{"value"=>"<p>The Research Material subseries is a small but rich sampling of primary source documents related to racial discrimination in the military and in New York City housing during World War II; the abduction and rape of a 24 year-old Alabama African-American woman, Recy Taylor, by a gang of white youth; and the extradition from New York of a Florida chain gang fugitive, Willie Reid. Reid's case is documented by a writ of habeas corpus his sister filed on his behalf, challenging the validity of his conviction and alleging he would be lynched upon his return to Florida. The housing incident involves Lawrence and Anita Patterson, an interracial couple a white friend had helped move into an apartment in the complex where she lived in the summer of 1943. All three tenants were soon ordered to vacate the premises, but a successful campaign organized with the help of the Communist Party prevented their eviction. Three months later, Lawrence Patterson would write of the World War II Louisiana labor battalion where he was conscripted, as \"a prison without walls\", and of his fellow soldiers as \"coolie labor\" assigned to the most demeaning tasks: \"There isn't much patriotism here, and no love or respect for the country\". Also included are a 1944 letter to Philadelphia Communist Party leader James Ford, providing eyewitness accounts of the frame-up of a South Carolina field hand, Arthur Middleton, on rape charges, and two reports by an African-American woman identified only as \"Lilyan\", addressed to the New York Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions, charging that the phasing out of her title as Secretary to the National Director, Irving Adler, in 1953, in the midst of a labor dispute, was due to racial discrimination. These documents presumably laid the basis for articles Gordon wrote for the Daily Worker.</p>"}