No
crime in
American history-- let alone a crime that
never
occurred-- produced as many trials, convictions,
reversals, and
retrials
as did an alleged gang rape of two white girls by nine
black teenagers
on a Southern Railroad freight run on March 25,
1931. Over the
course
of the two decades that followed, the struggle for
justice of the
"Scottsboro
Boys," as the black teens were called, made celebrities
out of
anonymities,
launched and ended careers, wasted lives, produced
heroes, opened
southern
juries to blacks, exacerbated sectional strife, and
divided America's
political
left.
Hoboing was a common pastime in the Depression year
of
1931.
For some, riding freights was an appealing adventure
compared to the
drudgery
and dreariness of their daily lives. Others
hopped rail cars to
move
from one fruitless job search to the next.
Two dozen or so
mainly male--and mainly young--whites and blacks rode
the Southern
Railroad's
Chattanooga to Memphis freight on March 25, 1931.
Among them were four
black Chattanooga teenagers hoping to investigate a
rumor of government
jobs in Memphis hauling logs on the river and five
other black teens
from
various parts of Georgia. Four young
whites, two males and
two females dressed in overalls, also rode the train,
returning to
Huntsville
from unsuccessful job searches in the cotton
mills of
Chattanooga. (LINK
TO
DIAGRAM OF TRAIN).
Soon after the train crossed the Alabama border, a
white
youth walked
across the top of a tank car. He stepped on the
hand of a black
youth
named Haywood
Patterson, who was hanging on to its side.
Patterson had
friends
aboard the train. A stone-throwing fight erupted
between white
youths
and a larger group of black youths. Eventually,
the blacks
succeeded
in forcing all but one of the members of the white
gang off the
train.
Patterson pulled the one remaining white youth, Orville
Gilley, back onto the train after it had
accelerated to a
life-endangering
speed. Some of the whites forced off the train
went to the
stationmaster
in Stevenson to report what they described as an
assault by a gang
of
blacks. The stationmaster wired ahead. A posse
in Paint Rock,
Alabama
stopped the train. (LINK
TO
MAP OF NORTHERN ALABAMA). Dozens of men
with guns rushed
at the train as it ground to a halt. The armed
men rounded up
every
black youth they could find. Nine captured
blacks, soon to be
called
"The
Scottsboro
Boys," were tied together with plow line, loaded
on a
flat back
truck, and taken to a jail in Scottsboro.
Also greeted by the posse in Paint Rock were
two
mill workers from
Huntsville, Victoria
Price and Ruby
Bates. One or the other of the girls,
either in response to a
question or on their own initiative, told one of the
posse members that
they had been raped by a gang of twelve blacks with
pistols and
knives.
In the jail that March 25th, Price pointed out six of
the nine boys and
said that they were the ones who raped her. The
guard reportedly
replied, "If those six had Miss Price, it stands to
reason that the
others
had Miss Bates." When one of the accused,Clarence
Norris, called the girls liars he was struck by
a
bayonet.
A crowd of several hundred men, hoping for a good
old-fashioned
lynching,
surrounded the Scottsboro jail the night of their
arrest for
rape.
Their plans were foiled, however, when Alabama's
governor, B. M.
Miller,
ordered the National Guard to Scottsboro to protect
the suspects.
Trials of the Scottsboro Boys began twelve days after
their
arrest in
the courtroom of Judge A. E. Hawkins.
Haywood Patterson
described
the scene as "one big smiling white face." Many
local newspapers
had made their conclusions about the defendants before
the trials
began.
One headline read: "ALL NEGROES POSITIVELY IDENTIFIED
BY GIRLS AND ONE
WHITE BOY WHO WAS HELD PRISONER WITH PISTOL AND KNIVES
WHILE NINE BLACK
FIENDS COMMITTED REVOLTING CRIME." Representing
the Boys in their
uphill legal battle were Stephen Roddy and Milo Moody.
They were no
"Dream
Team." Roddy was an unpaid and unprepared
Chattanooga real estate
attorney who, on the first day of trial, was "so
stewed he could hardly
walk straight." Moody was a forgetful
seventy-year old local
attorney
who hadn't tried a case in decades.
The defense lawyers demonstrated their incompetence
in many
ways.
They expressed a willingness to have all nine
defendants tried
together,
despite the prejudice such a trial might cause toRoy
Wright, for example, who at age twelve was the
youngest of the
nine Scottsboro Boys. (The prosecution, fearing
that a single
trial
might constitute reversible error, decided to try the
defendants in
groups
of two or three.) The cross-examination of
Victoria Price
lasted
only minutes, while examining doctors R. R. Bridges
and John Lynch were
not cross-examined at all. Ruby Bates was not asked
about
contradictions
between her testimony and that of Price. The
defense offered only
the defendants themselves as witnesses, and their
testimony was
rambling,
sometimes incoherent, and riddled with obvious
misstatements. Six
of the boys (Andy Wright, Willie Roberson, Charles
Weems, Ozie Powell,
Olen Montgomery, and Eugene Williams) denied raping or
even having seen
the two girls. But three others, all who later
claimed they did
so
because of beatings and threats, said that a gang rape
by other
defendants
did occur. Clarence Norris provided what one
paper called "the
highlight
of the trial" when he said of the other blacks, "They
all raped her,
everyone
of them." No closing argument was offered by
defense attorneys. A
local editorialist described the state's case as "so
conclusive as to
be
almost perfect."
Guilty verdicts in the first trial were announced
while the
second trial
was underway. The large crowd outside the
courthouse let out a
roar
of approval that was clearly heard by the second jury
inside. When the
four trials were over, eight of the nine Scottsboro
Boys had been
convicted
and sentenced to death. A mistrial was declared
in the case of
twelve-year
old Roy Wright, when eleven of the jurors held out for
death despite
the
request of the prosecution for only a life sentence in
view of his
tender
age.
The NAACP, which might have been expected to rush to
the
defense of
the Scottsboro Boys, did not. Rape was a
politically explosive
charge
in the South, and the NAACP was concerned about damage
to its
effectiveness
that might result if it turned out some or all of the
Boys were
guilty.
Instead, it was the Communist Party that moved
aggressively to make the
Scottsboro case their own. The Party saw the
case as providing a
great recruiting tool among southern blacks and
northern
liberals.
The Communist Party, through its legal arm, the
International Labor
Defense
(ILD), pronounced the case against the Boys a
"murderous frame-up" and
began efforts, ultimately successful, to be
named as their
attorneys.
The NAACP, a slow-moving bureaucracy, finally came to
the realization
that
the Scottsboro Boys were most likely innocent and that
leadership in
the
case would have large public relations benefits.
As a last-ditch
effort to beat back the ILD in the battle over
representation, NAACP
officials
persuaded renowned defense attorney Clarence
Darrow to
take their case to
Alabama.
But it was by then too late. The Scottsboro
Boys, for better or
worse,
cast their lots with the Communists who, in the South,
were "treated
with
only slightly more courtesy than a gang of rapists."
In January, 1932, the Alabama Supreme Court, by a 6 -
1
vote, affirmed
all but one of the eight convictions and death
sentences. (The
court
ruled that Eugene Williams, age thirteen, should have
not been tried as
an adult.) The cases were appealed to the United
States Supreme
Court
which overturned the convictions in the landmark case
of Powell
vs Alabama. The Court, 7 - 2, ruled that
the
right
of the defendants under the Fourteenth Amendment's due
process clause
to
competent legal counsel had been denied by
Alabama. There would
have
to be new trials.
The prosecutor in the retrials was Alabama's newly
elected
attorney
general, Thomas
Knight,
Jr. Knight's father, Thomas Knight, Sr.,
had authored
the Alabama Supreme Court decision upholding the
original convictions.
The ILD selected two attorneys to represent the
Scottsboro
Boys in the
retrials. The ILD quieted skeptics who saw the
organization
caring
more about the benefits it could derive from the case
than the Boys'
welfare
by asking Samuel
Leibowitz
to serve as the lead defense attorney.
Leibowitz
was
a New York criminal attorney who had secured an
astonishing record of
seventy-seven
acquittals and one hung jury in seventy-eight murder
trials.
Liebowitz
was often described as"the next Clarence Darrow."
Liebowitz was a
mainline
Democrat with no connections with or sympathies toward
the Communist
Party.
Joseph Brodsky, the ILD's chief attorney, was selected
to assist
Leibowitz.
The Scottsboro Boys spent the two years between their
first
trials and
the second round, scheduled to begin in March, 1933 in
Decatur, in the
deplorable conditions of Depression-era Alabama
prisons. While on death
row at Kilby prison, on the very date originally set
for their own
executions,
they watched as another inmate was carried off to
unsoundproofed death
chamber adjacent to their cells, then listened to the
sounds of his
electrocution.
Once or twice a week they were allowed to leave their
tiny cells, as
they
were handcuffed and walked a few yards down the hall
to a shower. An
early
visitor found them "terrified, bewildered" like
"scared little mice,
caught
in a trap."(LINK
TO
UNPUBLISHED 1931 RANSDALL REPORT). They
fought, they
wrote
letters if they could write at all, they thought about
girls and life
on
the outside, they dreamed of their executions.
As their trial
date
approached, they were moved to the Decatur jail, a
rat-infested
facility
that two years earlier had been condemned as "unfit
for white
prisoners."
The second trial of Haywood Patterson opened on March
30,
1933, in the
courtroom ofJudge
James Horton. Leibowitz moved to quash the
indictments
on the ground that Negroes had been systematically
excluded from jury
rolls.
He raised some eyebrows by questioning the veracity of
local jury
commissioners
and many more when he insisted that prosecutor Knight
stop his practice
of calling black witnesses, who Leibowitz had called
to show had never
served on juries, by their first names. To many
local observers
it
was one thing to defend rapists-- that, after all, is
part of the
American
justice system--, but it was another, unforgivable
thing to come to
Alabama
and attack their social order and way of life.
Unsurprisingly,
the
motion to quash the indictment was denied.
On April 3, Victoria ("Big Leg") Price was
called to
the stand.
Direct examination was brief, only sixteen
minutes. Price
recounted
her job-hunting trip to Chattanooga, the fight on the
train between
whites
and blacks, and the gang rape in which Haywood
Patterson was one of her
attackers. Prosecutor Knight's strategy on direct was
to cover the
essential
facts in a condensed, unadorned way that would
provide few
opportunities for defense attorneys to expose
contradictions with the
more
detailed (and implausible) story she told in the
first trials.
Leibowitz's
cross-examination was merciless. His questions
suggested his
answers.
There was no Callie Brochie's boardinghouse in
Chattanooga, as Price
claimed.
She was an adulterer who had consorted with Jack
Tiller in the
Huntsville
freight yards two days before the alleged rape, and it
was his semen
(or
that of Orville Gilley) that was found in her
vagina. She was a
person
of low repute, a prostitute. She was neither
crying, bleeding, or
seriously bruised after the alleged gang rape.
She was fearful of
being arrested for a Mann Act violation (crossing
state lines for
immoral
purposes) when she met the posse in Paint Rock, so she
and Bates made
groundless
accusations of rape to deflect attention from their
own sins.
Thoughout
the four-hour cross, Price remained sarcastic,
evasive, and
venomous.
She used her ignorance and poor memory to her
advantage and proved to
be
a difficult witness to corner. On re-direct,
Price added a new
dramatic
and inflammatory elaboration to her previous account:
while she was
being
penetrated, she said, her attacker told her that when
he pulled his
"thing"
out, "you will have a black baby."(LINK
TO
PRICE TESTIMONY).
Dr.
R.
R. Bridges, the Scottsboro doctor who examined
the girls less
than
two hours after the alleged rapes, was the next
prosecution witness to
take the stand. He turned out to be a better
witness for the
defense.
He did confirm that semen was found in the vaginas of
the two girls
(more
in the case of Bates than of Price).
Leibowitz,
however,
was able to show on cross-examination that the
girls were both
calm,
composed, and free of bleeding and vaginal
damage. Moreover, the
semen that Bridges examined was non-motile, even
though sperm generally
live from twelve to forty-eight hours after
intercourse. (LINK
TO BRIDGES TESTIMONY).
The prosecution's best moment came when Arthur
Woodall, a
member of
the posse who searched the defendants at Paint Rock,
was on the
stand.
Woodall testified that he had found a knife on one of
the defendants,
though
he couldn't remember which one. Leibowitz asked
Woodall if he had
asked the boy whether it was his knife. Woodall
said that he had,
and that the boy said he had taken it "off the white
girl, Victoria
Price."
The surprised look on Leibowitz's face caused Knight
to clap his hands
and then dash out of the courtroom to hide his glee.
Liebowitz moved
for
a mistrial, but Judge Horton denied the motion and
instead told jurors
they should ignore Knight's reaction.(LINK
TO
WOODALL TESTIMONY).
The prosecution's only eyewitness to the crime was a
farmer
named Ory
Dobbins who said he saw the defendants grab Price and
Bates as they
were
about to leap from the train. The credibility of
the farmer's
testimony
was seriously damaged by Leibowitz on cross, when he
asked how it was
that
Dobbins could even be sure, given the speed of the
train and his
considerable
distance from it, that it was a woman that he
saw. Dobbins
answered, "She was wearing women's clothes."
Everyone who had
followed
the case knew that Bates and Price both were wearing
overalls.
"Are
you sure it wasn't overalls or a coat?," Judge Horton
asked. "No
sir, a dress," Dobbins said.
(LINK
TO DOBBINS TESTIMONY).
Defense witnesses were all called to serve a single
purpose:
to prove
Price a liar and convince the jury that no rape had
occurred aboard the
Southern Railroad freight. Dallas Ramsey,
a Chattanooga
resident,
testified that he saw Price in the hobo jungle she
denied ever having
visited.(LINK
TO RAMSEY TESTIMONY).
George
Chamlee, a Chattanooga attorney, testified that his
investigation could
turn up no evidence of a Callie Brochie or the
boardinghouse that Price
said she owned, and in which Price and Bates allegedly
spent the night
prior to her return train trip to Alabama.(LINK
TO CHAMLEE TESTIMONY).Six
of
the accused testified, including Willie
Roberson, who testified that on the day of the
alleged rape he was
suffering from a serious case of venereal disease and
was so weak that
he could not walk without a cane, let alone leap from
boxcar to boxcar
as Price had claimed.(LINK
TO
ROBERSON TESTIMONY). Ozie Powell proved
the weakest of
the
accused on the stand, confused and bewildered when
asked by Knight on
cross
to affirm or disaffirm answers he had given to
prosecution questions at
the first trial. In an attempt to minimize the
damage, Leibowitz
asked only, when Knight's barrage was finished, "Ozie
tell us about how
much schooling you have had in your life?"
Powell answered,
"about
three months." (LINK
TO POWELL TESTIMONY). Knight had
considerably less
luck
with Haywood Patterson. In desperation Knight
asked Patterson,
"Were
you tried in Scottsboro?" Patterson replied, "I
was framed in
Scottsboro."
An angry Knight shot back, "Who told you to say
that?" Patterson
answered, "I told myself to say it".(LINK
TO PATTERSON TESTIMONY).
Lester Carter, the twenty-three-year-old traveling
companion
of Bates
and Price, was one of the defense's most spectacular
witnesses.
Carter,
who Price had denied having known until the day of the
alleged crime,
testified
that he had met Bates, Price, and Prices' boyfriend
Jack Tiller in a
Huntsville
hobo jungle the night before he would travel with the
two girls to
Chattanooga.
He told the jury that the night the four were together
in the hobo
jungle,
and while he began making love to Ruby Bates while
Price did the same
with
Tiller. Carter testified that two days later, on
the return trip
to Hunstville from Chattanooga, he jumped off the
freight train when
fighting
broke out between blacks and the outnumbered whites. (LINK
TO
CARTER TESTIMONY).
The appearance of the defense's final and most
dramatic
witness, Ruby
Bates, might have been taken from the script of a
hokey Hollywood
movie.
In the months before the trial, Bates' whereabouts
were a
mystery.
Leibowitz announced that he was resting his case, then
approached the
bench
and asked for a short recess. Minutes later
National Guardsmen
open
the back doors of the courtroom, and-- to the
astonished gasps of
spectators
and the dismay of Knight-- in walked Ruby Bates.
Under direct
examination,
Bates said a troubled conscience and the advice of
famous New York
minister
Harry Emerson Fosdick prompted her to return to
Alabama to tell the
truth
about what happened on March 25, 1931. Bates
said that there was
no rape, that none of the defendants touched her or
even spoke to her,
and that the accusations of rape were made after Price
told her "to
frame
up a story" to avoid morals charges. On
cross-examination, Knight
ripped into Bates, confronting her both with her
conflicting testimony
in the first trials and accusations that her new
versions of events had
been bought with new clothes and other Communist Party
gifts. He
demanded to know whether he hadn't told her months
before in his office
that he would "punish anyone who made her swear
falsely" and that he
"did
not want to burn any person that wasn't guilty."
"I think you
did,"
Bates answered.
(LINK
TO BATES TESTIMONY)
In the summations that followed, none was more
controversial
than that
of Wade Wright, Solicitor of Morgan County, who was
assisting Attorney
General Knight in the prosecution. In a line
that would move
thousands
of Jews around the country to protest, Wright asked
the Patterson
jurors
"whether justice in this case is going to be bought
and sold with Jew
money
from New York?" Leibowitz jumped up and demanded a
mistrial, which
Judge
Horton refused to declare. Knight seemed to be
embarrassed by his
colleague's blatantly anti-Semitic appeal and in his
own summation told
the jurors, "I do not want a verdict based on racial
prejudice or
religious
creed." Knight, however, was himself no model of
decorum, referring to
Patterson as "that thing."
Leibowitz, in his summation, called the accusations
of Price
the "foul,
contemptible, outrageous lie" of an "abandoned"
woman. He closed
with the Lord's Prayer and an all-or-nothing appeal to
the jury: acquit
them or give them the chair.
At one o'clock on April 8, 1933, the jury was sent
out to
deliberate
the fate of Haywood Patterson after Judge Horton
reminded the jury that
"You are not trying lawyers; you are not trying state
lines." The
next day the jury emerged from the jury room laughing,
leading some in
the defense camp to think that they must have won an
acquittal.
They
were wrong. The jury pronounced Patterson guilty
and sentenced
him
to death. The decision on guilt took only
five
minutes.
The testimony of Bates wasn't even considered.
Leibowitz was
stunned.
Safely back in New York after the trial Leibowitz said
of the jury that
had just found his client guilty: "If you ever saw
those creatures,
those
bigots whose mouths are slits in their faces, whose
eyes popped out at
you like frogs, whose chins dripped tobacco juice,
bewhiskered and
filthy,
you would not ask how they could do it." Ruby Bates
returned East with
Leibowitz, then became the leading lady at
ILD-sponsored Scottsboro
rallies,
where she would beg forgiveness, plead for justice for
"The Boys," and
join in singing The Internationale.
On June 22, 1933, Judge James Horton, described as
looking
like "Lincoln
without the beard," convened court in his hometown of
Athens, Alabama
to
hear a defense motion for a new trial. Hardly
anyone held out
hope
that the motion would be granted. Horton,
however, had become
convinced
that Price was lying. Not only was her story
full of
inconsistencies,
but it was not corroborated by other witnesses or the
medical
evidence.
Judge Horton had one additional reason to believe that
Patterson was
innocent
that remained a secret until years after the
trial. After Dr.
Bridges
presented his medical testimony, the prosecution had
requested that Dr.
M. H. Lynch, originally listed as a prosecution
witness, be excused from
testifying. His testimony would only be
redundant, according to
Knight.
After Horton excused the young doctor, he was
approached by Lynch who
said
he wanted to talk privately. Horton and Lynch
talked in the
courthouse
men's bathroom while armed guards stood outside the
door. Lynch
told
Horton he was convinced that the girls were lying, had
told them so to
their faces, and that they merely laughed at
him. Horton urged
Lynch
to testify, but Lynch, only a few years out of medical
school and just
building a practice in Scottsboro, resisted, saying
that to do so would
ruin his career. Sympathizing with Lynch's
predicament, Horton
withdrew
his demand. Judge Horton, who had to face
re-election the next
year,
had been warned that setting aside the jury's verdict
in this case
would
be political suicide. Horton, however, believed
one should "let
justice
be done, though the heavens may fall." To a
stunned courtroom, he
announced that he was setting aside the verdict and
death sentence, and
ordering a new trial.(LINK
TO
HORTON DECISION) (Horton, who was
unopposed the
previous
time he ran, lost his judgeship in the next
election.)
Attorney General Knight wasted no time in announcing
that
the state
was convinced of the Scottsboro Boys' guilt and would
press ahead with
prosecutions. At the next trial, Knight
promised, there would be
corroboration for Price's story. Orville Gilley,
the one white
boy
left on the train when the alleged rapes took place,
had agree to
testify
for the prosecution. The prosecution had one
additional ground for
optimism.
Pressure in the right places had succeeded in getting
the new trials
transferred
out of Judge Horton's courtroom. William
Callahan, a septuagenarian, no nonsense judge,
would
preside
at Haywood Patterson's next trial, scheduled for
November, 1933.
Judge Callahan was no Judge Horton. His stated
goal
was "to debunk"
the Scottsboro cases-- to get them off the front pages
of America's
newspapers. (LINK
TO
STORIES ON CALLAHAN TRIALS). To cut the
trials down to
size,
he made it as difficult as possible for reporters to
do their job,
refused
to ask for troops to protect the defendants or their
attorneys, and set
three days as a goal for completing each trial.
During the trials
he acted more like a second prosecutor than a judge,
sustaining
virtually
every prosecution objection and overruling
virtually every
defense
objection. He cut off all defense inquiry into
Price's chastity,
character, or reputation. When Leibowitz persisted
with questioning
designed
to suggest Price might have had sex with someone other
than a
Scottsboro
Boy around March 25, 1931, Callahan sternly
reprimanded him. In
his
instructions to the jury, Callahan told them that they
should presume
that
no white woman in Alabama would consent to sex with a
black. At
the
close of his instructions in the Patterson trial,
Callahan failed to
provide
the jury with the form for an acquittal until the
prosecution, fearing
reversible error, urged him to do so. Patterson
said of Callahan,
"He couldn't get me to the chair fast enough."
The undisputed star of the third Patterson trial, and
the
second Norris
trial which immediately followed, was Orville Gilley.
Gilley was a
charming
and entertaining witness, even offering to recite some
of his poetry
until
the dour Callahan cut him off, saying "I don't like
poetry."
Gilley's
account of the onboard fight and rape differed in many
details from
that
of Price, but he corroborated her on the essential
fact. Gilley
claimed
that the rapes ended only when he convinced the
Negroes to stop before
"they killed that woman." Why did Gilley
suddenly appear as a
prosecution
witness when they most needed him? Knight
admitted that he sent
weekly
checks to Gilley's mother and occasional spending
money to
Gilley.
Leibowitz contended that Gilley's reluctant lies were
simply a result
of
the prosecutor calling in his chips.
Guilty verdicts were quickly returned by juries in
both the
Patterson
and Norris trials.(LINKS TO
NORRIS
TRIAL TESTIMONY: (1) PRICE
(2) BRIDGES
(3)BATES).
Both defendants were sentenced to death.
Leibowitz angrily promised to appeal the verdicts "to
Hell and
back."
Judge Callahan, in the interest of judicial economy,
agreed to postpone
the trials of the remaining seven Scottsboro Boys
until the appeals of
the first two had run their course.
On February 15, 1935, the United States Supreme Court
heard
arguments
in the Patterson and Norris cases. Leibowitz
argued that the
convictions
should be overturned because Alabama excluded blacks
from its jury
rolls
in violation of the equal protection clause of the
Constitution.
The names of blacks that appeared on the jury rolls
introduced in Judge
Callahan's courtroom were, Leibowitz told the
justices, forged sometime
after the start of Patterson's trial. Chief
Justice Charles Evans
Hughes asked Leibowitz if he could prove that
allegation.
Leibowitz
had a page bring in the actual jury rolls and a
magnifying glass.
Hughes looked at the rolls, then passed it to the next
seated justice,
who then passed it to the next. Looks of disgust
appeared on
their
faces. Six weeks later the Supreme Court
announced their decision
in Norris
vs.
Alabama, unanimously holding that the
Alabama system of
jury
selection unconstitutional and reversing the
convictions of Norris and
Patterson. Leibowitz said, "I am thrilled beyond
words." He
hoped that the Court's decision would convince Alabama
that the
Scottsboro
cases were no longer worth their economic and
political cost.
The state decided to press ahead with prosecutions as
the
defense tried
to deal with its own internal problems. Two ILD
lawyers in
Nashville
were arrested and charged with trying to bribe
Victoria Price to change
her testimony, infuriating Leibowitz, who said the ILD
was
"assassinating"
the Scottsboro Boys. Leibowitz, meanwhile, was
under criticism
himself
for having through his actions at previous trials
alienated potential
jurors.
As Haywood Patterson's fourth trial began in January,
1936, in Judge
Callahan's
courtroom, Leibowitz agreed to let a local attorney
named Charles Watts
play the more visible role while he coached from a
seat behind.
No surprise to anyone, Patterson was again convicted
of
rape.
What was surprising, however, was that the jury
sentenced him to
seventy-five
years in prison rather than giving him the death
sentence the
prosecution
requested. One determined Methodist on the jury
succeeded in
persuading
the other eleven to go along with his
"compromise." The verdict
represented
the first time in the history of Alabama that a black
man convicted of
raping a white woman had not been sentenced to death.
Another surprising development occurred as the
Scottsboro
Boys, who
had been in Decatur to testify in Patterson's trial,
were being
transported
by guards back to their Birmingham prison. Ozie
Powell, while handcuffed in the backseat of a
car, managed to
extract a pen knife from a pocket and slash the neck
of a deputy
sheriff,
seriously injuring him. The sheriff, who was
driving, slammed on
the brakes, got out of the car, and shot Powell in the
head. The
sheriff called Powell's action an escape attempt.
Powell said he took
the
action out of a growing fear that they would be
murdered on the road,
and
complained that his hands were raised in the air
when he was
shot.
Powell teetered on the verge of death, but
survived. He suffered
permanent brain damage, however. According to
Clarence Norris,
Powell
was never the same again.
In 1936 there was the first serious talk of
compromise in
what had become,
in the eyes of many, the case of The White People
of Alabama vs.
The
Rest of the World. Allan Knight Chalmers,
head of the
Scottsboro
Defense Committee, eschewed diatribe and worked to
build an
understanding
of the facts of the case among influential Alabamians
by, for example,
distributing copies of Judge Horton's decision
throughout the
state.
In December of 1936, while Patterson's appeal was
still pending and the
other eight blacks awaited their trials, Thomas Knight
met secretly
with
Samuel Leibowitz in New York to discuss a
compromise. Knight told
Leibowitz that the cases were draining Alabama
financially and
politically,
and that he himself was sick of it all. He
offered to drop the
prosecutions
of three, and give the others no more than ten years
for either rape or
assault. Leibowitz was understandably reluctant to
accept any deal that
included more jail time time for any of his innocent
clients, but
Knight
had a strong bargaining position: guilty or not, any
trial was almost
certain
to result in conviction. Leibowitz agreed to the
compromise "with
a heavy heart." Before it could be implemented,
however, the
compromise
was thrown into doubt by the sudden death of Thomas
Knight in May,
1937.
One week later, Judge Callahan announced that the next
round of trials
would begin in July.
Seven of the nine Scottsboro Boys had been held in
jail for
over six
years without trial by the time jury selection began
in the third trial
of Clarence Norris on Monday, July 12, 1937.
Trying to beat the
hundred
degree heat, Judge Callahan rushed the trial even more
than usual, and
by Wednesday morning the prosecution had a death
sentence. Andy
Wright's
trial was next; he got ninety-nine years. On
Saturday, July 24 at
eleven o'clock, Charlie
Weem's jury returned and gave him seventy-five
years. Moments
later,
Ozie Powell was brought into court and the new
prosecutor, Thomas
Lawson,
announced that the state was dropping rape charges
against Powell and
that
he was pleading guilty to assaulting a deputy.
Then came the big
news. Lawson announced that all charges were
being dropped
against
the remaining four defendants: Willie Roberson, Olen
Montgomery, Eugene
Williams, and Roy Wright. He said that
after "careful
consideration"
every prosecutor was "convinced" that Roberson and
Montgomery were "not
guilty." Wright and Williams, regardless of
their guilty or
innocence,
were twelve and thirteen at the time and, in view of
the jail time they
had already served, justice required that they also be
released.
Leibowitz
led the four from the jail to an awaiting car, and
with an escort of
state
troopers they were driven to the Tennessee border. (LINK
TO
PHOTO OF LIEBOWITZ AND FOUR AFTER RELEASE).
Free of
Alabama,
but not of the label "Scottsboro Boy" or from the
wounds inflicted by
six
years in prison, they went on with their separate
lives: to marriage,
to
alcoholism, to jobs, to fatherhood, to hope, to
disillusionment, to
disease,
or to suicide.
For the five Scottsboro Boys left in Alabama, they
had a new
demon with
which to contend. Each of the five was convinced
that their
continued
confinement bought the freedom of the others, and they
resented it
deeply.
They struggled with life in hellholes of
prisons. Atmore Prison,
near Mobile, was a desperate place teeming with
poisonous snakes,
sadistic
guards, and rapacious prisoners. Kilby Prison,
near Birmingham,
housed
Alabama's electric chair; one of Haywood Patterson's
jobs was to carry
out the bodies of electrocuted inmates. They
sodomized or were
sodomized;
they assaulted or were assaulted. They survived,
but barely.
In 1938, a pardon for all of the Scottsboro Boys left
in
Alabama seemed
all but assured. Governor
Bibb
Graves was anxious to end the whole Scottsboro
episode before
he left office, and told Scottsboro Defense Committee
head Allan
Chalmers
that the five would be released after he had his
traditional pre-pardon
interviews with each in his office. The
interviews, however,
could
hardly have gone worse. First, Haywood Patterson
was found to be
carrying a knife when he was searched on his way to
the
interview.
Patterson claimed he always carried a knife for
protection, but
authorities
assumed the worst. Second, brain-damaged Ozie
Powell refused to
answer
Graves questions, saying "I don't want to say nothing
to you."
Third,
according to Graves' account, Clarence Norris
threatened to kill
Haywood
Patterson, with whom he had been feuding bitterly,
after his
release.
Finally, none of the Scottsboro Boys admitted any
knowledge or guilt
concerning
a rape aboard the Chattanooga to Memphis freight--a
rape that Graves
still
believed occurred. Graves left office without issuing
the pardons.
Either through paroles or escapes all of the
Scottsboro Boys
eventually
found their way out of Alabama. Charles Weems
was paroled in
1943,
Ozie Powell and Clarence Norris in 1946, and Andy
Wright, the last to leave Alabama for good
(Wright had been paroled
earlier, then returned because of a parole violation)
in June,
1950.
Haywood Patterson managed a dramatic escape in
1948. Patterson
and
Norris each went on to participate in the writing of
books about their
lives. Patterson's book, Scottsboro Boy, was
published
in
1950 while he was a fugitive. Shortly after its
publication,
Patterson
was arrested by the FBI, but the Governor G. Mennen
Williams of
Michigan
refused Alabama's extradition request. Norris
published his book, The
Last of the Scottsboro Boys, in 1979. Ten
years later, on
January
23, 1989, the last of the Scottsboro Boys was dead.
The story of the Scottsboro Boys lives on through the
efforts of artists
and scholars. Leadbelly recorded a song,
"Scottsboro Boys." (LINK
TO
AUDIO CLIP FROM SONG). Dan T.
Carter published his
award-winning Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the
American South in
1969.
A movie, Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys,
was shown on NBC
in 1976. ( One inaccuracy in Carter's book was relied
on to the movie
producer's
detriment: Carter reported that Ruby Bates and
Victoria Price had died
in 1961, when in fact at the time of the movie's
release they were both
alive and well, and Victoria Price at least was ready
to sue for
defamation.
Her suit was dismissed by a federal appeals court.) (LINK
TO
INFORMATION ABOUT PRICE'S CIVIL SUIT).
James
Goodman published Stories of Scottsboro, a
superb
recounting
of the Scottsboro tragedy from multiple
perspectives, in
1994.
At this writing, in October, 1998, a new documentary
on the Scottsboro
Boys is in production.
The story of the Scottsboro Boys is one of the most
shameful
examples
of injustice in our nation's history. It makes
clear that in the
Deep South of the 1930's, jurors were not willing to
accord a black
charged
with raping a white woman the usual presumption of
innocence. In
fact, one may argue that the presumption seemed
reversed: a black was
presumed
guilty unless he could establish his innocence beyond
a reasonable
doubt.
The cases show that to jurors, black lives didn't
count for much.
The jurors that in April, 1933 had just voted to
sentence Haywood
Patterson
to death were seen laughing as they emerged from the
juryroom.
Hannah
Arendt wrote of "the banality of evil." Evil
rarely comes in the
form of monsters, but rather in the form of relatively
normal people
who,
for reasons of careers, ideology, or a desire
for society's
approval,
are indifferent to the human consequences of their
actions.
Because
of indifferent jurors and career-motivated
prosecutors, the
self-serving
and groundless accusations of a single woman were
allowed to change
forever
the lives of nine black teenagers who found themselves
in the wrong
place
at the wrong time.
It is easy, especially for a Minnesota native like
myself,
to look at
the story of the Scottsboro Boys and to condemn a
whole region of the
country.
That, however, is unfair. There were good people
of the
South--courageous
newspaper editors, attorneys, ministers, and others--
who fought for
justice
for the Scottsboro Boys. One southerner's actions
stand out above all
others.
The decision of Judge James Horton to set aside the
conviction of
Haywood
Patterson, despite the dire consequences that decision
would have for
his
own career, was heroism, pure and simple.