Yokinen Show Trial

This publicity attracted the attention of U.S. Immigration authorities, who immediately detained Yokinen for deportation on the grounds that he had violated terms of his entry into the country by holding membership in an organization advocating the use of "force and violence" to overthrow the United States government.

By way of contrast, American Communist support among the black workers of the United States was extremely weak, limited to a small handful of radicals around the New York City-based African Blood Brotherhood, a number of whom were themselves immigrants to the country from the Caribbean basin.

[5] As the decade of the 1920s drew to a close, the Communist Party looked to renew its effort to win the allegiance of black Americans, beginning with a self-examination of the racial views and behaviors of its own members — the overwhelming majority of whom were ethnic immigrant whites.

The CP, according to Harry Haywood, used this specific case of racism to launch a struggle against white chauvinism in the party, and consolidate an understanding of the newly adopted position on the national question.

On the walls of the hall was a banner which read: “Race Inferiority is a White Ruling Class Lie: Smash the Jim Crow Laws and Practices.” The trial received wide attention in black newspapers as well as the bourgeois press.

It demonstrated to the black community that the CP was one organization serious about fighting racism and according to Haywood was responsible for the party’s ability to initiate the Scottsboro Defense (see Cha.

[7] These details piqued the interest of members of the conservative Herbert Hoover administration, public concern about the American Communist Party having been stoked by the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee the previous year.

[8] Despite the fact that he had married in the United States and his wife had given birth to a daughter on American soil (making her a citizen of that country), the deportation order against Yokinen was sustained in New York's highest court.