International Labor Defense (ILD)

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INTERNATIONAL LABOR DEFENSE (ILD)

The International Labor Defense (ILD), founded in 1925 for the purpose of providing free legal services and support for "labor and political prisoners" and their families, was the legal arm of the Communist Party and was closely associated with the International Red Aid (an organization founded by Comintern in Moscow in 1922 to provide relief for martyrs of the revolution). The ILD attracted a significant following during the 1930s due to its spirited defense of numerous poor and working-class defendants, immigrants, and blacks, contributing considerably to the Communist Party's reputation as a militant proponent of workers' rights and a champion of oppressed black Americans.

James P. Cannon, an influential Communist Party member, led the drive to create the ILD, and was at its helm until he was expelled from the Communist Party in 1928. Membership in the ILD was open, but Communists generally held positions of leadership. National directors during the 1930s included J. Louis Engdahl, who succeeded Cannon; William L. Patterson, a prominent African-American party member; and Anna Damon.

Shortly after its founding the organization became engaged in the failed campaign to save the lives of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants and anarchists convicted and sentenced to die for a 1927 robbery and murder. The ILD went on to agitate for the release of labor activists Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, who were unjustly confined for a 1916 bombing in San Francisco.

During the 1930s the ILD began to direct more of its activities toward African Americans. As part of its constitution, the ILD made special concessions to "the defense of the Negro people;" however, it was subsequent to 1928 and the mandates of the Sixth Congress of the Comintern (the international Communist body headquartered in Moscow) that it began to concentrate on cases of racial injustice. Its efforts included the successful nationwide campaign to free Angelo Herndon, a young black organizer imprisoned in Georgia for leading a hunger march in Atlanta in 1932, and numerous other less celebrated cases of southern racial repression.

Unquestionably, it was the struggle surrounding the "Scottsboro Boys," nine black youths wrongfully condemned for the rape of two white women on an Alabama freight car in 1931, that propelled the ILD and the Communist Party into the forefront of American consciousness. The organization mounted an aggressive legal defense bolstered by its hallmark strategy of "mass pressure": massive publicity, demonstrations, rallies, and speaking tours. Largely through its efforts, the ILD transformed a local miscarriage of justice into a national and international indictment of racism.

In 1937, the ILD selected its first non-Communist head, Vito Marcantonio. Under his leadership, the organization continued its vigorous defense of targeted groups and initiated an attack on debt peonage in the South. The ILD began to lose momentum in the next decade and merged with the Civil Rights Congress in 1946.