Workers Defense League Collection

The Workers Defense League (WDL) was founded in August 1936 stemming from various groups including chapters of the Labor and Socialist Defense Committee; with the main goal to defend union organizers and workers and promote labor rights. Original officers included Norman Thomas, David Clendenin, George S. Counts, Pauli Murray, James Farmer, A. Philip Randolph, and Joe Felmet. The WDL also served as the legal arm of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, an interracial union of tenant farmers and sharecroppers.

Some of the causes that were supported by the WDL included providing assistance for immigration and deportation cases; conscientious objectors; conscription; opposition of Japanese American incarceration; desegregation of the armed forces; anti-semitism, Jim Crow laws; and equal rights. Along with other organizations such as National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Civil Rights Congress, the Southern Christian Leadership Council, and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), WDL also supported civil rights cases. One of the cases that WDL is known for taking is that of Odell Waller, a Virginia sharecropper that fatally shot his landlord in self-defense in 1940. WDL waged a nationwide campaign in his defense, but their efforts were unsuccessful and Waller was executed in 1942.