Who is angelo herndon

After being confined in jail for the long period of time that I have already mentioned, I was sick for several weeks. On Christmas Eve I was released. I want to say also that the policy of the Unemployment Council is to carry on a constant fight for the rights of the Negro people.

We realize that unless Negro and white workers are united together, they cannot get relief. The capitalist class teaches race hatred to Negro and white workers and keep it going all the time, tit for tat, the white worker running after the Negro worker and the Negro worker running after the white worker, and the capitalist becomes the exploiter and the robber of them both. We of the Unemployment Council are out to expose such things. If there were not any Negroes in the United States, somebody would have to be used as the scapegoat.

There would still be a racial question, probably the Jews, or the Greeks, or somebody. It is in the interest of the capitalist to play one race against the other, so greater profits can be realized from the working people of ail races. But the Unemployment Council points out to the Negro and white workers that the solution is not in committing suicide, that the solution can only be found in the unity and organization of black and white workers.

In organization the workers have strength. Now, why do I say this? I say it because it is to the interest of the capitalist class that the workers be kept down all of the time so they can make as much profit as they possibly can.

So, on the other hand, it is to the interest of Negro and white workers to get as much for their work as they can—that is, if they happen to have any work. Unfortunately, at the present time there are millions of workers in the United States without work, and the capitalist class, the state government, city government and all other governments, have taken no steps to provide relief for those unemployed.

And it seems that this question is left up to the Negro and white workers to solve, and they will solve it by organizing and demanding the right to live, a right that they are entitled to. They have built up this country, and are therefore entitled to some of the things that they have produced.

Not only are they entitled to such things, but it is their right to demand them. When the State of Georgia and the City of Atlanta raised the question of inciting to insurrection and attempting to incite to insurrection, or attempting to overthrow the government, all I can say is, that no matter what you do with Angelo Herndon, no matter what you do with the Angelo Herndons in the future, this question of unemployment, the question of unity between Negro and white workers cannot be solved with hands that are stained with the blood of an innocent individual.

You may send me to my death, as far as I know. But no one can deny these facts. The present system under which we are living today is on the verge of collapse; it has developed to its highest point and now it is beginning to shake.

They say that once a miner, always a miner. His sons never doubted that they would go down into the mines as soon as they got old enough. Almost every working-class family, especially in those days, nursed the idea that one of its members, anyway, would get out of die factory, and wear clean clothes all the time and sit at a desk. My family was no exception. They hoped that I would be the one to leave the working-class. They were ready to make almost any sacrifices to send me through high-school and college.

Besides myself, there were six other boys and two girls. We all did what we could. Mother went out to do housework for rich white folks. An older brother got a job in the steel mills. They still had the idea they could scrimp and save and send me through college. So one fine morning in , my brother Leo and I started off for Lexington, Ky.

A few miles outside of Lexington, we were taken on at a small mine owned by the powerful DeBardeleben Coal Corporation. We lived in the company town.

It was pretty bad. The houses were just shacks on unpaved streets. We seldom had anything to eat that was right. They kept our pay low and paid only every two weeks, so we had to have credit between times. We got advances in the form of clackers, which could be used only in the company store. Their prices were very high. I remember paying 30 cents a pound for porkchops in the company store and then noticing that the butcher in town was selling them for 20 cents.

The company store prices were just robbery without a pistol. The safely conditions in the mine were rotten. The escapeways were far from where we worked, and there was never enough timbering to keep the rocks from falling. There were some bad accidents while I was there. I took all the skin off my right hand pushing a car up into the facing. The car slipped, the track turned over, and the next thing I knew I had lost all the skin and a lot of the flesh off my right hand.

The scars are there to this day. The Negroes and whites very seldom came in contact with each other. Of course there were separate company patches for living quarters. In the spring of Atlanta police arrested six radical labor organizers and charged them with attempting to incite insurrection and distributing insurrectionary literature. First passed in , following the slave insurrection in Virginia led by Nat Turner, the law was initially drafted to discourage slave rebellions but was revised soon after the Civil War to combat insurrection.

After another decade of dormancy, the law was revived in by solicitor general John A. Boykin to pursue labor organizers. Although none of the accused ever stood trial, formal charges were not dropped for another seven years. Davis Jr. Walter LeCraw read aloud passages that denounced white supremacy, and lead prosecutor John H. Although it rendered a guilty verdict on January 18, , only three days after the trial opened, the jury recommended mercy, shielding Herndon from a possible death sentence.

A rehearing petition was subsequently rejected as well, thus clearing the way for an appeal to the U. Supreme Court. At the local level, the organization helped establish the Provisional Committee for the Defense of Angelo Herndon, an interracial umbrella group of sympathetic parties briefly headed by the poet and activist Don West.

In May the U. However, despite the best efforts of the National Bar Association, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People , and prominent religious figures, the Supreme Court dismissed the rehearing petition in October Sutherland began preparations for a second round of appeals. Their efforts were rewarded on December 7, , when Judge Hugh M.

The case of Herndon v. Lowry appeared before the court amid great fanfare in February The emerging liberal bloc that exonerated Herndon subsequently provided a majority in a series of rulings that significantly expanded First Amendment rights.

The experiences of Alabama Communists, however, suggest that racial divisions were far more fluid and Southern working-class consciousness far more complex than most historians have realized. The African-Americans who made up the Alabama radical movement experienced and opposed race and class oppression as a totality.

The Party and its various auxiliaries served as vehicles for black working-class opposition on a variety of different levels ranging from antiracist activities to intraracial class conflict. Furthermore, the CP attracted some openly bigoted whites despite its militant antiracist slogans.

The Party also drew women whose efforts to overcome gender-defined limitations proved more decisive to their radicalization than did either race or class issues. It is genuinely fascinating to see how the ideas of Marx and Engels were considered, debated, and reshaped in the context of racist capitalism in the American south. Herndon's memoir provides numerous examples of his excitement at finding in Marx the language and ideas that he had been seeking to articulate his own construction of the relationship between white owners and black workers.

Here is how Herndon paraphrases the Communist Manifesto in his own words as a man of about twenty :. The worker has no power. All he possesses is the power of his hands and his brains. It is his ability to produce things. It is only natural, therefore, that he should try and get as much as he can for his labor.

To make his demands more effective he is obliged to band together with other workers into powerful labor organizations, for there is strength in numbers. The capitalists, on the other hand, own all the factories, the mines and the government. Their only interest is to make as much profit as they can. Do you find this information helpful?

A small donation would help us keep this accessible to all. Forego a bottle of soda and donate its cost to us for the information you just learned, and feel good about helping to make it available to everyone! Salter, D. Angelo Herndon ?