The Workers' Defense League, a socialist labor rights organization, began a national campaign calling for the commutation of Waller's sentence, and was supported in its efforts by novelist Pearl S. Buck, philosopher John Dewey, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

The case failed to overturn the poll tax, but led to reform of Virginia's penal system and motivated Pauli Murray to begin her career in civil rights law.

[7] At 6:30 AM on July 15, 1940, Odell drove to Davis's farm to get the wheat with Annie, relatives Archie Waller and Thomas Younger, and a friend named Buck Fitzgerald.

[6] Afraid he would be lynched, Waller fled to Columbus, Ohio, but was arrested there at the home of an uncle on July 24 after a manhunt involving police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The RWL's members had been expelled from the Communist Party USA in 1934 for their Trotskyist beliefs, and the organization was unpopular due to its opposition to World War II.

[13] The group compared the trial to that of the Scottsboro Boys, nine African-American young men accused of rape in Alabama under suspicious circumstances, and began to criticize the racism and economic conditions of Waller's rural Virginia county.

[14] Historian Richard B. Sherman argues that the group brought negative publicity to Waller's trial from the start by creating the perception that "radical outsiders" were behind his defense.

[21] On September 27, 1940, after less than an hour's deliberation, the jury found Waller guilty of first degree murder and sentenced him to death, a verdict praised by the Virginia press covering the trial.

[23] After the trial, the RWL agreed to pass responsibility for the public campaign and legal appeals to the WDL, provided that the case continued to be handled "on a class struggle basis", with attention to national issues as well as Waller's specific situation.

[4] In December, Virginia Governor James H. Price granted Waller his first stay of execution, this one for three months, giving the new defense additional time to study the case.

[29] [The Waller case] attracted national attention, and it expressly highlighted racial identity as a component of criminal justice, press coverage, and regional exceptionalism.

[36] In a final attempt to win a pardon or commutation from the governor, activists staged events around the country, including a two-hour blackout of the lights in the primarily African-American neighborhood of Harlem in New York City.

[38] Pauli Murray, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters' A. Philip Randolph, and the NAACP's Walter White traveled to Washington in an attempt to lobby the president personally, unaware that he had already secretly appealed on their behalf.

[39] The president's apparent refusal to act damaged his relationship with civil rights leaders; Murray, in an open letter on behalf of the movement, called it a "stab in the back".

[41] Waller wrote a ten-page "Dying Statement" before his execution, admitting he had made mistakes but insisting that he had acted in self-defense: I haven't lived so upright and I have asked God to forgive me and I feel he has ...

[46] Governor Darden, influenced by the popular sentiment that the case had evoked, began a reform of the Virginia penal system, including the creation of an official Pardon and Parole Board with the authority to commute sentences.