Biography
Joe Carr, a nineteen-year-old West Virginia coal miner and Young Communist League and National Miners' Union organizer, was placed in a death cell on "Murderers' Row" in the Fulton Tower Prison alongside condemned men while facing the electric chair. 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.
