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  • Battling Racism
  • Clive Webb (bio)
Susan D. Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain, Princeton University Press, 2009; 382 pp., £19.95; ISBN 978-0-691-14186-2.

The novels short-listed for the prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction in 2009 included Scottsboro by Ellen Feldman, a potent hybrid of literary imagination and historical fact. Its publication renewed public awareness of one of the most notorious acts of racial injustice perpetrated in the recurrently tragic and tortured history of the American South.

On 2 March 1931a fight broke out between black and white youths aboard a freight train travelling through Alabama. Thrown from the train, the humiliated whites went straight to the local sheriff. A posse apprehended nine African American males after the train had stopped in the town of Paint Rock. Also on board the train were two white women, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, who claimed that the black adolescents had raped them. Accusations that black men sexually assaulted white women provided the sparks that inflamed much of the racial violence that beset the Jim Crow South. Only the intervention of the National Guard saved the accused from an angry mob threatening to storm the jail where they were held. The young men may have avoided vigilante justice, but there was no chance of their securing a fair trial. Despite the absence of forensic evidence to support the rape accusation, a court returned a guilty verdict against eight of the youth and sentenced them to death. Their case was taken up by the Communist Party USA, which at the time was organizing a bi-racial alliance of black and white workers in the southern states. [End Page 246]

The Scottsboro affair became an international cause célèbre. Demonstrations occurred not only across the United States but also throughout Europe and Latin America. Public awareness of and sympathy for the plight of the convicted youth owed much to one of their mothers, Ada Wright, who undertook an extensive speaking tour of Europe under the auspices of the International Labor Defense, the Communist Party USA's legal organization. Her European sojourn is the focus of the opening chapter of Susan D. Pennybacker's innovative study of international racial politics in the interwar era. The story of Ada Wright and the Scottsboro case is one in a series of biographical portraits of social and political reformers through which the author dramatizes the operation of an international network of anti-colonial and anti-racist activism.

Some of these characters will be familiar to scholars, others less so. In addition to Wright, Pennybacker includes chapters on the Trinidadian radical George Padmore; Lady Kathleen Simon and the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery and Aborigines' Protection Society; the Indian-born communist Shapurji Saklatvala and the Meerut conspiracy case; and political refugees from Nazi Germany, foremost among them the communist propagandist Willi Münzenberg. The breadth and depth of her research is formidable, drawing on a multidisciplinary range of sources including archival material from Britain, France, Russia and the United States. It is an arresting aside to note that Ezra Pound was among the luminaries who added his support to the Scottsboro defendants. Few political journeys are as intriguing and unsettling as the one that took the poet from protesting against Jim Crow injustice in the 1930s to inspiring fanatical far-right opposition to racial integration in the 1950s.

The case studies constructed by Pennybacker tell a story of tragically unfulfilled promise. When foreign nationals such as the Chinese, Italians and Mexicans suffered violence at the hands of lynch mobs in the United States they were able to appeal to diplomatic representatives who pressured Washington for legal and financial redress. Although African Americans were more often the victims of mob violence, ironically they had less sway over their own government because they lacked such leverage as the threat of sanctions, severing of official ties, and war. But while they did not command the same influence as the official representatives of foreign governments, activists such as Padmore and Lady Simon provided African American protest with an important resource by placing similar international pressure on the United States to improve its race...

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