The old International Labor Defense (ILD) . . . tried to influence the American Negro, and came into conflict with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People as a result of the ILD's communist tactics in covering the Scottsboro (Alabama) Case into a vehicle for communist propaganda. In this case nine Negro boys were indicted in 1931 on charges of having raped two white girls.
After the Scottsboro boys were first convicted, the NAACP charged that the defense "fell considerably short of perfection," and then retained the late famed Chicago criminal lawyer, Clarence Darrow, to represent the boys. In 1931 the late Walter White, then head of the NAACP, said the Daily Worker accused another defense attorney, Stephen R. Roddy, ". . . of being a member of the Ku Klux Klan, of having conspired with the prosecution to electrocute the nine boys, of having been the inmate of an insane asylum." According to White, the communists also charged the NAACP "as being 'in league with the lyncher-bosses of the South,' as plotters to 'murder the Scottsboro martyrs,' as sycophantic 'tools of the capitalists.'" The NAACP withdrew from the case, recognizing that the Communist Party was interested only in promoting "Red Fascism" in America.
George S. Schuyler, an editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, reflected the consensus of American Negroes when he concluded, ". . . The record shows that where and when the Communists seemed to be fighting for Negro rights, their object was simply to strengthen the hand of [the then 'soviet'] Russia."