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little to disagree on in their evaluation of the case. Houston praised much of the
ILD's role the case and called for unity between the ILD and NAACP in seeking
freedom for the defendants, and two shifted the focus of the debate to the more
theoretical points of the Black Belt Nation thesis.55
Several years later, William Patterson, previously national chair of the ILD,
remarked, "I think that perhaps on some occasions in our zeal to create a united
front we were too sharply critical of some of the forces with which we worked." A
self-criticism that blames excessive zeal for unity for overly critical and divisive
practice is obviously incomplete. Still, Patterson's reflection on the past does
describe, in any understated way, the treatment meted out to Charles Houston and
his colleagues by the ILD after the Soper decision. And, in this case, the endemic
ultra-leftism and sectarianism of Third Period Communism probably did the ILD
real damage. Houston was well connected and increasingly influential with the
Baltimore freedom movement, and his co-counsel in the Ades defense, Thurgood
Marshall, was an organic part of its leadership. A successful collaboration with
them in defense of Ades would have significantly advanced the position of the ILD
within the movement (and strengthened the overall movement). Instead, the ILD's
polemics against Houston must have reverberated through the leadership of the
Baltimore movement. Definite evidence of the damage done by the ILD's
sectarianism in this regard is, however, hard to come by. it is at least suggestive,
though, that in June 1934, after Ades' break with Houston and company, he asked
the Black lawyers of Baltimore to support him in his demand that a judge and
attorney earlier involved in the Euel Lee case be, respectively, impeached and
disbarred. The Black lawyers tersely turned him down.5"
However, it should be reiterated that the controversy between Ades and the
ILD on the one side, and Houston and his colleagues on the other, occurred in the
context on a concerted effort by the government to weaken the ILD, and to brand
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