Energized, he attended a Birmingham Unemployment Council meeting, where he met members of the Communist party. Though small, the party’s Depression-era evangelism to African Americans, especially in the South, emphasized racial parity and class struggle. As the Depression deepened, their message resonated with the hungry, tired, and desperate seeking food, shelter, and work.
“I knew that this was what I’d been looking for all my life,” he wrote of that moment. “That date means a lot more to me than my birthday or any other day in my life. They believed in organizing and sticking together. They believed that we didn’t have to have bosses on our backs. They believed that Negroes ought to have equal rights with whites.”
He formally joined the Council and became a party organizer, mobilizing workers of all races on the shared struggles of the working class.
In 1930, as he’d later write in his manifesto, the 17-year-old represented Birmingham at the National Unemployment Convention in Chicago, organized an anti-lynching conference in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and represented at the Trade Union Unity League in New Orleans shortly after the Scottsboro Boys’ arrest.
After drawing scrutiny from Alabama officials for his union activity, Herndon headed to Atlanta, where he soon began organizing workers. Shortly after, according to an article in The Journal of Negro History, Herndon spearheaded a committee to mobilize interracial groups to advocate for rent assistance and unemployment insurance. “I couldn’t say how many workers were unemployed,” he’d later write. “The officials [kept] this information carefully hidden.”
By mid-June 1932, unemployment checks stopped altogether for thousands of residents, and the state shut down relief centers, forcing some people to leave for farm work. Many objected, demanding more help from the city. Herndon, now 19, stepped up, calling on officials to end the out-of-city work campaign and restore unemployment relief.
This is what led Herndon to galvanize the unemployed in the unforgettable march that last day in June — one that catapulted him into history. It also led to his subsequent monitoring and arrest. “I was placed in a [cell] and was shown a large electric chair, and told to spill everything I knew about the movement,” Herndon later remembered. “I refused to talk, and was held incommunicado for eleven days. Finally, I smuggled out a letter through another prisoner, and the International Labor Defense got on the job.”
