The League of Struggle for Negro Rights was organized by the
Communist Party in 1930 as the successor to the
American Negro Labor Congress. The League was particularly active in organizing support for the "
Scottsboro Boys", nine black men sentenced to death in 1931 for crimes they had not committed. It also campaigned for a separate black nation in the South, one of the CPUSA's principal tenets in the early 1930s, and against
police brutality, the Italian occupation of
Ethiopia and
Jim Crow laws, while also advocating a more general policy of opposition to
fascism and support for the
Soviet Union.