? the attorneys of the International Labor Defense asked at the trial. The state had an answer ready and the answer revealed as in a lightning flash the role of the courts in keeping Negroes oppressed and enslaved.

Lee, the state explained, had a name for being a “bad n***r.” That is the term the white bosses use for a Negro who dares to ask for his most elementary human rights. He had worked on the farm of Green Davis, and Davis hadn’t given him his wages. Lee dared to demand the wages due him. Further, Lee hadn’t liked being called a “n***r.” The state produced three witnesses to show that Lee had, on various occasions, remarked: “Mrs. Davis calls me a n***r and a coon. I’m not a n***r and there’s no such word as coon.”

This evidence proved, to the satisfaction of the state and the hand-picked all-white jury, that Lee was the murderer of Green Davis. Any Negro who would dare to demand his wages and to resent insult, would also commit murder.

Lee’s arrest was followed by a near-lynching. The representatives and attorneys of the Inter national Labor Defense were beaten when they appeared to defend Lee.

Th elementary right to choose one’s attorney was denied Lee. “No lawyer of the International Labor Defense can come into my court and de fend a Negro,” said Judge Joseph L. Bailey at Snow Hill.

the district counted on all the forces of the state The judges, sheriffs and the rich landowners of to back them up in their Jim-Crow practices and rulings. They forgot to count on the anger and power of the working-class. This power began to assert itself in the case of Euel Lee.

Mass meetings in many sections of the country exposed the frame-up of Lee. The workers, Negro and white, called for the release of the framed worker, for the right of Negroes to serve on juries.

The lynch-courts were finally forced to grant Lee’s right to choose his own attorneys. These attorneys, Joe Brodsky, Bernard Ades and David Levinson, now began a struggle, backed up by the workers, to expose the Jim Crow practices of the Maryland courts.

The right of Negroes to serve on juries was the

point on which hung the first trial of Euel Lee at Towson. The grand jury which had indicted Lee was white. The trial jury was also all-white. Never, in his 26 years on the bench, said Judge Frank Duncan, had he had a Negro sitting as juror in his court.

On the basis of this admission, and on the basis of the obviously framed character of the case against Lee, the International Labor Defense went to the Maryland Court of Appeals. So clear was the case, so loud the voices of the workers in protest that the Court of Appeals dared not deny the demand for a new trial.

The second trial of Lee took place in Towson late in September. Again an all-white jury sat in the case. Three Negroes who were called for service were quickly dismissed by the state. No white juror could be questioned as to his prejudice against Negroes, the court ruled. The questions of the attorneys of the International Labor Defense, “Are you aware of the Jim Crow practices in this county?” and “Do you consider Negroes your social equals?” were stopped by the court, and the prospective jurors were forbidden to answer.

Then came a move on the part of the defense attorneys which startled the court. In one sentence it lay bare, and it challenged, the whole system of Jim Crowism, the role of the courts in upholding this system. The attorneys for the International Labor Defense moved that “the trial Jim Crow laws and practices are abolished in of Euel Lee be indefinitely postponed until all Baltimore County.”

The officials of the court knew their function well. They denied the motion, and they denied, one after the other, all motions of the defense to secure the most elementary rights for Lee. Once more an all-white jury found Lee “guilty.”

But the fight for Lee, the fight for the constitutional rights denied to Lee, the fight against the system of Jim-Crowism and national oppression that framed this farm-worker,–this fight has just begun.

Labor Defender was published monthly from 1926 until 1937 by the International Labor Defense (ILD), a Workers Party of America, and later Communist Party-led, non-partisan defense organization founded by James Cannon and William Haywood while in Moscow, 1925 to support prisoners of the class war, victims of racism and imperialism, and the struggle against fascism. It included, poetry, letters from prisoners, and was heavily illustrated with photos, images, and cartoons. Labor Defender was the central organ of the Scottsboro and Sacco and Vanzetti defense campaigns. Editors included T. J. O’ Flaherty, Max Shactman, Karl Reeve, J. Louis Engdahl, William L. Patterson, Sasha Small, and Sender Garlin.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/labordefender/1932/v08n11-nov-1932-LD.pdf