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before a jury of his peers.

If that be dangerous Communistic and radical, it is nevertheless
patriotic Americanism to which all thinking citizens can well subscribe.57

The ILD did appeal the verdict, claiming that the jury selection process was
unconstitutional. To much surprise, the Maryland Court of Appeals agreed with
the ILD and, on July 5,1932, awarded Lee a new trial. Jury rolls throughout
Maryland were thereby desegregated and an important legal precedent established

CO

- one that would have long term ramifications far beyond Maryland. °

On September 26, 1934, Euel Lee's second murder trail opened in Towson,
Maryland. Unlike the first trial in January, a large number of Black spectators
attended, an indication of the growing popular interest — and growing hopefulness

— in the Black community over the case. The ILD attorneys continued their
strategy of defending Lee by attacking Jim Crow. They argued that segregated
conditions in the courtroom prejudiced the jurors and asked for a change to a non-
segregated venue or a postponement of the trail until segregation was ended. They
further argued that the panel from which the jury was chosen, though integrated,
was substantially the same panel that the Court of Appeals had declared
unconstitutional; and the jury itself was again all white. The judges denied their
motions. The trial lasted three days, the jury deliberated almost three hours (in
contrast to twenty-three minutes in January). Euel Lee was again convicted of
murder, he was again sentence to death, the ILD again began a process of appeals,
and the Afro-American again editorialized on the importance of what the ILD and
CP had done, calling on its readers to donate money for Lee's appeals"

During the whole time that it was pursuing a legal defense of Euel Lee, the
ILD was also conducting a mass defense campaign. This campaign reflected basic
premises of the national ILD as well as the local: that litigation in bourgeois courts
was not enough, and had to be backed up by mass mobilization; that the courts
were not an isolated arena of struggle, but must be used to build the mass