Herdon Case

HERNDON CASE. In 1932, Angelo Braxton Herndon (1913-1997), a nineteen-year-old Black Communist, helped organize an interracial hunger march in Atlanta, Georgia. Less than a week later, Atlanta police arrested him when picking up mail at his post office box, held him without bail, and charged him with “attempting to incite insurrection,” a capital crime.

Thus began one of the legal causes célèbres of the 1930s. The International Labor Defense, the Communist Party’s legal defense arm, took charge of Herndon’s defense, retaining a young Black Atlanta attorney, Benjamin J. Davis, to try his case. Davis challenged the constitutionality of Atlanta’s jury and grand jury systems (which excluded blacks), the constitutionality of the insurrection law, and the employment of racial epithets in court by prosecutor and judge, but his arguments were swept aside by a white-supremacist judge and jury who convicted Herndon and sentenced him to twenty years on a chain gang. The outrageous conduct of the judge, as well as the extraordinary severity of the sentence (for organizing a peaceful demonstration), prompted a nationwide movement in Herndon’s behalf, including black organizations, labor unions, and religious groups as well as the Communist Party.

Appeals on the Herndon case lasted for four years. Finally, in 1937, the Supreme Court, by a five-to-four margin, ruled that the Georgia insurrection law was unconstitutional and secured Herndon’s release. The trial, the appeals, and the movement in Herndon’s defense helped educate the northern public about abuses in the southern legal system and strengthen liberal opposition to racial segregation.

Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth. Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008.

Griffiths, “Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and the Case of Angelo Herndon.” African American Review. 35(Winter 2001), pp. 615-36.

Herndon, Angelo. Let Me Live. New York: Random House, 1937.