Biography
Michael A. Russo was one of the Massachusetts "Bay State Reds" — the Communist Party members arrested in 1956 and prosecuted under the Smith Act for conspiracy to advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government. He was photographed with his fellow defendants — Otis Archer Hood, Anne Burlak Timpson, Daniel Boone Schirmer, Sidney Lipshires, Geoffrey Warner White, and Edward Strong — after they won their case in 1957, when the prosecution was dismissed in the wake of the Supreme Court's Yates decision. Beyond his role as a Massachusetts Smith Act defendant, the individual record of his life is thinly documented.
