Defense (ILD), of the "Scottsboro Boys", nine black men arrested in 1931 in Scottsboro, Alabama after a fight with some white men also riding the rails. They were convicted and sentenced to death for allegedly raping two white women on the same train. None of the defendants had shared the same boxcar as either of the women they were charged with raping. The International Labor Defense was the first to offer its assistance. William L. Patterson, a black attorney who had left a successful practice to join the Communist Party, returned from training in the Soviet Union to run the ILD. After fierce disputes with the NAACP, with the ILD seeking to mount a broad-based political campaign to free the nine while the NAACP followed a more legalistic strategy, the ILD took control of the defendants' appeals. The ILD attracted national press attention to the case, and highlighted the racial injustices in the region. The ILD overturned the men's convictions on appeal to the United States Supreme Court, which held in Powell v. Alabama, that the State's failure to provide the defendants with counsel in a capital case violated their rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. The ILD's battles with the NAACP continued when the cases returned to Alabama for retrial. The NAACP blamed the ILD for the lead defendant's being convicted and sentenced to death in the retrial. The NAACP later agreed to join with the ILD in defending the nine after other black organizations and a number of NAACP branches attacked it for that position, so the tensions never disappeared. The ILD retained control of the second round of appeals. It won reversals of these convictions in Norris v. Alabama, , on the ground that the exclusion of blacks from the jury pool had violated the defendants' constitutional rights. In a third retrial, all of the defendants were convicted. The Scottsboro defense was one of the ILD's many cases in the South at that time: it also defended Angelo Herndon, a Communist Party activist sentenced to death by the State of Georgia for treason due to his advocacy of national self-determination for blacks in the Southern United States. The ILD also demanded retribution from state governments for the families of lynching victims, for their failure to protect blacks. It pushed for due process for criminal defendants. For a period of time in the early and mid-1930s, the ILD was