June 28, 2025 marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the International Labor Defense, or ILD. This organization of activist lawyers and thousands of supporters paved the way for many mass-based legal defense strategies and served as a predecessor to other progressive legal organizations active today, like the National Lawyer’s Guild. The ILD represented defendants in a number of contentious political cases including Sacco and Vanzetti, Tom Mooney, Angelo Herndon and the Scottsboro Boys. They piloted a number of pressure tactics still commonly used today, such as building mass support in the form of community defense campaigns.
Despite the rich legacy and lasting impact the ILD contributed to the practice of law, especially in radical political spaces, its history is too often buried or ignored. However, on the 100th anniversary of its creation, amidst a political environment of anti-trangender Supreme Court cases, the revival of Red Scare era laws to target pro-Palestine activists and the extralegal deportation of migrants, the revolutionary lessons of the ILD are more important than ever.
Born out of struggle
The ILD grew out of an urgent need for organized, adept and politically-minded lawyers. In the early 20th century in the United States, a strong labor movement led by socialists won major battles against the robber baron capitalists of the Gilded Age. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, the American ruling class feared similar upheaval here. What could an emboldened, organized working class accomplish?
The capitalists lashed out, and a witch hunt against these leaders, known as the First Red Scare, ensued. Left-wing political dissidents, from communists to anarchists, were ruthlessly targeted in the Palmer Raids of 1919-20. These raids, led by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer under president Woodrow Wilson, targeted homes and union halls to hunt down the most militant anticapitalist leaders of the time, leading to the arrest and attempted deportation of thousands of mostly immigrant labor leaders.
In 1920, the National Defense Committee was rapidly formed to defend those arrested in the Palmer Raids. The legal defense was ultimately successful, with fewer than 10% of those targeted actually facing deportation. However, the threat of attack by the state remained. In 1922, federal agents raided the Communist Party convention and arrested the majority of its top leaders. The need for a legal defense arm of the movement continued to grow amid repression, and socialist labor leaders, from Eugene Debs to Bill Haywood, got on board. Finally, in 1925, the ILD was born.
A bastion of revolutionary defense
The ILD hit the ground running with a focus on labor work, defending numbers of striking workers from legal retaliation from their employers. They defended striking anthracite coal miners across Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Illinois, textile workers in Massachusetts and North Carolina and many more workers jailed for striking against the boss’s repression. The ILD’s newspaper, the Labor Defender, was circulated to tens of thousands of followers throughout the U.S.
Beginning in the 1930s, the ILD began to shift focus. The Communist International, or Comintern, had recently adopted the Black Belt thesis, which argued that Black people in the United States constituted an oppressed nation. The entire Communist Party shifted its work to anti-racist organizing and building multinational unity, and the ILD followed suit. It began to increasingly emphasize the inequality of the law toward Black people in the U.S. under a racist system and to represent an increasing number of civil rights cases. Additionally, the ILD began recruiting a greater number of Black lawyers, like William Patterson and Benjamin Davis. Davis was radicalized by his involvement in the fight to free Angelo Herndon, a Black labor organizer jailed for attempting to organize across racial divisions. Herndon’s case became a flashpoint in the national struggle against racist repression, and lawyers like Davis became leaders in the struggle to desegregate the legal profession from within.
The Scottsboro Case
Of all the cases spearheaded by the ILD, the one with the most far reaching legacy is that of the Scottsboro Boys. In 1931, nine Black teenagers were falsely accused of raping two white women on a train in Alabama. The ILD swiftly mobilized a national campaign to defend the teens, not only providing legal representation but also building a mass movement that included rallies, petitions, and international pressure.
The Scottsboro case marked a turning point in U.S. legal history. It was one of the first times that a broad-based defense campaign publicly exposed the role of racism in the criminal legal system and successfully brought it to the attention of people far beyond the South. The ILD’s legal strategy forced multiple retrials and appeals, ultimately reaching the U.S. Supreme Court and resulting in landmark decisions about the right to adequate legal representation and the inclusion of Black jurors.
Importantly, the ILD’s campaign showed that legal defense need not be confined to the courtroom. A strategy that paired legal representation with political agitation and public pressure could win larger gains than previously thought possible. The ILD’s model proved that mobilizing working-class and oppressed communities to defend one another was a powerful counter to the supposedly neutral arm of the law. These ideas would go on to shape the future of civil rights lawyering in the U.S. and around the world.
A lasting legacy
With the recent release of Mahmoud Khalil from ICE detention, the impact the ILD has left on the legal profession and the necessity of studying their tactics becomes clearer than ever. Khalil’s case contains an uncanny number of similarities to the Palmer Raids that necessitated the formation of the ILD: a raid led by federal agents detains an immigrant activist targeted for his political beliefs and attempts to deport him, only to be thwarted by a mass movement in support of his right to political expression.
Khalil’s case, along with those of Rumeysa Ozturk, Mohsen Mahdawi, Momodou Taal and many other pro-Palestine student activists, demonstrates that today, we are in the midst of a new Red Scare, and the very same laws used to justify targeting immigrant activists a century ago are being revived to chill dissent once again. In an age of escalating repression, where the fundamental right to free speech is under attack, the need for political legal defense has never been greater.
On the anniversary of the ILD’s founding, we must not simply remember their legacy. We must continue their fight.
Feature image: Scottsboro defendants with ILD lawyer Samuel Leibowitz, 1932. Credit: Encyclopedia of Alabama.
