You Can't Kill a Man Because of the Books He Reads
Angelo Herndon's Fight for Free Speech
by Brad Snyder
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Pub Date Feb 04 2025 | Archive Date Jan 31 2025
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Description
The story of a young, Black Communist Party organizer wrongly convicted of attempting to incite insurrection and the landmark case that made him a civil rights hero.
Decades before the impeachment of an American president for a similar offense, Angelo Herndon was charged under Georgia law with “attempting to incite insurrection”—a crime punishable by death. In 1932, the eighteen-year-old Black Communist Party organizer was arrested and had his room illegally searched and his radical literature seized. Charged under an old slave insurrection statute, Herndon was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to eighteen to twenty years on a chain gang. You Can’t Kill a Man Because of the Books He Readschronicles Herndon’s five-year quest for freedom during a time when Blacks, white liberals, and the radical left joined forces to define the nation’s commitment to civil rights and civil liberties.
Herndon’s champions included the young, Black Harvard Law School–educated attorney Benjamin J. Davis Jr.; the future historian C. Vann Woodward, who joined the interracial Herndon defense committee; the white-shoe New York lawyer Whitney North Seymour, who argued Herndon’s appeals; and literary friends Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright. With their support, Herndon won his freedom and reinvented himself as a Harlem literary star until a dramatic fall from grace.
A legal odyssey of Herndon’s narrow escape from certain death because of his unpopular political beliefs, You Can’t Kill a Man Because of the Books He Reads explores Herndon’s journey from Alabama coal miner to Communist Party organizer to Harlem hero and beyond. Brad Snyder tells the stories of the diverse coalition of people who rallied to his cause and who twice appealed his case to the U.S. Supreme Court. They forced the Court to recognize free speech and peaceable assembly as essential rights in a democracy – a landmark decision in 1930s America as well as today.
Advance Praise
"Angelo Herndon had been a Communist Party organizer for barely two years when the Atlanta police arrested him for attempting to incite an insurrection. In his careful, compelling new book, Brad Snyder recreates the extraordinary struggle to save Herndon from life on a Jim Crow chain gang for daring to promote ideas the authorities didn’t want to hear. A story of fundamental principles and unlikely heroes, expertly told." -Kevin Boyle, author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age
"Some works of history are top-down. Some bottom-up. You Can’t Kill a Man Because of the Books He Reads is both. Brad Snyder moves gracefully from the streets of 1930s Atlanta, where Angelo Herndon, a young Black radical, was charged with insurrection, all the way to the chambers of the U.S. Supreme Court. This is a hard and hopeful story. Snyder tells it with energy, economy, wide-ranging empathy, and quiet passion." -James Goodman, author of Stories of Scottsboro
"A gripping story of how democracy triumphed under the most challenging circumstances. A timely book and a great read." -Patricia Sullivan, author of Justice Rising: Robert Kennedy’s America in Black and White
Available Editions
EDITION | Hardcover |
ISBN | 9781324036548 |
PRICE | $37.99 (USD) |
PAGES | 336 |