The group of teenaged black lads riding illegally on a train from Chattanooga towards Memphis, Tennessee in 1931 included two brothers, Andrew “Andy” and Leroy “Roy” Wright. The group was accused to assaulting two white girls, and the several trials in Scottsboro, in northern Alabama in 1932 became symbolic of American racial bigotry and state violence. Eight of them were sentenced to the electric chair (Roy was aged thirteen and the sentence did not apply to him). Among protestors were the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP] and the communist-dominated International Labor Defense. Sympathetic individuals were to be found in Europe, and Ada Wright, the widowed house servant and mother of the two, came to Britain under the sponsorship of the ILD.

Ada Wright visited over a dozen countries, reaching Moscow, in 1932. Her arrest in Prague “on a charge of ‘meddling in Czech affairs'” was noted by the Evening Dispatch (5 September 1932, page 7). Various groups formed, and the Rochdale Observer (10 September 1932, page 1) carried an advert that the Rochdale defence committee would be hold a public meeting. One speaker was H. Pollit (sic) who was Harry Pollitt, the Lancashire radical who was the general secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and who dominated the British party for decades.

The very strong influence of communists in America – and in Britain – took the focus away from Ada Wright’s testimony as a black woman raised in the segregated and violent southern states. Her son Roy was released from prison in 1937, his brother in 1944 (but he broke his parole terms and finally walked free in 1950).

Dan T. Carter. Scottsboro. A Tragedy of the American South (Louisiana State University Press, 1969; rev. ed. 2007) has little detail on Scottsboro and Europe. Minute books, memoirs, and local newspaper reports around Britain may well reveal something on Ada Wright.