On September 11, 1934, four African American members of the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World (PMEW) were put on trial for unlawful and riotous assembly in an attempt to "unite the Negro race in one body with the Japanese race and all dark races of the Far East to overthrow the present system of government and to make the white race subservient to the Negro race and to set up a government by the Negroes and the people fo the Far East". They arrested following disquiet by African American preachers and European American cotton plantation owners. Whilst the defenders pleaded innocence, blaming the Original Independent Benevolent Afro-Pacific Movement of the World, a splinter group from the PMEW, for any unrest, the prosecutor was openly racist, suggesting that the four had no business to be driving around in a high powered chrysler car. The four were sentenced to one year in jail. Before sentencing, however the judge and constable, stepped outside to allow a mob of two hundred white spectators to invade the building and beat the defendants. Their lawyer fled to Cape Girardeau, ninety miles away. The NAACP provided lawyers is St Louis, who filed a case of Habeas corpus. The case was heard before the Missouri Supreme Court in Jefferson City, which quashed the sentences saying that no legal trial had taken place. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steele%2C_Missouri