In the midst of the Great Depression in 1931, nine Black teenage boys were falsely convicted of allegedly raping two white women on a train in Scottsboro, Alabama. The Scottsboro Case quickly became one of the most infamous international spectacles that would eventually define the interwar period. The Scottsboro defense campaign, led by the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and the International Labor Defense (ILD), emphasized that the defendants’ case should be understood in the larger context of international workers’ struggles occurring throughout the imperial world. The Party’s campaign relied on several strategies to gain international significance, however, its decision to recruit Ada Wright—the mother of Scottsboro defendants, Andy and Roy Wright— to embark on a European speaking tour, was perhaps one of the most significant strategies it utilized.
Wright’s experiences on this tour point to the evolving international landscape that characterize the interwar period. Wright’s lived experience as a Black Southern domestic worker and mother informed her unique perspective of the international labor struggle that persisted during the Great Depression. Her analyses of Black workers’ and mothers’ struggles throughout the Jim Crow South made a considerable impression on British anti-imperial activists and workers alike. Her speeches not only galvanized European workers, but also empowered Black working class women and mothers in the United States to join the communist struggle for workers’ rights, women’s rights, and Black liberation. Her tour ultimately contributed to the formation of an interracial anti-imperialist Popular Front that circulated throughout Britain. When Wright initially embarked upon her European tour in 1933, scholar Susan Pennybacker explains that “London sat uncomfortably poised between Jim Crow and the Third Reich.” The Scottsboro case seemed to be the bridge between the condemnation of the growing fascist movement in Germany and the racialized organization of labor throughout the British Empire.