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nine Junius I was arrested in November of ’54, and I guess I was in jail, first in Memphis, and then in Winston-Salem for a couple of months. They set a one-hundredthousand -dollar bail, and it took between six weeks and two months to get that reduced. There’s always a very disturbed atmosphere in jail, and the penitentiary is a bit more relaxed. A week in jail is like a month in the penitentiary . I managed to get out just in time for Christmas. The Smith Act, under which I was arrested, was passed in 1940, and it had two clauses. One was the conspiracy clause: the conspiracy not to overthrow the government but to teach or advocate the violent overthrow of the government . And the other was a membership clause. The membership clause, which was much more drastic and carried much heavier penalties, forbade membership in an organization that advocated the overthrow of the government . I never considered that the Party did that—and still don’t. I mean, there’s plenty of leeway for counter views, but my position, which I took in public repeatedly, was that if the Communist Party couldn’t win a majority to support its position then we deserved political oblivion. Of course, I did feel that if anybody was going to overthrow the constitutional guarantees of this country, we had a right to fight back. The violent overthrow of the government just seemed like an absolute absurdity. For a while I became a professional defendant. I spent half my time trying to get my defense organized and trying to raise money for all of the expenses. I spoke at this and that and the other so-called broad affairs, which were all Party-arranged. The Emergency Civil Liberties Committee was going to help me, for example. Oh, they were going to be such a big help. And it turned 84 A RED FAMILY out they wanted me to organize affairs through my contacts, and they’d take half the money. And it would be called a “broad” affair because the ECLC would sponsor it instead of the Party defense organization. I had to keep going back to North Carolina for pretrial motions. Getting a lawyer was a major undertaking. David Rein, one of the few lawyers who had the guts to defend the Party and other left-wingers, came down and handled the trial marvelously well. During the trial, in the spring of ’55, the government named a lot of names, which made life pretty difficult for a lot of my friends. To follow it up, later in the year they had the House Committee on Un-American Activities come down to North Carolina. So after my conviction, during the appellant stage, I was trying to organize a defense of the Party in North Carolina, getting lawyers for the people there and knocking myself out. This time, the idea of getting much if any mass work done went more or less by the board. We had become a small defense organization. This was a miserable business, you know, but there were a few spots of encouragement . And it took place back at the textile mills in the Durham area. There was a guy who had been working in a textile mill who was named as a Communist in my first trial. He had his master’s degree and was halfway towards his doctorate when he had begun to work in this mill and had been successful in reorganizing it—so successful that when the company fired him, the workers walked out on strike, and the entire mill was closed down for nearly a week. The only way they got them back to work was with a toplevel sellout from the national office of the Textile Workers Union. In spite of all the difficulties, some people were so resourceful and so persistent that they were able to make mass ties and function. But, generally, as soon as the word went out that you were a Communist, you were dead. Which, if you think about it, pretty well knocks the organization in the head. In spite of acts of great personal courage, people would end up isolated and ineffectual and sometimes damned lucky if they could make a living and survive. So I was living in the Bronx, making forty-two dollars and fifty cents a week as a Party organizer, the highest pay I ever got. Gladys had a series of...

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