{"value"=>"<p>Legal Cases where the Federation provided legal representation, submitted briefs or engaged in support work through public outreach campaigns, ranged from deportations and issues of academic freedom, to unequal justice for Mexican-Americans and Southern blacks. The files consist of correspondence, briefs, publications of various defense committees and newspaper clippings. Among the academic freedom issues represented in these files are the cases of Josephine Truslow Adams, dismissed from the faculty at Swarthmore College; Homer Rainey removed as president of the University of Texas; Morris Schappes jailed for perjury; and Max Yergan dropped from the teaching staff at the College of the City of New York. Cases involving red-baiting and freedom of speech include Harry Bridges who faced deportation, and Tom Mooney and Earl Browder, jailed because of their association with the Communist Party. (Tom Mooney's November 1933 desperate appeal to Marshall for funds is one of the earliest documents in the collection.).</p> <p>The King, Ramsey and Conner case in California, and the R.J. Thomas case in Texas were concerned with the rights of labor to organize. The Sleepy Lagoon case involved the mass arrest of 300 Mexican-American youth and the conviction of 17 among them in the alleged killing of one man in Los Angeles during the so-called \"Zoot-Suit crime wave\" of 1942. Cases of Jim Crow justice included Samuel Buckhannon, sentenced to a Georgia chain gang for the theft of cigarettes; William Mason Wellman, strapped to the electric chair and pardoned in extremis when someone else confessed to the rape of a 67 year-old white woman that took place at a time when Wellman was on a job 350 miles away; James Williams, Fred Lane and James Davis, three Florida youth sentenced to death and executed in an alleged case of rape. Meanwhile the six Alabama whites who gang-raped Recy Taylor, a 24 year-old African-American woman, were not even indicted. Additional Jim Crow cases are in a miscellaneous folder.</p>"}