{"value"=>"<p>The Case Files consist for the most part of correspondence, briefs, publications of various defense committees and newspaper clippings. The Columbia, Tennessee Riot of 1946 started with a dispute over a radio in a repair shop and the failed lynching of a young African-American veteran, followed by a nightly raid on the black side of town by a mob of white vigilantes and state and local police. One black resident fired back at the assailants who went on a rampage of terror and mass vandalism. Dozens of black residents were rounded up at the local jail and two of them shot to death. The NAACP handled the legal defense in the case but NFCL and later CRC conducted a vigorous campaign in favor of a Federal grand jury investigation of the riot and its aftermath. Marshall co-chaired a Conference to Stop Lynch Terror in Columbia, Tennessee, and NFCL/CRC joined the NAACP in launching a National Committee for Justice in Columbia.</p> <p>German Communist Gerhart Eisler was a WWII refugee who was widely denounced as Moscow's No.1 man in the U.S. He was convicted of entering the country with a false passport and of contempt of Congress. While on bail awaiting appeal, he fled as a stowaway on a Polish ship. The CRC Bail Fund had posted bail for Eisler and intervened after his flight to reverse a Justice Department perjury charge that would make him extraditable from England where he was briefly detained after being forced to exit the ship in Southampton. The file includes various Eisler speeches and statements, several briefs and letters of support, newspaper clippings and campaign material on his behalf. A letter of apology from Eisler to Marshall is with the personal correspondence in box 1. Other communist-related cases include the \"Los Angeles 10\" ordered jailed indefinitely and without bail for failure to answer questions about the Communist Party; Carl Marzani, indicted and found guilty of concealing his past membership in the Party; William Patterson, CRC's national executive secretary, charged with contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over names of CRC contributors to HUAC; and the 12 Communist Party leaders indicted under the Smith Act.</p> <p>Arrested on the charge of having raped a white woman in Laurel, Mississippi in 1945, Willie McGee was tried and convicted three times in Mississippi courts, and after the Supreme Court refused to review his case was put to death in the electric chair in May 1951. Marshall was among the first to bring his case to national attention, and CRC spearheaded an international campaign in his defense. In a letter to New York Post columnist Max Lerner the day of McGee's execution, and after his own retreat from political life, Marshall wrote that he was sickened and deeply angry: \"There is nothing more horrible than taking the life of an innocent man - of a State killing a man because he is a Negro\". The McGee file consists of correspondence, campaign material and clippings. Included is a letter from Mississippi's Attorney General to the governor of the state laying out the case against McGee, a letter from NY attorney Bella Abzug commenting on the Mississippi Attorney General's letter, and the copy of a letter from McGee's wife, Rosalee, to William Patterson (1949).</p> <p>The case of the \"Martinsville 7\" in Virginia, also involving allegations of interracial rape, resulted in the execution of eight African-American men in spite of mass protests organized by CRC and other organizations. Another case that appealed to Marshall was the \"Trenton Six\" in New Jersey - six black youth on death row who were exonerated after a vigorous CRC defense and public opinion campaign. Included in the latter file are legal briefs, correspondence, clippings and campaign material. A miscellaneous file for other Jim Crow and racial discrimination cases relates to, among others: Fletcher Mills, a 23 year old former sharecropper fighting extradition to Alabama in 1949; Lemas Woods whose 1946 death sentence was reversed after a determined public opinion campaign; and disabled veteran Major Benton sentenced to death on an alleged rape charge in North Carolina in 1946.</p>"}