Today, December 7, were it not for a two months stay of execution, Heywood Patterson and Clarence Norris, the eldest of the Scottsboro Boys, would have been electrocuted. For more than three and a half years the International Labor Defense has been struggling to keep the boys alive. The best lawyers were employed and the support of the people all over the world was aroused to keep the jim-crow court from sentencing the boys to a legal lynching.

            In the face of death which confronts the boys just two months from today, the maneuvers of Samuel Leibowitz and his American Scottsboro Committee are worthy of only a publicity seeker and opportunist The Scottsboro-Herndon action committee and the I.L.D., on the other hand, have the support of the Scottsboro mothers and boys, and are exerting every effort, through legal and mass campaign to free the boys.

            Therefore the Negro Study Forum supports the I.L.D. and the Scottsboro-Herndon committee, and is calling a Scottsboro-Herndon Defense Week from December 10 to 14 in Brooklyn College. It is initiating college-wide action which will include a Scottsboro mass rally on Wednesday, December 12, from twelve to two o'clock at which Richard B. Moore and popular faculty members will speak; and a huge petition list in the shape of an electric chair, three-dimensional white cardboard, to be covered by thousands of signatures of instructors and students. This spectacular chair will serve to make the school Scottsboro-conscious, and will indicate our sentiment of the palpable injustice done the Scottsboro Boys.

            Support the Scottsboro-Herndon campaign in Brooklyn College!

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May 20, 2004