“The law again. The precious law:” Black Women Radicals and the Fight to End Legal Lynching, 1949–1955

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1059-4337(05)37003-7
• Date: 15 December 2005
• Published date: 15 December 2005
• Pages: 53-83
• Author: Dayo F. Gore

‘‘THE LAW AGAIN. THE PRECIOUS

LAW:’’ BLACK WOMEN RADICALS

AND THE FIGHT TO END LEGAL

LYNCHING, 1949–1955

Dayo F. Gore

ABSTRACT

This article examines the early post-World War II civil rights organizing

of black women radicals affiliated with the organized left. It details the

work of these women in such organizations as the Civil Rights Congress

and Freedom newspaper as they fought to challenge the unjust conviction

and sentencing of black defendants caught in the racial machinations of

U.S. local and state criminal justice systems. These campaigns against

what was provocatively called ‘‘legal lynching’’ formed a cornerstone of

African American civil rights activism in the early postwar years. In

centering the civil rights politics and organizing of these black women

radicals, a more detailed picture emerges of the Communist Party-

supported anti-legal lynching campaigns. Such a perspective moves be-

yond a view of civil rights legal activism as solely the work of lawyers, to

examining the ways committed activists within the U.S. left, helped to

build this legal activism and sustain an important left base in the U.S.

during the Cold War.

Crime and Punishment: Perspectives from the Humanities

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Volume 37, 53–83

Copyright r2005 by Elsevier Ltd.

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1016/S1059-4337(05)37003-7

53

The law again. The precious law.

The law has got Mrs. Ingram, all right.

The same old law that killed Willie McGee. Yvonne Gregory (1951)

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s

(NAACP) court-based activism has served as an important narrative in

detailing black resistance and the emerging civil rights movement of the

post-World War II era. The story of the NAACP’s civil rights legal activism

during this period often emphasizes the strategies of trained lawyers, care-

fully selected test cases, orderly protest and ‘‘innocent’’ victims – with their

innocence defined by their image as upstanding, hardworking and mostly

law-abiding black citizens (McNeil, 1983;Tushnet, 1987;Kelley, 1993;

Greenberg, 1994). But, placed within the context of the long civil rights

movement of the twentieth century, legal challenges to desegregation reflect

only one strategy among many in which black activists engaged the U.S.

legal system to push for equality and justice. In fact, when examining civil

rights legal activism in the early postwar years, the most common and at-

tention grabbing strategies did not involve civil suits and test cases, but

advocacy and protest campaigns for black defendants caught in the racial

machinations of U.S. local and state criminal justice systems that were

provocatively framed as ‘‘legal lynchings’’ (Tushnet, 1987;Meier & Bracey,

1993, p. 8).

Both the NAACP and the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), supported by the

Communist party USA (CP), emerged as leading organizations in advocat-

ing for black defendants during the 1940s and 1950s. Each organization

represented seemingly opposing legal strategies and developed an often

tense, and at times openly hostile, relationship (Cox, 1951;Record, 1964;

Niason, 1985; Goodman, 1994; Ransby, 2003). Considerable scholarly work

has examined aspects of criminal defense civil rights legal activism, high-

lighting cases in which black defendants were unjustly convicted and harshly

punished (Martin, 1985;Lawson, Colburn & Paulson, 1986;Cortner, 1986;

Wright, 1990;Rise, 1992;Goodman, 1994). Yet, as historian Charles

H. Martin (1987, p. 25) points out, the success of the NAACP legal strategies

and absences produced by anticommunist politics, have led most scholars to

overlook the work of ‘‘left-wing legal defense organization[s]’’ that ‘‘served

as an alterative to the NAACP in the late 1940s and early 1950s.’’

Since the publication of Martin’s work on the CRC in 1987, scholars have

worked to include the behind-the-scenes legal maneuvers and conflicts that

emerged over competing political ideologies and strategies in legal lynching

cases. However, in explaining the activism of the CRC and other left

DAYO F. GORE54