Junius Scales (March 26, 1920 – August 5, 2002) was an American leader of the Communist Party of the United States of America notable for his arrest and conviction under the Smith Act in the 1950s.
At this time he openly and publicly identified himself as the Communist Party leader in North Carolina, leading to newspaper stories which embarrassed his wealthy family and led to his forced resignation from his post on the state committee of the Southern Conference on Human Welfare.
His wife moved back to New York, where she lived under an alias in the Bronx with her mother and their infant daughter, with Junius making carefully guarded visits to his family only at infrequent intervals.
While free on bail while appealing his conviction, Scales remained as state chairman of the CP until 1956, when he denounced the Soviet invasion of Hungary.
After a brief association with the dissident John Gates faction he quit the Communist Party in 1957, following Nikita Khrushchev's revelations of Stalin-era atrocities.
His arrest by the FBI on a street corner in Memphis in 1954 was the beginning of a seven-year legal ordeal, in which he was represented by prominent lawyer Telford Taylor and North Carolina civil rights attorney McNeill Smith.
His memoirs, "Cause At Heart: A Former Communist Remembers", written with his closest friend, Richard Nickson, published by the University of Georgia Press, appeared in 1987.