Biography
M. H. Powers, a Trade Union Unity League iron-workers' organizer and Communist district organizer from St. Paul, Minnesota, was jailed in March 1930 for leaflets and a mass meeting of the unemployed and held on the insurrection charge in a death cell. 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.
