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accusation was that the undue delay of justice in the Euel Lee case had forced the
mob to take the law into it own hands. Shamefully, Governor Ritchie and state
officials came to adopt a sanitized version of the same argument shortly thereafter;
as Ritchie himself put it, "I am studying our judicial system to see what changes can
be made to prevent long delays through appeals as those delays in the Lee case
were responsible for the two lynch ings which have followed. '
And then there was the embarrassing dispute over Euel Lee's body. Ades
had obtained Lee's permission to take possession of his body after his execution;
the ILD planned to make Lee's body the center of an anti-lynching protest in New
York. Maryland Judge Eugene O'Dunne, however, blocked this plan, and Lee was
quickly buried, his grave guarded for several days by armed police. This
controversy led to a rare editorial criticism of the ILD in the Afro, and to tensions
with some of its allies in the Black freedom movement.
Nevertheless, the long Euel Lee defense campaign had left the ILD and the
Baltimore Communist Party with considerable influence among the active elements
of the Black community. The ILD's relationship with the Afro-American was of
course an indication of this. The Afro was the principal opinion-making organ of
and (as was argued above) the central bearer of political culture in the Baltimore
Black community during tiiese years, and its virtual alliance with the ILD around
the Euel Lee case suggests that the organization had much support in the more
progressive sectors of the Black middle strata and beyond. In fact, the Afro
responded favorably to more than just the ILD and its work around Euel Lee; as
Haywood Farrar argues in his fine study of the Afro-American, this paper had a
"high opinion*1 of the Communist Party in general in the early 1930s. There were
many favorable editorials and positive news stories in the Afro during those years
on the whole range of activities Baltimore's Communists engaged in — May Day
celebrations, unemployed work, interracial dances, the MWIU - with special
emphasis on the anti-racist aspects of these activities. Additionally, Afro managing
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