In his book Negro Liberation published in 1948, Haywood gave a full statement of his position. But this was somewhat in the nature of a swan song, since the Black Belt was by then far gone in the process of disappearing due to the mass migrations of Afro-Americans to the North and West. Progress was to come, however, from another direction. The arrest, trial, and sentencing to death of nine Afro-American youths at Scottsboro, Alabama, was met by the development of able legal defense and powerful mass protest. This case was thus connected into an international symbol of struggle against racist persecution and oppression.
Time permits here only a very brief statement.
Suffice it to say that as Vice President of the International Labor Defense, the present speaker was connected with the Scottsboro case from its beginning until the last of these youths was released. But there should be recalled here a meeting held at the Civic Club in New York when William Pickens of the N.A.A.C.P. launched a sharp attack against the I.L.D. and the Communists whom he charged with seeking to sacrifice the Scottsboro youths to the Communist cause. This sage counsel had to be followed at the end when it was necessary to form the Joint Scottsboro Defense Committee with Dr. Alan Chalmers as a leading figure. A powerful force had been added to the Scottsboro defense when William L. Patterson succeeded J. Louis Engdahl as President of the I.L.D. Patterson in the tradition of the abolitionist Wendell Phillips had turned the key in his law office and had gone out to defend the Afro-American victims of racist oppression. As a result of the Scottsboro campaign and the work among the unemployed, the Communist Party attracted numerous Afro-Americans to its support and into its ranks.