1933 - Human Rights, Social Justice

Human Rights, Social Justice

The Nazis open the first German concentration camp March 20 at Dachau outside Munich. The facility is for communists and other political prisoners, Jews, and Roms (gypsies) (see Buchenwald, 1937).

The Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei, or secret police) is inaugurated by the Nazis under the leadership of Rudolph Dieles, 32, a brother-in-law of Hitler aide Hermann Goering, who has founded the organization. Industrialist Alfried Krupp, 26, joins the Schutz Staffeinel (SS), having been persuaded (along with his father, Gustav) by Hjalmar Schacht that the new Nazi regime will increase expenditures for armaments and outlaw trade unions.

German feminist Gertrude Baumer, now 59, loses the seat she has held since 1920 in the Reichstag, is interrogated by the new Gestapo, but continues to edit her newspaper Die Frau.

Turkey grants women the right to vote on the same basis as men.

Guatemala's president Jorge Ubico has 100 trade union, student, and political leaders shot (see politics, 1931). He has abolished debt slavery to appease Indian plantation workers, but the vagrancy law that he has pushed through has left their condition little altered, and he issues a decree permitting coffee and banana planters to kill their peons with impunity.

One of the alleged rape victims in the Scottsboro case of 1932 writes a note January 5 to her boyfriend Earl: "I want too make a statment too you," writes Ruby Bates. "Mary Sanders is a goddam lie about those Negroes jazzing me those policemen made me tell a lie that is my statement because I want too clear myself that is all . . . those Negroes did not touch me or those white boys I hope you will believe me the law dont . . . i was drunk at the time and did not know what i was doing i know it was wrong too let those Negroes die on account of me i hope you will believe my statement because it is the gods truth . . . i was jazzed but those white boys jazzed me i wish those Negroes are not Burnt on account of me it is those white Boys fault that is my statement and that is all i know i hope you tell the law." The "Scottsboro Boys" receive a new trial in Alabama (see 1932); it ends in conviction, and the Supreme Court will again reverse the convictions with a landmark ruling that blacks may not be systematically excluded from grand and trial juries. The International Labor Defense engages Romanian-born civil rights lawyer Samuel S. Leibowitz, 40, who comes down from New York with Shad Polier, 27, to take up the cause, a third trial with one black on the jury will end in conviction, but some indictments will be dropped, the sentences will be commuted to life imprisonment, and the defendants will serve a total of 130 years behind bars (one will not be paroled until 1951).

An Alabama court sentences black landowner Ned Cobb (originally Nate Shaw) to 12 years' imprisonment for exchanging shots with a white sheriff after coming to the support of a neighbor whose land was about to be possessed by deputies. Cotton prices have fallen so low that land farmed by black and white sharecroppers is worth even less than the crop grown on it, bankers and merchants loan the tenant farmers money based on the value of the crop, they take payment out of whatever cash the crop fetches, the farmers often have to use all their land for cash crops even if it means they do not have large enough gardens to grow food, and they have to borrow more money to keep their families fed. Now 48, Cobb has been relatively successful, plantation owners resent his success, he has organized a tenant farmers' union to fight against unfair treatment, but he will be imprisoned until 1945.

Lynchings spread across the South; lynch mobs kill 42 blacks.