Jane Speed de Andreu

Jane Speed de Andreu was an Alabama-born Communist organizer who was jailed on at least five occasions between 1933 and 1954, in Birmingham, New York and Puerto Rico. She came from an old Alabama family and worked in the sharecroppers and anti-Jim Crow struggles of the 1930s South. On May 1, 1933 she addressed the interracial May Day demonstration in Birmingham and was arrested; convicted of disorderly conduct, of speaking without a permit and of violating the city ordinances forbidding unsegregated public assemblies, she was offered a fine and chose jail instead, serving fifty-three days. In September 1935 she and Julia Church Kolar were arrested after entering the Italian Consulate in New York to protest Mussolinis planned invasion of Ethiopia; both were convicted and given suspended sentences. She later moved to Puerto Rico and married the Communist writer César Andreu Iglesias. Police arrested her in Santurce on July 14, 1950, with Manuel Arroyo Zeppenfeldt and Ana Livia Cordero, while they gathered signatures on a petition against use of the atomic bomb. In the roundup that followed the March 1954 attack on the United States Capitol she was seized at dawn on March 7 and held three weeks in the Arecibo Womens Jail without ever being formally charged. On October 20, 1954 she was arrested again, with her husband, in the federal Smith Act roundup, and was indicted a week later as the only continental defendant among the eleven charged in the first Smith Act prosecution ever brought in Puerto Rico. The case was tried in San Juan in 1956 in English, a language most of the defendants could not follow; the prosecution was withdrawn and archived in 1958 without a conviction against her. She was born in 1910 and died in 1958, at forty-eight, the same year the case against her was dropped.

Daily Worker, August 20, 1934, page 3: An August 18 Baton Rouge dispatch describes her arrest while accompanying an interracial delegation seeking relief at the state capitol. Police detained the delegates about an hour, released them and ordered them out of town. The dispatch date does not establish the precise arrest day.

The April 20, 1934 Daily Worker recalls her arrest with a Black worker printed as Ned Goodwin at the previous year’s interracial Birmingham May Day demonstration. It describes police action against the absence of a physical barrier separating Black and white participants. The retrospective belongs to her already recorded May 1, 1933 case, not a new April 1934 arrest. The issue does not independently resolve whether Ned Goodwin is the L. Goodwin named in another account. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1934/v11-n095-apr-20-1934-DW-LOC.pdf#page=2

Meyer’s study explicitly reports that César Andreu Iglesias and his wife Jane Speed were arrested and imprisoned for some months in the roundup following the 1950 Nationalist uprising. This is a separate reported political detention from the 1954 Smith Act prosecution; the approximate months are not a precise measured term, and no exact admission or release day is printed. Source: https://www.redalyc.org/pdf/377/37722223004.pdf#page=36

Printed Jane Speed, age23, the Scottsboro-campaign report identifies her as Alabama-born, speaking for Southern white women and jailed in Birmingham after the MayDay demonstration. It says she refused bail unless Black coarrestees were granted bail. The same episode is separately indexed under the shorter name Jane Speed; that likely duplicate requires separate consolidation review, not another case here. Pages9,23. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/labordefender/1933/v09n07-jul-1933-lab-def.pdf