Anne Burlak

Burlak gained her first major experience with labor management conflicts trying to organize workers across lines of race and ethnicity in the South. After briefly working in North and South Carolina, the NTWU sent her to Atlanta, in 1930 to organize workers there into multiracial unions.[3] Facing opposition not only from recalcitrant mill owners but also from the state's enforcement of segregation, Burlak was arrested and charged with insurrection under Georgia law, which carried the death penalty.[1] Burlak was one in a group of black and white Communist organizers who were facing insurrection charges; collectively they became known as the Atlanta Six and counted M. H. Powers,[1] Joe Carr,[1] and Herbert Newton[4] among their number. Burlak and the rest of the Atlanta Six were held in jail for six weeks.[2] Upon being released on bail, Burlak traveled the country to raise funds for the Atlanta Six's legal defense.[1] The law under which the Atlanta Six were charged dated from before the Civil War,[5] and would not be overturned until the Supreme Court's decision in Herndon v. Lowry (1937).[6][2] The charges against Burlak and the Atlanta Six were later dropped in 1939.[2]

Following her release from prison in Georgia, Burlak began organizing Rhode Island textile workers in their struggle for collective bargaining, overtime pay, and wage increases. She would become a central figure in the strikes that shook the state's textile industry in the early 1930s.[3] Burlak soon began leading strike actions in Pawtucket and Central Falls, and was arrested for alleged violence in a July 1931 strike.[3] She was ultimately sentenced to 30 days in jail and a fine.[3] As a response to her continued activism, she faced deportation by federal immigration authorities, who tried to prove she was not born in the United States.[3]

During her time in Rhode Island, Burlak ran for elected office multiple times on the Communist Party ticket. In 1932, she ran for mayor of the city of Pawtucket, garnering only 160 votes in a city of 77,000 inhabitants.[3] The Communist Party platform promised government-funded social welfare and support of workers' right to strike, among other planks. At the statewide and national level, Governor Theodore Francis Green and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt were elected in 1932 on the Democratic Party ticket, pledging similar reforms and support of workers.[3] Burlak also led the Rhode Island delegation to the 1932 National Hunger March[7] on Washington, D.C.[8]

Burlak later unsuccessfully ran for Secretary of State of Rhode Island in 1938.[2] Following this defeat, Burlak relocated to Massachusetts within the next several years, and was elected Executive Secretary of the Communist Party of Massachusetts in 1940.[2] She would be based in the Boston area for the remainder of her life, where she continued to advocate for housing, schools, and social welfare.[8][9]

As the National Secretary of the NWTU, Burlak became involved in crafting aspects of the National Recovery Administration (NRA)'s industrywide codes for minimum working conditions on behalf of textile unions.[3] While voluntary, the provisions laid out in the NRA were widely accepted around the United States, leading to an increase in collective bargaining in the workplace and worker membership in the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Backed by the federal government, the AFL, particularly its United Textile Workers union (UTW), became a powerful political player and purged Communists from its ranks.[1] As a prominent member of the more radical NWTU, Burlak was deemed a threat by the AFL, who enlisted its leadership and law enforcement in preventing her from leading in strikes or attending worker rallies.[1] In 1939, she was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee.[2]

Burlak was also targeted during the postwar Red Scare era. In 1956, she was arrested under the Smith Act, as were many other American Communists.[2] The charges were not dropped until the Supreme Court decision in Yates v. United States (1957), which ruled that the First Amendment protected political speech in the absence of a "clear and present danger". Burlak was later arrested in 1964 under the McCarran Act, which required Communists to register with the United States government; the charges were dropped after the Supreme Court ruled the McCarran Act unconstitutional in Albertson v. Subversive Activities Control Board.[2]