Mother Ada Wright and the International Campaign to Free the Scottsboro Boys, 1931–1934

JAMES A. MILLER, SUSAN D. PENNYBACKER,
and EVE ROSENHAFT

On March 25, 1931, local authorities in Paint Rock, Alabama, arrested nine black youths on a freight train after receiving word about a fight between blacks and whites on the train. They discovered two white women (Ruby Bates and Victoria Price) dressed in men's overalls on the same train and subsequently charged the nine young men with rape. Four of the "Scottsboro Boys," Roy and Andy Wright, Eugene Williams, and Heywood Patterson, had grown up in Chattanooga, Tennessee; the Wrights were the sons of Ada Wright, a widow and a domestic servant in Chattanooga. Ozie Powell, Clarence Norris, Olen Montgomery, Charlie Weems, and Willie Roberson came from different towns in Georgia and encountered the others for the first time on the train. Olen Montgomery was completely blind in one eye and could barely see out of the other; Willie Roberson suffered from untreated syphilis and could hardly walk. Presiding judge Alfred E. Hawkins assigned all seven members of the Scottsboro bar to defend the young men, but all of them found excuses not to involve themselves except for seventy-year-old Milo C. Moody. In Chattanooga, sixty miles away, members of the local Interdenominational Colored Ministers' Alliance raised funds to retain Stephen R. Roddy, a white lawyer from Chattanooga. On April 9, 1931, after four separate trials conducted over a four-day period before four different all-white juries in the mountain town of Scottsboro, eight of the defendants were found guilty as charged. Judge Hawkins promptly sentenced them to death. The case of the ninth defendant—thirteen-year-old Roy Wright—ended in a mistrial after a majority of the jury refused to accept the prosecution's recommendation that he be spared the death penalty because of his extreme youth.1	1
The Scottsboro case has been called one of the great defining moments of the twentieth century, providing a vocabulary and constellation of images not only for its own time but for subsequent generations as well—each of which has been compelled to reinterpret and reappropriate Scottsboro for its own purposes. The mythic power of the case did not derive from the fact of injustice alone. It depended on the way the case was publicized—and its outcomes shaped—by the campaign on behalf of the defendants organized by the international Communist movement.2 At the height of the campaign, workers and activists rallied in Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, across Europe and the United States, in parts of the British Empire and its dominions, and in the farming collectives of Russia, in an unprecedented attempt to create sympathy for the victims of racial injustice—and, at the same time, to oppose imperialism and foster interracial solidarity on a global scale. Only the antislavery struggle of the nineteenth century had enjoyed such global orchestration and empathy. The fact and resonance of the campaign demand acknowledgment in their international as well as their American dimensions. Satisfying as it may be, however, to add a Scottsboro chapter to the story of global struggle against injustice, to do so in a purely recuperative or celebratory spirit would be to sidestep the complexities of interwar "racial politics" and "internationalism."3	2
We seek to document and reinterpret the dynamics of the international Scottsboro campaign as a central episode in the global racial politics of the 1930s. This essay contends that the case and its defense cannot be properly understood without an explicit reckoning with the involvement of the defendants' families, in this instance represented by the figure of Mrs. Ada Wright, nor without freeing its interpretation from the confines of the North American context. The challenge to the notion of the case as solely a chapter in African-American history has methodological as well as empirical implications. Scottsboro was an episode that "intruded" on various "national" histories, and a study of its international dimensions demands that we, too, "intrude." Our effort to reconstruct "race" as a category of language and action in the wider Euro-American context and beyond, especially in ways that acknowledge blacks as historical agents rather than simply as objects of scrutiny, thereby offers a new perspective on several national histories. Ours is an exercise in recovering a black presence in Europe before the onset of global conflict, in reconsidering the American case in the light of it, and vice versa. But here, where global racial politics also encounters "proletarian internationalism," historians need to find new ways of seeing and accounting for individuals and movements, in terms of identities that are complex and open-ended, and sometimes contradictory. This approach is not that of the "transatlantic" or the "diasporic," in the sense in which these terms are often currently used, nor "comparative" work in its conventional mode. It does not argue that Scottsboro transcended the boundaries of national political cultures, or managed to evade differences of spoken and read languages, for example. It does not trace the migrations back and forth of peoples of color in ways that free "race" from specific historical locations within those national cultures. It does, however, disrupt a comparison of "nations" that assumes a national identity as the sole defining identity for any historical actor. It invites a historically grounded reconsideration of the issues of "authenticity" that often bedevil both racial politics and accounts of international Communism in the twentieth century.	3
This essay places the pursuit of an international constituency at the heart of an investigation that crosses borders and languages, holding constant the people of the story and the episode they are involved in: whites and blacks interact and lead the narrative, which centers on the journey of Ada Wright through Europe in 1932. We suggest that there is a way to write about an international political culture in the 1930s that is different from either the "history of the communist movement" or "the history of the colonial other." Europeanists and Americanists both need to rethink issues of "race," not simply in terms of imperial presences and interactions but also in terms of the bedrock history of metropolitan political cultures. As a problematic, it is here to stay. The search for tools to map its contours is assisted immeasurably by the availability of newly released documents of the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow; frequently deployed in the past decade to provide support for a renewed demonizing of the Comintern and its activists, they also afford insight into the ambiguities of a movement that captured the imagination of a generation. These and other sources have provoked our new version of this story, in which Scottsboro mother, Ada Wright, is our first emissary.4	4
Communist Party organizers in the South closely monitored the Scottsboro case from the beginning. James Allen and Helen Marcy, editors of the Communist Party (CPUSA)'s Southern Worker, based in Chattanooga, alerted the New York office of the International Labor Defense (ILD). Marcy and Lowell Wakefield, an ILD organizer recently assigned to Chattanooga, attended the pretrial hearings. Wakefield and Douglas McKenzie, a black organizer from the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, attended the trials. Even before the verdicts were issued, they sent a telegram to Judge Hawkins and Alabama Governor B. M. Miller calling for an end to the "legal lynching" of the Scottsboro Boys and demanding that the defendants be protected from lynch mobs. On April 10, 1931, right after the verdicts, the Central Committee of the Communist Party USA published a lengthy statement on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys in the Daily Worker; on the same day, the ILD voted to defend them. In the meantime, on April 2, 1931, Dr. P. A. Stephens, secretary of the Chattanooga Ministers' Alliance, wrote to the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), requesting assistance. Walter White, the NAACP secretary, responded immediately, asking for more information, but the NAACP proceeded with caution in considering its role in the case.	5
In the immediate aftermath of the Scottsboro verdicts, mass protests—some carefully planned and orchestrated by the Communist Party, others more spontaneous—broke out in cities across the United States and abroad. The ILD dispatched attorney Allan Taub to Chattanooga, and he and Douglas McKenzie located the families of the defendants there; they were later joined by the ILD's chief lawyer, Joseph Brodsky, who interviewed the nine defendants in the Birmingham jail where they were being held. The ILD also secured the services of George W. Chamlee of Chattanooga, a former county attorney general and the grandson of a decorated Confederate veteran, to handle the appeal. After a series of equivocal and contradictory public statements, the NAACP officially entered the case on May 4, 1931, when Walter White visited the Scottsboro Boys in Kilby Prison, seeking to persuade them to give the NAACP control of their defense.5 In the context of the Communist International's "Third Period," of intensified class struggle and anticipation of imminent socialist revolution, the Communists cast the NAACP in the dual role of class-and-race traitor, adopting the vocabulary hitherto reserved for "reformists" and "social fascists" within the labor movement. As James S. Allen, one of the CPUSA's key theoreticians on the "Negro Question," proclaimed: "The main political significance of the earlier stage in the Scottsboro struggle rested in the fight between revolutionary forces led by the Communist Party and reformist forces represented by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The struggle went far beyond the question of who shall carry through the legal defense of the Scottsboro boys. It was a struggle between two opposing class forces."6 The conflict between the CPUSA, the ILD, and the NAACP, and the rhetoric it generated, would have a decisive impact on the conduct of the campaign in its early years.	6
This rapid sequence of events secured the status of the Scottsboro case as perhaps the most infamous and celebrated racial spectacle of the 1930s, a decade in which the world press regularly reported on lynchings and racial violence in America.7 The defendants languished in their jail cells throughout the 1930s, through two major Supreme Court rulings, through the endless and vituperative wrangling over their defense, through the dramatic recantation of one of the accusers' original testimony, and Judge James E. Horton's courageous decision to set aside the second conviction of Haywood Paterson and order a new trial—before the eventual release of Roy Wright, Olen Montgomery, Willie Roberson, and Eugene Williams in 1937. Charlie Weems was paroled in 1943 and Ozie Powell in 1946. Clarence Norris and Andy Wright were released in 1944; Haywood Patterson escaped from Kilby Prison in 1948. It was not until 1976, however, when Clarence Norris, the "last of the Scottsboro Boys," was officially pardoned of parole violation and freed by Governor George Wallace of Alabama that the case could be said to have come to an end. It spanned more than four decades, and the defendants, taken together, served 130 years in prison.	7
This reassessment of Scottsboro is concerned primarily with the construction of the Scottsboro case by the ILD and its international sister organization, Red Aid, and addresses the role of Communist work "among Negroes" through the lens of the case. It also begins to address the involvement of American black organizations through its references to the NAACP and the NAACP's international contacts.8 It is especially concerned with the various forms of "representation" of the Scottsboro Boys and the quest for racial authenticity that often motivated their use.9 The international campaign's use of shared propaganda and its attempt to deploy a common translation of vernaculars (the spoken and read idioms obtaining in varied national and regional cultures) demands a method that can interpret both local and "universal" rhetorical strategies. The problems of imagery and rhetoric are not simply propagandistic or sentimental trappings of the Scottsboro campaign but keys to its vernacular meanings. The campaign defied existing parameters of racial etiquette at the same time that it paradoxically drew on and reified racial imagery drawn from the endemic features of predominantly white political cultures. This paradox posed a fundamental dilemma for the project of radical social transformation. In their attempts to navigate their shifting relationships with the wider discursive and political settings in which they had been raised, and in which they lived their everyday lives, to what extent did radical activists, in the United States, Europe, and globally, challenge the existing racial wisdom?	8
In the national context of the racial terror that shaped American southern life for the first half of the twentieth century, the Scottsboro case was more routine than perhaps most readers wish to recall.10 Nor did it occur in an organizational or political vacuum, for it coincided with the moment when the CPUSA had elevated the struggle for black liberation to a high place on its national agenda. The "Resolution on the Negro Question," passed by the Sixth Congress of the Communist International in 1928, which proposed "the right of Negroes to national self-determination in the southern states where the Negroes form a majority of the population," prefigured Scottsboro.11 This resolution, and its subsequent slogan, "The Right of Self-Determination for Negroes in the Black Belt," signaled a new stage in the development of the Communist Party USA in its international profile. But it also introduced new problems, particularly in its equation of the condition of black communities in the United States and South Africa with national minorities in the Soviet Union; the USSR was offered up as the example of a harmonious interracial society that had solved its national minorities question. Nevertheless, the "Negro Question" was now placed at the center of the CPUSA's work:	9
It is essential for the Communist Party to make an energetic beginning now—at the present moment—with the organization of joint mass struggles of white and black workers against Negro oppression. This alone will enable us to get rid of the bourgeois white chauvinism which is polluting the ranks of the white workers in America, to overcome the distrust of the Negro masses caused by the inhuman barbarous Negro slave traffic still carried on by the American bourgeoisie—in as much as it is directed even against all white workers—and to win over to our side these millions of Negroes as active fellow-fighters in the struggle for the overthrow of bourgeois power throughout America.12	10
During the early years of the Great Depression, the party's campaigns against white chauvinism had reached such a peak that white comrades were enjoined to recognize their own skin privilege, even as they suffered from the ravages of the economy.13 In 1930, party leader Earl Browder pointed to a disturbing tendency among the rank and file: "The existence of 2 million Negro workers and the further industrialization of the Negroes demand a radical change in the work of the party among the Negroes . . . White chauvinism has manifested itself even in open antagonisms of some comrades . . . In Gary, white members of the Workers Party protested against Negroes eating in the restaurant owned by the Party. In Detroit, party members, yielding to pressure, drove Negro comrades from a social given in aid of the miners' strike."14	11
The party also began to follow more cases of criminal assaults on blacks, as if to police "white chauvinism" in mainstream America in anticipation of its intense involvement in the Scottsboro campaign. There were also international interventions into the American situation, partly in response to ongoing factional warfare. Comrade John Ballam, visiting Russia in 1929, made the mistake of raising some questions about the self-determination line, "revealing an attitude unworthy of a Communist." He was accused of saying in Comintern sessions: "You fellows over here look at the question with European eyes . . . the Negro people in America have no distinctly separate language, culture, territory or traditions upon which to base a struggle for national liberation and the establishment of a separate Negro State within the borders of the USA."15 Under the pressure of correspondence from back home, Ballam recanted: "I realize that the attitude toward the NEGRO QUESTION is the ACID TEST for every communist, especially in America, and with the help and guidance of the Comintern, I PLEDGE MYSELF to work to uproot EVERY VESTIGE OF WHITE CHAUVINISM in our Party, wherever it appears."16 The highlight of the campaigns against white chauvinism in the United States was the elaborate, highly orchestrated, and well-publicized trial of the Finnish Communist August Yokinen, at the Harlem Casino on Sunday, March 1, 1931. Yokinen was found guilty of using racist language, by a mock jury observed by hundreds of spectators.17 Browder subsequently observed: "If we had not previously had the experience of the Yokinen trial, probably the Scottsboro boys would have become merely another item in the long list of Negro lynchings which disgrace America daily . . . But because the Communist Party had been politically armed and prepared, this made it possible to seize upon the Scottsboro case for a national mobilization of protest and struggle which aroused large masses throughout the country, and even throughout the world."18	12
In the international movement, the spirit of the CPUSA internal and public critique of white prejudice spread, often forming the groundwork for the rhetorical flourishes of the Scottsboro campaign. In England, there existed a fledgling black Left among maritime workers in the port cities, among colonial students and expatriate Caribbean, African, and Indian trade unionists and intellectuals, and in a very few indigenous black organizations, notably the Negro Welfare Association (NWA), promoted by the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and led by West Indian activist Arnold Ward and his allies, such as fellow traveler and former Colonial Office official Reginald Bridgeman. The CPGB had among its leading comrades Rajani Palme Dutt, the Indian Member of Parliament Shapurji Saklatvala, and a number of younger Indian members.19 Yet Saklatvala concluded that the party had utterly failed to reach most potential recruits:	13
In places like East London, Cardiff, Swansea, Liverpool, Glasgow, Dundee, New Castle [sic], Hull and other seaports, there is always a number of Asiatic and African seamen or hawkers employed or unemployed. There are also colonial students almost in all universities in Great Britain. There is no healthy contact between them and Party members in the various localities . . . Many things happen among the coloured seamen in the East End of London and members of the Party and of the unemployed workers' movement, living right in the locality know nothing about it, can give me no information and have no plans of even private friendly contacts or any desire to learn of the situation. There is a tendency to treat the colonial problem as a mere side issue and as nobody's business in particular.20	14
The CPGB called for a battle against white chauvinism in its ranks, though without the public rituals of accusation and redemption that took place in the United States. In Britain, and in the empire in general, the 1930s witnessed new systems of labor discipline, institutionalized racial coding in employment, and a legacy of popular violence following on the 1919 race riots in the English port cities. Events in Jamaica, Trinidad, Nigeria, and Gambia warranted special party attention alongside protests of "increasing discrimination against Negroes in England."21 But plans to carry out this agenda rarely met with success. The South African Party, in many respects a stepchild of the CPGB, was riven by charges of white chauvinism and a condescending attitude toward Native political movements.22 Activism among CPGB youth and within the circles of intellectuals who supported forms of anti-imperialism was nevertheless influenced in the 1930s by the presence of Trinidadian George Padmore, by Palme Dutt's deep editorial preoccupations with imperial questions in the CPGB theoretical organ, Labour Monthly, and by the fleeting contacts with black and Indian radicals like those around Bronisaw Malinowski at the London School of Economics, including Eric Williams, Jomo Kenyatta, and Ralph Bunche.23	15
Padmore provided a crucial link between Anglo-American black radicalism, the Comintern, and the anti-imperialist and anti-racist movement on the European continent. He also had individual connections with non-party black intellectuals, like his boyhood friend, C. L. R. James. He and the German activist Willi Münzenberg were the early Scottsboro campaign's most important international agents. Their lives and travels crisscrossed with Ada Wright's, and, like hers, their roles had a direct influence on the kinds of support the campaign received, the hostility it encountered, the terms in which it was depicted, and even the inhibitions that some potential supporters felt.24 Central to this influence was the new emphasis on race in Comintern policy that was institutionalized in the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUCNW), briefly directed from early 1931 by Padmore in Hamburg, German Communist leader Ernst Thälmann's stronghold and the center of a black presence in the maritime shipping industry of Europe. From there, its English-language journal The Negro Worker was carried to readers in Europe, Africa, and the Americas by seamen and students, trade unionists and intellectual smugglers. Hamburg was also the center for the activities of the Comintern-sponsored International Union of Seamen and Harborworkers, which presented itself as an alternative to majority trade-union reformism and as a focus for the collective self-assertion of a labor force that was by its nature global, international, and multiracial.25	16
Cover of The Negro Worker 1, no. 6 (June 1931). Courtesy of the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.
The ITUCNW was able to draw on the experience and personnel of an older organization, the League Against Imperialism (LAI), formed in 1927 under the leadership of Münzenberg. With its headquarters in Berlin, the league developed as a classic front organization, sustaining sympathy for the Communist movement by building on liberal and humanitarian opposition to colonial oppression and attempting to organize and agitate in the colonies themselves. Initially successful in attracting some leading names to its letterhead (including many who would figure in the Scottsboro campaign), the league was systematically boycotted by the Socialist Second International; the LAI leadership admitted by 1930 that it had failed either to consolidate its support among intellectuals or to develop significant popular momentum. It continued, however, to organize propaganda and agitation around colonial struggles, insistently bringing conflicts in the British and Dutch colonies to the attention of urban audiences in Germany.26 In Berlin, the LAI's ambit encompassed, among other international figures such as the American radical Agnes Smedley (whose Indian partner, Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, was a co-worker of Münzenberg), a circle of Indian students, a loose collection of pan-Islamist activists, and a handful of Afro-Germans. Chattopadhyaya's German ties were forged in the Indian nationalist movement's murky relations with Germany at the outset of the Great War; he and others had drifted toward the LAI and Communist circles during the 1920s. The Afro-Germans were in turn linked to networks of people of African descent who were resident in Germany.27	17
Organizations with a more familiar profile and a wider brief than the ITUCNW or the LAI began to incorporate the anti-racist message into their anticolonialist rhetoric, and to popularize images of Negro life in America. Chief among these was the International Red Aid (also known by its Russian initials MOPR), an affiliate of the American and British ILD branches, the most successful of the Comintern mass organizations on the Continent, because it concentrated on work that was essentially humanitarian: collecting money to pay for soup kitchens for the families of striking workers, offering legal aid to victims of political justice, organizing peoples' tribunals to investigate miscarriages of justice or notorious cases of police brutality.28 In Britain, the ILD's predecessor had claimed thousands of members in the late 1920s and raised substantial funds for its Class-war Prisoners Campaign. When the secretariat of the International Red Aid formally confirmed in 1930 that it was adopting the fight against the persecution of the toiling Negro masses, it was with a characteristic emphasis on suffering as a focus for mobilization: "The Negro masses are beginning to awaken. In America they fight shoulder to shoulder with white workers in strikes and political demonstrations. In the black Colonies the revolutionary wave is rising ever higher and growing ever more intense . . . In East, West and South Africa the blood of the Negro masses has flowed in rivers . . . In the United States 36 horrific lynchings were carried out on Negroes in the first nine months of 1930."29 German Red Aid invoked images of racial harmony in its mobilization for the International Jamboree of Worker and Peasant Children in Berlin; it published photographs of lynching scenes juxtaposed with those of European victims of police repression, suggesting links between the interracial labor struggles of American workers and the concerns of German workers. Workers from the strike at Gastonia, North Carolina, visited a home set up by the German Red Aid for the children of political prisoners and victims of police terror, and their story was told in press reports and slide shows.30	18
By the time Scottsboro broke, the networks and the individuals whose business it was to represent racial politics in Europe were in place, as were the components of a common discourse, in which different empires and different black territories and communities were portrayed as possessing a common element of racial violence and the usurpation of liberties. Yet, however insistently some Communists looked to develop the political potential of a black or colonial presence in key European cities, "Negro work" was hard going, treading on boundaries of etiquette and intruding on local cultures. In the seamen's bars of Hamburg, racial animosities could make themselves felt. When African-American CPUSA leader James Ford arrived in Germany to take over some work for Padmore, he was aghast at the party's treatment of the "colonial work," writing to say that there was little money extended for it by the German Party comrades there: "And, finally, we never get anything properly done until we break down the bourgeois inference that Negroes, Chinese and Indians are nothing but niggers' coolies and one must confess that this is a general impression."31	19
Padmore's description of the 1930 conference of Negro workers at Hamburg was typical: some of the African delegates became so desperate that they threatened to go to the police for food and assistance. A comrade referred to the conference as the "Negro Drama." It was, Padmore wrote, "conducted poorly and with unsatisfactory representation . . . [and featured] the refusal of visas, lack of civil rights, arrest of delegates from Panama, losing of delegates from South Africa by what methods we do not as yet know, the banning of the conference by the British Labor Government, the Jim Crow practices on steamships resulting in [the] late arrival of the American delegation, the backward[ness] and isolation of the Negro organizations from the International Labor movement."32 "Racial progress," even within the Communist movement, was limited by prejudice and other preoccupations; this would affect the shape and efficacy of the Scottsboro campaign. The presence of blacks in the campaign, and of Ada Wright in particular, would offer an implicit challenge to the habituated behaviors of the white-dominated Communist Party formations and front groups.	20
Press and propaganda campaigns were not enough to sustain anticolonial and anti-imperial gestures in Europe; survey after survey showed that even activists hardly ever read the carefully composed journals of the mass organizations.33 What could close many of these gaps was a campaign that honored victimized black workers, exposed American capitalism and its courts to view, and united white workers around a plausible and supportable black cause that mirrored descriptions of the sharecropper/landlord/bossist South—a struggle that could simultaneously address white chauvinism and labor, and Negro "fakers" and "reformists" in the spirit of the drive against social fascism. In this post–World War I era, in which Europe was experiencing a heightened "Americanization," ranging from the adoption of industrial management techniques to the ubiquity of Hollywood imagery, the negative racial reputation of the South was a ready draw. Robert Minor, the white point man for many aspects of the CPUSA's "Negro Work," was on the lookout for such an issue. He searched for a case, in one instance proposing that an incident he had just heard about "could be Sacco and Vanzettized to the ends of the earth." He reasoned: "We should absolutely not forget the Negro race angle . . . the remarks of Rep. Green of Florida who wants to deport all the Negroes with the 'REDS': Surely, this is an opportunity." Minor succinctly stated the party's regional task as that of "making the South a part of the main territory of the Party, not as a sort of outlying missionary territory, as the Catholic Church would express it."34 The CPUSA sent white and black comrades into the South to build organizations in targeted areas, especially in Kentucky, Tennessee, and northern Alabama. When the Scottsboro case broke, the region that was led from a base in Chattanooga was already witnessing a miners' strike in Harlan County, Kentucky.35	21
Southern regional organizer Tom Johnson immediately ordered Mary Dalton and other Chattanooga comrades to seek out the defendants' families. But black southerners constituted only one dimension of the party's national concerns; perceptions in New York and Chattanooga could diverge. In fact, Johnson protested to the Politburo that "the great publicity of the whole trial and of the proported [sic] confessions has created an idea in the minds of even many Negro workers that at least some of them [the accused] may be involved in the alledged [sic] crime [but] certainly the trial was a framed up lynch law trial." He sent white Alabamian contacts to check the stories, until he was satisfied that the defendants were indeed innocent.36 When the ill-fated freight train riders set out on their journey into the Alabama night on March 25, 1931, they could not have known of all those who waited for them—not just their accusers were poised but their defenders as well. Once the decision was made to provide the Scottsboro Boys with basic assistance over the coming years, the party, through the means of the ILD and International Red Aid outside the United States, plunged the defendants and their families into the world of proletarian internationalism.	22
With the defendants' execution set for July 10, 1931, Berlin transport workers sent the first telegram from Europe on April 24; the Red Aid executive issued the first international appeal from Moscow in May. During the summer, as more European letters and telegrams reached the Alabama authorities and the White House, demonstrators broke windows at the U.S. diplomatic and trade delegations in Berlin, Bremen, Dresden, Leipzig, and Cologne.37 A global wave of protests ensued, "reaching from California to Sydney, from Montreal to Cape Horn, from Shanghai to Buenos Aires," which Red Aid, the ILD, and many American observers credited with pressuring the Alabama Supreme Court to agree to hear the defendants' appeal. Ada Wright herself was known to have said for years thereafter, even until her death, that it was the Russians who had saved her sons.38 In the USSR, a collective farm established "Brigade Eight" to honor eight of the defendants: "To the eight Negroes of Scottsboro—'Dear comrades, we, workers of the West Siberian Regional Counsel [sic] of People's Economy, are all greatly indignified [sic] by the intention of the American bourgeois court to carry out your death sentence on April 6th . . . We know perfectly well that your only fault is your Negro origin and your being unemployed workers. Comrades, don't lose courage. The end of capitalism is rapidly approaching.'"39	23
When the verdicts were confirmed by the court in March 1932, with the executions set for May 13, the ILD sent Ada Wright, then in her thirties, on a speaking tour of Europe; born in rural Tennessee, Wright had never traveled outside the South until the case broke.40 Accompanied by Louis Engdahl, general secretary of the ILD, Wright disembarked at Hamburg on May 7.41 Their tour was wide-ranging and adventurous, made strenuous by the fact that once they arrived in Europe the American visitors were dependent on the willingness of governments to grant them visas and the goodwill of the local authorities once they had crossed a border. In Germany, the Foreign Office alerted the regional authorities to the campaign; at the prompting of the Interior Ministry, the police in most major German cities barred Ada Wright from speaking under the same public-order regulations that harried radical activists. She often stood outside a hall for as long as three hours, while Engdahl and German supporters spoke on her behalf: "She burst into tears. It was heartbreaking to witness the desperation of the mother whom they want to deny the right to risk all to save her sons from the electric chair."42 Engdahl was nevertheless convinced of the campaign's success in Germany: "The total result . . . has been to set all Germany thinking about the Scottsboro case to the extent that on trains, in streetcars, and even on the public highways, the Negro mother, her likeness being made familiar by pictures and publicized everywhere, was continuously asked by those interested, 'What can we do to help?'"43	24
Ada Wright and Louis Engdahl arrive in Hamburg, 1932. Courtesy of the Russian State Archives of Social and Political History (RGASPI), Moscow. A railroad porter stands on the far right.
Wright visited Austria, Switzerland, and Paris. She and Engdahl sneaked over the French border into Belgium. They were greeted in Brussels by a large crowd of demonstrators and expelled; only Engdahl was allowed to return.44 After a visit to the Netherlands and a second trip to Paris, the tour shifted to Britain, where Engdahl was denied entry.45 Wright arrived in London in June 1932, and was met by Shapurji Saklatvala, Bob Lovell, head of the British ILD, and "a large number of white and colored workers." She looked forward to working in the United Kingdom without an interpreter. After three stays of execution, the U.S. Supreme Court was scheduled to review the case in four months' time, a reprieve that Wright attributed in her speeches to the international and American campaigns. She spoke in London, Manchester, Dundee, Kirkaldy, Glasgow, and Bristol, along with ILD organizers.46 Prime Minister Eamon De Valera prohibited Wright from entering Ireland.47 She traveled instead to Scandinavia, where 10,000 people reportedly demonstrated in Copenhagen alone.48 Wright and Engdahl again crossed the Belgian border illegally to visit the coal district of Wallonia in late August 1932. She addressed audiences of women in Charleroi and in Gilly, the heart of the "moving and often murderous arena" of the Borinage. When she was arrested in Charleroi, a crowd of mothers with babes in arms accompanied her to the police station.49 She was again arrested in Kladno, Czechoslovakia, on suspicion of spreading Communist propaganda with the intent to interfere in local politics: "I answered that I don't know anything about local conditions in Kladno, that I'm not trained enough to give a political speech and I don't know enough about Communism yet to be a good Communist." She spent three nights in a cell before she and Engdahl were expelled.50	25
Front page of the Communist Party of Great Britain's Daily Worker, July 7, 1932, featuring a shot of Ada Wright (center) at a demonstration in Glasgow, upon her arrival there. Courtesy of the Marx Memorial Library, London.
At the end of 1932, Engdahl wrote: "In spite of all obstacles, sixteen countries were traversed in six months. Nearly half a million people took part in almost 200 meetings and demonstrations, while the press campaign made itself felt in hundreds of millions of copies of the daily press and journals of all political tendencies."51 He and Ada Wright ended their tour in Moscow, at the World Congress celebrating the tenth anniversary of International Red Aid. In Red Square, tens of thousands of Russian workers crowded the streets with banners, calling for freedom for the sons of Ada Wright and the collapse of the world imperial order. But both travelers arrived exhausted. Wright had stomach surgery and could not appear on the platform. Louis Engdahl collapsed on the third day of the congress and died of pneumonia.52 Ada Wright carried his ashes back to his family in the United States, where the New York police used tear gas and clubs to break up the demonstrations called to greet her in Harlem.53 She spent several more years campaigning in America and eventually returned to her job with an Irish-American family in Chattanooga, making regular visits to Andy in the Alabama jail.54	26
"If we are to believe the majority of writers of Negro dialect and the burnt-cork artists, Negro speech is a weird thing, full of 'ams' and 'Ises.' Fortunately, we don't have to believe them. We may go directly to the Negro and let him speak for himself . . . nowhere can be found the Negro who asks 'am it?' nor yet his brother who announces 'Ise uh gwinter.' He exists only for a certain type of writer and performer."55	27
"Boys" they were at the beginning of the campaign, "boys" they were forty-five years later when Clarence Norris was finally pardoned, even though, at the time of their arrests, they ranged in age from thirteen to twenty. This appellation, adopted internationally in various translated forms, served a dual function and significantly shaped the discourse that emerged around them. It invoked the racist southern slang term for black men of any age, reinforcing the image of the South as a region where Jim Crow practices kept black men permanently infantilized, locked into a fixed subordinate status in the racial caste system. But the term also conferred both the presumption of innocence (including sexual innocence) and victim status upon the defendants; it partially separated them from the widespread racial mythology of black men as savages with irresistible sex drives, as instinctive rapists with an insatiable desire for white women. In the final analysis, the success of the Scottsboro campaign would depend on the extent to which it could portray them as casualties of southern justice.56	28
From the very beginning, the rhetoric surrounding the case pitted the youthful innocence of the Scottsboro Boys against the savage menace of southern life. Helen Marcy wrote of the "nine young Negro boys" as "terrified youngsters," and—equally important—as "starving and wretched Negro workers."57 The Daily Worker characterized them as "nine young Negro workers."58 This vocabulary remained consistent throughout the 1930s, and the discourse of the national black press and the mainstream media often replicated it.59 The image of the Scottsboro Boys was carefully crafted by Communist Party strategists, slogan writers, and orators. Consider the following:	29
i Wont you all to Rite to Me and tell Me how is things Going on a bout this Case of us 9 Boys Bee Cause i am in here For SomethinG i know i did not do . . . i Was on My Way to Memphis on a oil tank By My Self a lone and i Was Not Worred With any one untell i Got to Paint Rock alabama and they Just Made a Frame up on uS Boys Just Cause they Cud . . . Oh, to think of what I am charged with. If there is a god as they say he knows I am not guilty of such hideous crime . . . You know I pray every night of my life. Maybe he knows that I know nothing of that crime . . . To think there is people so unjust that they put things on people they don't know anything about. Well, nevertheless the good lord don't like ugly things so I'll trust in him for those that try to punish me for a deed I didn't commit.60	30
On the front cover of The Negro Worker for November–December 1932 (vol. 2, nos. 11–12), opposition to lynching is linked to the Scottsboro campaign. American lynching photographs were widely disseminated in Europe by Comintern-affiliated publications. Courtesy of the Tamiment Library, New York University.
These excerpts from letters evidently written by Olen Montgomery and Roy Wright stand in noticeable contrast to the appeal issued in the name of the Scottsboro defendants in the May 1932 issue of The Negro Worker:	31
From the death cell here in Kilby Prison, eight of us Scottsboro boys is writing this to you. We have been sentenced to die for something we ain't never done. Us poor boys been sentenced to burn up on the electric chair for the reason we is workers—and the color of our skin is black. We like any one of you workers is none of us older than 20. Two of us is 14 and one is 13 years old . . . What we guilty of? Nothing but being out of a job. Nothing but looking for work. Our kinfolk was starving for food. we wanted to help them out. So we hopped a freight—just like any one of you workers might a done—to go down to Mobile to hunt work. We was taken off the train by a mob and framed up on rape charges . . . Only ones helped us down here been the International Labor Defense and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights. We don't put no faith in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. They give some of us boys eats to go against the other boys who talked for the I.L.D. But we wouldn't split. Nohow. We know our friends and our enemies. Working class boys, we asks you to save us from being burnt on the electric chair. We's only poor working class boys whose skin is black. We shouldn't die for that. We hear about working people holding meetings for us all over the world. We asks for more big meetings. It'll take a lot of big meetings to help the I.L.D. and the L.S.N.R. to save us from the bossman down here. Help us boys. We ain't done nothing wrong. We are only workers like you are. Only our skin is black.61	32
The Scottsboro Boys were illiterate or barely literate. Ozie Powell had three months of schooling. Clarence Norris completed the second grade, Heywood Patterson the third, Olen Montgomery and Charlie Weems the fifth, and Andy Wright the sixth.62 Any attempt to render their voices and their outlook required considerable tactical and rhetorical sensitivity. The various voices within which the defendants, and subsequently, their mothers, spoke—or were spoken for—reflected attempts to convey black vernacular speech through written dialect, some, to be sure, more accurate and authentic-sounding than others. These attempts to render black "authenticity" go to the heart of the strategic and rhetorical decisions that shaped the Scottsboro campaign. They were highly charged, carrying with them the possibilities of the international, multilingual replication of deeply entrenched racial stereotypes derived from the legacy of minstrelsy in American culture.63 To appropriate Scottsboro was to lurch into the mainstream of American southern experience and to link the defendants' plight to the economic hardships and racial discontent of northern black communities. It was to join the outcry against lynching and racial injustice with the sentiments of Jews and Gentiles, liberals and radicals, domestics and dockworkers, meatpackers and lawyers. It was, above all, to try to find a language that would forge solidarity among these various audiences. Making the case comprehensible to a global audience meant making the plight of the defendants a part of the vocabulary of social injustice and police terror in a multiplicity of accents and relying on the existing reputation of the South abroad.64	33
There was considerable initial behind-the-scenes discussion in the CPUSA about the terms within which the campaign would be presented, some of it shaped by concern about the racial and gender dynamics of the legal charges against the Scottsboro defendants. One week after the first trials, Clarence Hathaway, on behalf of the Politburo, wired a number of slogans to Tom Johnson, who opposed their call to "DEMAND NEW TRIAL BEFORE JURY COMPOSED OF WORKERS AT LEAST HALF TO BE NEGROES," arguing that this was a meaningless plea in Tennessee; instead, he proposed the slogan "DEMAND A NEW TRIAL BEFORE A NEGRO JURY."65 As for the "10,000 [whites] who shouted for blood," Johnson observed, "These were not bosses, they were all misled, half-starved white mountaineers and croppers." The bosses and landlords were not concerned about the virtue of white women; the party should want to stress the long hours inflicted on white and black women in the textile mills while "croppers and their families are left to starve."66 But two weeks after their conviction, it was the defendants who were cast as victimized black workers: "They are typical honest and innocent hardworking lads of tender age and absolutely not of the hardened sort that could possibly be conceived to have committed the crime of violent attack upon women . . . These boys . . . are too simple and direct, as well as too young to be able to dissimulate under the pressure of a case of this kind."67	34
The allusions to gender and the sexual in the rhetoric of the campaign, in what was, after all, a rape trial, betray the preoccupations of party strategists. They reveal Communist inexperience, naïveté, discomfort, and ambivalence about interracial mixing. Typically, a district party leader responded sharply to a press photo in which a white female comrade was portrayed standing with a black comrade, referring to the "cheap sex publicity on the part of the Negro comrade. Such a picture appearing in the capitalist newspapers will drive away millions of American workers from the Party."68 During the Gastonia strike, bosses or their agents distributed an anti–Communist Party leaflet that asked, "would you want your sister to marry a Negro?"69 There was extensive discussion about not replying to the leaflet, as this might compromise the party in relationship to its white southern worker constituency. On the surface, a national and increasing global awareness of lynching created space for a critique of the prevailing race and gender coding in American culture, particularly with regard to anxieties about interracial sex. As Roger N. Baldwin of the Scottsboro Defense Committee would put it in 1937: "whatever the evidence, no Negro can be acquitted when a white woman, even of the lowest character, accuses him . . . [S]o deep-rooted is southern prejudice, in favor of the word of any white woman, whatever her character, that no defense can overcome it."70 In practice, though, the rhetoric adopted for the Scottsboro campaign tacitly accepted that attacking white womanhood was bad; it simply argued that the Scottsboro Boys "did not do it." At best, it made white women complicitous in the oppression of black men,71 and this judgment was eased by the identification of Ruby Bates and Victoria Price as prostitutes; if any white women were worth defending, these two were certainly not among them: "Two notorious prostitutes were the only witnesses against them, but the slave driving landlords of the South forced through the death sentence to terrorize the Negro masses into accepting still lower wages and worse conditions."72 The option of defending Ruby Bates and Victoria Price as unemployed textile workers was there from the outset and not taken up, until Bates recanted her testimony in January 1933, whereupon she was finally embraced as a "worker."73	35
The Scottsboro campaign depended as much on the distinction between rape and prostitution as it did on the issue of innocent black youngsters being framed. And this strategy was clearly reassuring to many of the campaign's supporters across the globe: it appealed to what was confidently conveyed as an implicit Euro-American consensus on the impossibility of "rape" in the context of proven prostitution and a shared intercultural "fact" that could blunt and transcend a "purely racial" interpretation of the case. A typical British trade union motion emphatically protested against such brutal and unjust treatment and explained, "the very fact that the two white girls were prostitutes proves the whole case to be unfounded." Alfons Goldschmidt, chairman of the German Scottsboro defense committee, was one of very few for whom the guilt of the girls was not a necessary correlate to the innocence of the boys: "These children have been accused of raping two prostitutes. But that isn't true, and even if it were true, and even if they weren't prostitutes, where is the human justice that would sink to such dreadful cruelty?"74	36
Cover of a pamphlet published and circulated by the American International Labor Defense, circa 1935, featuring photos of two of the defendants, Clarence Norris and Haywood Patterson. Courtesy of the Tamiment Library, New York University.
The campaign orchestrated elaborate and multi-tiered roles for women, following a convention of using the mothers of political prisoners in their sons' campaigns. In the United States, there were tours with Mother Mooney, mother of imprisoned anarchist Tom Mooney; the Scottsboro mothers' tours (including, after her recantation in 1933, the reformed Ruby Bates); and the children's tours, including Lucille Wright, Ada's daughter. But the mothers were the key and provided a universal motif.75 A party leader recalled: "we knew we had in our hands a weapon with which we could break down the illusions of the white liberals and petty bourgeois reformist Negroes by utilizing these mothers to help build this mass movement."76 Like the architects of the antislavery movement, party strategists were wed to certain notions of African-American authenticity; they needed the actual physical presence of black people and, ideally, vernacular black voices to showcase their political claims. While Ada Wright's vernacular speech underscored her southern, rural roots, it also left her vulnerable in some quarters to accusations of ignorance. In a comment on her arrest in Belgium, Alabama's Birmingham Post remarked with characteristic venom, but not without percipience, of the nature of the international campaign: "Ada Wright does not and cannot represent any issue of human rights. She has no real knowledge of the guilt or innocence of her boy. She knows little of the meaning of legal rights or of the Communist doctrine of her sponsors. Her sole qualification is that she speaks strange racial dialect which permits of whatever translation a designing interpreter may wish to give."77	37
Wright and her supporters adopted an equally modest attitude toward the degree of her political sophistication, but this was to prove a special allure of the campaign. In Providence, Rhode Island, at a gathering at an African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, a promise was made to the people: "Mother Wright will tell you in simple words a story that will touch your heart and win your support if you are a fair play human."78 In Berlin, a German protester wrote: "The mother of one of the Negro lads was here in Germany and told us about the way the Negro lads are suffering in the death cell. A mother who is suffering herself is traveling the world to save her child—that should make us think!" French Scottsboro material recalled "a mama mad with grief and yet calm . . . She had only to leaf through the memories of a black mother who had lived in the poor districts where Negroes live in the United States."79 London's Daily Worker described Mrs. Wright as "a toil-worn woman from far away Tennessee, who had undertaken this long journey of suffering in order to save the lives of her sons . . . she spoke quietly in the soft, pleasant drawl of the South. The audience strained to catch every word. Intense interest and sympathy was written on every face and tears welled into many eyes. The Negro mother told her story as only a mother can. Just a simple story of life at home, the departure of the boys in search of work and then—prison, the menace of the electric chair." Tellingly, Wright added a plea for support in the rhetoric of the Third (Communist) International; her boys, she said, were linked to "class war prisoners all over the world."80 She, too, referred to Bates and Price as prostitutes, and stated that her sons had been threatened and told that, if they confessed, the death penalty would be dropped. The narrative she offered was both chilling and melodramatic. She spoke of her mother, the daughter of a slave, who had worked in the fields for a quarter a day. Her grandmother had been sold for three hundred dollars and lashed with a whip on the auction block.81 In Scotland, "Cries of indignation rent the air as she told in simple, poignant language of the brutal savagery of the drunken, lynching mob outside the Court House, demanding death for the boys . . . The Dundee workers will not quickly forget the visit which has forged new bonds of unity between British workers and their colored comrades."82 The appeal to mothers underlined the emphasis on the youth of the Scottsboro Boys, and hence their presumptive innocence. "Stop the Lynching of Nine Negro Boys," demanded the Silvertown and Woolwich Cooperative; "Eight Negro Children to the Electric Chair," declaimed a German Red Aid booklet; "American lynch-law is thirsting for the blood of nine innocent working-class boys," explained the Dutch Red Aid.83 The German campaign allotted special responsibility to the youth and children's (Pioneer) sections of Red Aid who wrote letters to the defendants, entire schools giving their support.84	38
The caption reads, "A Mother Fights for Her Sons," from the Summer 1932 issue of Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (Berlin), the most popular product of Willi Münzenberg's Communist press empire. Courtesy of the Bundesarchiv, Berlin.
Scottsboro began as a Comintern campaign, but it did not end there. Its multiple purposes and the multiple associations that were deliberately invoked to reinforce sympathy with the defendants' case allowed the campaign to exceed the intentions of its originators and to generalize the antagonisms between Communism and reformism. The Communist Party's pervasive demonization of the NAACP went far beyond American borders. A group of "American Negro Cotton Specialists," sent by the CPUSA to work in Tashkent, wrote: "We condemn the role played by the leaders of the NAACP in the Scottsboro case . . . The Negro reformists are the most dangerous element of the Negro masses . . . We look upon this condemnation as a legal lynching and as a concession to white chauvinism."85 NAACP Field Secretary William Pickens summed up the NAACP's public response with this dyspeptic comment: "Throwing brickbats at an American in Dresden, Germany, won't do anything for a black boy in an Alabama jail except to hang him."86 The NAACP shadowed the campaign through an active mobilization of its own networks and contacts in the United States and abroad; during 1932, Pickens traveled through Europe explaining the NAACP's perspective on the case.87	39
In Europe, the groundswell of popular support crossing both class and organizational divides also transformed the character of the campaign in ways that its originators had not foreseen. In the Netherlands, Ada Wright broadcast her message from a Social Democratic radio station. In Belgium, the former president of the Second Socialist International, Emile Vandervelde, joined her on the platform. Communists complained that the Social Democrats were stealing their thunder in Sweden. In France, the campaign was substantially snatched from the hands of the Communists by a broad-based coalition, spearheaded by French friends of the NAACP, in which Socialists and liberal intellectuals, including Léon Blum, played prominent roles.88	40
The British Labour Party forbid its members from involvement in official Communist work, but Labour supporters were found in every ostensibly popular body associated with the campaign; George Lansbury offered support to the campaign, and Wright visited with Labour Members of Parliament at the House of Commons.89 Two hundred signed the resolution of the Barry Colonial Social Club in Cardiff, where Saklatvala addressed a meeting of "Negro Indian, Spanish and British workers."90 The Amalgamated Engineering Union contributed generously to campaign funds. The London Scottsboro Defense Committee in various incarnations included Kenyatta, Vera Brittain, Naomi Mitchison, Eleanor Rathbone, and Julian Huxley, and was later led by the energetic Nancy Cunard, estranged daughter of the shipping magnate.91 Three hundred students and faculty at the London School of Economics—including Harold Laski, R. M. Tawney, and Eileen Power—sent a petition to the U.S. ambassador.92	41
In Germany, the Communist movement maintained its hegemony over the campaign. No other major party or political organization was publicly committed to the cause; the Social Democratic and trade-union press all but ignored the case. Yet a German "Committee to Rescue the Scottsboro Victims" was formed in 1931. It indisputably carried out its work under the aegis of the Communist movement while operating in a distinct political-cultural milieu that overlapped with the network of Communist organizations and tapped a still-wider reservoir of sympathy and interest.93 This committee represented an authentic political impulse outside the leading parties, which appeared in campaigns concerning humanitarian or civil rights issues throughout the years of the Weimar Republic, even as it was systematically blocked in the political sphere. That this impulse was not confined to a metropolitan circle of "fellow-traveling" intellectuals is reflected in the wide range of locations and social types represented by the signatories to the committee's protests. In 1932, Alfons Goldschmidt cited 1,500 letters of support whose signatories included men and women lawyers, civil servants, physicians, professors, teachers, and professionals from German cities of every size.94 A Leipzig protest letter initiated by children included men and women signatories who were artists, housewives, pensioners, white-collar, skilled, and manual workers.95 The German protests that flooded the American authorities were too numerous to deny their sincerity and spontaneity.	42
Audience of the Eighth World Congress of International Workers' Relief (International Arbeiterhilfe, or IAH), in Berlin, October 9–16, 1931. The youth section of the IAH in Germany was active in the Scottsboro campaign. Courtesy of the Russian State Archives of Social and Political History, Moscow.
Nor was the impulse to unite around Scottsboro limited to either active Communists or to those articulate members of German society who could see themselves as standing above politics. On a visit to Germany in 1932, William Pickens received a sympathetic hearing from the Committee to Rescue Mooney and Billings, which was independent of the Communists' own campaign. An alliance of groups located between the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the German Communist Party (KPD), it included the principal socialist, communist, and syndicalist splinter parties as well as student, sporting, and cultural organizations. They wrote to the New York ILD office: "the task of proletarian solidarity must not be held back by party political and tactical differences . . . In the whole capitalist world white and colored people are being thrown into prison, executed or lynched by the tools of the bourgeoisie. The victims belong to all different political groupings. Just as we are trying to bring about a united front of all sympathizers . . . , you too must give up your narrow partisan attitude."96	43
From the start, the Scottsboro campaign was linked rhetorically and organizationally with other Communist campaigns in the United States, such as that of Angelo Herndon, a black Communist Party militant arrested in Atlanta in 1932 and charged with subversion.97 By Ada Wright's very presence in Europe, the agony of black America—her personal agony—was brought into dialogue with that of ordinary people all over a continent torn by economic and political crisis. This largely explains the choice of her tour's venues. In the national and regional capitals, a cosmopolitan audience awaited her. At the meetings and conferences of Comintern-sponsored organizations, her presence signaled the essential unity of the multiple causes championed by the international movement. In May 1932, Ada Wright addressed the Congress of the International Union of Seamen and Harborworkers in Hamburg, which passed a resolution calling for a Scottsboro committee on every ship and in every port, and she appeared on the podium at the Anti-War Congress in Amsterdam.98 In the Belgian Borinage, an unofficial miners' strike supported by the Communists had recently widened into a general strike provoking extreme police repression and a national solidarity campaign. Similar conditions prevailed in the English and Scottish industrial towns that she visited, as well as in Kladno, Czechoslovakia, and the Scandinavian coastal settlements where she spoke.99	44
The first protest meetings in Berlin promised that a veteran of the Bavarian Soviet Republic brutally suppressed in 1919 would join a "Negro worker" on the platform, an early signal of the strategy of linking local and remote struggles in Germany. In the overheated crisis atmosphere that was developing in Germany in 1931 and 1932, Berliners attending public enquiries about the shooting of two policemen in the city center and the repressive measures it had precipitated far outnumbered those buying tickets for Scottsboro meetings. In early 1932, a new public-order decree threatened four youths on trial for killing a Nazi in Essen with the death penalty; it was not always easy for readers to distinguish which young workers the Communist press headlines were urging them to rescue from the executioner.100 Yet the foregrounding of police repression or systemic injustice, rather than Nazism, as the local point of reference for Scottsboro was characteristic of the campaign in Germany as elsewhere, in spite of the fact that the German Communists' most alarming adversary in the political arena was openly racist. The possibility of an analogy between Nazi anti-Semitism and American racism was largely ignored (Padmore's Negro Worker excepted), not only in campaign rhetoric but also in individual statements about Scottsboro, although it seems likely that the heightened visibility and respectability of anti-Semitism in public and institutional life that coincided with the Nazis' political success made people who were already committed to human rights issues receptive to the Scottsboro message.	45
Ada Wright's tour placed her personally at the center of other "workers' struggles": in Berlin, had she been allowed on the platform, she would have shared it with the wife of a Communist murdered in a Nazi ambush the previous June, who greeted the meeting in the name of the wives of proletarian prisoners. While Mrs. Wright waited outside, the meeting descended into disorder and was broken up by the police when the last speaker, Erich Mühsam, denounced the Berlin police chief as an ally of the American murderers.101 In Manchester, Ada Wright was introduced on the platform to Mrs. Knight, a founding member of the CPGB, and the mother of Lester Hutchinson, one of the prisoners still in jail in Meerut, India, awaiting trial for treason.102 In London, Mrs. Wright's send-off rally at the Shoreditch town hall followed a march that boasted Tom Mann. Communist Party leader Harry Pollitt emphasized the link with youth unemployment in the United Kingdom, stating that part of Mrs. Wright's story could be told by thousands of mothers in the shipbuilding, textile, and mining centers of Britain. He alluded to press attempts to foment anti-Americanism in its coverage of the case, but he reserved his own hatred expressly for the American imperialists and especially for the British imperialists' savagery in South Africa and Nigeria.103	46
The internationalist, humanitarian vision of a world of connected causes and struggles was not simply that of proletarian internationalism. The Scottsboro campaign appealed to those who saw a principled global struggle for human rights as their metier. In North America, Scottsboro was understood in the context of anti–Jim Crow and anti-lynching mobilizations. These campaigns reflected an indigenous history of race relations going back to slavery and its abolition. In Europe, too, nineteenth-century campaigns against slavery and lynching had reached and moved audiences across class boundaries.104 The allure of the campaign lay in the presence of people who, in flesh and blood, were direct descendants of American slaves, who seemed to speak as if their cultural connection was unbroken, whose physiques bore marks of manual labor, of service. Goldschmidt published extracts from letters received by the committee in a 1932 pamphlet that depicted Roy Wright behind bars on its cover: "Man is man, whether black, yellow or white, at least in my eyes. Hasn't the white race committed serious crimes, especially against the Negroes? Weren't they enslaved? Wasn't it Christians, preaching a merciful God, that ripped children and parents, or husband and wife apart and sold them?"105 In London, Lady Kathleen Simon, secretary of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, who had lived in the American South as a child, was scandalized by Jim Crow and maintained ties with NAACP and anti-lynching circles in the United States. In 1934, she and her husband, Foreign Secretary John Simon, celebrated the "William Wilberforce centenary" of the act abolishing slavery in the empire by worshiping at St. Paul's Cathedral with thousands of others, reliving the moments when the great bells rang. Some of London's black residents joined them, and took the parts of their ostensible forebears who had screamed hallelujah a century before.106 The Scottsboro defendants, in such a context, were "slaves who needed to be freed."	47
The plight of black Americans was insistently linked to anticolonialism in the campaign for the defense of the victims of European empires. The American case was made synonymous on occasion with the racial violence of empire, in sharp contrast to the depiction of American blacks as entertainers and musicians, or even as cotton pickers. Meerut conspiracy trial propaganda linked Scottsboro and China with India in a "common struggle for colonial liberation" and referred to the pogroms in czarist Russia (against which the Bolsheviks had stood) as "the Russian counterpart of lynching bees."107 In Germany, Josef Bilé sketched a lurid catalog of abuses and atrocities in Cameroon, his homeland, to introduce his argument that the oppression of American Negroes was a reflex of the global white backlash against rising Negro consciousness. Germany's loss of its African possessions under the Versailles Treaty had reduced the German public's receptiveness to anticolonialist discourses, while encouraging the foregrounding of contradictory visions of the United States. The European public was fascinated with its unique fusion of democratic and imperialist power. Louis Engdahl made this connection: "It is particularly fitting that a Negro Mother should have been the first to be invited by the German International Red Aid, raising sharply the actual picture of class oppression and mass misery in the US against the usually accepted and rainbow-hued glories of the land of p