Abstract

Georgia Suppresses Insurrection

The Georgia Supreme Court has sustained the conviction in a lower court and the sentence to the chain gang for a term of from eighteen to twenty years of Angelo Herndon, nineteen-year-old Negro youth, on a charge of inciting to insurrection. The charges were two. He participated in a meeting of unemployed Negro and white workers. Worse, the police raided his home, without warrant, and found radical books there such as "Communism and Christianism" by former episcopal bishop William Montgomery Brown, "The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers" and other items. In the trial that followed the prosecution appealed to racial, religious, and political prejudices. All of the state's witnesses were public employees, some of them detectives. The court blocked attempts of the defense to put on the stand white economists of standing from Georgia universities as expert witnesses on the literature and theories involved. The old insurrection statute is being used in Georgia as a criminal-syndicalist law.