Cause at Heart: A Former Communist Remembers - Brossura

Scales, Junius Irving; Nickson, Richard

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0820327859 ISBN 13: 9780820327853

Casa editrice: Univ of Georgia Pr, 2005

Riassunto

On November 18, 1954, Junius Irving Scales, the Communist Party district organizer for the upper South, was arrested on a quiet Memphis street by FBI agents. Charged with violation of the Smith Act of 1940, Scales spent the next six years ensnared in a legal system that was in thrall to a daunting force: McCarthyism. Scales’s case twice reached the U.S. Supreme Court; ultimately, his lower-court guilty verdict was upheld. Scales served fifteen months in Lewisburg Penitentiary before his six-year sentence was commuted by President Kennedy in 1962.

Cause at Heart follows Scales from his privileged southern upbringing through the awakening of his social conscience, his civil- and labor- rights work for the Party across the South, his arrest and trials, his disillusionment with the Party, and his time in prison. Even behind bars Scales refused to cooperate with his prosecutors, to ?name names.” In their foreword, Vernon Burton and James Barrett draw chilling parallels between the Smith Act, the legal grounds on which Scales was convicted, and contemporary restrictions on individual rights such as the Patriot Act. Today, as it did sixty-plus years ago, ?Congress has radically expanded the description of what constitutes a threat to the U.S. government.”

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Junius Irving Scales (1920-2002) was a Communist Party member for eighteen years. A native of Greensboro, North Carolina, Scales lived in New York after his release from prison. Richard Nickson, a close friend of Scales for more than fifty years, is a professor emeritus of English at William Paterson University of New Jersey.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Univ of Georgia Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0820327859
• ISBN 13: 9780820327853
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 427