You Can't Kill a Man Because of the Books He Reads

Decades before the impeachment of an American president for a similar offense, Angelo Herndon was charged under Georgia law with attempting to incite insurrectiona 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 Cant Kill a Man Because of the Books He Reads chronicles Herndons five-year quest for freedom during a time when Blacks, white liberals, and the radical left joined forces to define the nations commitment to civil rights and civil liberties. Herndons champions included the young, Black Harvard Law Schooleducated 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 Herndons 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 Herndons narrow escape from certain death because of his unpopular political beliefs, You Cant Kill a Man Because of the Books He Reads explores Herndons 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 democracya landmark decision in 1930s America as well as today.