Biography
Herbert Newton, a Black national organizer of the American Negro Labor Congress born in Boston to a family formerly enslaved in Virginia, was held on the Atlanta insurrection charge; he had already been jailed at Stamford, Connecticut and Trenton, New Jersey for unemployment and May Day activity. In the spring of 1930 the state of Georgia revived an 1861 anti-slave-insurrection statute to charge a group of Communist and labor organizers with "attempting to incite insurrection" — a capital offense — for organizing Black and white workers into the same unions and leading demonstrations of Atlanta's unemployed. Held without bail in the Fulton Tower Prison and threatened with the electric chair, the "Atlanta Six" became one of the ILD's signature free-speech defenses; the insurrection charges were eventually beaten.
