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Junius Irving Scales was born into a prominent and wealthy Greensboro family in 1920. He joined the Communist Party in 1939 while a student at the University of North Carolina and worked as a civil rights coordinator and labor organizer before and after military service in World War II. The following is an excerpt from the book, "Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights" (W.W. Norton & Company, 2009) by Greensboro native Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore.

Despite his mother's "frenzied objections," Junius Scales announced publicly that he was a Communist on October 29, 1947. The CP National Committee had pressured him to do so, and he had already been so open that many in the state suspected that he was a Communist. His main reason for the declaration, however, was to lessen his fellow North Carolinians' fear of Communists. Those who knew him were impressed by his gentleness, and those who did not know him were impressed by his pedigree.

"I have been associated with the Communist Party for a number of years," he said. "I hope that I may in a small way dispel some of the dangerous illusions and falsehoods about the Communists which are being used to distract us from the real problems we must solve. As a Southerner," Scales argued, "I am especially glad to belong to the only organization which fights for the full and complete equality of the Negro."

He completely misjudged the effect of the declaration. His neighbors and friends, even those who had ribbed him for years about being a "left-winger," now reacted with shock and often outright hostility.

Scales tried his best to continue as a Communist and as a North Carolinian after he became district chairman of the Carolinas in 1948. He went on a radio program to defend civil liberties, sponsored a black man who wanted to attend graduate school at UNC, and tried to organize around postwar inflation issues. He fought against a bill in the North Carolina General Assembly to outlaw the Communist Party by arguing to his fellow citizens that the bill was not "anticommunist"; it was "anti-you."

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Against a national backdrop of prosecutions, the FBI followed Scales's every move and paid informers to infiltrate the Chapel Hill Party. It responded by ordering Scales to go underground, and he left Chapel Hill on October 6, 1951. Years of intrigue ensued as he shuttled about the South, doing little except conferring with Party leaders, while the FBI played cat and mouse with him. Once when he was visiting Greensboro, FBI agents endlessly circled his mother's house on the winding roads of Hamilton Lakes and cast spotlights across the Scales's front lawn every time they passed. ... Shadowing Mrs. A.M. Scales was not terribly exciting work. As a courtesy, she began to toot the horn at the federal agent parking in front of her house to wake him up and let him know she was home when she returned from shopping. Junius slipped more deeply underground.

Then on November 19, 1954, all of his mother's fears came true in the front-page banner headline in her morning paper: FBI Nabs Junius Scales; Bail is $100,000. ... He had been arrested under the membership clause of the Smith Act, which carried a fine of ten thousand dollars and a maximum of ten years in prison for belonging to an organization that advocated the violent overthrow of the government. ... The trial was to be in Greensboro, Scales's hometown. Three days before Christmas his mother posted bond.

(Scales was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison. His appeal reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which reversed his conviction, and he was tried a second time, again in Greensboro, in February 1958, represented by John McNeill Smith, "a moderate community leader in a mainstream law firm.")

In his opening remarks, McNeill Smith told the jury that Karl Marx was not on trial. The defendant was Junius Scales, "this boy, one of our boys." He argued that they would hear nothing of "rifles, bayonets, bullets (or) bombs," because Scales had never talked about them. The prosecutor's case was very similar to that of the first trial, but this time there were defense witnesses who swore that Scales had never advocated violence. The jury was out only eighty minutes before it returned with a guilty verdict and another six-year sentence.

The verdict was incomprehensible to Scales and Smith. It is likely that Scales's prominent social position worked against him. Perhaps jurors resented the fact that someone like him, descended from one of the finest families in the state and rich beyond their wildest dreams, would throw away his privilege on Communism. The hometown newspaper approved: "American justice has once again gone its even-tempered way." Scales went to prison on October 2, 1961.

Almost as soon as Scales was imprisoned, liberals began working to get him pardoned. He had repudiated Communism, and the Party hoped he would rot in jail. Within six months, hundreds signed a petition urging President John F. Kennedy to pardon Scales. Frank Porter Graham, C. Vann Woodward, and Paul Green signed, as did the historian John Hope Franklin. A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King Jr. did too.

On Christmas Eve 1962 Kennedy commuted Junius Scales's sentence but did not pardon him. Scales got a job working at night as a proofreader for the New York Times and ventured back to North Carolina rarely and with great trepidation. In the end he remembered why he joined the Party. He never regretted embracing its goals as he saw them: the defeat of Fascism, workers' rights to organize, full equality for African Americans, and a more equitable economic structure. This boy, one of our boys, fought for the underdog.

Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore is Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History and acting chairwoman, Department of African American Studies, at Yale University.