The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1930-09-22
Statement issued by the Interna-
tional Labor Defense, J. Louis Eng
dahl, General Secretary.

udHls ISnSIdl DGClGLdIAs
The International Labor Defense
organized the struggle, through the
protest of world labor and legal
aid, to rescue the scores of Casio
MIA, North Carolina, strikers and
organizers from death by burning
in the electric chair or living
deaths through serving long sem
fences in the prisons of the multi
millionaire mill owners. Death and
prison constituted the reply of the
industrial overlords to the demands
of the workers for better wages,
more bread.
Of the % workers indicted the
joint attack of the police and the
Manville-Jenckes lynching mob, the
self-tyled Committee Of 1907, on
the strikers tent colony June T,
1929, resulting in the death of the
chief of police, Aderholt, Is were
charged with murder and put on
trial for their lives.
World Workers Protest
The militant struggle of the In
ternational Labor Defense, that
was taken up by the workers of
Latin America, Europe and the
other continents, forced the mill
owners lynch law justice n drop
the electric chair charge. Nine de-
PENDANTS were dismissed. Seven
were put ntrial before a highly
prejudiced and inflamed jury and
railroaded to a guilty verdict in
a court where their testimony, and
the testimony of witnesses ap-
pearing for them, was impeached
because they were Communists or
declared their lack of belief in
God. The brutal vengeance of the
court found concrete form in out
rageous sentences totalling lit
years of terrible torture in the
coming dungeons of the Southern
ruling class which, in spite of the
formal abolition of chattel slavery,
still holds the Negro masses in the
South in a state of virtual slavery.
Not Bail But Lives
The International Labor Defense
declares it is a question of saving
the lives of the Gastonia strikers
and organizers from the judicial
lynching of the Southern boss class
justice, as against the attitude
voiced by Mr.. Roger Baldwin, di-
rector of the American Civil Liber-
ties Union of Saving the bail'".
Mr.. Baldwin does not rush into
print to expose the murderous
Southern chain gang system, where
working class victims of capitalist
class tyranny, Negro and white
are done to death; the barbarous
convict labor system, that submits
helpless prisoners to the savage
exploitation of private profit in
terests, which still persists in
many forms as part of the killing
prison regime of Southern peni-
tentiaries. No effort is made to
pillory the capitalist social order
that breeds the lynching horrors,
by rope and faggot, of both Negro
and white workers, that recently
took five Negro workers lives in
two days. The international Labor
Defense brings these facts sharply
to the forefront, at the moment
when the real issues are being
blurred by the hysterical discussion
about the escape, the return"
and the Surrender of the Caste
mia defendants.
The international Labor Defense
has not in the past and does not
now advise victims of the class
struggle to jump their bail. Its
mission is to organize and mobilize
the workers and poor farmers of
the nation to assure whatever de-
Tense is possible for class war pris-
oners at the hands of capitalist elias
justice. 1t has defended more than
5000 workers, since the beginning
Of theyear, arrested for carrying
on various working class activities.
Shield of Class War Prisoners
The international Labor Defense
has no interests separate and apart
from those of the prisoners of the
class war. II has no reliance in
the "fairnes" of capitalist courts
and declares it is nonsense to be-
lie-e that the so-called civil liber-
ties were intended for the working
class. The international Labor De-
Tense is entirely on the side of
working class prisoners against the
courts, with their police, their jail
ers, their executioners. The inter-
ests of the international Labor De-
tense are only with the welfare of
the Gastonia Defendants and of the
whole working class. 1t is for this
reason that the International Labor
Defense sheds no tears over the
alleged escape" of the Gastonia
defendants. If Fred Beal and 9TH
er Gastonia defendants left for the
Soviet Union, they left of their
own volition. OF course, the Soviet
Union welcomed them, just as it
has welcomed $4,000 other class
war refugees from murderous fas-
cist regimes in Italy, Hungary,
Bulgaria, Poland and other capt.
talist countries such as the U. S.
1t has exactly at the moment
when these and other prisoners