Biography
Abner Green was the executive secretary of the American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born and a trustee of the Civil Rights Congress Bail Fund. He was jailed for contempt in 1951 for refusing to reveal the fund's contributors, and spent much of the 1950s fighting deportation and contempt prosecutions.
John Q. Barrett’s 2017 legal history distinguishes Green’s initial contempt finding, which did not send him to prison, from two later July 1951 criminal-contempt convictions and actual imprisonment under concurrent six-month sentences. One concerned American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born records demanded by a federal grand jury; the other concerned Bail Fund records. Concurrent imposed terms are not added together or treated as a verified completed custody total.
Jackson, Vinson, Reed, and “Reds,” Journal of Law 7 (2017), pages 19–32.
