Biography
Thomas Mattox was a seventeen-year-old Black youth held in Philadelphia in 1943 as a fugitive wanted in Georgia. Governor James of Pennsylvania had ordered his extradition, but Common Pleas Judge Clare P. Fenerty overrode the order, declaring he would not send a man back to be lynched. New Masses cited the case as a rare instance of a Northern court blocking a racial-frame-up extradition to the South.
