Workers Defense League

WORKERS DEFENSE LEAGUE. Established in 1936 by the Socialist Party(SP), the Workers Defense League(WDL) endured beyond the decline of its parent organization. Serving as a legal and advocacy organization for a remarkable range of cases and causes, including the rights of farmworkers, soldiers, political refugees, Black building trades workers, and the unemployed, it retained a low profile through most of its history. But several of WDL’s campaigns drew national attention, and it forged numerous coalitions between liberals and radicals in the labor and civil rights movements. It also attracted some larger personalities in the Left. Early staff members included Murray Kempton, Brendan Sexton, and Pauli Murray. Its most famed figure, Norman Thomas, bravely led dramatic campaigns in the New Deal era, at personal risk of arrest and beatings.

WDL was created through a merger of several SP-initiated ad hoc defense committees, most notably the Committee for Justice in Tampa, founded to bring to justice the Ku Klux Klan murderers of Joseph Shoemaker, a former Socialist who had organized a challenge to the political establishment in Tampa, Florida. The Committee for Justice, and subsequently, WDL, succeeded in winning a jury conviction on kidnapping charges, although this ruling was ultimately thrown out by the Florida Supreme Court. The WDL’s long involvement with farmworkers began at its founding with its legal work on behalf of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, an interracial organization of sharecroppers and tenant farmers. For another two decades, WDL fought debt peonage and other abuses of farmworkers in the South.

From 1940 to 1942, WDL defended and organized a national campaign on behalf of Odell Waller, a young Black sharecropper in Virginia who shot and killed his landlord in a dispute over payments. WDL challenged the law in Virginia and other states that limited juries to poll tax payers, effectively excluding Black jurors.

WDL’s other noted civil rights involvements included the participation of two of its staff (Joseph Felmet and James Peck) in the first Freedom Ride, the “Journey of Reconciliation” of 1947. The two were among a group of eight whites and eight Blacks testing the newly-won Supreme Court ruling in Morgan v. Virginia that banned segregated seating in interstate bus travel. In the 1960s, WDL challenged segregation in the building trades unions by organizing a training program for the apprenticeship exams, and succeeding, after a court battle, in getting the first Black apprentices admitted to Sheet Metal Workers Local 28 in New York City and to other locals. This initiative led to a large program across the United States, with cooperation from some unions to integrate the construction trades, despite the bitter opposition of AFL president George Meany and others to anything resembling Affirmative Action.

The rights of soldiers became a particular focus under Rowland Watts, a World War II conscientious objector and lawyer, who led the WDL (and for a time was legal director of the ACLU) from the 1950s into the 1970s. In 1955, Watts compiled a report exposing unfair discharges of drafted soldiers based on alleged subversive associations of their family members, in some cases going back a generation. The report resulted in a reform of this practice. In 1969, Watts successfully defended five soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey, who faced life imprisonment on riot charges. During the 1970s, he and WDL represented numerous Vietnam veterans dishonorably or less-than-honorably discharged from the service.

From the 1980s onward, WDL turned its attention to advocating for unemployed workers denied unemployment insurance benefits, viewing these administrative hearings as tests of unfair firings and winning thousands of cases, many referred by unions. Decades into the twenty-first century, the WDL represented several hundred claimants’ cases per year. Its now-distant Socialist Party roots were symbolized by the listing on its letterhead of Norman Thomas as its founder.

Ingalls, Robert P., Urban Vigilantes in the New South, 1882-1936. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993.

Sherman, Richard B., The Case of Odell Waller and Virginia Justice, 1940-1942. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992.

“How the Army Controls the Minds of Our Youth,” I.F. Stone’s Weekly, Vol. III, No. 31, August 15, 1955.

Workers Defense League Records, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University. http://reuther.wayne.edu/node/3178