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Julian Bond
August, 1972

Writing of another political trial, his own, in 1951, Dr. W. E. B. DuBois said:

"What turns me cold in all this experience is the certainly that thousands of innocent victims are in jail today because they had neither money, experience nor friends to help them. The eyes of the world were on our trial despite the desperate effort of the press and radio to suppress the facts and cloud the real issues; the courage and money of friends and of strangers who dared stand for a principle free me; but God only knows how many who were as innocent as I and my colleagues are today in hell. They daily stagger out of prison doors embittered, vengeful, hopeless, ruined. And of this army of the wronged, the proportion of Negroes is frightful. We protect and defend sensational cases where Negroes are involved. But the great mass of arrested or accused black folk do have ^{have no} defense. There is desperate need . . . to ^N oppose this national racket of railroading to jails and chain gangs the poor, friendless and black".*

Dr. DuBois' 1951 observations are twice as true twenty years later, the practice of charging and imprisoning the helpless and

*The Autobiography of W. E. B. DuBois, International Publishers.