You Can't Kill a Man Because of the Books He Reads

Angelo Herndon's Fight for Free Speech

Inbunden, Engelska, 2025

371 kr

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Beskrivning

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.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2025-02-04
Mått:160 x 236 x 30 mm
Vikt:643 g
Format:Inbunden
Språk:Engelska
Antal sidor:336
Förlag:WW Norton & Co
ISBN:9781324036548
Utmärkelser:Short-listed for American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award 2026

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Mer om författaren

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.

Recensioner i media

"Angelo Herndon had been a Communist Party organizer for barely two years when the Atlanta police arrested him for attempting to incite an insurrection. In his careful, compelling new book, Brad Snyder recreates the extraordinary struggle to save Herndon from life on a Jim Crow chain gang for daring to promote ideas the authorities didn’t want to hear. A story of fundamental principles and unlikely heroes, expertly told."