You Can't Kill a Man Because of the Books He Reads: Angelo Herndon's Fight for Free Speech - Couverture rigide

Snyder, Brad

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1324036540 ISBN 13 : 9781324036548

Editeur : WW Norton & Co, 2025

Synopsis

The story of a young, Black Communist Party organiser wrongly convicted of attempting to incite insurrection and the landmark case that made him a civil rights hero

Decades before the impeachment of an American president for a similar offence, Angelo Herndon was charged under Georgia law with “attempting to incite insurrection”—a crime punishable by death. In 1932, the eighteen-year-old Black Communist Party organiser was arrested and had his room illegally searched and his radical literature seized. Charged under an old slave insurrection statute, Herndon was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to eighteen to twenty years on a chain gang. You Can’t Kill a Man Because of the Books He Reads chronicles Herndon’s five-year quest for freedom during a time when Blacks, white liberals and the radical left joined forces to define the nation’s commitment to civil rights and civil liberties.

Herndon’s champions included the young, Black Harvard Law School–educated attorney Benjamin J. Davis Jr.; the future historian C. Vann Woodward, who joined the interracial Herndon defence committee; the white-shoe New York lawyer Whitney North Seymour, who argued Herndon’s appeals; and literary friends Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. With their support, Herndon won his freedom and reinvented himself as a Harlem literary star until a dramatic fall from grace.

A legal odyssey of Herndon’s narrow escape from certain death because of his unpopular political beliefs, You Can’t Kill a Man Because of the Books He Reads explores Herndon’s journey from Alabama coal miner to Communist Party organiser to Harlem hero and beyond. Brad Snyder tells the stories of the diverse coalition of people who rallied to his cause and who twice appealed his case to the U.S. Supreme Court. They forced the Court to recognise free speech and peaceable assembly as essential rights in a democracy—a landmark decision in 1930s America as well as today.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Brad Snyder, author of Democratic Justice, is a professor of constitutional law and twentieth-century American legal history at Georgetown Law. In addition to his legal scholarship, he has written for Politico, Slate, and the Washington Post. He lives in Washington, DC.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: WW Norton & Co
• Date d'édition: 2025
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1324036540
• ISBN 13: 9781324036548
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 336
• Coordonnées du fabricant: Walk; n.pederzini@terminaldistribuzione.com; ; Via Bruno Buozzi, 24/26,; Granarolo dell'Emilia BO,; 40057; Italie