Among the best known campaigners for the Scottsboro defendants was Ada “Mother” Wright, mother of two of the accused, Andrew and Roy Wright. She toured and spoke widely, both in the U.S. and Europe, where she spent six months speaking in sixteen different countries during 1932. Here we follow her tour with J. Louis Engdahl, top leader of the Communist Party heading up its Scottsboro campaign through the International Labor Defense, U.S. affiliate of International Red Aid (I.R.A.). His reports for Inprecorr not only detail issues in the Scottboro case, the most important civil rights and prisoner solidarity campaign of the 1930s, but also serves as a travelogue of the European left, with its violent divisions of the early 1930s, and of the continent’s racial politics as Wright becomes a target for the supremacist and anti-Communist ravings of the European right. Below are over a dozens reports from Austria, Switzerland, Belgium (they were deported from), Great Britain, Czechoslovakia (again deported), The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Hungary, Bulgaria, France, and more. The tour ended in Moscow for the International Red Aid congress in November, with Engdahl sick from pneumonia which he did not recover from, dying there on November 21, 1932.

‘Ada Wright European Scottsboro Tour an Achievement’ by J. Louis Engdahl from International Press Correspondence. May-November, 1932.

The Scottsboro Mother Fights. May 26, 1932.

The Scottsboro Negro Mother, Ada Wright, fighting not only for the lives of her two sons but for the nine Negro boys facing the electric chair in Alabama, has completed her tour of Germany.

Before the eyes of great masses of German workers, the mask of so-called democracy has dropped form the face of capitalist class tyranny and there has been revealed the hideous features of lynch-murder, lynch justice, of the class and national oppression of 13,000,000 Negroes, workers and poor farmers in the United States.

The Negro Mother had never been beyond the confines of the state of Tennessee, in which she had lived all her life, until the judicial lynchers in Alabama sought to legalize through the electric chair the originally attempted mob murder of her two sons, and the seven sons of six other Negro mothers. But she possessed the proletarian instinct of class resistance and appeared continuously throughout the past year in the great cities of the United States, raising the banners of the Scottsboro campaign.

Hers is a background of Negro slavery days in the United States, her own grandmother not long dead having been the human slave of the plantation taskmasters in “The South” of the United States, torn from her own mother at six years of age and sold on the auction bloc for $300.

The right of the slaveowner to murder his own slaves lives in the lynch murder today. The struggle to root out this class and race oppression, that continues to take its huge toll of human blood and agony through frightful lynching horrors, burnings, hangings, floggings, shootings, brought the Negro Mother across the Atlantic Ocean to present the true picture of American class justice to European labour.

This is the first time that such a spokesman has come from America although the world-wide struggles for Sacco and Vanzetti, for the victims of Gastonia, and for Tom Mooney and Warren K. Billings have mounted high in Europe. It is peculiarly fitting that a Negro Mother should have been the first to be invited to Europe by the German International Red Aid, raising sharply the actual picture of class oppression and mass misery in the United States against the usually accepted and rainbow hued glories of “the land of prosperity and democracy”.

The Negro Mother, Ada Wright, might have spoken before huge audiences in 17 cities during her two week’s stay in Germany. But the Scottsboro demonstrations were completely forbidden in three cities Cologne, Frankfurt and Muenchen. The police of Leipzig and Hannover adopted the policy initiated and carried out by the socialist police president of Berlin, Grzesinski, that the Scottsboro Mother was not to speak, appear at or send a message to the meetings. But the meetings were carried through just the same. In the three cities of Altona-Hamburg, Halle and Stuttgart the police stood by to keep her from speaking as she was allowed to sit upon the speakers’ platform. She spoke in eight cities including Zoergiebel’s Dortmund and Noske’s Darmstadt.

It was the declaration that the social-democratic police regime worked hand in glove with the Alabama lynchers that caused Grzesinski’s police in Berlin to break up the Scottsboro demonstration when it was about to conclude. But this proved more than ever the police tyranny that sought everywhere to gag and silence the Negro Mother, a policy of the central government at Berlin that feels and knows its class interests with American capitalism in spite of Dawes and Young Plans, reparations demands and war debt payments.

Everywhere, however, it may be said, that attempted suppression of the Scottsboro Negro Mother’s appeal only won for it increasing mass support.

The Fascist press did team work with the Socialist police aa in Berlin, where the Nazi organ “Angriff” sought to denounce the Negro Mother’s tour as a “theater coup” of the International Red Aid, and to denounce Dr. Albert Einstein, leading member of the Committee for the Liberation of the Scottsboro Negro boys as a Jew, and to attack the author, Thomas Mann, demanding that he forget about conditions in America and confine himself solely to Germany. But even the liberal “Fremdenblatt” of Hamburg sought to dismiss the whole question as merely “Communist agitation”.

The total result has been, however, to set all Germany thinking about the Scottsboro case to the extent that on trains, in street cars and even on the public highways, the Negro Mother, her likeness being made familiar by pictures published everywhere, was continually asked by those interested, “What can we do to help?”

From all the meetings and from many individuals there went the demands to the police-guarded embassy of the United States in Berlin, that the Scottsboro Negro boys be immediately and unconditionally freed, a protest that included the pledge to develop greater activities with the rapid approach of June 24th, the date now set for the electrocution of seven of the boys while the other await new trials that, threaten to bring for them similar sentences. Germany develops the campaign against the fiendish Scottsboro judicial lynching.

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The Scottsboro Mother in Austria. June 2, 1932.

The Nazi (Hitlerite) press (Kampfruf, Vienna) had savagely declared that it would be a good thing if the Scottsboro Negro boys were burned alive in the electric chair. It argued that they were members of an inferior race which would thus be lessened in its numbers, making for the strengthening of Nordic superiority and purity.

But the toiling masses thought differently. After having demonstrated their solidarity with the oppressed Negro masses in the United States on the Scottsboro issue, both on International May Day, May First, and on Scottsboro Day, May 7th, they poured out in unexpected numbers to, greet the Scottsboro Negro Mother, Ada Wright, in Vienna, Not only workers, however, but intellectuals and other middle class elements joined the thousands, of whom 234 joined the International Red Aid.

Unlike Germany, where the greater part of the bourgeois and social-democratic press sought to ignore the message of struggle that the Scottsboro Mother had brought to Europe, the Viennese press, from Nazi to Communist, carried a tremendous broadside of publicity. This, with the exception of the Hitlerite organs, was mostly favourable, a tribute to the tremendous mass appeal of the Scottsboro issue. The social-fascist press, the mouthpiece of the Austrian left social-democrats, who are peculiarly adept in the use of social-demagogy, sought to exploit the Scottsboro issue to the utmost, just as they had brazenly raised the slogan of “Defend the Soviet Union!” on May Day.

Thus the Social-Democratic “Der Abend” had Ada Wright’s picture on the front page on the day of her visit to Vienna. It had probably not heard of the unwritten law of the American press that the likeness of no Negro is to appear on its first pages, or on almost any other page for that matter.

In the great mass meetings, however, attended by great numbers of Social-Democratic workers, the speakers placed the question, “But what does the Social-Democratic Party actually do to help free the Scottsboro boys?” and the thundering answer came back, especially from the Social-Democratic workers, “Nothing!”

In fact, on the very day of Ada Wright’s visit to Vienna, the Social-Democratic Party was putting the finishing touches to the programme for the opening of one of its municipal apartment houses to be christened “The George Washington”, in memory of the first American president, who was a Negro slave-owner. Thus the social-democrats, in the days when Austria is going hat in hand to French and British imperialisms for financial assistance to bolster up its poverty-stricken shilling, also beg at the door of Wall Street imperialism for American favours, inviting the American ambassador and his whole diplomatic staff with the tourist colony to lead in the dedication ceremonies.

The Austrian International Red Aid secretary had been arrested at the May Seventh demonstration, the charge being put forward that she had mentioned that in some countries the workers had stoned the windows of American embassies. Ada Wright received greater police attention in “Socialist” Vienna than in any city yet visited. Plainclothes police at the station who followed her in a taxi to the hotel where she was taken. The same police sat at a nearby table as she lunched in the hotel’s dining room. They were at the demonstration in the evening and followed her to the café where she was taken later by some of Vienna’s workers. Then they again followed her to the hotel. The next day they called for inspection of passports and detailed questioning. They were without doubt in an excellent position to give full information to the nervous American ambassador who has already been forced to listen to the demands of several delegations of Austria’s workers. Vienna’s demonstration selected another such delegation.

In Vienna Mrs. Wright conferred with Ernest Toller, world-famous author and playwright, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Germany’s famous physician and others on the development of the work of the Committee for the Liberation of the Scottsboro Negro Boys, which is carrying on a tremendous activity in Austria as well as in Czechoslovakia and Germany. They both pledged themselves to continue their activities with greater energy. Toller had just come from Budapest where he had attended a Writers’ Congress. Young Communists had just carried through a Scottsboro demonstration before the American embassy and were being hounded by the police. Toller created a furore in the congress by declaring that instead of persecuting the young Communists, a protest should be launched against the proposed Scottsboro murders.

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Switzerland Aroused by Scottsboro Negro Mother. June 9, 1932.

Geneva, home of the League of Nations, has its workers, conscious of their class interests and discontented middle class elements grown cynical and restless before the endless parade of “conferences”, that creates nothing but a famine in paper, except that it is an instrument for the mobilisation of international profit against would labour.

This was clearly seen when the Geneva Scottsboro Demonstration voted unanimously for resolutions denouncing the judicial lynching of the nine Negro boys in Alabama.

But greater proof still, when volunteers were called for to take the Scottsboro demands to the American Delegation to the Disarmament Conference more than half the great throng raised their hands.

Geneva workers have been beaten and jailed for their protest actions against the League of Nations, especially at the opening of the present session of the Disarmament Conference, but here the Scottsboro Campaign brought out a new, spontaneous spirit of struggle that will thunder its demands into the ears of the head of Wall Street’s delegation, the Southern Senator, Claudé O. Swanson, from Virginia, home of savage Jim Crow and other segregation laws, and Hugh Gibson, the American Ambassador to Switzerland.

The Scottsboro Mother, Ada Wright, was greeted with the “International” in French in Geneva, just as it had been raised with blazing enthusiasm in the German language in Zürich, Basel, Schaffhausen and Berne, but also intermingled everywhere was the Italian language, testimony not only to the Italian section of the Swiss population, but to the large political migration exiled from Italy by the Mussolini fascist terror. Italian speakers everywhere raised the Scottsboro issue in the van of their appeals for greater efforts against the regime of murder against workers over the frontier of Italy nearby.

The Scottsboro Campaign in Switzerland is more than a year old. It started almost immediately with the beginning of the struggle in the United States. Repeated waves of protest, as the date of execution has been postponed from July 10, last year, to April Sixth, to May 13th, and now to June 24th, have mounted higher and higher, but it received new impetus from the tour of the Scottsboro Mother, Scottsboro became to Switzerland a living reality.

The judicial lynchers can expect no abatement of the Scottsboro campaign through their efforts to tire out the protest struggle. Switzerland is typical of Europe, and without doubt of all countries.

The Swiss Section of the International Red Aid (International Labour Defence) leads the struggle. The Committee for the Liberation of the Scottsboro Negro Boys is taking substance. It has the support of the aged author, Romain Rolland, although in ill health at his home near Geneva. The campaign is being strengthened in the trade unions, against the opposition of the social-democratic leadership, in cultural organisations, in the workers’ sports’ organisation that have considerable strength. The Scottsboro Mother, raising the demand for the liberation of her own and the other Scottsboro boys, roused the children to action on a ever broader scale and they have pledged themselves to collect the names of 10,000 children immediately and rush them off to President Herbert Hoover, in proletarian competition with the children of Germany, Austria and other countries. In Zürich the Pioneers gathered hundreds of signatures in a few hours before the Scottsboro meeting there. At the meeting itself their spokesman in a rousing greeting to Mrs. Wright announced what they had already accomplished but stated that their aim was not hundreds but thousands of children’s signatures and the distribution of literature for a better understanding of the issues involved.

The Swiss Red Aid will raise the Scottsboro issue as it participates in the carrying through of the International Solidarity Day of the Workers’ International Relief, June 12th.

The Socialist press meets this growing mass movement with complete silence, the social-democratic officialdom with resistance wherever it appears in workers’ organisations, and elected Socialist officials and police agents of the bosses with the mobilisation of the police, as in Zürich, for the defence of the dollar’s embassies and consulates against the rising wrath of the working class, as Switzerland responds to the Scottsboro appeal.

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Scottsboro, Vandervelde and the Belgian Congo. June 23, 1932.

Gendarmes of the Renkin-Cocq regime in Belgium sought to bar the way to the European tour of the Scottsboro Negro Mother, Mrs. Ada Wright. Expelled from the country, forbidden to return even for passage to Holland, she came back across the border unannounced, appeared at a tremendous meeting in Brussels when it was thought she was in Paris, and then cheering thousands demonstrated at the railroad station as she continued on her way, this time without police interference.

Scottsboro had become a slogan of struggle against oppression in the Belgian Congo which touched the nerve centres of Belgian imperialism. Efforts to gag the Scottsboro appeal were smashed, however, by the mass basis of its appeal. On the day that the Scottsboro Mother was expelled the American International Red Aid Secretary continued the tour and spoke to thousands in the coal mining-metal industrial centre of Seraing. The police offered no resistance until the last word of “The International” had resounded through the Plaza before the local railroad station. Then they made their arrest; but only after a bitter struggle with the workers. The decree delivered over the telephone by the minister of justice from Brussels was that the American Red Aid Secretary must leave the country immediately, that he would be placed under arrest if he spoke at another meeting.

Next day, however, protests pouring in militantly denouncing the expulsion of the Scottsboro Mother and demanding her right to return, and the right of the American Red Aid Secretary to remain in the country, supported by direct demands upon the highest ministers of the Belgian king preparing his welcome for the American aviatrix, Amelia Earhart, brought quick results. The ban on the meetings was lifted and the American Red Aid Secretary was allowed to speak, but decision on the return of Mrs. Wright was no doubt purposely delayed until the workers took things into their own hands and brought her back themselves.

This protest storm brought swirling to the surface of the struggle none other than Emile Vandervelde, chairman of the Second Socialist International, former Socialist minister to his royal majesty, but still a member of parliament. He came to and was allowed to speak at the Scottsboro demonstration, He was listened to with interest. He admitted that the International Red Aid had saved the lives of the Scottsboro Negro boys. He said he spoke only as an individual and professed his humanitarian instincts had been outraged by the sentence of death passed on the Negro children. He said if he had still been the first minister of the land, the Scottsboro Mother would not have been denied entrance to the country. He did not have a word to say against the oppression of the Scottsboro Mother under Socialist attacks in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and other countries although, this had been sharply brought to his attention. He had not a word to say about the social-democratic police gendarmes in other countries, nor of the Ramsay MacDonald government in England for refusing entrance to the Scottsboro Mother. He did not explain the silence of his own official organ, Le Peuple, that only gave some notice, as he himself came to the demonstration, after the thundering protest had stormed upwards from the toiling masses. No breath of explanation as to the oppressive role of the social-democracy in the colonies and semi-colonies.

Vandervelde’s manoeuvre reveals the fact that the social- democracy realises that the mass proportions of the Scottsboro campaign, drawing into its orbit the struggle on behalf of the Negro masses in the African colonies of European imperialism, cannot be ignored. As in the Sacco-Vanzetti campaign they now seek to enter it to betray it.

This is the second important development resulting from the European tour of the Scottsboro Mother, just as the first important development was the forcing of the United States Supreme Court to give a hearing to the appeal demanded by the International Red Aid in the United States at the moment when workers over Europe were storming at the doors of American embassies and consulates in numerous countries. These achievements must be stepping stones raising the protest to higher levels.

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Scottsboro and the Struggle against Imperialism. July 7, 1930.

The tour of the Scottsboro Negro Mother through eight European countries has emphasized the role of the growing resistance to this persecution as a struggle also against imperialist oppression in the colonial and semi-colonial countries.

This was not so clear in Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Switzerland, capitalist countries without colonies. Here the broad basis of response to the Scottsboro appeal was to be found in the class solidarity with the workers and the oppressed Negro masses in the United States.

In France, Belgium, Holland and Great Britain, all capitalist homelands with colonial empires, the broader appeal of the Scottsboro struggle was emphasized. Here the Scottsboro Negro Mother became not only a symbol of struggle between the workers of European countries and the United States, but also of the strengthening unity between labour in the capitalist countries and in the lands of colonial oppression.

Thus in France, Scottsboro became a slogan of struggle against the savage oppression of French imperialism in Madagascar, in the French Negro colonies in Africa, against the bloody tyranny in Indo-China, In Belgium, Scottsboro brought to the front the mass murders of the Negro slaves of the Congo. The tyranny of Dutch imperialism over Negroes in the West Indies and over the brown peoples of Indonesia came into the centre of the Scottsboro campaign. Similarly in England with its far-flung colonies seething with discontent under the lash of British imperialism.

The “Southern Gentlemen”, of Scottsboro, Alabama, who last year thought that their judicial lynching of the nine Scottsboro Negro boys would soon “all be over”, that they had enough electric current quickly to burn alive these Negro children, did not anticipate the electric storms of protest they were letting loose in all parts of the world. Working class protest paralyzed the hand of judicial lynch law justice that sought to throw the switch that would send fiery bolts of electricity through the youthful bodies of the Scottsboro children.

The colonial peoples witness the white workers in the capitalist homelands fighting for the lives of the Scottsboro boys–Negro working class children–the children of an oppressed race. This lifts to a higher level, therefore, the unity of action between the white workers in the lands of capitalism, and the coloured races in the colonies. Thus, on the basis of the Scottsboro campaign, the white workers overcome their shortcomings in the past in failing to struggle sufficiently against colonial oppression. New life in many of the Scottsboro meetings was given to the League of Struggle Against Imperialism that worked wholeheartedly with the International Red Aid in mobilising the masses for the tour of the Negro Mother.

Negro workers living in the European countries became the organisers of the meetings of the Scottsboro Mother. They were also among the speakers. The police of the Socialist police president, Grzesinski, in Berlin, knew what they were about when they directed their most vicious attacks against the Negro workers present, when they broke up the meeting. In all the meetings in Holland a Negro worker spoke side by side with an Indonesian worker. Workers of other races, especially Chinese, came to the meetings in goodly numbers.

While the tour of the Negro Mother emphasized this phase of the Scottsboro campaign, it must be said that only a beginning has been made. Under pressure of European mass protest, aroused through the tour of the Scottsboro Mother, the United States Supreme Court has decided to review the Scottsboro case and has set October 10 as the day of the hearing. The execution of the Negro boys set for June 24th has therefore been postponed. Evidently the judges of the highest court in the United States will seek to put some highly polished judicial veneer upon the lynch mob actions of the Scottsboro courts, not sufficiently refined to maintain the illusions of “fairness” so necessary for the life of capitalist class justice.

The Scottsboro judicial lynching will be carried through unless the world protest grows during the next three months. There is the danger that the campaign will witness a downward trend if more faith is placed in lawyers’ arguments before the tribunals of capitalism than in working class protest. It is clear that the heavy burden of the protest falls on the workers in the capitalist homelands carefully coordinating the Scottsboro campaign with their other struggles against persecution, Amnesty Campaigns, Anti-War struggles, Anti-Fascist movements, with special efforts directed towards building the widest protest on the Sacco-Vanzetti Anniversary, August 22nd, the fifth year since these two workers were burned alive in the electric chair in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1927.

In spite of the fact that labour suffered from the illusion in 1927, especially in the United States, that it was living in a period of so-called “prosperity” that would endure forever, the Sacco-Vanzetti campaign in its seventh year reached tremendous world-wide proportions.

Exactly because the year 1932 sees these illusions shattered, with labour everywhere plunged in the deepest mass misery in all capitalist, colonial and semi-colonial countries, the Scottsboro Campaign in its second year rapidly approaches the level of the Sacco-Vanzetti struggle, which must be far surpassed. This can be done.

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Ten Days for the Scottsboro Negro Mother in Great Britain. July 14, 1932.

It took more than three weeks to win the right for the Scottsboro Negro Mother, Mrs. Ada Wright, to visit Great Britain for ten days, the time limit set by the British foreign office in London.

In the United States the workers demanded of the state department at Washington that it keep its “Hands Off!”, the Scottsboro Negro Mother’s tour. It was clear that the dollar ambassador to London, the American multi-millionaire, Andrew Mellon, formerly secretary of the treasury in the Hoover cabinet, while refusing to listen to the protests of the British workers against the burning alive of the Scottsboro boys, had exerted the utmost pressure upon the MacDonald government to bar Mrs. Ada Wright from Britain’s shores. But the decision given in the closing days of May, by the British consul at Zurich, Switzerland, that the Scottsboro Mother be not admitted, was changed in the latter days of June by the British foreign-offices own decision rendered through the British consul in Paris granting the ten-day stay, of which the Scottsboro Negro Mother took immediate advantage.

It was clear that the MacDonald government had capitulated to this extent before the growing mass basis in Europe of the Scottsboro campaign, just as the Belgian government that had first expelled Mrs. Ada Wright completely turned about and saw its former Socialist premier, Emile Vandervelde, chairman of the Second Socialist International, speak from the same platform with Mrs. Wright, and withdrew its police completely from the scene of the Brussels’ Scottsboro demonstration.

It is significant that these international developments are taking place around the first anniversary, July 10th, of the date first set (July 10, 1931) for the burning alive of the Scottsboro Negro children in the electric chair in its Kilby Prison, Montgomery, Alabama.

When the Southern Judge, Hawkins, on April 8, 1931, sentenced the Negro boys to die in the electric chair on Friday, July 10, 1931, it is clear that he fully believed the sentence would be carried out. So did the mob of 10,000 around the courthouse led by so-called “southern gentlemen”. So did the Southern press, while the northern press gave little attention. Never before had world protest been organized against lynching–either mob lynching or judicial lynching–carried through by the so-called “white supremacy” against the oppressed Negro millions “to keep them in their place”: Not even the workers in the United States had been mobilized sufficiently against this class and national oppression.

Not only the landlord and industrial reaction in the South, but the ruling class generally throughout the United States was startled by the rapidity and successful development of the world-wide protest against its planned murders. In the South especially it had never been considered a “crime” for an individual white, or a mob of whites, to kill Negroes. Leaders or members of lynching parties–mobs were never arrested. Instead they were the honoured members of the community, elected to public office and sent to congress in Washington.

Instead of “July 10, 1931”, therefore, we now have “October 10, 1932”, the date when the United States Supreme Court, the highest in the land, will review the Scottsboro case. It is not in the power of this high court to free the Scottsboro Negro boys. That power still rests with Governor Miller, of Alabama. The Washington high court has the power to overrule the decisions of the lower courts and declare that the Negro boys must have a new trial. Such a decision, however, wrung from the Washington high court, the strongest pillar of capitalist class justice in the United States, will have its tremendous historic significance and will go far toward determining the further developments in this attempted legal massacre in Alabama.

The steadily growing mass protest, in France, in Belgium, in Holland and now in Great Britain, since the United States Supreme Court action in deciding to review the case, shows that the toiling masses have no illusions as to the “fairness” or “impartiality” of capitalist class justice, but realize that mass pressure alone can bring concessions from or victory over the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, and that section of the American ruling class that lords it over the oppressed Negro masses in Alabama.

This is the significance of the “crashing of the gates” of British-MacDonald imperialism by the Scottsboro Negro Mother, the mass welcome that she received from the workers, Negroes, Hindus and of other races with the white workers, the workers of all races attending the meetings and demonstrations, being listed among the speakers.

The Scottsboro Negro Mother visited the Houses of Parliament and demanded action from the Labour Party members, some of whom listened to her. George Lansbury, one of the “left” weathercocks of the Labour Party, asked for a statement of the Scottsboro case, so that he can place it before the Labour Party Parliamentary Executive. The bourgeois League of Coloured Peoples requested Mrs. Wright as a speaker before it. This, however, will not be allowed to evaporate into “respectful protests” or “carefully worded demands” upon the lynch-law ambassador of the Wall Street plutocracy–Mellon. But militant action will press for ever-wider mass movements of struggle against the intended Scottsboro massacre of the Negro boys whole centuries of barbarous oppression crystallized into one bloody infamy in the days when the world’s richest imperialism is in the grip of its worst economic crisis.

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Holland Greets the Scottsboro Negro Mother. July 21, 1932.

Holland’s radio audience is served by two broadcasting stations. One of these is V.A.R.A. (United Labor Radio Association) controlled by the Dutch social-democrats. It was a far cry from the Scottsboro meetings, forbidden, broken up by the Socialist police in Germany, to the Socialist invitation to Mrs. Ada Wright in Holland to speak over their radio.

Thus the Scottsboro appeal was broadcasted through the air for the first time in Europe.

It was clear that this manoeuvre of the Socialists in Holland followed closely on the heels of the lead given by the chairman of the Second Socialist International, Emile Vandervelde, in opening his arms to the Scottsboro Mother in Brussels, and his heart to the cause of the Negro boys facing the electric chair. Het Volk (The People), central organ of the Social-Democratic Party of Holland, featured the Scottsboro case with pictures but omitted mention entirely of the International Red Aid.

How deliberate this actually was became crystal clear with the translation of the Scottsboro Mother’s appeal over the radio, when the social-democratic translator provided by the station itself and who had been given an advance copy of her speech, declared that it was the Socialists who had come to the aid of the Scottsboro Negro boys and were. defending them and once more omitting all mention of the International Red Aid.

The basis for this campaign of deception was to be found in the tremendous mass support of the Scottsboro campaign in Holland as revealed in the demonstrations held in Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Delft, the Hague, and even in the farming districts of Friesland, in north Holland, in St. Anna Parochie, Beets and Appelscha. The Social-Democrats had already recognised the mass influence of the International Red Aid in Holland by declaring that any social-democrats joining the International Red Aid would be expelled from the Social-Democratic Party.

In Rotterdam the police denied the workers the right to demonstrate in the streets following the great meeting. The possibilities of such demonstrations became clear in Amsterdam where fully 10,000 workers marched through the streets to the Post-office Building following the mass meeting in the great hall of the Diamond Exchange. The meetings at Delft and the Hague were unprecedented.

The response that swept over Friesland, the northern agricultural district of Holland, however, was a revelation. Friesland was one of the seven original free states of Holland. As an independent free state it was the first to recognise the independence of the American colonies following the war of independence against Great Britain, 1776.

As an indication of its gratitude the new nation sent a tablet which still rests in the wall of the capitol of Friesland, at Leeuwarden, bearing the inscription: “Memorial of Gratitude from the United States of America to the State of Friesland for Its Recognition of the Independence of the United States—1785.”

All of the Scottsboro mass meetings held voted unanimously to send this tablet back to the United States government at Washington, as the murderer and jailer of workers. They demanded that Garret Roorda, Communist Party member of the provincial the provincial parliament, raise this question officially and ask that this demand be approved. Similar demands were made during the Sacco-Vanzetti campaign in 1927, but failed because of lack of social-democratic support. The issue has returned anew demanding that the Socialists again take a position.

The Scottsboro issue will be raised in the Dutch Parliament by the two Communist members, David J. Wynkoop and Louis De Visser. The parliament of Queen Wilhelmina’s government, headed by the Catholic Centre and its coalition of Christian parties, contains a social-democratic opposition of 26 out of 100 members. It will be forced to take an open stand on this issue.

It is significant that many of the meetings in Holland were organised by the Negro workers now living in Holland, but who had come from Surinam, the Dutch West Indian Negro colony. A native of Indonesia, the Dutch East Indian colony, also spoke at many meetings, thus bringing forward the bloody oppression of coloured peoples in the colonies of Dutch imperialism.

The Scottsboro Mother’s visit to Holland coincided with the wave of indignation sweeping the working class masses of the country over the police murder of the agricultural worker, John DeYonge, during a demonstration against wage reductions for agricultural workers. DeYonge was first wounded by the police and then fatally stabbed through the heart by a police sabre. Out of a town of 7,000 population more than 3,000 came to the funeral, with delegations from Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Haarlem and other cities.

Thus the workers of Holland feel the oppression at home, develop closer unity with the outraged masses in the colonial countries, and bring the Scottsboro persecution to their very doors. During the meetings addressed by the Scottsboro Negro Mother more than 1,000 applications for membership poured in, the Amsterdam meeting alone yielding 350 members. The Scottsboro Committee of liberals and intellectuals was also strengthened at a special meeting presided over by Professor G. Mannoury of the University of Amsterdam.

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The Scottsboro Mother in Norway. July 28, 1932.

The response to the Scottsboro Campaign in Norway, during the tour of the Scottsboro Negro Mother, Mrs. Ada Wright, registered in the demonstrations and mass meetings held, the wide publicity in the press, bourgeois, social-democratic and Communist, pledges of support from trade unions and other organisations–reveals the deep interest in the judicial lynching in Alabama which has been recognised by the United States Supreme Court in the hearing that it has granted for the appeal, October Tenth.

Although Norway was involved a little late in the economic crisis, today sees large numbers of part-time workers in Oslo, the jobless numbers grow in Drontheim and throughout the north, while in Bergen the harbor is full of idle shipping. In the north, however, many workers had been imprisoned for helping themselves to food needed for themselves and their families, while in Bergen, the editor of the local workers’ paper, “Arbeidet”, was serving out the fourth month of five months’ sentence for having championed the cause of the unemployed. These factors helped widen the basis for the Scottsboro campaign in Norway, as well as the intense interest for all things American among Norwegians, especially the message of the Negro Mother in “the new Sacco-Vanzetti persecution”.

Martin Tranmael and the social-democratic leadership of the Norwegian Labour Party had heard of the manoeuvres of Vandervelde, in Belgium, of Blum, in France, of the social-democracy in Holland, and of the permission finally granted to the Scottsboro Mother by the Premier of Great Britain, MacDonald, to visit England, although only for ten days. The Tranmael social-democratic press, however, that covers Norway with 36 publications was in difficulties. The Tranmael social-democracy had declared that membership in the International Red Aid, and in other organisations of the working class, would mean immediate expulsion from the Labour Party. It was therefore difficult to greet the Scottsboro campaign of the Red Aid. This was avoided, however, by entirely ignoring the International Red Aid and declaring that the Scottsboro defence is being conducted by the Dreiser Committee in the United States. This is, of course, partly the truth since the Dreiser Committee is giving tremendous support to the International Red Aid in its fight for the Negro boys.

One of the arguments, of course, of the Tranmael press against the building of the International Red Aid, is that workers through their unions pay a “juridical fee” that meets all obligations in case of difficulties arising out of persecutions in labour struggles. To be sure, this puts the defence struggles of the workers on a purely legalistic basis, seeking to rob it of its mass protest and class struggle basis, which is exactly the aim of the Vanderveldes, the Blums and the MacDonalds, the organisers on behalf of the capitalist class of the oppression of the workers and the enslaved toiling masses in the colonies.

In the eleven countries so far visited by the Scottsboro Mother, the Ny Tid, of Drontheim, Norway, was the first to publish her appeal in full, and when the dock workers of Drontheim sang the “Internationale” in farewell to the Scottsboro as she boarded ship for Bergen, the Scottsboro campaign had reached its point farthest north, close to the Arctic Circle.”

There was significance in the fact that in Bergen her appeal was translated by the secretary of a building trades unions, while in Oslo the trade unions pledged themselves to follow the Scottsboro Mother’s visit with an energetic development of the whole campaign.

At the same time the government of Norway refused permission to the Scottsboro Mother to broadcast her message over the official government radio with the excuse that “all time was occupied”, although the radio service is supposed to be impartial toward all sections of the population, But the Scottsboro campaign helped shatter even this well-nurtured illusion.

***

Scottsboro, Strike Struggles and the Social-Democrats in Sweden. August 4, 1932.

Industrial centres of various kinds in Sweden helped spread the Scottsboro protest in response to the tour of the Negro Mother from the United States. Interest in the Scottsboro campaign finds a basis among workers in all industries.

Like Vandervelde, Blum and other leading social-democrats, their counterparts in Sweden insisted that the Scottsboro campaign must be completely isolated from “politics”. “Social-Demokraten”, of Stockholm, argued that it was doing a disfavour to the Scottsboro mother, Mrs. Ada Wright, and her cause to send her to speak in the Soderhamm strike zone. It would be putting the stamp of “politics” upon her non-political cause. But the Scottsboro mother gave her answer by declaring that it was the workers who were carrying on the basic struggle for the release of the Scottsboro boys, and that she had found specially strong support for the Scottsboro cause among striking workers. And she insisted on going to Soderhamm. And in Soderhamm the striking workers themselves, through their own spokesman, specially greeted the Scottsboro mother and emphatically denounced the traitor role of the “Social-Demokraten”. The strikers pointed out that they, the victims of police clubs and bullets, could well understand the issues involved in the Scottsboro persecution and pledged themselves to help build the struggle until the Scottsboro boys were freed from the clutches of capitalist class justice that reaches out for its victims among workers of all races and nationalities. They understood clearly that it is not purely a humanitarian issue that grows out of a mistake committed by the capitalist courts that are otherwise “fair and impartial”.

After that the “Social-Demokraten” closed its columns to the Scottsboro campaign and the social-democrats in charge of Sweden’s government-controlled radio refused the Scottsboro mother the right to broadcast her appeal to the nation.

The Kilbom right wing renegades who received subsidies for their press from the Ivar Kreuger treasure chests joined the social-democrats in seeking to ignore the Scottsboro campaign which received considerable publicity in Sweden, as in Norway, from the press generally, including the syndicalist daily newspaper published in Stockholm.

The response to the Scottsboro appeal can be measured in many ways. In Norrkoping, for instance, there were more workers in the Scottsboro demonstration than in last May Day’s Demonstration. The police of Norrkoping evidently felt the undercurrent of Scottsboro protest since they began making arrests early of those distributing propaganda for the meeting and a special police stenographer was brought down from Stockholm in order to get a record of everything that was said by the speakers. In fact the Swedish police build their activities more and more after the German model.

The Scottsboro tour through Sweden brought forward on the one hand, the organisational weakness of the Swedish Section of the International Red Aid, while on the other hand it revealed the tremendous interest in the struggles against the persecution of labour, not only in Sweden itself but internationally. It was not difficult, therefore, to join up the preparations for the World Congress of the International Red Aid, in November in Moscow, with the Scottsboro campaign, struggle against fascism and war as the broad basis for mighty mass mobilisations. It may be said, that the tour of the Scottsboro Negro Mother in Sweden actually discovered for the Swedish workers not only the necessity but the tremendous possibility of building a mass Red Aid organisation.

***

Scottsboro in Czechoslovakia. September 15, 1932.

The Scottsboro Negro Mother, Mrs. Ada Wright, spent three days and three nights in the police stations, jails and prisons of Kladno and Prague in Czechoslovakia. This attempt to silence the Scottsboro appeal failed. It may be said that it was heard louder throughout Czechoslovakia, and out into the neighbouring nations, with the Negro Mother in prison, than in any of the dozen countries so far visited where the attempted humiliation of prison bars was not forced upon her.

The Czechoslovakian press, with few exceptions, was filled for days with favourable mention of the Scottsboro struggle. The outstanding exception was the “Vecer”, personal organ of Minister of the Interior Slavik, who sent Mrs. Wright to prison. This government organ and voice of the agrarian reaction loudly applauded the expulsion decree issued against Mrs. Wright, whom it denounced as a “Bolshevik Negro Woman”, and as “A Black Communist”.

There are no doubt many reasons why the Scottsboro Negro Mother should be jailed first in Czechoslovakia. The president of the republic, T.G. Masaryk, at one time professor in the University of Chicago, the Rockefeller Standard Oil University, is keenly sensitive to the pressure that emanates from Washington through the American Embassy in Prague. The date of October Tenth, when the United States Supreme Court in Washington will hear the Scottsboro appeal, is rapidly approaching, and Embassies all over Europe are getting progressively more nervous with the increasing protest against the planned judicial lynching of the Scottsboro children. It may be said that the American Ambassadors in all the thirteen countries have sought to smash the Scottsboro Mother’s tour with prison bars. This resulted in two expulsions from Belgium. The diplomatic ambition, however, has so far been successful only in Czechoslovakia, but with the result that the Scottsboro issue looms bigger than ever in the Masaryk Republic. The Scottsboro Mother went to prison with head erect and firm faith in her cause, and she was vindicated by the ever-broader basis developed for the Scottsboro struggle.

The Scottsboro Negro Mother was charged with being an “undesirable foreigner”. What “undesirable” means in this instance may be judged by the fact that this same Czechoslovakian government, not many days before had acclaimed the fiendish oppressor of the workers of Chicago, its mayor, Anthony J. Cermak, born in the same Kladno where Mrs. Wright was arrested. Official Kladno had prepared festivities for Mayor Cermak, head of the Chicago police department that carries through the worst oppression of workers, especially Negro workers, two of whom were shot dead in the police war against the protest of the jobless against the eviction of some of their comrades from their homes. Official Kladno sent Mrs. Wright to jail claiming she had come to talk “politics”, that she intended mixing in the “internal affairs of the country. It may be said, however, that Czechoslovakia’s official regime themselves helped to give added political significance to the Scottsboro persecution which is an outgrowth of the national oppression of the Negro masses in the United States. The Germans, Slovaks, Ruthenians and other national minorities, forced into this artificial creature of the Versailles peace, easily identified the basis of the Scottsboro persecution with their own oppression.

The International Red Aid, that organised the Scottsboro campaign and gave it leadership in Czechoslovakia, had been outlawed by the government but, with the presence of the Scottsboro Mother, even in prison, the bourgeois press declared that, “It seems as if the Red Aid is still with us and as active as ever.”

The regime of Masaryk-Slavik, with its chief of political police, Rejsek, prepared for the Scottsboro Negro Mother’s coming by prohibiting all the meetings and demonstrations arranged at which she was to speak. New meetings had to be organised by special invitation as ordered by Paragraph Two of the Criminal Code. With the Negro Mother in jail, and later expelled from the country, even these meetings were smashed by the police.

The Masaryk-Slavik-Rejsek police regime was worried because Mrs. Wright had attended the Amsterdam Anti-War Congress; it wanted to know where she got the money to pay the expenses of her tour: exactly why she had chosen contact, her whole life’s history, and finally Mrs. Wright was to come to Czechoslovakia and with whom she had been in finger-printed and her picture secured for the police archives, The professor-president in his most scholarly researches could not have delved into his subject more intensely.

But the government has made the Scottsboro issue a major political issue for itself. The vicious treatment of the Scottsboro Mother will be made the basis of an interpellation in Parliament. Slavik’s organ, “Vecer”, will be called to account in the courts, with no illusions as to the decisions of this capitalist tribunal. A special delegation will raise the whole question directly before President Masaryk at the first opportunity. It is believed that Masaryk will not dare refuse such a hearing. And the Scottsboro Campaign in Czecho-Slovakia has taken on new life. Scottsboro-Mooney Committees will be organised everywhere and Czechoslovakia will be in the forefront of the October Tenth campaign.

There are four social-democratic members of the cabinet in Czechoslovakia, the ministers of justice, of culture and public instruction, of public welfare, and of relief. They did not raise their voices in defence of the Scottsboro Mother, not one of them.

The growing protest, however, was seen in the Mothers’ Delegation organised spontaneously that came to the office of Minister Slavik protesting against the Scottsboro Mother’s treatment. One Mother came with a babe in her arms. Of course, Minister Slavik ordered them out of his office, as if that settled the Scottsboro issue.

***

Scottsboro in Horthy’s Hungary. September 29, 1932.

Into the very shadow of Horthy’s gallows in Hungary the Scottsboro Negro Mother, Mrs. Ada Wright, carried her fight against the more modern American anti-labour weapon of judicial murder–the electric chair–that threatens the Scottsboro Negro boys.

In many Scottsboro meetings over Europe she had raised her voice for the lives of Sallai and Fuerst, and she had denounced their fascist murderers. And then she had come to Budapest to raise the struggle against the American dollar reaction and its judicial lynchers before the Hungarian masses.

The Hungarian social-democratic organ, “Nepszava”, through open provocation, wrecked the only meeting planned in Hungary, that of the Feminist Society at Budapest.

It published brazenly the “information” of the Czecho-Slovakian police agents, that Mrs. Wright had been arrested as a “Communist propagandist” and an “undesirable foreigner”, that she was on a “propaganda tour” carrying on “extreme left agitation” and raising “Communist slogans”, and that only “left political organisations” had urged her release from prison on President Masaryk. This was all in the best style of the “Vecer”, the mouthpiece of Slavik, Czechoslovakia’s minister of the interior, who had to justify the Scottsboro Negro Mother’s expulsion by denouncing her as a “Black Bolshevik” and as a “Communist Negro Woman”. The Social-Democratic “Nepszáva” became Slavik’s Hungarian mouthpiece and the best provocateur of the Hungarian police in a land where all militant labour organisations are prohibited and their members subjected to the bloodiest oppression. Sallai and Fuerst were strangled to death by Horthy’s hangmen merely for being members of the Communist Party.

Merely carrying through the meeting for the Scottsboro. Negro Mother, under these conditions, in the eyes of the leadership of the Feminist Society, meant that this organisation, too, would be prohibited, or persecuted out of existence as was the case with the Hungarian section of the League for Human Rights. One of the leaders of the Feminist Society now stands charged before Hungary’s fascist courts with “defamation of the nation” because she dared use strong language in a petition circulated for signatures among the thinking people of Budapest against the bestial slaughter of Sallai and Fuerst.

It was also claimed that the press of Budapest would be closed to the Scottsboro Negro Mother. On the day of her arrival the “Magyar Hirlap” had published a report of her arrest in Graz, Austria, where she had never been, since her meeting here had been prohibited, also by a social-democratic government official acting in the absence of his fascist superior. Two days before Young Communists in Budapest had been bloodily attacked by the police while carrying, through an International Youth Day Demonstration under red flags in the streets, one of their number being fatally wounded, dying a few days later. There were 48 arrests.

But the Scottsboro Negro Mother, in spite of difficulties found a Voice in the press of Budapest, long articles with pictures being published; even the social-democratic “Nepszáva”, that had last spring attacked the circulation of a Scottsboro protest petition to the American ambassador as “Communist propaganda” that must be denounced, changed front and published a news article and an interview in its “Woman’s Section” that would lead all the world to believe that it had always been agitating energetically for the release of the Scottsboro children…

The editor of its woman’s page wrote of Mrs. Wright that; “She is a living monument of Motherhood, more beautiful than any work in bronze or marble. In her lives the Mother Love of thousands of years.”

Even the voice of the Scottsboro children in prison was heard through the publication of extracts, even though brief, of their letters to their Mother. The penetrating appeal of “Scottsboro!” had crashed through the fascist dictatorship’s censorship and terror.

It will probably never be known just how Stephan Bethlen, leader of the government party and premier for ten years explained it to the American ambassador, Nicholas Roosevelt, nephew of New York’s governor and democratic candidate for the presidency, when they next played golf together. Perhaps Roosevelt tried to laugh it off, mingling with his cronies, militarists, the titled nobility that remains and the money changers, who sip their liquor midst the laughter of the terraced gardens of the elite hotels of the Danube embankment. This is the same outfit with which Herbert Hoover, who opposes Roosevelt for the presidency in his efforts to get reelected, cooperated as head of the American Food Administration and helped destroy the Hungarian Soviet Republic behind the mask of dollar philanthropy, and aided in carrying through a blood bath of death and torture against thousands of the fest forces of the Hungarian working class.

It was as if the Scottsboro Mother struck back at both the democratic and republican oppressors of her race and class, both the defenders and apologists for the lynch mobs, when she got her appeal before the impoverished Hungarian worker and peasant masses, some sections of which had already raised the Scottsboro slogans in militant struggle, just as they had helped carry through the Sacco-Vanzetti Campaign in its final stages in 1927, when the secretary of the legal revolutionary workers’ party received six months in prison merely for sending a protest telegram to the United States. This year Scottsboro has been in the centre of many Hungarian working class activities, especially the demonstration before the American embassy when the workers raised the slogans of “Down with Dollar Imperialism!” “Down with the Lynchers of the Young Negro Workers!” “We Demand the Release of the Scottsboro Negro Children!” and “Long Live the international Red Aid!” in this land where the Red Aid is a proscribed organisation. There were 16 arrests and the bourgeois press said nothing. Other forms of gatherings, in the open during the summer, have taken place where speakers have discussed the international terror and “Scottsboro”.

Hungary provides fertile soil for the Scottsboro campaign that will crystallize into ever broader Scottsboro Committees and other forms of struggle. Even under the martial law of the Horthy terror the important day of October Tenth in the Scottsboro struggle will be fittingly remembered, And Hungarian labour looks with enthusiasm to the World Congress of the international Red Aid in Moscow in November as a milestone in the development of greater resistance to fascism and terror.

The Scottsboro Negro Mother proceeded next to Bulgaria. As the passenger train sped along she had translated for her the slogan that appeared chalked on the sides of many cars of freight trains that passed: “Karikas must not die!” and: “Free Karikas!”

***

Dollar Diplomacy in the Balkans and the Scottsboro Campaign. October 6, 1932.

American dollar diplomacy sent a servile editor from the “Altoona Times” in Pennsylvania, the state of steel, coal, war “munitions and transport, to be its ambassador to Bulgaria. And in the capital, Sofia, the biggest electric sign is that of the Singer Sewing Machine Company in the letters of the Slavic alphabet. And there is a “Rockefeller Institute” trying to tell an impoverished peasantry how to till the soil scientifically.

American labour sent a Negro Mother from Chattanooga, Tennessee, as its ambassador to the Balkans to raise the “Scottsboro” issue of Negro and workers’ rights; not the plea of the dollar for greater profits, the task of the “Altoona Times” editor.

The Scottsboro Negro Mother comes from “The South”, where the crushing poverty makes almost impossible the enjoyment of the Singer sewing machine luxury. But the great electric signs of high pressure salesmanship are there as well as in Bulgaria. Ten thousand Bulgarian worker and peasant dead, during the last ten years, shot down, beaten to death, buried alive, burned alive, hanged upon the gallows ceaselessly busy, in order that the Zankoffs might rule and the Singer Sewing Machine electric sign continue to sparkle over Bulgaria. Here every workers’ effort is illegal, the Communist Party, the Young Communist League, the Red Trade Unions, the International Red Aid, the Workers’ International Relief; newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, leaflets. It is a five year prison sentence even to be caught with a copy of the International Press Correspondence. The strangling effort of capital punishment, imprisonment even until death, police torture until life itself gives way, censorship in all of its most vicious forms, all seek to blot out the “thoughts and the efforts of the masses for a better day.

But it was exactly in this land where the Scottsboro Negro Mother found one of the best functioning Scottsboro Committees, ready and eager to give her every possible assistance. They came–men, women, children to the railroad station upon her arrival and showered with red flowers and the greetings of the workers and peasants. On the reception committee one could show the horrible scars of red hot needles driven through the fingers under the nails as the Bulgarian “third degree” method of forcing the confession the Bulgarian fascist state desired. Unsuccessful it had hurled its victim into prison for three years; not a worker or peasant, but a writer. Another could show the wound of the gendarme’s bullet that had pierced his shoulder. These were the living. Hatred for the Bulgarian murder regime. Burning hatred for the judicial lynch murder system that seeks to burn alive in the electric chair the Scottsboro, Negro children in Alabama, almost on the other side of the world.

Meetings had been proposed in a dozen cities from the Black Sea to the River Danube, from the Greek to the Yugoslavian borders. But these were prohibited by the fascist terror; first by the police of Sofia, then by the minister of the interior for all of Bulgaria.

The interior minister, Guirgonoff, was forced to listen to the demands of the Scottsboro Mother that she be allowed to speak in Bulgaria. But it was like trying to speak to the lynch mob in Scottsboro on the day of the trial, April 6, 1931, when ten thousand demanded that their eager appetites for the blood of the Negro children be satiated.

To be sure, the interior minister, in the best chosen words protested his humanitarian instincts were aroused by such an unrighteous verdict. But he had complete faith in the courts of the United States, Bulgaria could not interfere. It was too weak. It must not touch such foreign questions, with an eye to the “Singer” electric sign on the roof of Sofia’s tallest building, and actually declaring, in his own words, “The American government wouldn’t like it”.

So the gendarmes on horseback, with loaded rifles, were posted before the American embassy and around the meeting hall where the Scottsboro, Mother was to have made her appeal. In spite of prohibition the billboards and walls of the town, the kiosks on the boulevards had been placarded at night with a huge poster that the Negro Mother would speak. Tens of thousands of leaflets were distributed. Many came to the meeting hall and were driven off. The throng converges in a street nearby and a speaker–a candidate in the municipal elections then in progress, is raised in the midst of the multitude. For fully ten minutes he speaks before the gendarmes with horses’ hoofs, spurred boots, rubber clubs, sabres, rifles and every other accoutrement of war manage to break up the gathering with its bloody beatings and the arrest of the speaker. The throng is forced in the direction of the Zankoff Club, the bloody Zankoff of the days of 1923 and 1925, when militant workers and peasants were hunted like beasts and slaughtered by the thousands. “Down with the Murderers! was the slogan raised by the workers, “Down with the Zankoff Murderers!” and as the gendarmes attacked again, aided by fascists, and the workers began singing “The Internationale”, the American ambassador, the “Altoona Times” editor, cowering in his own embassy behind the guard of Bulgarian gendarmes, could well feel that “murderers” applied as well to his own “lynch law” regime. Another effort was made to start another meeting in another street but it failed to hold against the police attack. Under these conditions it was impossible for the Negro Mother to be heard.

She was arrested the next day and expelled from the country. The arrest took place at a gathering with workers’ children in a public park, called “The King’s Garden”. As the Negro Mother arrived in the park, the children, shoulder to shoulder, raised their little fists and gave the “Red Front!” salute in German, then singing “The Internationale” in Bulgarian. Then the gendarmes, on horse and afoot, seemed to come from all directions. They took the Negro Mother away under police escort. The children tried to follow but were driven off as they hurled back their cries of “Shame! Shame!” And in the evening they came in great numbers, in spite of the gendarmerie, to the railroad station.

While the Scottsboro Mother herself was denied the right to speak, and only uttered the few words to the children, nevertheless, she got her message to the whole nation through its own bourgeois press. Her “Scottsboro” story crowded the publicity over the visit of a British naval squadron to the Black Sea port of Varna, not far from Soviet Odessa, another move in the war preparations. In general, the press publicity, in articles and pictures, was sympathetic and did not at all, even after the fashion of the social-democratic “Népszava” in Hungary, follow the lead given by the interior minister, Guirgonoff, that the Scottsboro Mother was merely a “Communist propagandist”.

“You know”, the interior minister had declared, “the Communists always take up these humanitarian questions, I know absolutely that the International Juridical Association that is supporting the Scottsboro Campaign is a Moscow organisation. And you know, what we think of Communists here in Bulgaria, and what we do to them”.

No doubt, this was intended as a threat crystallized out of his fear and servility before Washington, and his fear and hatred of Moscow.

The Scottsboro Mother had also put her case before the head of the Bulgarian Woman’s Federation. But there was no desire here to protest against the government’s decision or make an effort to change.

There was hope, however, in the greeting of the militant mother of the murdered secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party, herself sent to prison for three years merely for showing the picture of her dead son.

And in the “Red Front!” salute of the Bulgarian children at the railroad station, who kept their little fists raised until the train disappeared on its journey to the border with the Scottsboro Mother in police custody. But she had managed to send back her reply, “Keep up the Fight!” And there is no doubt that they will–in Bulgaria.

Thus the struggle sharpens against the United States Supreme Court that listens to the appeal–on October Tenth–against the judicial lynch verdict of the Scottsboro courts. The International Red Aid, supported by the many tens of millions in all countries, demands the overturn of the electric chair death verdicts of the Scottsboro and the Alabama lynch courts.

***

Scottsboro and the World Congress of the I.R.A. October 2, 1932.

The fight for the lives of the seven Scottsboro Negro children reaches a new and higher level of struggle as the United States Supreme Court adopts the same evasive methods used to pave the way for the burning alive of Sacco and Vanzetti five years ago.

The high court at Washington listened to the arguments for and against a new trial for the Scottsboro boys and then reserved decision until “some time in November,” hoping by the very indefiniteness of its postponement to confuse and disarm world protest. This is an old tactic that must be met decisively through a continually sharpening struggle against the electric chair of dollar oppression.

The International Scottsboro Day of protest, October, Tenth, at the very moment when the U.S. Supreme Court was in session hearing the appeal, with world protest centred directly upon the tribunal of dollar class justice, marks the opening of a new phase of struggle under the leadership of the International Red Aid. Never before had the American high court been under fire as on October Tenth. World labour has never been so mobilised against the high court of any other capitalist country.

There was no such mobilisation in the Sacco-Vanzetti case. The class courts had already made their decision before world protest was mobilised, which then thundered fruitlessly at the door of the Massachusetts’ millionaire governor. The same is true of the Mooney-Billings persecution.

Two characteristics of the Scottsboro Campaign under the leadership of the International Red Aid are: (1) It has been quickly mobilised compared with other campaigns, and (2) It is without illusions as to the “justness” and the “fairness” of capitalist class justice. Not even the bourgeois press raises a word of defence on behalf of the so-called “impartiality” of the American judicial lynchers.

For instance, there are Parisian editions of two leading capitalist newspapers in the United States, the “Chicago Daily Tribune” and the “New York Herald”. Neither of these dares utter a word against mass protest on the basis of the “justice and fairness” that may be expected from the American court. The merely seek to differentiate as between “good protest” and “bad protest” as, “All day long”, in the words of the “Chicago Tribune”, “from the time it opened in the morning until it closed at five p.m., the Embassy (Paris) was besieged by delegations of Reds who presented petitions in favour of the condemned Negroes”.

The “Chicago Daily Tribune”, that has fascist aspirations and has been closely linked with underworld gangsterdom in its own home city, uses the familiar and vicious method of trying to discredit militant mass protest by excitedly speaking of “Threats to assault U.S. Embassy officials and prominent Americans in Paris and to bomb American buildings here (Paris) unless the seven Negroes sentenced to death at Scottsboro, Alabama, are set free”. The threats are supposed to have been made by a youth representatives of the French Section of the International Red Aid. But this is all in the usual method of the “Chicago Daily Tribune”, that styles itself the “World’s Greatest Newspaper”, that sets out with its venomous poison to discredit a movement that it can no longer combat with silence. On the other hand it lauds “peaceful and polite” protest and of “behaviour” before the American embassy secretary that “was above reproach”. The “New York Herald” tries to console itself with the declaration that the fifteen delegations that came to the American embassy in Paris were “calm and peaceful”.

The mouthpieces of the American bourgeoisie in Paris are both wrong twice over. The growing Scottsboro world protest is neither “bomb throwing” nor “calm and peaceful”. It grows into mighty mass demonstrations and strike struggles. The mobilised working class cannot be charged with the deeds of the police agent provocateurs on the one hand, or the tears of bourgeois sentimentalists including the social fascists (Léon Blum, Emile Vandervelde, etc.) on the other.

The truth of this is revealed in the fact that the Scottsboro protest action on October Tenth, for the first time, crashed through quite generally to the first pages of the world press. This means that hundreds of millions of copies of daily newspapers in all lands re-echoed with “Scottsboro!” –the story of the judicial lynching in Alabama. And the United States Supreme Court, that could have given a decision if it desired in five minutes, postponed action until November.

It did not sit well upon the stomach of dollar class justice to have its court room crowded with workers, mostly Negroes, with many more outside; that there were demonstrations over all the United States and Canada; that German worker delegations coming to the American embassy in Berlin ordered the Hindenburg-von Papen police to “stay outside” when they insisted on accompanying them into the building. And so it went the world over, all delegations were elected from great mass meetings. In Berlin the Scottsboro Day delegations were elected at the mass meetings greeting the released nine young workers tried for the death of a Nazi in the Röntgenstrasse Hitlerite attack upon workers.

The U.S. Supreme Court postponed its decision in the month of intensive preparations for the World Congress of the International Red Aid, that leads the Scottsboro Campaign, to be held in Moscow, November 10.

Into the most secluded conference chambers of the U.S. Supreme Court of millionaire corporation lawyers must roar labour’s growing denunciation of the Scottsboro judicial lynch murder.

***

The European Scottsboro Tour an Achievement. November 10, 1932.

The European tour of the Scottsboro Negro Mother through sixteen countries in six months must be considered as an outstanding working class achievement in the period of mounting terror and growing war preparations. It has now been successfully ended on the eve of the World Congress of the International Red Aid, that organised and carried through the tour, and while the United States Supreme Court is still considering the appeal argued on October Tenth against the Alabama judicial lynching of the Scottsboro Negro children.

It was the roar of European and world protest that originally halted the judicial lynching decreed by the Scottsboro judge, Hawkins, of “death by the passage of a current of electricity through your bodies”.

In an effort to stifle this protest the prosecuting attorney in Alabama threatened the telegraph agencies with contempt of court, which might mean several months in prison, if telegrams of protest were received and delivered.

But the waves of protest continued to lash against the whole judicial structure and the lynch system of Alabama so that, when the official lynch mob raided a meeting of Negro share croppers at Camp Hill, Alabama, murdered the leader, burned down the church in which the meeting was held, and made numerous arrests, immediately the International Red Aik took up the fight, all the prisoners were freed, because, said these official mobsters, “We do not want another Scottsboro case!”

When the Scottsboro Negro Mother left New York for Europe in April the Negro children, two of whom were her own sons, were condemned to die on June 23. At that moment the federal government at Washington stood ready, and still does, to give the lynch courts of Alabama every possible aid in carrying through the mass burnings in the electric chair.

President Hoover’s department of state, at Washington, that did not dare, because of the mass proportions of the Scottsboro campaign, to stop Mrs. Ada Wright, mother of two of the Scottsboro Negro Boys, and J. Louis Engdahl, National Chairman of the American Section of the International Red Aid, leaving the United States, tried to bring pressure on various European governments to accomplish its purpose.

Thus the “New York Times”, that speaks quite authoritatively of the activities of the Wall Street government in Europe, said at the very beginning of the European Scottsboro tour, that:

“The American Embassy (Berlin) is reported to have brought informally the proposed agitation to the attention of the Foreign-Office, which in turn has referred the matter to the local police at points where the woman. (Mrs. Wright) is scheduled to appear.”

The German government, like the government of the Dollar reaction, would not assume the responsibility of suppressing the Scottsboro tour. It left this task, for the most part, to social-democratic police presidents, who, nevertheless, failed in their task, for the German tour was ended successfully and on the heels of this triumph came the decision, June 1st, from the United States Supreme Court that it would hear the appeal demanded by the International Red Aid against the electric chair decisions of the Alabama lynch courts. The European Scottsboro campaign, that had smashed through all obstacles, had forced this favourable action from the highest court in the United States, that had refused to listen to the appeal in the Sacco-Vanzetti, the Mooney-Billings and numerous other major persecutions of workers.

But this in no way ended the activities of the dollar diplomats in Europe. They increased their efforts to gag the Scottsboro European campaign. These dollar diplomats are carefully chosen on the basis of their reactionary views. There is the multi-millionaire, Andrew Mellon, Wall Street’s ambassador in London, with John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford, the three richest men in the United States. He has even refused to receive worker delegations bringing Scottsboro protests.

This is the pack of human bloodhounds that the Hoover government turned loose on the Scottsboro Negro Mother in Europe. They accomplished her arrest and expulsion twice in Belgium; organized the grand reception for Mayor Cermak of Chicago, and the arrest and three days’ imprisonment of the Scottsboro Mother in Czechoslovakia; secured the prohibition of all her meetings and her expulsion from Bulgaria. This “influence” was openly admitted by Belgium’s minister of justice and by Bulgaria’s minister of the interior.

From high places in the Czechoslovakian government it was even learned that the American dollar diplomats in Europe not only had the ambition of blocking the Scottsboro tour, but urged a “secret agreement” or “gentlemen’s understanding for the barring of all international exchanges of speakers.

In spite of all obstacles, however, the Scottsboro tour pressed on through sixteen countries in six months, in nearly two hundred meetings and demonstrations that reached upwards of half a million listeners, while the press campaign found its way into hundreds of millions of copies of daily newspapers and magazines of all political tendencies.

Under the glare of this publicity the nine black-gowned judges of the United States Supreme Court listened in silence to the demands for a new trial made by the lawyers of the International Red Aid on October Tenth and then withheld decision. The court has adjourned until November Seventh, no doubt hoping that world protest will abate in the meantime. The very forces let loose by the Scottsboro European Tour and by the world protest, a better understanding of the savage and bloody oppression of the many millions of the Negro masses in the United States, provide the basis for the development of the campaign. The European Scottsboro tour was the first of its kind. The world-wide protest must reach broad proportions not yet achieved.

This effort will face new and greater obstacles since the Scottsboro protest joins well with the struggle against the growing white terror and fascism in the capitalist countries, and against the murderous terror regime that develops ever more fiendish attacks upon the worker and peasant masses in the colonies and semi-colonies, Of this, it is certain, the judicial lynchers and the raging mob thirsting for Negro workers’ blood in Scottsboro, Alabama, on April 6, 1931, were not aware. It only knew its vicious mission to strive by every means “to keep the Negro in his place”, and to maintain the boasted “white superiority”. It is clear that the dollar government in Washington now fully understands the implications of the Scottsboro campaign that today rocks some of the strongest pillars in its edifice. It is only when it is fully understood that the dollar reaction will do everything possible to put through to its bloody conclusion, the burning alive of the Scottsboro Negro Children, that the absolute need for the widest world-wide mobilisation of protest becomes, crystal clear, and renewed effort is developed to secure this mobilisation. That is the immediate task now while the United States Supreme Court delays in making its decision.