B. D. Amis
B. D. Amis (Benjamin DeWayne Amis; 7 July 1896 – 9 June 1993) was an African American labor organizer and civil rights leader. Particularly influential in the fight for African Americans' and workers during the period of official segregation in the South and informal discrimination throughout the country, Amis is most remembered for his militant Communist activism on behalf of the notable legal cases of the falsely-accused Scottsboro Boys, the African American organizer Angelo Herndon, as well as the white labor leader Tom Mooney.
Biography
Born Benjamin DeWayne Amis in Chicago, Illinois in 1893, Amis went by B.D. Amis throughout his life, although often signing his letters as "B. DeWayne Amis" in the 1930s. Growing up in the black neighborhoods of Chicago, B. D. Amis was strongly influenced by the anti-lynching writings of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, a Southern-born African American journalist, civil rights leader, and women's rights activist then living in Chicago.
Politically involved since the early 1920s, by 1928, Amis was president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Peoria branch. The recently founded Communist Party, organized on a favorable position towards African Americans, provided an invitation to a meeting in New York, which made a profoundly interested him as one of the few non-black organizations in the 1920s willing to seriously struggle against racism, and Amis would soon be working with William Z. Foster, the party leader and presidential candidate, whom Amis would help renominate together with the African American vice president nominee James W. Ford in 1932.