Brave and defiant, Angelo Herndon’s statement to comrades on the day he surrendered himself to Georgia authorities seeking the death penalty for the crimes of ‘inciting Negro rebellion.’
‘A Message’ by Angelo Herndon from Labor Defender. Vol. No. 11. November, 1935.
Written on the day he left for Georgia to surrender himself to the authorities who demand his life
To all of you, members and friends of the International Labor Defense, who have shown your solidarity with me since the first day of my arrest, I want to send my greeting before I start for the Georgia chain gang. I will not say good-by because I have the greatest confidence in the masses of the people of this country, Negro and white, and I know that they will do all in their power to help win my freedom.
You who realize the conditions under which the workers in the South are forced to live and suffer, realize that this is not alone a fight to save the life of one individual, one person whose name is Angelo Herndon. This is a fight for the freedom of 14,000,000 citizens in this country, a fight for the right of the Negro people to be treated like civilized human beings. A fight to stop them from being trampled underfoot as they are today. You know that this is also a fight to wipe out a vicious unconstitutional law passed in the days of slavery and used to oppress the wage slaves of today; a fight to free 18 other men and women indicted and facing death under this same law.
Today when terror is slowly swallowing up the whole country, when fascism is showing its head in the United States, today is the time to act–if we are to save ourselves. If we allow this terror to grow without organizing to check it there will be hundreds of Herndon cases in every state in the country.
The rulers of Georgia think that by doing me to my death, they will halt the fight for freedom. They think that by sentencing me as they did, they will stop the millions of unemployed, Negro and white, from organizing together and marching side by side as we did in Atlanta, to demand bread. But we can and we must show them that they are wrong. The Negro people, whose history is filled with many examples of courage, of willingness to die in defense of their rights, will unite will organize together with the white workers and show the ruling class oppressors that the fight for Herndon is the fight for all the American workers.
We can already see that hundreds of thousands of American workers regard less of their political opinions, their religious beliefs, their race, their color, have generalized this. A broad united front has been forged in the fight for my freedom. Past differences have been swept aside. And I know that the front will grow wider as the days go by.
No matter what our political opinions are, no matter what other differences there might be between us, we are all American workers and American citizens. We love this country because we have built it up. Our very blood, our very bones are in the soil and we are the ones who have made this country what it is. We are asked to believe that under the Stars and Stripes we are today a free people. But how can we believe it when men and women are thrown into jail because they ask for bread for their hungry children, when they are slugged and beaten because they strike for decent wages, when they are put behind the bars for exercising the rights of free speech. Through my case the State of Georgia has made it a crime punishable by death to read a newspaper or a book. If this goes untrue in every corner of the country challenged in Georgia it will soon be This is not an isolated case. It is part and parcel of the whole system of reaction and terror that is developing at a tremendous pace in the United States today.
We have the power and the force to stop this wave. What we must do is band our forces together into one fighting alliance of all workers, black and white, native and foreign born, and show our oppressors that we are fighting not only to free Herndon but to free ourselves. Too long we have permitted them to get away with their outrages. They murdered Sacco and Vanzetti. They have murdered hundreds of others. They have kept Tom Mooney in jail for 19 years. They will try to do it over and over again. But today our strength is greater than it was in those years. Let us put it together my friends, to defeat their plans.
I know that if I were humble and would get down on my knees in humiliation and beg for mercy, the rulers of Georgia would like it better. But before I would ever ask them for mercy that way I would rather die. There can be no greater honor than fighting for the freedom of the Negro people and for the freedom of the working class. If they should decide to take my life for doing this, let them understand that I would rather die fighting for what belongs to me and my class than to sit idly by while they trample my people underfoot.
And in my final words to you, I want to tell you that I know that it is the work of the International Labor Defense and those who support it, that has kept me alive these three and a half years since I was arrested. During these same years the I.L.D. has conducted many other defense battles and won many victories. The I.L.D. needs your support more than ever before, grow into the powerful defense shield and you need the I.L.D. Help it to it must become to prevent more Hern- the rest. Join the I.L.D. today. One don cases, Scottsboro, Mooneys and all who has felt its power as I have, knows its worth and calls on you to swell its ranks.
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/1935/v11n11-nov-1935-orig-LD.pdf
