ABSTRACT
Harvard University professor George Elliot Baker had a well-deserved reputation among his students as a tough taskmaster. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was under intense pressure from blacks to revive the campaign it had begun in the 1920s to get a federal antilynching law passed. In the summer of 1933, White outlined a proposed congressional antilynching bill and consulted with the American Civil Liberties Union and other social reform groups to gain their support. The Wagner-Costigan antilynching bill was almost a carbon copy of the Dyer bill. For a brief time in 1931, the International Labor Defense, set up by the Communists during the 1920s to defend labor radicals and party activists, even worked with NAACP attorneys on the legal defense of 'Scottsboro boys', eight young black men falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama. Attorney General Frank Murphy created a separate Civil Liberties Unit in Justice Department's Criminal Division in February 1939.
