Junius Scales

Junius Scales (March 26, 1920 – August 5, 2002) was an American leader of the Communist Party of the United States of America notable for his arrest and conviction under the Smith Act in the 1950s. He was arrested in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1954 after going underground. His appeals lasted seven years and reached the Supreme Court twice. He began serving a six-year sentence at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in October, 1961. On Christmas Eve, 1962, President Kennedy commuted his sentence and he was released.

Junius Irving Scales was born into a socially prominent family in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1920. In 1935, he began hanging around 'The Intimate Bookshop' in Chapel Hill (run by Milton A. Abernethy and known to locals simply as Ab's), a barnlike off campus watering hole for local intellectuals and bohemians which had a clandestine Communist Party printing press in a back room. He was soon hired as a clerk in the store, and spent more time reading the books than working. He started attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill the following year, at the age of 16, and three years later on his birthday in 1939, he secretly joined the Communist Party and, soon afterward, married his first wife, Vera, and quit school to become a union organizer in the textile mills. The attack on Pearl Harbor brought a sudden end to his union organizing efforts, and he volunteered for military service.

After serving in the U.S. Army from 1942 to 1946, he returned to Chapel Hill. While completing work on his bachelor's degree and starting work on his master's, he became the local party organizer, supervising five local Communist clubs and hosting weekly salons at his home that were open to both party and non-party members. In 1948, he became state chairman of the party. At this time he openly and publicly identified himself as the Communist Party leader in North Carolina, leading to newspaper stories which embarrassed his wealthy family and led to his forced resignation from his post on the state committee of the Southern Conference on Human Welfare. The strain on his marriage led to his divorce. He married his second wife, Gladys, a New Yorker, in 1950. Their only child, Barbara, was born in Durham in April 1951.

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