Angelo Herndon was charged under Georgia law with “attempting to incite insurrection”—a 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 Can’t Kill a Man Because of the Books He Reads chronicles Herndon’s five-year quest for freedom during a time when Blacks, white liberals and the radical left joined forces to define the nation’s commitment to civil rights and civil liberties.
Brad Snyder is the St. Thomas More Professor in Law and History; Anne Fleming Research Professor at Georgetown Law. He is the author of Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment, The House of Truth: A Washington Political Salon and the Foundations of American Liberalism and A Well-Paid Slave: Curt Flood’s Fight for Free Agency in Professional Sports.
Kenneth W. Mack is the inaugural Lawrence D. Biele Professor of Law and Affiliate Professor of History at Harvard University. He is also the co-faculty leader of the Harvard Law School Program on Law and History. He is the author of Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer He is also the co-editor of In Between and Across: Legal History Without Boundaries.