Communist councilman from Harlem : autobiographical notes written in a federal penitentiary / by Benjamin J. Davis.

Includes index and notes.

This text includes a list of illustrations, depicting Benjamin Davis throughout his personal and political life.

1990 introduction / by Simon W. Gerson --

Foreword / by Henry Winston --

Editor's note / [Editor unamed] --

1, The world I was born into -- 2. A southern education -- 3. I became a lawyer -- 4. A Herndon case -- 5. After the Herndon trial -- 6. The impossible case -- 7. In the city council -- 8. Death of my father - 9. Civil rights in the postwar period -- 10. My friend Pete Cacchione dies -- 11. Trial and sentence -- 12. Life in the Terre Haute Penitentiary --

Appendix: 1. Of hypocrisy and the like -- 2. The instinction of being first -- 3. A trip to Mexico -- 4. A weekend in the far west -- 5. Anything can happen --

Addendum: Ben Davis speaks to the Harvard Law Forum.

"This book tells the story of a Southern black man who became a Communist in the struggle to save a black youth from electrocution in Georgia. The youth was Angelo Herndon, a young Communist who was seeking to unite black and white unemployed workers in the fight for jobs and bread in Atlanta during the height of the Great Depression in the 1930s. The author of the book was his lawyer. In later years the author was a frontline fighter against racism and political corruption in New York City. The first black Communist to be elected to legislative office in the United States, he was a city countil for six years, from 1944 to 1949....Benjamin J. Davis's story is an inspiration in the struggle for black liberation and socialism. This is why the Department of Justice kept his book in prison for ten years after the author himself was released. The writing was done under enormous difficulties in a tiny, poorly lit cell in the Jim-Crow section of the Federal Penitentiary at Terre Haute, Indiana, several months of it in solitary confiement." -- from the foreword.