Mary Dalton

Mary Dalton, a twenty-year-old National Textile Workers' Union organizer, spent six weeks in the Fulton Tower Prison on the Atlanta insurrection charge before being released on ILD bail. 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.