This is an opinion column

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Today’s guest columnist is Dr, Thomas Reidy.

A blackjack split open Joe Gelders’s head before three men shoved him into a nearby sedan. It was late in the evening on the 26th day of September 1936.

The kidnappers drove an hour and half from Birmingham to a wooded area near Maplesville, where the tormentors stripped Gelders naked but for his underwear, then beat him nearly to death.

When he woke, they were gone. A local sheriff picked up Gelders on the side of the road and drove him to a hospital in Clanton.

Gelders survived the beating, but the story made headlines across the country.

Joe Gelders was white, Jewish, and former assistant physics professor at the University of Alabama. The university had forced to him resign a few years earlier due to several public appearances supporting of the communist movement in the south, along with his vocal defense of the “Scottsboro Boys.”

He had recently moved back to Alabama to head the southern chapter of the communist-backed National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners.

During the 1930s, stories involving communists, violence, secretive and not-so-secretive meetings were common. In 1932, the Birmingham Post devoted an entire two-page special spread to discuss the “communist problem” in the community.

Communism thrived in Birmingham

Under the shadow of the massive industrial concerns, such as Tennessee Coal and Iron, Republic Steel, and Sloss Furnaces, communism thrived in ways that made its presence in Birmingham unique, not just in Alabama, but unique to the entire south.

Planting communism in Birmingham, Alabama was intentional. Moscow initiated its strategy after it was largely unsuccessful recruiting Blacks from northern industrial cities like Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago, to the Communist Party (CPUSA) throughout the1920s

The 1928 Sixth World Congress of the Communist International, which was held in Moscow, for the first-time prioritized efforts to bring southern Blacks into the fold.

COMINTERN, an international organization that advocated for world communism, defined Blacks as a “subjugated people,” with every right to “self-determination.”

In 1930, the CPUSA established Birmingham as one of its two headquarters in the south, tasked with overseeing the growth of membership in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida.

Birmingham wasn’t just a good choice; it was the perfect choice.

No other location in the south provided the abundant opportunities to attract fellow travelers. By enlisting support among laborers in the heavy industries, communists were able to infiltrate trade unions that were either embryonic and weak, or community run.

Plus, headquartering in Birmingham put the communist party on the doorsteps of a multitude of starving and dissatisfied sharecroppers.

Negro and white workers suffer hunger and unemployment

When teenaged African American Angelo Herndon moved to Birmingham to stay with his cousins, he immediately saw the inequities of Jim Crow. He tried and failed to get good jobs, and when he did, he was paid at a lower rate than whites doing the same job.

The union jobs, especially, roused his emotions: “The whole thing smacked of a stage farce. What made matters even more ridiculous was the fact that Negroes fell under the Jim Crow ban and were prevented from joining.”

Then one evening as he was walking home, he found a crumpled handbill on the side of the road. The flyer discussed, “hunger, unemployment, and suffering of both Negro and white workers in Birmingham,” and called for a meeting that afternoon under the auspices of the communist-backed Unemployment Council. Herndon attended the meeting and became a fixture in Birmingham’s communist leadership structure.

In Chattanooga, CPUSA launched its first edition of The Southern Worker on August 16, 1930, with a masthead reading “published in Birmingham” to throw off authorities. The first edition featured a cartoon of a Black man and white man shaking hands under the caption, “Black and White Workers—Unite!”, and carried a story about how “TCI Hounds Birmingham Workers.”

Dispiriting reports of a U.S. economy in freefall in the early 1930s, with high unemployment rates and lowering wages, affirmed the endemic evils within a capitalist society for party members and sympathizers.

All signs pointed to the fact that communism was making inroads in the south. Public anxiety over increased communist activity was reflected in local papers. The major Birmingham newspapers printed the word “communists” 10,308 times in the decade of the 30s, nearly three times as many mentions as in the 1920s, a decade that featured the Palmer raids and the Sacco and Vanzetti trials and executions. In 1932, the Birmingham Post devoted an entire two-page spread tilted, “Workings of Communist Revealed.”

Then came Scottsboro

On March 25, 1931, authorities in Jackson County, Alabama, arrested nine young African Americans and charged them with raping two white women aboard a freight train traveling from Chattanooga to Memphis. They were tried two weeks later in Scottsboro, convicted of capital crimes, and eight of the nine were given death sentences. Though the charges were false, the verdicts were never in doubt.

Normally, a case of this nature would not have drawn attention outside its immediate area. Yet because groundwork had been laid by southern communists, Scottsboro represented a too-good-to-be-true story of capitalist exploitation and provided an unparalleled opportunity for the communist membership drive.

The Southern Worker sent reporters to cover the trial. Through its network of communist and left wing affiliates, word about the case traveled quickly.

Outrage ensued. On April 25 in Harlem, police broke up a Scottsboro Boys rally of several hundred, badly beating five, and arresting four others. One month later, over 5,000 marched down Harlem’s Lennox Avenue in protest. Scenes of protesters holding “They Shall Not Die” signs occurred throughout the United States.

By June the rest of the world had joined in.

Demonstrations and letter writing pressure campaigns accelerated across Europe first, then to the left-leaning democracies across the continents. Over 50,000 protesters marched in Munich, with marchers smashing rocks through the windows of the U.S. Embassy carrying messages to “Free the Scottsboro Boys.”

A similar incident occurred at the U.S embassy in Beirut. In Edinburgh, Johannesburg, Havana, Mexico City and countless other cities, activists rallied and sent postcards to Alabama’s governor to free the Scottsboro Boys.

“The case of the Scottsboro negroes,” a savvy Birmingham journalist wrote, was “looked upon as invaluable material for speeches to vilify capitalist manufacturers.”

Protest loudest in Birmingham

The protest was loudest in Birmingham where organizers arranged large rallies and speaking engagements to raise funds for the defense of the Scottsboro nine. Ada Wright, mother of two defendants, spoke at two separate rallies in Birmingham. These fundraisers continued through the 1930s under the auspices of communist and communist-backed groups.

Yet, in the end, communism more than met its match with Jim Crow. May Day speeches were broken up and white communists were arrested for publicly intermingling with Blacks. The communist-sponsored Scottsboro lawyers, who were northern and Jewish, were pilloried by southern courts.

Although CPUSA and Moscow may not have reached their goals of creating a voting block of Black workers sympathetic to the party, their reach into labor had significant impact on the speed with which many New Deal programs passed.

Angelo Herndon, the young man who found the crumpled handbill on the street on his way home from work, became another party cause célèbre. After he fled Birmingham to avoid jail in 1932, Herndon landed in Atlanta and helped organize an employment rally.

He was arrested and charged under a civil war era law that had been enacted to stave off slave rebellions. Rallies supporting Herndon appeared alongside those demanding freedom for the Scottsboro Boys.

And as for Joe Gelders, he recovered from the injuries he sustained during his kidnapping and was able to positively identify three of his four assailants. The men were employees of TCI. As they drove him to the wooded area, the leader of the group warned that if he did not leave Birmingham immediately, they would “fill him with lead.”

Despite Gelders sworn affidavit, a Jefferson County grand jury failed to indict, and the case was closed.

Summing up what no doubt represented the view of a significant number of Birmingham citizens and its industrial leaders, county prosecutor called Gelders nothing more than “a Jew, a Communist, and a supporter of the Scottsboro Boys.”

Dr. Thomas Reidy, PhD, serves as the executive director for the Scottsboro Boys Museum, where he is credited with designing and writing the content for its exhibits. He played a pivotal role lobbying for and writing the Scottsboro Boys Act (AL 2013), a law which allows the state to posthumously pardon convicted felons. He received his PhD in History from the University of Alabama and was a popular lecturer at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Dr. Reidy recently edited and wrote the Introduction to The Founding of Alabama: Background and Formative Period in the Great Bend and Madison County (UA PRESS, 2019), which is available in bookstores today.

David Sher is the founder and publisher of ComebackTown. He’s past Chairman of the Birmingham Regional Chamber of Commerce (BBA), Operation New Birmingham (REV Birmingham), and the City Action Partnership (CAP).

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Invite David to speak for free to your group about how we can have a more prosperous metro Birmingham. [email protected]