As a young lawyer, William L. Patterson, was passionately engaged the Sacco and Vanzetti case which brought him into the Communist Party in 1926 through its American Negro Labor Congress and International Labor Defense, which he would eventually lead. Here, Patterson shares his experiences of being arrested, one of over 250, on the day the state murdered Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, August 22, 1927, and the direct line to the Scottsboro case.

‘From Sacco-Vanzetti to Scottsboro’ by William L. Patterson from Labor Defender. Vol. 10 No. 8. September, 1934.

For months I watched the development of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, particularly the vicious hatred generated against these two workers by all the forces of respectability. In those days, 1925-1926, I was a fairly successful lawyer in Harlem, recently emigrated from Southern California where I was part of the legal staff of the NAACP.

The persecution of the Negro people had always been a very deep and burning concern of mine. But here in the Sacco and Vanzetti case I saw for the first time, very much the same sort of persecution of two white men, two workers, who were obviously innocent of the ridiculous murder charge against them.

The more I thought and read about this case the more I began to see that terror was not reserved for the Negro people alone, that terror was part and parcel of the program of the ruling class. Finally when the defense campaign was at its height, developed in. to a wide mass campaign by the newly born International Labor Defense, I decided to go up to this organization and ask if I could be of any assistance.

I was received very cordially by the I.L.D: secretary, Rose Baron. I was afraid they might not want to have me go along with their delegation that was leaving for Boston. I offered to pay my own way.

The delegation was composed chiefly of intellectuals, John Dos Passos, Mike Gold, John Howard Lawson, Clarina Michelson and many others. When we got to Boston, we immediately organized a picket line on the Boston Common.

We had no sooner started to walk than a squad of mounted police attacked us. The Mall, where we had planned to hold a meeting, was closed off by a cordon of police. We walked a little further. Crowds began to gather and someone started to speak. Shouts filled the air, “Save Sacco and Vanzetti! Free Sacco and Vanzetti!”

The police descended on us. “That’s enough. Take off those damn signs! Get moving!”

They began to grab the signs. Some of the on-lookers tried to help us protect them–but police clubs began to rain blows. Then the mounted police let us have it. One of them seemed particularly anxious to get me. I ducked behind a tree and evaded him for a few seconds. but another cop got me. As he grabbed me by the collar he said, “Well, this is the first time I ever see a n***r bastard that was a Communist.”

But when he had dragged me to the patrol wagon, new complications arose. The prisoners were all loaded in except myself. They couldn’t put me in because there was a white woman inside! So we walked to the police station. When I was brought in to be locked up, the other prisoners set up a big cheer. It was the first time such a thing had happened to me. White people, workers, writers, cheering me, the first solidarity cheer I had ever heard. I shall never forget it.

After this experience in the Sacco-Vanzetti case, after these two work er heroes were executed in spite of all the evidence proving them innocent murdered by the ruling class because of their political convictions, as an example to other militant workers–I felt that I could no longer remain on the outside of the class war, I felt that I belonged right in the ranks.

And when during the Scottsboro case I was placed in a responsible position by the International Labor Defense, I felt that our cry after August 22, 1927 “Sacco and Vanzetti have not died in vain”–must be made a reality. The lessons of the Sacco and Vanzetti case were many. Mass defense, mass pressure, called for by Vanzetti himself who knew that only class could free him, were brushed the organized might of the working aside by liberalism, by illusions of “fairness” of the courts which must bourgeois democracy concerning the not be “intimidated”, or “irritated” by noisy demonstrations and picket lines. The mass actions organized by the I.L.D. in 1926, the year it was organized, were splendid–but too late.

And so from the very start the Scottsboro defense was mass defense, supplemented by the best available legal defense but mass pressure, nationally, internationally, mass pressure of Negro and white united in protest against the vicious lynch frame-up of nine innocent Negro boys. And six times this mass pressure defeated the lynch verdicts of the Alabama courts. For three and a half years the boys have been kept alive by the defense of millions who rallied to the slogans: “The Scottsboro Boys Shall Not Die. The Scottsboro Boys Must Be Freed.”

In spite of the wave of fascist terror sweeping across the land today, victory in the Scottsboro case is within our grasp. Dimitroff and his comrades were torn from the hands of the Nazi butchers by the mass pressure of the workers of the world. The Scottsboro boys must be rescued from the hands of the Southern lynch lords.

The U.S. Supreme Court, which played such a shameful role in the Sacco-Vanzetti case, aiding in their murder by evasion and silence, must be forced to free the Scottsboro Boys.

Already the justices should be showered with protest resolutions. Street demonstrations must rally thousands upon thousands of Negro and white workers to the defense of the boys. Workers in the factories must be reached with the appeal for the International Labor Defense. They should be told of the actions of the Cleaners and Dyers in Philadelphia who carried through a half hour Scottsboro protest strike. They should be encouraged to follow this example. They must be shown how the fight to free the Scottsboro Boys is part of their fight in defense of their right to live.

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/1934/v10n08-sep-1934-orig-LD.pdf