Still fighting near the end of her life, Clara Zetkin makes an anti-racist appeal for international action in defense of the Scottsboro accused.

‘Scottsboro Appeal’ by Clara Zetkin from The Daily Worker. Vol. 9 No. 105. May 3, 1932.

Clara Zetkin in Stirring Appeal to Workers to Push Fight for Scotttsboro Boys–German Woman Working Class Leader Calls for the Building of Powerful Mass Movement to Force Release of Boys

To all members and friends of the International Red Aid!

To all who still have a human conscience!

To all those in whose breast a human heart still beats!

Members and friends of the International Red Aid, and all of you who still have a human conscience and in whose breast a human hearts still beats: unite to prevent a most horrible legal crime, so horrible that it is hardly possible even to imagine it.

Unless you act with speed and decision, another murder will go down in the annals of legal crime in the United States, whose history is already filled with horrors and cruelty.

The indignation and wrath aroused by the burning of Sacco and Vanzetti at the modern stake, the electric chair, has not yet died down. These two workers were innocent, and would have been acquitted by bourgeois class law, if they had been impartially tried. Now the hangmen stand ready to deliver up at one blow, to a horrible death by means of this murderous instrument, eight more innocent workers.

In the state of Alabama, eight young Negroes—mere boys—the oldest of them hardly 20—have been condemned to death.

And this, although it has been proved that they did not commit the crime of which they were accused–of having “raped” two white prostitutes. The accusation is a deliberate lie, which was made in order to serve the dary [sic] ends of property owners and manufacturers. These people want to have the young Negroes burned alive, in order to terrorize the toiling Negro masses, who are rising against exploitation and who, together with their white brothers and sisters, are building a united front against hunger, imperialist war and the bloody white terror.

The serious charge of which the boys are accused showed itself from the very beginning to be groundless, and does not stand serious examination. One of the prostitutes herself later definitely repudiated her testimony. The judges proceeded to ignore this fact as if they had been deaf and blind. The most debasing race hatred of whites against blacks, the expression of race arrogance and a low standard of humanity and culture–awakened and lashed the brutal instincts of the lynchers, and it was in this atmosphere that the trial took place and the sentence was passed. This hatred rages in Alabama, and demands its victims. To satisfy this lust, eight young Negroes are to be burned at the stake.

Because of the looming possibility of death in the electric chair, we must strain all our energies, we must act swiftly, we must lose no time, we must utilize every moment, so that eight young lives may be saved from the terrible fate of being burned alive in the electric chair.

Members and friends of the International Red Aid in all countries! I know that you will continue to do as you have been doing, that you will exert your whole strength and energy for the demand:

“Snatch the eight Negro boys from the electric chair, free them from prison, and free also the brave, innocent working-class leaders, Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, and the Harlan and all political prisoners.”

Yes, you must accomplish the seemingly impossible; you must still further increase your unselfish, energetic work to save the eight Negro boys. Thus you will remain the firm, invincible shock-troops in the struggle against the crime of race hatred, lynch justice and greed. But in order to block the legal murder of the eight boys, strong, firm mass forces must be organized everywhere!

All of you who still have a conscience, and in whose breast a human heart still beats: to the rescue of these eight youths, whom the executioners are preparing to drag to the electric chair! Whose only guilt is that they were born with black skins! Speak! Act! In your front ranks will be uncounted human beings from the United States. You have not forgotten that in the United States men and women of lofty minds, courage and character staked their names, their social status, their health, their whole personality, and often their very lives–for the abolition of Negro slavery, for liberation and equality for their black brothers and sisters. Do not let the great example of these heroes remain dead facts in school text-books! Let them now exert their influence as a living force. The great deeds of those heroic men and women who, in the struggle of the masses for human rights against prejudice and hatred, fearlessly unfurled and carried high the banner of complete equality and liberation for all those deprived of their rights, for the despised and the oppressed–these deeds are indelibly inscribed on the pages of history!

Do not allow a dark crime, the murder of eight young Negroes, to be added, next to these illustrious pages, to the dark, bloody record of lynching and legal crime. Picture the inexpressible suffering of the long period of imprisonment, before the final decision, when the prisoners are daily and hourly tortured by the terrible thought that tomorrow or the day afterward the executioners may come to their cells in order to lead the eight victims as sacrifices to the altar of race hatred. The cry of the countless masses must drown the cries of the brutal mob of lynchers. The hands of the vast masses must be clenched into one giant fist, that will tear to pieces the sentence of death and will hurl away the electric chair!

Every man or woman who is silent, passive or indifferent during the struggle for the freedom of the eight young Negroes will be an accomplice to this unpardonable crime. This crime would be an indelible, shameful stain on the history of the United States and on the history of humanity.

The struggle to save the eight young lives from suffering and from murder in the electric chair becomes a historical struggle of enormous significance between unprejudiced humanity and high culture, against brutal, blood-thirsty race hatred.

In this struggle, humanity must be triumphant. Its triumph is assured if every man and woman will conscientiously and bravely fulfill his or her duty to the very end. All for the cause! Into the fight!

And fight for a strong Red Aid, hardened in the battle against white terror and for the international solidarity of all races and nationalities!

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924. National and City (New York and environs) editions exist.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1932/v09-n105-NY-may-03-1932-DW-LOC.pdf