RACES: Red Black & Georgia

When Angelo Herndon, 19-year-old blackamoor, went from Cincinnati to Georgia to preach Communism he forgot that in 1866, to prevent white men from seizing the government, some Georgians of his own race, aided by carpetbaggers, had passed a law making it a capital offense to “attempt to incite to insurrection.” Last week in Atlanta Angelo Herndon heard himself accused of attempting to set up a “Black State,” heard Georgia’s white assistant solicitor general ask twelve white men to condemn him to death.

Defense Counsel Benjamin Jefferson Davis Jr., black son of a black father who once bossed the Georgia G. O. P., made things no easier for his client. Loudly recalling that 3,265 Negroes had been lynched in the South since 1885, he cried: “That looks to me like an attempt to overthrow the Government of the United States. Suppose this defendant is a Communist. Did you ever hear of a Communist burning anyone at the stake?”

After deliberating two hours the Atlanta jury found Angelo Herndon guilty. “I think the jury was thoroughly justified,” said Judge Lee B. Wyatt as he sentenced Angelo Herndon, not to death but to 18-to-20 years in Georgia’s much-publicized chain gang.* Counsel Davis promised to appeal to the U. S. Supreme Court if necessary.

*The State House of Representatives last week resolved that Robert Elliott Burns, chain-gang fugitive and publicist, had plotted “to defame and bring reproach upon the name of a great people” with his exaggerated autobiographical book and cinema.