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friendship among nations, for unionism in America, the rise of the CIO, the need for social security and unemployment insurance, the needs of people everywhere-as he saw it- these things concerned him, and he devoted himself, body and soul, to their fulfillment.

[[italicised]] On February 17, 1942, Henry Winston joined the U.S. Army. He was attached to the 318th Air Base Squadron and was assigned tot he European Theatre of Operations. Although the Air Force was the largely jimcrowed, Henry Winston served his country with honor and received a citation from his Commanding Officer, Lt. Col. Howe. [[/italicised]]

Soon after Henry Winston had taken off the solder's uniform of the U.S. Government, the U.S. Government arrested him for "teaching and advocating" the overthrow of itself.

It seems so long ago now. Can you remember those days? The cold war had just begun and the fallout of cold terror it brought was imperceptibly, at first, beginning to poison the atmosphere of democratic belief. What history remembers as McCarthyism began then, in 1949, with the political trials of the leaders of the Communist Party. The Communists were its first victims and after their conviction it was "open season" on everyone else.

Hysteria rained down on us. Teachers fired. Hollywood child actors blacklisted. Guilt by association. Not even the U.S. Government was spared by the Frankenstein it had created. It was in this hysterical time that Henry Winston was brought to trial and convicted under the Smith Act.

[[italicised]] The Smith Act, wrote Zechoriah Chaffee Jr. of Harvard and an authority on Constitutional law, was "the most drastic restriction on freedom of speech every enacted in the United States in peacetime."

"The mood of the House is such," Representative Ford, of California, sadly said at the time of its enactment, "that if you brought in the Ten Commandments here today and [[/italicised]]

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[[italicised]] asked for their repeal and attached that request to an alien law, you could get it." [[/italicised]
]
In the years since, the Supreme Court has, as Reinhold Niebuhr said, "invalidated" Smith Act convictions such as the one for which Henry Winston was sentenced to prison.

Though for Henry Winston there is a bitter irony in this. When he has served his legally non-existent Smith Act sentence he will still have to serve another three years for a "contempt of court" conviction based on that "invalidated" sentence.

His "contempt of court" servitude was imposed because he did not report to prison on time. Never before has this been a crime, it has always been dealt with by the forfeiting of bail. Never before, in fact, in the history of Anglo-Saxon law have men been imprisoned for forgetting bail, for that is the purpose of bail under law. Yet, sentenced to three years for what no man has ever been sentenced before, [[italicised]] though he voluntarily gave himself up, [[/italicised]] though he is blind because of the treatment he received, though he has been tortured beyond belief, Henry Winston is being forced to undergo still further suffering.

9. Complete Integration

That Henry Winston and his compatriots, in the hysterical blindness of the witchhunters, were convicted and were imprisoned is no wonder. No, the wonder was and is that after all these years, with McCarthy long gone, with the lessons that America has learned, with the Smith Act convictions set aside by a wiser Supreme Court, with the whole world awakened to a new reality, that despite all this Henry Winston is still persecuted, is humiliated, is tortured, is still in prison.

Henry Winston's case is all of this, yet it is something more. He is not just a Communist, but a Negro Communist.

[[italicised]] When, years ago, he was convicted the Baltimore Afro-[[/italicised]]