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Angelo Herndon and the Radical Politics of Free Speech w/ Randall Kennedy | The Nation Podcast · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to the nation podcast, where we take you behind the scenes of our biggest stories with the journalists who wrote them.
• 0:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm DD Guttenblend, special correspondent for the nation and host of the nation podcast.
• 0:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Angelo Herndon was a black coal miner turned communist activist, who was repeatedly arrested, convicted of vagrancy, and incarcerated for his efforts to educate and mobilize workers.
• 0:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: In 1932, he helped organize an interracial protest against a county decision to cut off relief for the poor.
• 0:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: But it wasn't simply that protest that led to his sentence to time on a chain gang.
• 0:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was Herndon's possession and distribution of communist literature, which authorities used to charge him with inciting insurrection.
• 0:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Herndon's prosecution and the wrongful conviction that followed ultimately gave rise to Herndon V. Lauri, one of the most important civil rights and free speech cases of the 20th century.
• 1:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Herndon is also the subject of a recent book, Brad Snyder's, you can't kill a man because of the books he reads.
• 1:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Joining us today on the nation podcast to discuss his review of Snyder's book is Randall Kennedy, Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at the Harvard Law School, and author of Say It Loud on Race, Law, History, and Culture.
• 1:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can find Professor Kennedy's review in our December issue of the nation.
• 1:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Randy, thanks for being here and welcome to the nation podcast.
• 1:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks so much for having me.
• 1:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: it's a pleasure.
• 1:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's a fascinating piece.
• 1:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: I would say maybe particularly for those of us who are interested in American history and the history of the left, but also free speech.
• 1:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: So let's start with Hurned in V-Lowery, who was Hurned in and how did he come to be an important part of American legal history?
• 2:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, as you mentioned, Hurned in was a black
• 2:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: When all this happened, when he was arrested, he was quite young, he was a teenager.
• 2:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he was drawn into the communist orbit and became an organizer.
• 2:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And what generated this case was he organized unemployed people.
• 2:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: in Atlanta and what really frightened the authorities was that he organized a group of black and white.
• 2:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: unemployed people, poor people, and he organized them and urged them to make their dissatisfaction known to the local authorities, and he urged the crowd to demand that local authorities provide more poor relief.
• 3:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: and what really scared the local authorities was here, you had this young black communist who had succeeded in bringing white poor people together with black poor people.
• 3:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: And this was more than 30 years before Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King's poor people's campaign.
• 3:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
• 3:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was sort of a precursor.
• 3:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it really scared the powers that be when they the um the of local authorities did meet with uh protesters but they would only meet with the white ones.
• 3:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: The authorities promised that they would increase poor aid but they would but they would only meet with the white ones and the authorities
• 3:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: They didn't tell him why he was under arrest, but they arrested him.
• 3:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: They went to his apartment and ransacked it, took all of his, took anything that they thought might be useful in prosecuting him.
• 4:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: They held him in commutacado for a period of time, and in fact at one point they strapped him
• 4:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: They wanted him to confess to a crime, they didn't tell him what crime, but they just wanted him to confess in general.
• 4:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was a pretty cool customer.
• 4:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: He didn't confess.
• 4:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: He just stood his ground.
• 4:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then finally, he was able to get before a magistrate and their authorities had to proceed in some formal way to try to prosecute him.
• 4:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they charged him under a law that had been on the book since the 1830s.
• 4:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, it's really quite remarkable.
• 4:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: This law was one of many similar laws passed in the south, in the aftermath of the Nat Turner Rebellion.
• 5:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was a law that sought to criminalize Negro in selection.
• 5:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's the law under which he was
• 5:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: under which he was prosecuted and people should know this was a law that carried a death penalty or at least a potential death penalty.
• 5:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right.
• 5:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it was explicitly a law that was enacted to strengthen and protect slavery.
• 5:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
• 5:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: As an institution.
• 5:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
• 5:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: And yet here he is in 1930 being charged in Georgia under
• 5:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: a state that had a democratic party administration so you know for for younger listeners the democratic party in the 1930s was not the democratic party of today the republican party was not the republican party of today and yet one of the things that's really interesting about Angela herndon is his entry into the communist party and how and you know the the idea
• 6:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: At first of all, it took incredible courage to try and organize across race lines in the South in the 1930s.
• 6:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Democratic Party was clearly not interested in doing anything like that.
• 6:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Republican Party wasn't interested in doing anything like that.
• 6:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: He was, his exposure was first at something called the unemployed council, so tell us a little bit about that if you can.
• 6:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well there were a number of
• 6:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the Communist Party sponsored a number of organizations in an effort to draw into their ranks, young people, black people.
• 6:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're absolutely right about the Communist Party.
• 6:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, whatever else you want to say about the Communist Party, the Communist Party was a political organization, predominantly white, that sought to attract blacks into it.
• 7:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they did so, and they did so in a concerted way, they did so in a very militant way, a very open way.
• 7:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: They wanted to attract black people.
• 7:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, they weren't very successful, actually.
• 7:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: But they tried.
• 7:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Angela Hundin was taken with these people,
• 7:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: who were expressing solidarity with unemployed people, expressing solidarity with impoverished people, were expressing solidarity with black people.
• 7:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Hurnan was attracted to that and sort of fell into those circles and was inspired by the communist movement.
• 8:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: So now we have a sense of who Angelo Herndon was, and I am assuming that if you want to get a deeper sense of how he managed to maintain his composure amidst all of this, people should read the book, but who was Lowry?
• 8:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lowry was the sheriff who had possession.
• 8:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: of Kherndon.
• 8:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: So this was a basically a habeas corpus proceeding in which Kherndon was challenging the validity of his incarceration and the person who was behind his incarceration was
• 8:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Herndon's books pamphlets, the library that was found in his possession in order to justify charging him with more than just civil disturbance.
• 9:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is that correct?
• 9:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, their view was, this literature was revolutionary literature.
• 9:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was inflammatory.
• 9:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: The ideas of the Communist Party, the idea that black people should have a section of the South in which black people basically ruled a section of the South.
• 9:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: They view this as just horrific and insurrectionary and worthy of death.
• 9:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, it's interesting.
• 9:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, let's talk about that for a minute, because this is the idea of the black belt, which was, which was at this period communist party USA doctrine that if you took self-determination seriously, there were a number of states in the south where blacks either were or had been in the majority.
• 10:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Their rights were being suppressed.
• 10:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: by Jim Crow and rather than push for a multiracial democracy, the Communist party line at the time was self-rule, that these states should constitute a sovereign government on their own, in which blacks would be the majority.
• 10:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: And on the one hand, you could see that this was however unsuccessfully calculated to appeal
• 10:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: blacks in the south and on the other hand, it's scared the bejesus of white.
• 10:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: It certainly did.
• 10:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's sort of interesting.
• 10:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, right now, of course, pending before the Supreme Court of the United States, is a case involving the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and there is an aspect of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
• 11:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: that requires the creation of black districts under certain circumstances.
• 11:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: One might view that as a sort of diluted version.
• 11:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: of, you know, sort of the black belt theory of the 1930s of the Communist Party.
• 11:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, there is something of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind of a kind
• 11:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: So this is a, I mean, herndons are really interesting figure and to me, this period in the American Communist Party is a really interesting period because it's seated so many ideas that have come back.
• 11:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think that you are absolutely right in, for instance, alluding to the Republic of New Africa and also the, the resilience of this idea.
• 12:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: of black territory, you know, to get back to the, the herndon case, to tell you truth, one of the, one of the things I think is most interesting about the herndon case has to do with the lawyer who became herndon's chief lawyer at trial.
• 12:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this has been Davis, Ben Davis.
• 12:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right.
• 12:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fascinating.
• 12:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely fascinating case.
• 12:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, here's this bin Davis was an Atlanta born black American who was tremendously privileged.
• 12:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: He went to Amherst, then he goes to Harvard Law School.
• 13:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: He returns to Atlanta, his father owned a newspaper.
• 13:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were sort of been the upper echelons of black society in Atlanta.
• 13:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he reads about herndon, herndon's arrest.
• 13:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he on his own goes to see herndon, and based in volunteers himself,
• 13:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: to assist with Herndon's representation.
• 13:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now initially the Communist Party is a little bit worried about this.
• 13:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: because after all, well, Davis had never tried a criminal case.
• 13:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, Davis was very unexperienced.
• 13:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, he was enthusiastic.
• 13:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was generous minded, but he didn't have experience.
• 13:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the people who viewed themselves as basically the guardians of herndon, they went and got an experienced white attorney, local attorney, to represent herndon, but that fell apart fairly quickly
• 14:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: the white lawyer, the white's leaned on and pretty heavily.
• 14:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, they leaned on them and also the Herndon's allies worried whether this lawyer was going to be zealous enough in his defense of Herndon.
• 14:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: So for instance, the lawyer never challenged
• 14:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: the composition of the jury, that was going to be chosen to try herndon.
• 14:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: He wasn't going to challenge that jury, even though it's an all-white jury.
• 14:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, it was an all-white jury, but everybody knew it was going to be an all-white jury, but
• 14:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: at least there was the possibility of challenging it but there were lots of lawyers who were simply going to be unwilling to challenge the jury because after all, if you're a lawyer in a particular jurisdiction you live there.
• 15:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, you're going to be there next week, the day at, you know, the week after this case is tried, the month after this case is tried, the year after this case is tried.
• 15:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: So you're not going to be willing to do something, you might not be willing to do something that's going to make, you know, prospective clients or other lawyers or judges in that jurisdiction mad at you.
• 15:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, they got rid of this more experienced lawyer and they went back to Davis and actually he tried the case along with another very inexperienced black attorney, but they did try the case.
• 15:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it was no matter how experienced he was with that jury and in that jurisdiction, the conclusion was for ordained, so that correct, that herner was going to be convicted.
• 16:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: So then the question is what happens next?
• 16:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: And before we jump to what happens next, there is one aspect of the trial that your listeners need to know about,
• 16:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're absolutely right, there was no question but that herndon was going to be convicted.
• 16:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Everybody knew that.
• 16:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: The only question was what was going to be the manner of the trial?
• 16:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the trial was a kangaroo court.
• 16:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: At one point,
• 16:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: the prosecutor referred to witness, referred to, you know, referred to black people as niggers.
• 16:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this generated a heated objection from Ben Davis.
• 17:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the judge turns to the prosecutor and says, OK, don't use that term.
• 17:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Call them, call them pickin' innings.
• 17:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: That'll be all right.
• 17:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: That was the sort of thing that Ben Davis had to confront in this courtroom.
• 17:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, and then the prosecutor said, if you don't send this to defend the electric chair, we will have a red army marching through Georgia, which will take all the land away from white people and give it to the Negro.
• 17:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, there was no, there was no, in Uendo in this trial, it was all direct.
• 17:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
• 17:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: There wasn't code language.
• 17:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: it was pretty clear what they wanted and it was pretty clear that they were willing to do anything illicit prejudice, stigmatize and demonize the the the defendant and anybody who was aligned with them, they were willing to pull out all the stops and this this had a radicalizing effect
• 18:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: on Angelo Herndon's attorney, Ben Davis.
• 18:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ben Davis was so disgusted by what he saw in the trial of Angelo Herndon that he himself became a communist.
• 18:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: He joined secretly, at least initially.
• 18:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: He joined the Communist Party and after Angelo Herndon's conviction.
• 18:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ben Davis moved to New York and then had a long career as a communist himself.
• 18:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And was elected to New York City Council, I believe, as a communist from Harlem now.
• 18:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was elected to the City Council of New York and he became a leading communist.
• 18:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: He became an editor of a daily worker.
• 19:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: He became one of the leading figures in the communist party.
• 19:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: And indeed, in 1948, Ben Davis.
• 19:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: was convicted along with 10 other leading communists in the famous case, Dennis versus United States, interestingly enough, in that case, it was the federal government that invoked a law known as the Smith Act.
• 19:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: to prosecute communists, and the Smith Act was very similar to the very statute under which Angela Hundin was prosecuted.
• 19:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, the Smith Act also criminalized belief and the Smith Act prosecutions were the first time that belief had been successfully Criminalized in the United States, so it's worth remembering that one happy ending doesn't always Doesn't always endure one of the things that really interested me is that
• 20:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: after the conviction in Georgia, when they took the case to appeal, Ben Davis was able to put together a pretty incredible list of very impressive attorneys.
• 20:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you write about one of these people Carol Weiss King.
• 20:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
• 20:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: And she seems like a pretty interesting figure.
• 20:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Can you say a little bit more about
• 20:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: for assembling the defense team that represented Angela Hurned in on appeal.
• 20:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Carol White's king was a crusading progressive attorney.
• 20:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: She was one of the founders of the National Lawyers Guild.
• 20:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: She served as General Counsel for the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born.
• 20:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: She was a strong, leftist attorney.
• 21:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: She was also, and she was a very fine writer and analyst, legal analyst in her own right.
• 21:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: She also had a knack for being able to bring together
• 21:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: attorneys from different political camps.
• 21:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: So to try to overturn herndance conviction, she succeeded in enlisting the help
• 21:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: of a wide range of a attorney.
• 21:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: She got Whitney North Seymour involved in the case.
• 21:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was a corporate lawyer.
• 21:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in New York, he later became the president of the American Bar Association.
• 21:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, he was just a New York big shot.
• 21:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: and a pillar of the legal establishment, even then.
• 21:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Very much a pillar of legal establishment, and of course that was part of her thinking.
• 22:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: She wanted to get on her side, people who the Supreme Court would pay attention to.
• 22:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so she got him.
• 22:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: She was successful in listing the help of some young legal academics, Herbert Wexler was one of those.
• 22:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: He became one of the leading legal academics of the 20th century.
• 22:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: She succeeded in getting Albert Tuttle involved in the case, Albert Tuttle,
• 22:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: was a lawyer, very successful lawyer in Atlanta.
• 22:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: He later became a district court of appeals judge.
• 22:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: But in this period, he was a successful Southern white lawyer, you know, conventional in many ways.
• 22:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And she gathered together these folks,
• 23:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And she, with them, created briefs, which they submitted to the Supreme Court, this case went to the Supreme Court twice.
• 23:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's a little confusing.
• 23:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: How did that happen?
• 23:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, first, they challenged the conviction, straight from the, so there was a conviction, then the conviction
• 23:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: and then there was an attempt to appeal that case to the Supreme Court of the United States, but the Supreme Court of the United States rejected the appeal on procedural grounds.
• 23:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, here's one thing that I think that folks ought to recognize, you know, usually when you talk about Supreme Court cases, people talk about the substance of the case.
• 23:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: the legal, the big legal principle that is being argued about.
• 24:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: But, and you need to know about that, of course.
• 24:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: But you also need to know that before the Supreme Court gets to a case, the litigants have had to jump through many procedural hoops.
• 24:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And if you fail to jump through those procedural hoops, even if you have the law on your side, the Supreme Court, you know, won't even hear the case.
• 24:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the first time this case was appealed to the Supreme Court from Georgia, the Supreme Court's position was well,
• 24:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: You have it touched all of the procedural bases, you haven't done all you were supposed to do procedurally, so we're not going to hear your case.
• 24:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's what happened.
• 24:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then, largely because of attorney total, they were successful in getting the case
• 25:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Judge Dorsey, and Judge Dorsey made a ruling in favor of Angela Herndon.
• 25:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, because Dorsey made this ruling in favor of Angela Herndon, his ruling then became
• 25:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Supreme Court, on the second time around, decided to actually confront the substance of Angelo Herndon's appeal.
• 25:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right, so if it hadn't been for Dorsey's ruling, it wouldn't have gotten to the Supreme Court in the end.
• 26:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's right.
• 26:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: And as you point out, and I assume as Brad Snyder tells in some detail, Dorsey himself was a complicated and fascinating figure.
• 26:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: extraordinary figure, Dorsey was the former, well, first of all, Dorsey was a prosecutor, had been a prosecutor.
• 26:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Dorsey had been the prosecutor in the case against Leo Frank.
• 26:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Leo Frank was the white Jewish manager of a pencil factory where a white woman was murdered.
• 26:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And initially there was a belief that a black man had murdered her, but it was actually but it turned out that Dorsey prosecuted Leo Frank, the manager of this pencil factory, not only did Dorsey prosecute Dorsey succeed it with the prosecution,
• 27:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: And God had a conviction against Leo Frank.
• 27:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a ridiculous case against Frank in the sense that it was basically he was tried in the grip of a mob.
• 27:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a mob-tainted prosecution.
• 27:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: When I say mob-tainted, what I mean is that the local populace was whipped into a hysteria.
• 27:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: And while they were banged for blood because he was a Jew.
• 27:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, they were whipped into an hysteria.
• 27:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: They believed him to be guilty.
• 27:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: They hated him because he was a Jew.
• 27:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And things were so bad with the prosecution.
• 27:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The situation was so bad that when Frank was sentencing,
• 28:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: The judge who was to sit in some, advised Frank to stay away from the courthouse because he might be lynched just right then and there.
• 28:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: So he wasn't even on hand when the sentence was handed down.
• 28:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was, by the way, sentenced to death.
• 28:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: a governor commuted the sentence because the governor was convinced it was quite clear that this was, you know, a miscarriage of justice in many respects.
• 28:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the governor commuted his sentence, but the mob would not stand for that, and a mob
• 28:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: they lynched him.
• 28:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was lynched.
• 28:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was lynched.
• 28:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, and remember, Dorsey was the prosecutor in the case.
• 28:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, Dorsey then becomes the governor.
• 29:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: He became, you know, he got a lot of name recognition because of his prosecution of Leo Frank.
• 29:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: People were applauding him because of the prosecution of Leo Frank.
• 29:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was elected governor and then a strange thing happened.
• 29:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: He became governor, became very guilty about having seen and participated in, you know, extrajudicial violence in that state in Georgia, and he became a campaigner against lynching, particularly the lynching of black people.
• 29:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Very interesting.
• 29:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: I want to at least give you a chance to say.
• 29:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, your review is fascinating, but how is the book?
• 29:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a very professor Snyder, he's a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, Brad Snyder.
• 30:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's a very distinguished legal historian.
• 30:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: A couple of years ago, he wrote a, the leading biography of Felix Frank further.
• 30:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this book, you can't kill a man because of the books he reads, is a very fine
• 30:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: excavation of the Angelo-Hurndon case.
• 30:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the things that I like about the book is, first of all, it focuses attention on a case that actually has not gotten a whole lot of attention.
• 30:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: When you think, in law schools, in law schools, when you go to constitutional law courses
• 30:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Frankly, you don't read much about Angela Herndon.
• 30:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is not viewed as one of the canonical cases, though it should be.
• 30:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that one of the things that's going to be a good upshot of Brad Snyder's book is it's going to, I hope, bring attention to the importance of the Angela Herndon case.
• 31:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, there's another aspect of the Angela Hurned in case that fascinated me as a historian and as a journalist looking at America today, and that's the way in which Hurned and starts out very much as a communist sectarian.
• 31:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: you describe him or stone describes him as a member of the trade union unity league, which was the Communist Party's attempt to go around trade unions by setting up alternate unions.
• 31:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: So if there was a carpenter's union, they would set up a Communist carpenter's union.
• 31:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: And this was during the period when the Communist Party really wanted nothing to do with social democrats or social democracy when they called socialist social fascists because they were basically fighting sectarian battles.
• 32:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now those battles were always less salient in the south because people had more important things to worry about down there.
• 32:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: You could call it or see it as the birth of the popular front in that, you know, this sectarian organizer, once he's imprisoned and threatened, his defenders assemble a very broad coalition.
• 32:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: that goes well beyond the Communist Party, well beyond even mainstream liberals to, you know, even just sort of enlightened civil libertarians.
• 32:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that proves effective in defending him.
• 32:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: And this is 1932, so this is, this is when this is happening in the U.S. but the Soviet Union is still very much mired in sectarian battles.
• 32:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: So this is the American Communist Party beginning to think for itself in a certain way.
• 33:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think that everybody that's associated with the defense of Hondon, they step up a bit.
• 33:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: So on the one hand, you have the Communist Party that reaches out to people who can be helpful to herndon, even though the people to whom they reach out are people who have a very different ideological valence, and then you have people who really don't like the Communists.
• 33:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: but who do rally around her and including, for instance, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP and the Communist Party, they duped it out over and over and over again.
• 33:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was a lot of bad blood, but both of them, they joined hands,
• 33:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: in the defense of Angelo Hundin.
• 34:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were others as well.
• 34:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, some of the lawyers, particularly the southern, there were southern, white, racist lawyers who assisted with the defense of Angelo Hundin.
• 34:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why?
• 34:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were, they were racist.
• 34:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were reactionaries, but they did not like the idea.
• 34:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: of the government overstepping legal bounds.
• 34:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: They did not like that.
• 34:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they wanted to essentially hold the government back.
• 34:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they assisted in the defense of this black communists in order to effectuate that aim.
• 34:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: So he had a lot of people from a lot of different positions who rallied around Angelo Hurnton.
• 34:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, and, you know, without hitting this note too hard, it seems to me that there's a lot we can learn from that successful campaign, and from all of those various actors willingness to set aside their ideological litmus tests and work together to push back against overstepping and suppressing state authority.
• 35:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think that's correct, and at this particular moment, as we speak, we are confronting government overreach that is like nothing I've seen in my 71 years.
• 35:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, when you talk about the Angela Hurned in case what you're talking about
• 35:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: government overreach.
• 35:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we need to be very attentive to that, particularly at this perilous moment.
• 36:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: All right.
• 36:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, Randall Kennedy, I could talk to you all day, but I think we're I think we're out of time and it's been a great pleasure.
• 36:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for coming on the nation podcast.
• 36:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for having me.
• 36:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Be well.