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Stop the Scottsboro Murder
By O. Huiswood

American Imperialism is preparing a fresh crime against he working class. This electrocution of the eight Scottsboro boys, innocent victims of a dastardly frame up instigated by the southern ruling class, is fixed for April 6th.

For eight long months these boys have been mentally and physically tortured in the death cell. They were diliberately placed so that they could constantly view the electric chair. This was calculated to intimidate them, to break down their morals and to force them to "confess" to the framed up charge of raping two white prostitutes. 

The Supreme Court of the state of Alabama went through the farcical procedure of hearing the plea for a new trial. At the trial of the Negroes were Jim-Crowed and not even permitted to enter the courtroom. Nevertheless, hundreds of Negro workers demonstrating their solidarity with the boys by crowded about the doors and windows of the court to listen to the attorneys defending the boys.

With the date of execution drawing nearer and nearer the Supreme Court still has the case under "advise". the southern bourgeoisie will leave no stone unturned to send these boys to their death. Only the working class can snatch these children from the clutches of the hangman.

The American bourgeoisie faced with the greatest economic crisis on the one hand and the growing solidarity of the Negro and white workers under the fighting leadership of he Communist Party and the Red Trade Unions on the other is trying with the help of the social fascist trade union bureaucrats and the Negro reformists to carry out the most brutal attacks upon the working class.

As the crisis deepens the militancy of the workers is reflected in mass demonstrations and in strike struggles which the bosses attempt to crush in terror and blood.

In this savage offensive of the bosses to get out of the crisis, the Negro toilers are the worst sufferers. Every attempt of the Negro masses to resist the ever tightening yoke of oppression is met with the lynch rope, burning at the stake and the chain gang in order to break their spirit of resistance and to keep them the underdogs and social outcasts in a capitalist society.

One of the chief weapons of this offensive is inciting the white workers against the black, and the blacks against the foreign born, in order to misdirect their struggles from class lines into racial antagonisms, and thereby smash the United front of the working class in common struggle against unemployment, wage cuts, lengthening of hours and for the overthrow of the capitalist system.

The chief victims of the capitalist offensive are the brutally oppressed and exploited Negro toiling masses. That is why a new wave of lynching and mob terror is sweeping over the length and breath of the United States. In 1930 over 40 Negroes were lynched. In 1931, 79 known lynchings and murders of Negro workers took place. And already in the first two months of 1932 more than ten Negroes have been made victims of the lynching mobs.

In the Black Belt of the South American "democracy" enslaves millions of Negro toilers, share croppers, poor farmers and agricultural laborers, who are subjected to a most cruel system of semi-slave exploitation. Chained to the land, they are victims of peonage, the convict lease and chain-gang system, they are deprived of all rights, disfranchised, Jim-Crowed and segregated into special ghettos.

Not satisfied with this, the landlords and capitalists, foaming with rage and fear at the increasing number of demonstrations of solidarity between the black and white unemployed workers and starving farmers which have taken place during recent months are mobilizing their forces of reaction headed by the Ku 

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Klux Klan, the Black Shirts, etc. to stage new outrages against the Negro workers. 

Suffice it to note a few cases of the brutal Lynch terror launched against the Negro workers in the recent period. In Salisbury, Maryland, Mathew Williams lying at the point of death in a hospital was lynched and his body dragged through the streets of the Negro section. In Montgomery, Alabama, two unemployed Negro workers are in the death house awaiting electrocution on the charge of having stolen a silver half dollar. In Winston-Salem, North Carolina, John Moore a Negro worker is sentenced to death for having stolen a pair of shoes. In Maryland, Orphan Jones, a 60 year old Negro farm laborer is condemned to death on a frame up charge of murdering his employers.

Hardly a day passes without some outrage being committed against unarmed and defenseless Negro workers and peasants.

The purpose of all this is to strike terror into the hearts of the Negro masses and to crush their growing militancy. But in order to do this and hereby cover up their class interests the capitalists and the landlords resort to the vilest demagogy, by exploiting the backwardness of the white southern toiling masses by appealing to them to defend Anglo-Saxon "superiority" und [[and]] white "womanhood".

Through these methods of deception, the white ruling class of the South is able to keep the Negro toiling masses at the lowest level of starvation, so that they in turn can be used to undercut the already miserable existence of the white workers.

Of particular significance and importance is the role played by the Negro reformists to turn the militant struggles of the Negro masses into channels harmless to the Imperialists.

Their open betrayal of the interests of the Negro masses, their close alliance with the white bourgeoisie to suppress the growing revolts of the Negro workers is glaringly revealed in the Scottsboro case. The tremendous mass movement developed in defense of the Scotttsboro boys, served to bring to the fore the reformist leaders of the N.A.A.C.P. whose role was to serve as a shield for the white ruling class lynchers, whose murderous intentions were thwarted by the wide mass protest movement of the working class. Their attempt to get a hold of the legal defence, to spread confusion among the Negro masses, thereby isolating the revolutionaries was but a means to prepare the way for the white slave drivers to carry out their plans of legally lynching the innocent boys. It was only the tremendous mass pressure of the working class, which prevented the realization of these manouvres of the Negro reformists who are the chief props of the boss class lynchers.

The American working class has had sufficient experience in bourgeois class justice. We can not forget the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Only the organized might of the working class can rescue these eight young class victims from the clutches of the capitalist murderers. Only the mass protest movement of the world proletariat in support of the united struggle of the Negro and white workers of America can smash this attempt at bloody Lynch justice.

Only the immediate mss protest action of the international working class can stop the bloody fascist hands of the capitalists and landlords of the state of Alabama from carrying out their cold-blooded legal murder on April 6.

Proletarians of all countries! Demand the immediate unconditional release of the nine Scottsboro boys.

White and Negro workers! Organize mass defence to smash the rising Lynch attacks against the Negroes.

Demonstrate solidarity with the black and white workers of the U.S.A. against the terror and attacks of the bourgeoisie and their Social Fascist and National Reformist Agents.

Down with capitalist lynch justice! Death to the lynchers!

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