Man & Automaton

A tall, broad-shouldered Negro told a solemn story in a Manhattan federal courtroom last week. Manhattan Councilman Benjamin J. Davis, one of the eleven Communists on trial for conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the U.S. Government by force, was the third defendant to take the stand. He was the first to explain with any degree of conviction how and why some Americans become Communists.

In a low, drawling voice, Davis recalled his early days in Dawson, Ga., where he grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. Grandson of a slave and son of a newspaper editor, he had it better than most Southern Negroes. He went north to Amherst where he played varsity football, then took a law degree at Harvard.

After he returned to Georgia to practice law, he was engaged to defend a 19-year-old Communist named Angelo Herndon, who had been arrested for leading an unemployment demonstration. "This case," said Davis, "was the turning point of my whole life. In the course of trying it, I was made the victim with my client of the worst kind of treatment against Negroes. The judge referred to me and my client as 'nigger' and 'darky'* and threatened many times to jail me.

"I could see before me the whole treatment of the Negro people in the South. The fact that I had been luckier than most people in education and income did not shield me . . .

"In defending Herndon I had to familiarize myself with many Communist books and they made sense to me. As I read them I thought of them in terms of my father and the Ku Klux Klan crosses burned in his front yard when he became a member of the Republican National Committee, and of my mother, who died early because of that kind of thing."

The next year Davis joined the party, moved to New York City and began rising in the party hierarchy. Along the way he learned the tricks of the Communist game. Last week, the day after testifying effectively as a person, he became a party automaton again, using all the old harassing tactics--trying to slip irrelevant evidence into the record, denouncing a ticklish question as "Hitlerian distortion," flouting the rules to the point where Judge Harold Medina threatened to lock him up for contempt as he had already locked up four of Davis' fellow defendants.

* Communist Davis may have remembered wrong. The trial judge insisted that he used no such language himself, although he permitted witnesses to do so.

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