Angelo Herndon, a nineteen-year-old Black Communist organizer of the unemployed in Atlanta, was arrested in July 1932 after leading an interracial relief march and charged under Georgia's Reconstruction-era slave-insurrection statute — a capital offense — for possessing Party literature. Held incommunicado, he was convicted by an all-white jury in January 1933 and sentenced to eighteen to twenty years on the chain gang. "You may do what you will with Angelo Herndon," he told the court, "you cannot kill the working class."
The International Labor Defense made Herndon, alongside Scottsboro, the emblem of the Black South's criminalization of dissent. After five years of litigation, bail campaigns, and a return to prison in 1935, the Supreme Court in Herndon v. Lowry (1937) struck down his conviction by a single vote, freeing him and gutting the insurrection statute — one of the era's few outright victories over political prosecution.