The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1934-04-28

County jail where seven of the
Scottsboro boys are being tortured,
demanding their release, and linking
with this the demand for the free
dom Of Thaelmann and the German
and Austrian anti-fascists, of
Mooney, Billings, Herndon. the
heroic sharecroppers of Tallapoosa
who from a secret meeting in the
woods sent a cablegram to Germany
demanding the release of Dimitroff
and the other Reichstag fire trial
defendants.
THIS militant struggle against the
open fascist lynch terror which
walks the streets of Birmingham
and spreads like a cloud over the
South, must be supported by the
mass actions of hundreds of thou
sands of toilers all over the coun-
try on this May Day, must serve as
a powerful stimulus to turning the
defensive struggles of the toilers
into an offensive against the bosses.
The smashing of illusions of
legalism, breaking down carefully
nurtured faith in the Justice" Of
capitalist courts, development of the
fight for the domestic rights of the
toiling masses, development of
working-class solidarity through
mass action, through the fight for
the status and rights of political
prisoners as we'll as for their I'M
conditional freedom-nass defense
in courts-this is the basis on which
this fight must be developed.
Broad Significance of Struggles
The defensive fight for Thsel-
mann is an offensive against fas-
cism. The fight for the freedom of
the Scottsboro boys is fight
against lynching, for land, bread,
and freedom for the Negro people,
fight against jim Grow, for unity
of black and white toilers. The
fight for Herndon is a fight for
bread, the fight for the freedom of
Mooney and Billings fight for the
right to organize, to strike, to picket
and against company unions. The
defense struggle is the struggle for
international working-class unity.
I LITERALLY thousands of class
Il war victims are imprisoned in
the United States, many of them
directly because they fought for
workers rights. Many of these are
imprisoned for long terms. Others
are jailed and never brought to
trial. Others are jailed until trial,
then released by working-class mass
action. In the course of the past
year thousands have been sentenced
to longer or shorter terms in prison,
others to burn in the electric chair,
to hang from the galloWs of the
blue eagle Scores have been
lynched and murdered. The num-
Der of legal lynchings runs high into
three figures.
The fight for the lives and free
dom of these imprisoned toilers is
a fight for the same rights for which
they fought, against the terror,
unleashed by the New Deal and the
N. R. A. to force them to accept
starvation and oppression, of which
they are the victims,
In the conduct of these struggles
it is essential that the defense or
ganization of the working-class, the
International Labor Defense, be
broadened and strengthened. Only
by broadening and strengthening
this defense arm of the American
toilers, whose task is to give lead.
ership to these struggles. will
successful fight for the lives and
freedom of our class-war prisoners
be carried on.
The historical moment demandA
the sharpest struggle for complete
democracy, against terror and OPP
preston, against the denial of work.
ers' rights, under the banner of ths
I. l.. D., to draw in all strata of the
population, new thousands of fight
ers, new forces for the struggle as
whole.