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3 The World Confronts Jim Crow When nine African American young men and boys were arrested and tried in Alabama in the spring of 1931 for allegedly molesting sexually two white women, few could envision that this would become a paradigmatic case that would transform the unfortunate plight of the Negro, while catapulting William Patterson into the front ranks of Communist and Negro leadership. In 1969, well after the full measure of this trailblazing case could be taken, Patterson said quite accurately, “Perhaps no living American knows better than I the history of the Scottsboro Case, for I lived with it sixteen of its seventeen years’ duration.”1 “I knew something about the case of the nine lads,” he continued. “I had debated with Robert Vann,” the affluent Negro publisher of the Pittsburgh Courier, at a local university while this self-proclaimed revolutionist was still residing in the Keystone State. “Vann turned against the Negro militants, especially the Communists”; Patterson, the Moscow-trained radical, turned in the opposing direction.2 The Scottsboro case was profoundly important not least because it was seized upon by the Communist party and its global network of activists to highlight Jim Crow. This placed tremendous pressure on the nation’s rulers at a time when national security was being challenged frontally, it was thought, in leading capitals —Moscow particularly—which had decided to focus on Jim Crow, while training talented Negroes like Patterson to subvert this hateful system. Late in life, one of the Scottsboro defendants, Clarence Norris, admitted the obvious: “I believe,” he said in 1979, “the spotlight the ‘Reds’ put on Alabama saved all our lives. The ILD was working everywhere on all levels.” Patterson, as a result, “is a good friend today,” he said appreciatively, recalling that the Communist barrister “led a march for us to the White House, five thousand strong”3—which was quite unusual (perhaps even today) for an antiracist cause. Norris was not mistaken, for only months after the Scottsboro campaign had been launched, the CP was crowing about the gigantic steps that had been taken on the anti–Jim Crow front.4 Scottsboro, for example, occasioned a massive counterattack by the radical left not only on the antiracist front but with regard to the lineaments of Negro history generally—which was seen as similarly crucial.5 42 chapter three Ultimately, however, a delicate pas de deux was performed whereby those like Patterson, who had helped to place Jim Crow in the global spotlight, were sidelined, and in compensation, Jim Crow was eroded. This tendency was evident early on, for even in 1933 the government had begun to investigate the Scottsboro campaign, which was viewed contemptuously—but not falsely—as “an opening wedge for a Communist campaign that will probably outdo the Sacco Vanzetti case in publicity.” This was all done, it was said, at the behest of “Moscow’s orders”6—a hypothesis that was bolstered, it was thought, by the prominent presence in both cases of the Moscow-trained Communist William L. Patterson. As for Patterson, citing Dr. Mordecai Johnson of Howard University, he sniffed that, on balance, “the policy of godless Russia would be a boon to the Negro masses of Christian America.”7 State Department representatives were probably too busy ducking picketers, nasty imprecations, and (literal) brickbats to tease out the larger implications of what they were experiencing in the early 1930s. It was with exasperation that the NAACP in late 1934 editorialized that “the whole thing has been dramatized from Moscow to Manchukuo”—apparently unaware that this was the key to eroding Jim Crow and saving the defendants’ lives.8 The protests poured in: Sydney,9 Madrid,10 and particularly Riga11 were among the vectors of these anti–Jim Crow reports. Indeed, emerging from the “cotton fields of Central Asia,” said a U.S. official in Riga, were “eleven American Negroes working” there, who handed over brusquely a protest about Scottsboro.12 Other protests shook France, Scandinavia, and Melbourne, Australia.13 The case “re-echoes over the world,” it was said in early 1934.14 Romania militantly joined the fray.15 Rotterdam escaped merely with the “defacement of front door and coat of arms of [the] American consulate.”16 Oslo deemed itself lucky when “mass demonstrations” did not occur—only intensely spirited ones.17 The Communist press in London trumpeted the “world wide campaign” on behalf of the defendants.18 A mother of the defendants was embraced in the British House of Commons...

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