This letter addressed to Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945), president of the United States, was published in issue Nº 6 of the journal Movimiento (1933–36), the publication of the Confederación de Trabajadores Intelectuales de Uruguay (C.T.I.U.). The signers call themselves simply “Uruguayan intellectuals,” without distinguishing political position or profession. The letter protests the North American government’s prosecution of nine young black men in Scottsboro accused of—and eight of them sentenced to death for—raping two young white women (the only one not convicted was 12 years old). With the support of the United States Communist Party, the verdict was appealed to the Supreme Court of the State of Alabama for lack of due process. Seven of the eight convictions were upheld and a new trial granted in the ninth case, where the accused was a minor (13 years old). During the new trial, one of the supposed victims dropped the charges and admitted that her accusations were false. The signers (“Uruguayan intellectuals”) condemn the United States courts in one of the first local protests against the North American government; the political (racist) dimension of the legal system is addressed. During the previous decade, protest against “imperialism” had been unleashed when Augusto César Sandino, leader of the resistance to the North American invasion of Nicaragua (1927–33), was assassinated. In the thirties, intellectuals in the Rio de la Plata were increasingly staunch in their opposition to racism, specifically to the treatment of blacks in the United States, which was also understood in terms of opposition to Nazi-Fascism in Europe. The letter states: “At each conference, in each publication, and in each poem, we let the truth about the Scottsboro case out. Scottsboro is a cry against injustice that rings out the world over.”
This document attests to the political repercussions and anti-imperialist unrest on the local art scene pursuant to Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros’s visit to the country in 1933.