{"value"=>"<p>Series includes Herndon's letters from prison to ILD Secretary William Patterson and Acting Secretary Anna Damon, letters from supporters in the United States and abroad, and correspondence with his publisher.</p> <p>The Fulton Towers Prison files comprise a physical examination report by an African-American medical doctor, C.W. Powell, who visited Herndon in jail; a fact sheet on the case; and a July 21, 1932 letter from Otto Hall to Communist Party general secretary Earl Browder in New York, detailing mobilization efforts in Atlanta on Herndon's behalf, including appeals to trade-unions, a resolution by white Emory University students, and 10,000 leaflets distributed in one day. Included are letters from lawyers Ben Davis and John Greer, and a November 1935 telegram from Browder announcing the Party's new united front policy against fascism and war. There are also letters of solidarity from members of Angelo Herndon ILD branches, Free Herndon Committees across the country, the national Herndon Petition Committee and a Defend Angelo Herndon children's club in Dallas, Texas.</p> <p>Herndon's own letters are those of a defiant and alert young man. His initial letters to William Patterson took issue with the lawyers in his defense and criticized the lack of support from local comrades, including Otto Hall who \"was too yellow to come to the jail\". Even in jail, Herndon continued to organize. Included in the files are three April 1933 letters to Herndon from death row inmate John Downer, found guilty of \"attacking a white woman\", and a letter from Herndon urging the ILD to take on Downer's case \"as a sure way of building the ILD into a mass organization in Georgia and throughout the South\". Downer was executed in the spring of 1934. Willie White, another death row inmate, appealed directly to Georgia governor Eugene Talmadge; the letter, in Herndon's handwriting, asserted White's innocence and pleaded for clemency.</p> <p>Herndon's Campaign files include his correspondence with Anna Damon, Chicago socialite and acting ILD National Secretary, who organized two coast-to-coast tours to mobilize mass support and raise money for Herndon's legal defense. One million signatures were collected on a petition to Governor Talmadge by November 1935. Damon reportedly jumped to her death from a nearby hotel the night Earl Browder called for the dissolution of the American Communist Party in 1944. Other correspondents are A. Phillip Randolph, Walter White, Scottsboro defendant Haywood Patterson, and Pennsylvania Congressman Matthew Dunn who wrote to Talmadge on Herndon's behalf. Talmadge wrote back that he \"will be glad to consider the Herndon case\" for pardon if an application was made through the proper channels.</p> <p>Other documents in the Campaign files include a five-page introduction at a Herndon program in Kenosha, Wisconsin, recounting the 1854 capture of fugitive slave Joshua Glover in nearby Racine, and Glover's rescue by local abolitionists. That incident led to a Wisconsin Supreme Court decision declaring the Fugitive Slave Law as unconstitutional. Also included are a four-page anti-communist and anti-semitic rant by a self-described rightwing infiltrator of the Communist Party; and a letter from the American Legion in Atlanta commenting on the Herndon case and on the treatment of \"negros (sic) in the South, particularly in Georgia\", who \"have been treated better than any non-assimiable (sic) race occupying the same territory with a predominant and superior race\". With the use of the Insurrection law to convict Herndon came an increase in vigilante activism. The Insurrection law was also used against other union and political organizers, black and white, including the \"Atlanta Six\".</p> <p>Two additional correspondence files document Herndon's Supreme Court victory and the release of his autobiography, <em render=\"underline\">Let Me Live</em>. Congratulations on the Supreme Court's decision include letters from Roy Wilkins, Assitant Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Assistant; American Civil Liberties Union director Roger Baldwin; Walter Baer, a civil engineer facing deportation to Germany in 1937; and Lydia Gibson Minor, the wife of communist cartoonist and journalist Robert Minor, who wanted to paint a portrait of Herndon. The Executive Committee of International Red Aid likened Herndon's \"courageous stand before the courts of Georgia\" to Georgi Dimitroff's stand against Hermann Goering during the 1934 Reichstag Fire trial in Nazi Germany. Forty members of a Young Communist League branch signed a congratulation letter pledging \"to increase the Negro membership within a period of three months...as a toast to your victory and ours\". Also included are several dozens telegrams and a celebratory poem by Walter Lowenfels.</p> <p>In addition to the customary exchanges with his Random House editor, Robert K. Haas, the <em render=\"underline\">Let Me Live</em> correspondence includes many letters of appreciation from readers, Communist Party members and would-be distributors. Included is a three-page Herndon rebuttal to the editor of the <em render=\"underline\">New York Herald Tribune</em> book review section, which ran a favorable appraisal of the book but concluded that, \"Although it has come out as his autobiography, it is clear that while the material is his the writing was done by another hand\".</p>"}