Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War

3 Reframing Civil Rights Activism during the Cold War: The Rosa Lee Ingram Case, 1948–1959

74 | 3 Reframing Civil Rights Activism during the Cold War The Rosa Lee Ingram Case, 1948–1959 Tis the lawless laws of this land that killed this man! . . . It’s jails packed full of innocent folks with the real criminals judging in the court. . . . But be calm my sons men and women will come. Must come to defend a woman’s right to her own body. —Beulah Richardson, The Revolt of Rosa Ingram, ca. 1953 Every Negro woman in the United States is on trial with Rosa Ingram . . . Negro women have died too many deaths for their right to life. They have suffered too long for their honor and a chance to raise their children without shame. This struggle, we won’t give up. —Vivian Carter Mason, Pittsburgh Courier, 1948 In August 1951, Yvonne Gregory boarded a train in New York City headed to Americus, Georgia, in the heart of the Jim Crow South. This young black woman, a noted writer and staff member at Paul Robeson’s Freedom newspaper, was traveling to the home of Rosa Lee Ingram, who lived just outside Americus. Mrs. Ingram stood at the center of one of the most significant civil rights cases of the decade. In January 1948, Rosa Lee Ingram, a recently widowed sharecropper, and two of her teenage sons were convicted of the November 1947 murder of John Ethron Stratford and sentenced to death by electrocution. Stratford, a white sharecropper who lived on a plot of land adjacent to that worked by Rosa Lee Ingram, had died after a dispute with Mrs. Ingram turned violent Reframing Civil Rights Activism during the Cold War | 75 and Mrs. Ingram’s sons came to her aid. Although the exact circumstances of the altercation remained contested, all parties agreed that Stratford had carried a gun into the dispute and struck Mrs. Ingram first.1 The Ingrams’ guilt was determined in a one-day trial in Ellaville, Georgia, the county seat, located nearly 140 miles south of Atlanta and 15 miles north of Americus. The Ingram case initially garnered attention when a February 3, 1948, Atlanta Daily World article announced the conviction and sentencing of Mrs. Ingram and her two sons. The article detailed the plight of “the doomed” Rosa Lee Ingram and her sons, sixteen-year-old Wallace and fourteen-yearold Sammie Lee.2 The Daily World article presumed that racial bias within the all-white-male jury, which “disregarded” evidence that Stratford had initiated the assault, had led it to return a guilty verdict with no recommendation of mercy.3 The publicity surrounding the case, including the harsh sentence and the Ingrams’ imminent execution, which was set for February 27, provoked immediate protest from black communities throughout Georgia.4 The outrage and organizing soon spread nationally as the Pittsburgh Courier, a black-owned newspaper with a nationwide circulation of close to 250,000, began to cover the story.5 Such overwhelming grassroots support for this black woman’s right to self-defense spurred into action the leading civil rights organizations of the period. The usually cautious National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense and Education Fund added the case to its list of civil rights battles and, by March 1948, had taken over as sole legal counsel.6 Seeking to bring a radical voice and analysis to calls for justice, the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), a Communist Party–affiliated legal defense organization, also voted to begin organizing around the case. The CRC had been founded in 1946, through a merger of several progressive organizations, including the National Negro Congress and the International Labor Defense, which had organized the 1930s Scottsboro campaign.7 In many ways, the activism in support of Rosa Lee Ingram exemplified the power of mass-based campaigns that advocated for black defendants convicted by a racially biased criminal justice system. In fact, the fight to end what activists provocatively referred to as “legal lynching” proved fundamental to African American civil rights activism and mass mobilizations during the 1940s and early 1950s.8 Yet, as the historians Charles Martin and Gerald Horne have shown, the Ingram case displayed significant points of departure from most “legal lynching” cases.9 As reflected in contemporaneous campaigns to free Odell Waller, Willie McGee, the Martinsville Seven, 76 | Reframing Civil Rights Activism during the Cold War and the men of Groveland, Florida (as well as the earlier Scottsboro defendants ), the most...