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

Summary

The story of a young, Black Communist Party organizer 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 offense, 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 organizer 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.

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 organizer 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 US Supreme Court. They forced the Court to recognize free speech and peaceable assembly as essential rights in a democracy—a landmark decision in 1930s America as well as today.