Biography
George Blake Charney was a New York labor lawyer and a leading Communist Party USA figure in the postwar period. Born in Russia in 1905 and brought to New York as a child, he organized for the National Maritime Union and the New York State CIO before joining the partys national board. He was indicted in the Foley Square Second String in June 1951 and convicted alongside Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and the rest of the second string in January 1953. He was sentenced to three years in federal prison and served at Lewisburg.
After his release Charney became one of the leading dissident voices inside the CPUSA over Khrushchevs 1956 secret speech denouncing Stalin. He left the party in 1958 and in 1968 published A Long Journey, one of the canonical first-person accounts of the American communist experience and its disintegration after 1956.
National Guardian, October 19, 1953, New York insert page 2 and national page 16: Charney was campaigning for New York County district attorney as an independent People's Rights candidate after 9,300 ballot-petition signatures. The paper describes his Smith Act campaign as educational and reports the second Foley Square defendants on restricted liberty pending appeal. This is contemporary political activity during the appeal, not a new arrest or proof of a new prison-service interval. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/national-guardian/1953-10-19-5-52-nat-guardian.pdf
