The Daily Worker Newspaper, February 4, 1933, Page 4

Page Four DAILY WORKER, NEW YORK, SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 1933 18th S., New York City, N. ¥ Address and mail checks to # Ky mail everywhere: One yea exoepting Borough of Mauhattan and Canada; One year, $9; 6 Poblished by the Comprodaily Publishing Co. Jephone ALgonquin 4 K SUBSCRIPTION 436; six months, $5.50 Inc,, daily exeept Sm 956, Cable New York, N. St. RATES S months, $2).¢ month, Ths New York City cigs and $5; 3 months months Wage Cuts, Relief and Political Repression VERY struggle of workers 4 up as in the Briggs plant against wage cuts and speed- in Detroit, every struggle for unemployment relief and insurance, lik: the Hunger March to Washington, every fight rents is met by police attacks, In Detroit the state poli private police are mobilized unemployed. More than tt turns loose its spies age and relief and ¢ jef. A mili p dente: by the ‘Twenty default of had been 4 The sheriff and chief of five workers and sei at once took over the Unemployed Council, the employed. Commu The federal government, throt also on the job. The local press stated on “Deputies under Sheriff F of the department of labor, raided day night and seized the red propaganda was turned over to government age’ According to the focal press the are all cut and dried. It states “although he is prepared to Prosecutor John M. Raab expects Indge A. W. Hosinsk more than a year and a half of im hat set The prosecutor knew w even before they are tried! Six of the workers Studebaker Motor Company men and women workers More and more the heads of t tions of © ry commander are wor urd The South Bend chief of police, for statement to the press “The trouble Monday was duc local and outside, who are masqueradi Unemployed Councils.” “A good many of our citizens strations by these paid agitators. of people gather as mean they are all members of the take imum If unable to pay notorious ugainst evictions and high clubbings and arrests. ice, city police and the Ford against the strikers and the ral government departments of > for- fede nts of the Ind nd these orker ere held in o $7 after the demonstration had defended 100, msely carried out raids on the homes of of literature. These two officials ts against the as propaganda Party and the mass of the un- department of labor, n, 31 gh the was accompanied by an investigator the of five rioters late Mon- The confiscated literature nts.’ > court cases against the 24 workers to be sentenced by City )) fines they are liable to prisonment.” action on the all the atences tehse workerss were to get Bend is the home of the tarvation wages for both So. ig the func- » employers. issued the following police f prox instance to paid Communi agitators, both under the title of National being drawn into these demon- mere fact that a large number ar Th they did on Monday should not be construed to The Communistic demonstration. only thing we ask is that law abiding citizens do not become part of the crowd just because they are curi®us to see some excitement.” ‘The “excitement” consisted of a n armed attack on unarmed demon- strators and it is clear that the statement of the police chief is intended xs further intimidation: he is threatening the masses with reprisals if they support the demands of the U nempioyed Councils. The widespread charactér of the police attacks on the unemployed and strikers, the wholesale clubbin must not be taken as a matter of course. Wo for such persecution. Neither do w ernment spies against foreign born It is all a question the struggles. It is likewise a quest against the denial of elementary politi Police and military suppression into better relief and unemployment insurance. We. must not and we will not t these vicious per of American capitalism and of workers, Negro « battlefronts ‘We must Especia! federal government against the working c Letters from “NOT IF COMMUNISTS ARE REPRESENTED” i Brooklyn, N. Y. Editor of Daily Worker, Dear Sir:— It is with sincere regret that we adyise you that the symposium we had planned and in which you had already promised participation will pe postponed indefinitely. ‘As you recall, the original plan was to invite a speaker from your organization, the Nation and the ‘New Leader; the first two res- ponded immediately but the New Leader did not even extend the eourtesy of a reply. However, a representative called upon the New Leader, and to his astonishment and dismay, the re- AS ception accorded him was such to make it clear that not only are they unwilling to enter into any symposium where Communist opin- ion is represented, but an open front of hostility was assumed to- wards our representative upon the mere mention of “Communist. ‘The very subject of the Lidia jum: “Who Has the y Bi abou be welcomed by every every progressive school of thought as the most opportune vehicle for the expression of their viewpoint and for the expounding of their po- litical program. In view of recent electioneering speeches by leading members, declarations and propa~ ganda, the present refusal of the Socialist Party, through the New Leader, to take part .in an. open symposium definitely forces us to these conclusions: namely, that the Socialist Party fears to meet the : of Communist ‘debaters > that its utterances are merely dem- agogic and misleading; and that copfronted with differing opinions it fears open acknowledgment of its complete bankruptcy as a party which would lead the working class to:a way ous. The Socialist Part) could offer no better example, to those members of our club who | share its views, of its utter lack of courage of its convictions. May we trust that you will pub- /| Mah this letter in your columns?/ | cutions cannot be checked ngs and gassings, the mass arrests ers do not have to stand e have to siand for the use of gov- workers. 4 rs in ue of struggle al rights and the fight against all struggles against wage cuts, for ion i ble that ues which, uggle against the hunger drive will rally greater masses honest intellectuals in solid nec sues in all our strui e sinister part play gles. d by the Our Readers e feel it is important that all your readers should be made famil- iar with the actual attitude of the Socialist Party in contrast’ to its high-sounding, radical phrases. —Brighton Progressive Club, L, Lee, Secretary. |STATISTICS IN ARTICLE |ON STEEL PROVIDED BY |THE “PEN AND HAMMER” TATISTICAL material used in the article “New Steel Wage Cut Plotted by Wall Street Meet,” which appeared in Monday's issue of the Daily Worker was provided by Kalmun Hecht, member of the | Research Committee of the Pen an Hammer, working under the direction of L.R.A, Through an oversight, this ackonwledgement was omitted from the article. The Pen and Hammer Research Committee is now at work on a number of projects, including “The Effects of Poverty,” “Housing in New York City,” and has just begun indexing the Daily Worker. NYGARD’S LIFE STORY IS FEATURE IN THE “NEW PIONEER” «PACK in the club house, which was in a deserted alley, I con- sidered the deputy's words careful- ly. He had called the miners bums, and said that they were too lazy to | work. - And yet, I thought the min- ers had always been willing to work in the past. What could be wrong?” Boyhood days of Emil Nygard, mayor of Crosby, Minn.—first Com- munist mayor in the U. 8. who writes the story of his life in the New Pioneer. It is a thrilling nar- rative of the life of the workers in the Minnesota iron area—the fur- nace of struggle that moulded Emi Nygard. Already special orders are com- to the New Pioneer for the Feb- uary issue. Copies 5 cents each; bundle orders, 4 cents a copy. Order trom New Pioneer, P.O. Box 28, Station D, New York. _! ‘EveryFactory Our Fortress’ Establish Intimate, Per- manent Contacts With the Workers. “The successfal accomplishment of this task (winning the major- ity of the working class) requires that every Communist Party shall establish, extend and strengthen permanent and intimate contacts with the majority of the work- ers, wherever workers may be feund,”—From the 12th Plenum Resolution, E. C. C, I. |SHOP ACTIVITIES AND THE DAILY WORKER By GERTRUDE HAESSLER. J] WANT to speak on using the DAILY WORKER {n connection with activities in the shop. In fact, I want to touch on only one pha of Daily Worker activity in the shop, and that is Worker Cor: pondence. But this phase of acti ity embraces almost everything # worker can do in the shop for aad with the Daily Worker. We often hear comrades in the shops complain about the character of the Daily Worker—that it is not close enough to the conditions and struggles of the shop workers. Everyone admits the present faults of the Daily Worker, but it is these very comrades in the shops who can help to improve our “Daily” If the workers from the shops send in letters themselves about the conditions in the shops, and the attitude of the workers, the strug- gles going on, it will go a long way toward bringing the “Daily” more toward this activity, and thus im- proving it as a real mas8 organ, in close touch with the daily lives of the workers. NATURE OF WORKERS’ CORRESPONDENCE. ‘When news comes in through the district or section office, in report- ing style, it is handed to a rewrite man on the “Daily”, the facts con- densed as much as possible, and then put into the news section as ne’ But when a worker him- self writes from his shop, the let- ter is handled in an entirely dif- ferent way. This letter goes to the Worker Correspondence depart- ment, where the greatest possible use is made of it. os Loge IRST of all, it is usually printed as it was writen—in the work- er’s own language, which makes it more vivid reading. A letter like this is grouped with other letters from shops in the same industry, which makes the entire Worker Correspondence Section of particu- Jar interest to the workers of that industry. This method lends itself very easily to special distribution of a particular issue, and has been, suc- cessfully used in a number of our concentration factories. For in- stance, if a steel worker at Spar- rows Point gets a copy of the Daily Worker carrying a letter from one of his shopmates and sees in the | same section a letter from a | worker in the Bethlehem Steel at | Chicago, and from large steel plants in other parts of the country, he | begins to Jook upon the “Daily” as a fighting organ for steel workers. The same is true of the farmers, the veterans, the miners, etc. — and in all these industries and many others, we have run these special sections. EXPOSE BOSS PROPAGANDA Another running letters from workers, 1s that they very vividly expose by their own experiences the methods of creating boss illusions in the working class. For instance, @ worker writes of a big order his concern received, and the hulla- | pbaloo the newspapers made of this as a sign of returning prosperity. But this same worker tells how the order was not big enough even to keep the shop's minimum crew busy for a week or two, to say nothing of taking on laid-off men. Another worker writes how the ‘Teagie “Share-the-Work”, com- monly called the “share-the-mis- ery” plan works out in practice. It is instituted in his own shop, and he figures out exactly how big @ wage-cut for the employed this means, and how much of the bur- den of unemployment was shifted from the shoulders of the capital- ists to those of the employed work- ers. Still another worker writes how conditions in his shop immediately improved when the shop paper ap- peared, and how the boss immedi- ately attacked with a wage cut when the shop paper died. And he appeals for the re-issuance of the paper. A farmer himself writes an ac- count of blocking an eviction and forced sale. He was there, he gets in little important. details, and the farmers elsewhere like to read it, their own experiences. How much more vivid these stor~ | ies are from workers themselves! | And when this writing is combined with carefully arranged special dis- | tribution, this becomes a very ef- | fective means of drawing other workers in the same industry closer | to us, and stimulates them to write | | | too, woe Pe MRADE . » from Sparrows Point, has already made ar- rangement with us for special dis- tribution on certain days—he to furnish the material, and we to see to it that the material gets into the “Daily” on those days, and that the bundle gets to him. This can be done with any shop and any locality. Other places have the same arrangement. Some places have a standing order for a certain number of copies for any issue in which their stories appear. This is how we are going to root the “Daily” in the shops, among the strategic sections of the work- ing class, For this, we also need the cooperation of the unions. So | far some of the unions have coop- | erated excellently as far as material 4s concerned, and contacts for get~ valuable thing about | and they take a notion to write of *“_AND I HAVE ONLY BEGUN TO FIGHT!” -By Burck | Crisis Increases Capitalist Concentration By ANNA ROCHESTER AT the crisis has hit the cap- italist class is beyond question. Million dollar incomes declined from 513 in 1929 to 75 in 1931. Bank failures are rising again. The Insull collapse last April has | been followed by a fairly steady trickle of big receiverships. Strong railroads have stopped paying di- vidends. There is trouble ahead for insurance companies and say- ings banks because more bonds are weakening and farmers and city real estate owners can meet their mortgage payments. A few capitalists are down and out, and many are “suffering” be- cause they have to cut down ex- penses, with the loss of their spec- ulation profits that made the “prosperity” of boom years. But expensive shops, night clubs, opera, winter resorts, are still going strong. The total of interest and dividend payments by a certain group of banks, industrial corpora~ tions and government units up to the middle of 1932—as tabulated | by the Jotirnal of Commerce— was still abéve the 1928 level. ‘The banks closest to Morgan and Mellon have not cut their divid- ends. The chief Rockefeller com- panies are still paying on their common sidck. The gulf between the top capitalists and the masses of workers has never been wider and deeper in the United States than it is today. Whatever may have happened to their incomes, several facts show that the power of the chief overlords has actually been ex- tended during the crisis. 1. Big private banking houses which underwrite municipal bond issues and then sell them through the lesser banking houses to the broad capitalist public have taken upon themselves an open dictator- ship over municipal policies on budgets, wages of city workers and relief funds. One example among many was seen in New York City in the autumn of 1932, when the banks refused loans to the city unless wages of municipal workers were cut. BIG BANKS FEWER AND STRONGER 2. Increasing concentration of commercial banking — national banks, trust companies and state banks other than savings banks— has been going on ever since 1921, but the pace has been enormously speeded up by the crisis. The total number of banks dropped from 30,- 812 in 1921 to 25,330 in 1929. Then in the three years of crisis, to June 30, 1932, another 6,064 went out of business, leaving 19,046—the small- est number in more than 20 years. Banks are bigger and fewer and nearer to the leading power of Wall Street than they have ever been before. ier, i N December 31, 1932, according to the New York Times write- up of a tabulation in The Financial not | ‘Power of the Chief? | Rulers Extended Age, 42 banks each reported de- | Posits of over $100,000,000 and to- | gether had about one-third of the total deposif$ in all commercial banks in the United States. During 1932, while the total deposits in all banks had declined by 20 per cent, deposits in these 42 biggest banks had fallen by only 1 1-2 per cent. j Even a hasty survey of these biggest banks shows that all of those in New York City, Philadel- | phia, Boston, Newark, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Cleveland and Detroit have direct or indirect links with | Morgan, Rockefeller, Mellon, or | Kuhn, Loeb & Co., or with two or more of thesé overlords. Less ob- vious links with Wall Street cor- porations are doubtless present ih the scattering dozen in other states. Passage of the Glass-Steagall bill by the Senate, with its opening of the door to statewide ‘branch banking by national banks, shows that the big financiers are deliber- ately planning to expand further the. large dominant units. INDUSTRIAL POWER INCREASED Control of commercial banking is one important element in the financial control of industry. As a, larger percentage of banking fun@s is linked to the Wall Street rulers, the industrial power of these rulers is increased. 3. The investment trust is a device that gained great. popularity during the boom. It draws small investors’ funds into the hands of investment bankers who thereby secure large amounts for buying stocks and bonds of the chief in- dustrial corporations. Many of these “trusts” have been liquidated | at a heavy loss. Some of the big- gest are still in the process of | readjustment to the current low prices on the stock market. But two have been busily abosorbing others during the crisis. It is no accident that these two are Atlas Utilities Corp. a general invest- ment trust in spite of its name and very close to the Morgan-Bon- bright utility crowd, and the Tri- Continental Corp., in which Selig- man and Rockefeller are interested. Also last summer J. P. Morgan & Co. took the lead in setting up @ new corporation with authorized capital of $100,000,000, which other leading bankers were invited to join, for the purpose of buying up bargains in stocks.and bonds. INDUSTRIAL MERGERS CONTINUE 4. Giant industrial corporations hhave taken advantage of the crisis to buy up additional properties at bargain peices. This policy has been openly stated by Mellon’s Gulf Qil Corp. as a reason for omitting dividends.. Such giants as U. S. Steel, Ecthlehem Steel, West- ting letters, but when it comes to utilizing these industrial sections tor special distribution, we have re- ceived, cooperation from none of them as yet. As for the shop workers them- selves, this special distribution has greatly improved, and if continued, this activity will have a marked ef- fect on the character of the “Daily,” as well as on its circula- tion. SPECIALLY now, when the Daily Worker is conducting its finan- cial drive, must this activity be in- tensified. Such special distribu- tion acquaints the workers in the shop with the Daily Worker as their champion, their leader in the fight, and they can be approached to contribute toward its support. But beyond the contributions that will be collected in and around tha shops, 1s the other objective of the correspondence and also of the fin- ancial drive—to root the “Daily” solidly in the shops. Without doing this, the pennies received as a re- sult of a temporary interest are but a drop in an ocean. A sustained, intimate interest in the “Daily” fos- tered through our worker corres- pondents, means a solid base for the “Daily” in the shops, in the fortresses, which we must capture. ern Electric, Armour, American Smelting & Refining, Phelps Dodge, American Radiator & Standard Sanitary Corporation, Allis-Chal- mers, Hercules Powder. National Lead, duPont and others “have been quietly extending their do- mains. ‘The Standard Oil companies, broken up in 1911 by order of the Supreme Court, are gradually re- assembling the pieces of their em- pire into larger corporate units. ‘The merger of Prairie and Sinclair companies into the New Consoli- dated Oil marked a definite ex- Lae of Rockefeller power in oll. 5. While thousands of little storekeepers have been driven into bankruptcy and larger independent stores have had a marked shrink- age of trade, the chains and mail order hous*s have had the smallest decline. Total retail trade is es- timated to have fallen from’ $40 billions in 1931 to $31 or $382 bil- lions in 1932, a drop of at least 20 per cent. But a recent survey of leading chain stores ang mail order houses by the New York Times, January 15, 1933, founs #eir total sales had dropped’ by tess ‘than 14 per cent. ‘ 6. Atleast two of the special devices worked out during 1932 by | the working class ¢ emergency committee of financlers have helped to spread the dictator- ship of Wall Street. One involved an ingenious linking of all the 166 building and loan associations in New York State with a central | committee headed by Owen D. Young. Then, in a slightly dif- ferent field, certain big industrial- ists, including Sloan of General Motors and Teagle of Standard Oil, agreed to compel: small business men to use trade acceptances in- stead of cash or open credit. In praising the “manifold advantages” of this plan, the New York Times said, “The use of trade acceptances | would help the small business men by resisting him from injudicious purchases.” In other words, the big corporations more openly as- sumed the power to dictate to their customers, 7. Of course it is true. that many of the giant properties have been inflated and will! have to be “reorganized.” This applies espe- cially in the field of railroads and public utilities. But the financial rulers can—and generally do—use the receiverships and bondholders’ protective commitees, set up for the process of reorganization, to keep companies under their own con- trol or to shift them from one financial group to another. Often this is quite openly arranged. Two of the three receivers for Rocke- feller's Consolidation Coal Co., for example, are the president and an- other official of the company itself. Insull’s. utility empire was inter- fering with the growth of other stronger. systems, so Insull was | slated for destruction, and his operating companies which are still in sound financial condition | in spite of the failure of his top | holding companies will almost cer- tainly be taken up by groups tied to. Morgan or the Chase National Bank. Caney yee | ¥ the ruling of a federal judge in 1929, all receiverships coming before the federal court in New Nork—except those involving spe- cial types of litigation—are auto- matically turned over to be aw ministered by the Irving Trust Co., | 8 bank close to Morgan and the National City Bank. 8. Then last, but not least, is the Reconstruction Finance Cor- poration and the War Debt sit- uation. The big financiers guided the setting up of the Reconstruc- tion Finance Corporation so that they could secure for themselves and their banks the repayment of certain types of shaky loans and pass on the risk of loss See Federal Government. The R. F. C. has already paid over one billion dollars to the banks and railroads but only about a hundred million out of the $300,000,000 appropriated for loans to state funds for unem- ployment relief. sisted that while revision or even cancellation of war debts to the United States is now desirable, the sacredness of their private loans | in other countries must be re- Spected, As the crisis grows steadily worse —and capitalist writers are admit- ting that they see no basis for im- mediate recovery—this process of inereasing concentration of finan- cial power will continue. For how- ever the Morgan, Rockefeller, Mel- lon strongholds may be weakened by the further deepening of the crisis, they will stand up better than the outer fields of independent business. And when they turn to war as the one big capitalist solution of the crisis, the one hope of saving the capitalist system, the big financiers will further strengthen their own position. War loans mean profits for the leading bankers. War orders mean superprofits for the basic in- dustries which they control, “The trend toward centralized fin- ancial dictatorship and its political counterpart, an openly fascist gov- ernment, is deeply rooted in the capitalist system. The only alter- native lying before the present per- fod ‘is a revolutionary mass move- ment of workers and small farmers, strong enough to overthrow the capitalist system and substitute for the fascist dictatorship of capitalist overlords a government by and for m Three Outstanding Writers Call for Aid to “Daily” HREE outstanding American writers, Michael Gold, John Dos Passos and Sherwood Anderson, haye issued state- ments calling for support of the Daily Worker for $35,000 to save it front suspension. Gold, one of the editor's of and the author of “Jey during the last fe Dos Passos Parallel” and “Beyond Desir w years, hor of American writers. the s Without Money”, is known to readers of the Daily Worker as the author of many sketches and articles that have appeared in the ‘Daily’ “Three Soldiers”. and Anderson, whose latest book, , is based on the textile struggles in the South, are considered among the greatest living Both are members of the National New Masses “42nd Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, and Anderson was a delegate to the World Congress John Dos Passos Against War, held at Amsterdam last summer. =" S:1AEL a t “Th~ Daily Work lutionary movem. % >LD'S statement follows: has become as necessary to the American revo- as ‘Iskra’ was to the Russian. A newspaper is a collective organizer, and anyone who has gone thraugh the countyy has seen with what de~otion every line of the ‘Daily’ is tead by farmers, min- ers, factory workers. “Daily” bas shown great evidences of new power and ‘There is still room for improvement but un- doubtedly we are witnessing a great re-birth of the Daily Worker in the fire of the great class conflicts now on the order of the day in the richest country in growth. the world. Sherwood Anderson In the past few months the It is catching up to the great time we are in, and the speeded-up social forces. “Now is the time to rally to the ‘Daily’, and to keep it in the arena. It is more effective than ever, and more needed than ever. the Daily Worker is one of the major battles of ‘The battle. for the werking class, and on this front everyone must take some stand,” Dos Passos, who also sent a $10 donation. declared: “An active and honest press is the backbone of any mass movement. It is impossible without it to hold large scattered groups of men and women together for comrfion thought and common action. sufficlent and properly written newspapers has so far hampered the growth of the movement for a socialized The workers and producing j; elements who will have to create the new society are dependent for their ideas and their information on a press run for profit and in the interests of the exploit- economy in this country. ing groups. “It would be hard indeed if, at a moment when we need fifty Daily Workers, the single daily paper that represents a conscious and ag- gressive section of the working class should go THE DAILY WORKER is the only daily we have and we've got not only to keep it going, but to build it up into a great news- out of business. raper.” The lack of tremendously “Michael Gold © . “JT is terribly important that the Daily Worker keeps going”, writes Sherwood Anderson in a letter to the “Daily”. “We, in America, can’t go on always with this dead-defeated feeling. We need’ the courage- ous thumps we can get only from the Daily Worker.” NSWER the appeal of these noted writers who have joined with Theodore Dreiser in calling for action to save the Daily Worker! Writers, artists, intellectuals generally, as well as workers should con- sider it their urgent duty to keep the “ Daily” alive by contributing as much as they can and collecting among their friends. The Political Significance of the Herndon Case By OTTO HALL 'HE Herndon case is one of the” most important case in the history of our movement. There never has been a case that has brought forward so clearly, so many important aspects of the struggle of the American working class against capitalist exploitation. We have in this case the struggle of the workers against starvation and misery, and, as was brought out in the trial, the struggle for equal rights for Negroes and their right of self-determination in the South- ern Black Belt. ‘This nineteen-year-old Negro boy who shocked the white ruling -class out of their smugness and put fear in their hearts by his Bolshevik fortitude and stamina, is typical of the working class leadership in the south that is developing out of the sharpening struggles in that sec- tion, The Camp Hill fight, the very recent ‘Tallapoosa struggles, in which the Negro toilers haye de- monstrated to the entire world their willingness to fight and their revolutionary potentialities, are in- dications that in many sections of the South they will be the ones who will lead the struggles and set the example to the white work- ers that the only way out of their misery is through organization and struggle. SNe. T= renegade Lovestonites and Cannonites, and the leadership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, (Pickens, Du Bois, Schuyler, etc.) hhaye repeatedly spread the canard that the Negroes in the South are ignorant, backward, and so terror- ized that they won't fight. The southern bourgeoisie would like to believe this, but they are becoming more and more convinced that this | 1s not true, They also thought that In this way, the bankers have in- | the native southern white worker wouldn’t struggle, but the textile workers in North and South Caro- lina and Tennessee, and the fight- ing miners in Kentucky and West Virginia have changed this opinion. The vicious attacks of the south- ern capitalists against the workers, Negro and white, and. their at- tempts to suppress the revolution- ary movement that is developing down there, shows that they realize that they are sitting atop an active volcano that is likely to erupt at any moment, Due to the deepening crisis, they are finding it more and more difficult to bolster up among the white workers the ideology of race superiority that has served so long to hamper the united fight of the workers in that section. They can no longer afford to pay the white worker a little higher wages than those paid to the Negro for similar work. Consequently, the white worker is beginning to lose his feeling of race superiority and further is beginning’ to realize that unless he fights for Negro rights, he cannot better his own economic condition. The way the white work- | ers of Atlanta rallied to the support of Angelo Herndon is an interesting example. Never before had the workers of Atlanta, Negro and witlie,, and in the whole South for that matter, witnessed such smashing of favorite southern traditions. The two Negro lawyers, B. J. Davis and John H. Geer, native southern Negroes, in their conduct of the defense of Herndon in the courts astounded } every one by the way they bearded the bourbon lion in hfs den. They brought the question of Negro rights forward clearly and boldly during the trial in the. splendid fight they made for the right of ‘Negroes to serve on the jury. Never in the memory of any Negro in that court room had any lawyer at- tempted to stop white policemen and prosecutors from referring to their clients as “niggers” and “darkies.” When B. J. Davis ob- jected to these terms, the judge was forced to sustain the objection. co 8 Ti during the three days of the trial, the court room was crowd- ed with Negro and white workers. ‘The Jim Crow laws were broken for the first time when Negro and white workers occupied the, same benches. The court room became & political forum; Negro and white workers alike learned that’ the basic reason the bosses were able to keep thew. down below the starvation level was through the southern sys-~ tem of Jim Crow and the‘ national oppression of the Negro toilers in the black belt. The bosses througi2 their prosecutor, Walter Le Craw, made the Communist slogan of self-determination and basic argu- ment against the defendant. Craw shouted that, “if you. don't send this defendant to the electric chair we will have a Red Army marching through Georgia which will take all of the land away from the white people and give it to the Negroes!” Every opportunity the judge had to overrule objections made by the defense attorneys was utilized. The prosecutors were allowed to use every trick in the calendar to inject race prejudice in order to inflame the jury. A witness for the defense Professor Evans, a native south- erner, and professor of economics at Emory University, and whom the judge disqualified as an expert on Communism, was asked the follow- ing questions by prosecutor Hudson, a former baptist preacher. Question: equal rights for Negroes?” Answer: “Yes under the jaw.” Question: “Would you want your daughter to marry a Negro?” = «| Answer: “It's against the law in this state.” » ‘This question. was. allowed is. spite of the objections by the ete These tactics of the td cution did not get them anyw with the white workers who crowd- ed the court room. ny openly expressed indignation at the tactics of the bosses. 4 : e 58 working class today. As p result of | this fight we are getting the sup- Be (hae er ane Toes, inclu pe - tellectuals, who are attracted by the raising of the national questiom — in the struggle for Negro rights Also the white workers are'in con- | siderable numbers supporting this | fight. The revolutionary movement is going forward with increasing | tempo and the opportunity to break through the terror in that section was never better. Even the vicious sentence Res Herndon did not dampen the spirit of the workers. Many Negroes said that they ‘were guing to join the Communist Party and carry on the fight, — ia “Do you believe in | ane the fight for the release of — Angelo Herndon becomes one of | the most important tasks facing the | Le ~ cme