The Ohio woman who beat the Red Scare blacklists

COLUMBUS, Ohio—The place the Columbus Conference Heart’s concrete parking storage now sits, there as soon as stood an previous dwelling that hosted a modest bookstore stocked with liberal titles and publications, together with picks from the Nationwide Affiliation for the Examine of Negro Life and Historical past.

The institution was run by the owners: the unconventional organizer and activist, Anna Hass Morgan, and her husband, Richard Morgan, a outstanding Anthropology professor at Ohio State.

A long time in the past, the 2 misplaced all the things after Anna was referred to as earlier than the Ohio Un-American Actions Fee for her labor organizing, civil rights activism, and electoral work.

To Columbus

Anna Hass Morgan was a fierce, relentless lady who carried herself with an air of fearlessness. When she was protesting in opposition to Nazis marching via Chicago, police instructed her she was blocking visitors despite the fact that she stood safely on the sidewalk.

“I put my arms round a tree, and I stated I wouldn’t transfer and I wasn’t blocking the visitors as a result of the tree had been there longer than I had, and so they hadn’t moved the tree,” she stated in an interview. Two police needed to pry her from the tree and drag her away from the road. This was the primary occasion revealed in her 800-page FBI file.

Morgan was born in 1894 in Windfall, R.I., and spent a lot of her life on the transfer. Radicalized by Eugene Debs’ go to to the state, she attended Brown College for 2 years earlier than transferring to Cuba for 4 years together with her then-husband, Rubio, within the late 1910s.

She then returned to Rhode Island earlier than logging time in Chicago and Champaign, Ailing. Throughout the Nice Despair, Morgan organized unemployed employees, led protests in opposition to the shortage of medical care, and raised cash for placing miners and to purchase ambulances for the Spanish Civil Warfare.

She was additionally a member of the Girls’s Worldwide League for Peace and Freedom, the American League In opposition to Warfare and Fascism, and the Communist Get together USA. Progressively, Rubio grew weary of Morgan’s activism. He instructed her that she had to decide on between him or the occasion.

“I selected the Communist Get together,” she proclaimed. They divorced, and Morgan briefly moved to Indianapolis. She then married Richard Morgan and the 2 moved to Columbus.

Struggles in Columbus

Regardless of the Communist Get together being compelled to function underground as a result of repression and arrest of its management, the Franklin County membership boasted between 300 and 400 members. These members, together with Morgan, had been central to numerous native organizations and struggles. They had been actively engaged within the Progressive Get together, within the Black-led Vanguard League, and varied union struggles.

Within the early Forties, they organized in help of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Govt Order 8802, which prohibited racial discrimination for federal employment and arrange the Honest Employment Follow Fee.

Richard Morgan organized a Black historical past exhibit on the artwork museum and invited the founding father of the Nationwide Affiliation for the Examine of Negro Life and Historical past, the trailblazing Black historian Carter Woodson, to host the Affiliation’s annual assembly in Columbus.

This reportedly angered metropolis leaders, together with the Columbus Dispatch’s A.B. Johnson who, in keeping with Anna, “despatched phrase to the museum board that the exhibit must be closed up directly.” However the Columbus Citizen coated the battle and lecturers each Black and white spoke up in help of the exhibit, saying, “This was the very best factor that occurred to Columbus to have this exhibit open.”

Months earlier than she was subpoenaed to testify earlier than the Ohio Un-American Actions Fee in 1952, Morgan spearheaded reduction efforts for a strike happening simply east of South Linden.

The Mine, Mill, and Smelters Union led the strike in opposition to the American Zinc Oxide Plant, an organization that was poisoning its employees and the shantytown neighborhood the place employees lived, dubbed the “American Addition,” with poisonous fumes. The fumes induced respiratory sicknesses and loss of life, and the prolonged strike left Black residents within the American Addition neighborhood financially ruined.

The Communist Get together requested Morgan to chair a reduction committee that raised strike reduction funds, in addition to a solidarity demonstration that led to a dozen middle-class white residents being arrested for supporting the employees, an motion that boosted morale for these on strike.

Morgan had been arrested quite a few occasions in Columbus for her activism. As soon as, a mob raided the house of a neighborhood occasion organizer. After police ended the house raid, somebody referred to as Morgan to warn her that they had been more likely to come to her dwelling and bookstore subsequent. They didn’t, however the specter of mob violence, arrest, and police brutality always hung over the heads of organizers within the metropolis and throughout the nation.

Though the native Communist Get together was underground, it nonetheless remained underneath surveillance as nicely. Morgan recalled having government committee conferences in automobiles parked hidden alongside the Scioto River, and her husband was fired from OSU and the Ohio Historic Society for suspicion of being a Communist.

Morgan received a job as a nurse and took up different odd jobs to remain afloat, and the couple ended up transferring to a farm at 5800 Cleveland Ave., the place strip malls now stand. There was a concerted effort from private and non-private forces to stifle the beneficial properties that employees made whereas union density and radicalism flourished.

“In Dayton with fridge folks, in Akron with rubber, in Youngstown with metal, [the bosses] felt they needed to do one thing, and so they introduced in Harvey Matusow to interrupt the union. For $300 a month, he lied and lied about what the unions had been doing,” Morgan stated.

Matusow was a infamous paid witness through the McCarthy period, offering quite a few phony testimonies throughout the nation. Initially a paid informant working contained in the Communist Get together earlier than being expelled by the occasion, Matusow as soon as claimed that The New York Instances had 126 Communists on its Sunday sections employees, despite the fact that the Sunday sections employees numbered solely 100 folks.

He revealed his many lies in his e book False Witness, the place he admitted to fabricating tales concerning the Communists in Ohio unions in alternate for the cash companies had been paying him in an try to interrupt the unions.

“Huge enterprise noticed that as a way to break the unions, the Communists have to be hounded out of labor management,” Anita Waters, a former professor at Denison College, wrote in a Folks’s World article about Morgan. “Businessmen enlisted elected officers within the Ohio legislature to try this work for them.”

The Ohio Un-American Actions Fee

In 1952, Anna Hass Morgan was subpoenaed to come back earlier than the Ohio Un-American Actions Fee (OUAC), Ohio’s rendition of the Home Un-American Actions Committee, run by State Sen. Gordon Renner.

“Swiftly it simply appeared as if town was simply blowing up,” Morgan stated. “They threatened our lives, they threatened to burn our property, and all that.”

The subpoena alone was sufficient to blacklist a person. No lawyer would come anyplace near her. She was smeared within the press, and the fundamental requirements of on a regular basis life—similar to having insurance coverage—grew to become unattainable. “Folks had been afraid to be seen with us,” she later stated.

Throughout the listening to, Morgan was bombarded with particular questions on her activism and involvement within the Communist Get together, all of which she refused to reply. Her ready assertion was printed out as a leaflet and handed out by the United Electrical Employees, and later picked up by native papers. Morgan’s pleading of the Fifth Modification led to her arrest for contempt, and she or he was swiftly convicted.

OUAC really useful a continuation of anti-Communist repression, and the state legislature obliged. In 1953, two payments had been signed into legislation, one authorizing the firing of public staff who had been members of “subversive teams,” and the opposite authorizing the firing of public staff who refused to testify as as to if or not they had been members of such organizations.

Morgan was an unyielding particular person, a girl who wouldn’t cede to even probably the most all-encompassing and repressive forces. She discovered Thelma Furry, a lawyer who had simply graduated from the College of Akron Faculty of Legislation and herself a member of the Communist Get together.

“We agreed that someone needed to cease the Committee, and possibly I used to be the one to do it,” Morgan stated. After seven years of preventing, Morgan reached the U.S. Supreme Courtroom, which unanimously overturned her conviction, defending her proper to free speech. As Morgan put it: “All of the 9 previous males determined in my favor.”

After the resolute Morgan beat Ohio’s blacklists, she and her husband continued to battle for labor and civil rights. She recalled in an interview how dangerous Jim Crow was in Columbus. Black residents couldn’t enter many native eating places, had been sure to the galleries in film theaters, and suffered from racist violence.

In her later years, she marched in protest of the Vietnam Warfare. In 1968, she moved to Massachusetts, the place she lived to age 101.

Now, the girl whose life is a testomony to working-class defiance, and who has largely been purged from native reminiscence, ought to have her personal place in Columbus’ historical past restored. In any case, it was her defiance that introduced down the Ohio Un-American Actions Fee, and that ought to function a mannequin for present and future generations to hunt out injustices that want correcting and to say, “Perhaps I’m the one to do it.”

This text initially appeared in Matter Information. It’s reprinted right here with permission.

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