Brad Snyder with Brian Jones: You Can’t Kill a Man Because of the Books He Reads: Angelo Herndon’s Fight for Free Speech

​Join Author and Professor Brad Snyder as he discusses his new book You Can’t Kill a Man Because of the Books He Reads: Angelo Herndon’s Fight for Free Speech with the Director of the Center for Educators and Schools at the New York Public Library Brian Jones. 

This event will take place in person at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library on the 7th Floor.

The story of a young, Black Communist Party organizer wrongly convicted of attempting to incite insurrection and the landmark case that made him a civil rights hero.

Decades before the impeachment of an American president for a similar offense, Angelo Herndon was charged under Georgia law with “attempting to incite insurrection”―a crime punishable by death. In 1932, the eighteen-year-old Black Communist Party organizer was arrested and had his room illegally searched and his radical literature seized. Charged under an old slave insurrection statute, Herndon was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to eighteen to twenty years on a chain gang. You Can’t Kill a Man Because of the Books He Reads chronicles Herndon’s five-year quest for freedom during a time when Blacks, white liberals, and the radical left joined forces to define the nation’s commitment to civil rights and civil liberties.

Herndon’s champions included the young, Black Harvard Law School–educated attorney Benjamin J. Davis Jr.; the future historian C. Vann Woodward, who joined the interracial Herndon defense committee; the white-shoe New York lawyer Whitney North Seymour, who argued Herndon’s appeals; and literary friends Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright. With their support, Herndon won his freedom and reinvented himself as a Harlem literary star until a dramatic fall from grace.

A legal odyssey of Herndon’s narrow escape from certain death because of his unpopular political beliefs, You Can’t Kill a Man Because of the Books He Reads explores Herndon’s journey from Alabama coal miner to Communist Party organizer to Harlem hero and beyond. Brad Snyder tells the stories of the diverse coalition of people who rallied to his cause and who twice appealed his case to the U.S. Supreme Court. They forced the Court to recognize free speech and peaceable assembly as essential rights in a democracy―a landmark decision in 1930s America as well as today.

To join the event in person | Doors will open 30 minutes before the program begins. For free events, we generally overbook to ensure a full house. Priority will be given to those who have registered in advance, but registration does not guarantee admission. All registered seats are released shortly before start time, and seats may become available at that time. A standby line will form 30 minutes before the program.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

The St. Thomas More Professor in Law and History at Georgetown Law, Brad Snyder teaches constitutional law, sports law, and American legal history. His forthcoming book, You Can’t Kill a Man Because of the Books He Reads: Angelo Herndon’s Fight for Free Speech (W.W. Norton Feb. 4, 2025), tells the story of a Black Communist Party organizer charged with attempting to incite insurrection and the people who rallied to his cause during his five-year quest for freedom. Snyder’s previous book, Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment (W.W. Norton), was the first comprehensive biography of the Harvard Law School professor, New Deal power broker, and Supreme Court justice. A Guggenheim fellow, Snyder has published law review articles about constitutional history and is the author of The House of Truth: A Washington Political Salon and the Foundations of American Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2017). Prior to law teaching, he worked as an associate at Williams & Connolly LLP and wrote two critically acclaimed books about baseball including A Well-Paid Slave: Curt Flood’s Fight for Free Agency in Professional Sports (Viking/Penguin, 2006). A graduate of Duke University and Yale Law School, he clerked for the Hon. Dorothy W. Nelson on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. For more information about Professor Snyder’s work, go to bradsnyderauthor.com and follow him on twitter or BlueSky at @bradsnyderprof.

Brian Jones is the director of the Center for Educators and Schools at the New York Public Library. He is a former scholar in residence and former associate director of education at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. His first book, The Tuskegee Student Uprising: A History won the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s 2023 Nonfiction Literary Award. 

GET THE BOOK

• Borrow: NYPL Catalog


• E-Book app: SimplyE, available on iOS and Android


• This event will also include signing and sales of the book by our Library Shop.

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ACCESSIBILITY NOTES

In-Person

• Assistive listening devices and/or hearing loops are available at the venue.


• You can request a free ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation or CART (Communication Access Real-Time Translation) captioning service by emailing your request at least two weeks in advance of the event: email accessibility@nypl.org or use this Gmail template.


• This venue is fully accessible to wheelchairs.

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All programs are subject to change or cancellation. All events at The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library are subject to recording and photography. 

The 7 Stories Up Series at SNFL is made possible by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).