Scarce Scottsboro Boy African American Clarence Norris Autograph Signed Book

$2,365.14 Buy It Now, FREE Shipping, 30-Day Returns, eBay Money Back Guarantee
Seller: memorabilia111 ✉️ (808) 100%, Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan, US, Ships to: US, Item: 176299957861 SCARCE SCOTTSBORO BOY AFRICAN AMERICAN CLARENCE NORRIS AUTOGRAPH SIGNED BOOK. Author: NORRIS,Clarence and Washington, Sybil D. Title: The Last of the Scottsboro BoysSIGNED HARDCOVER BOOK BY BOTH CLARENCE BORRIS AND SIBIL D. WASHINGTON. WITH DUSTJACKET. BOOK IN VG SHAPE. DJ IN GOOD SHAPE 6-12-79 For Casper Citron Thank youClarence NorrisSybil D. Washington

Two white females, Victoria Price, age 21, and Ruby Bates, age 17, both mill workers, hopped on a train to hitch a ride from Chattanooga to Huntsville, Alabama, early in the morning of March 25, 1931. On board with them were approximately twenty black teenage boys and young men who were also hitching rides on the train. A group of white boys of about the same age were in the train car as well. When the train stopped, the group of white males jumped off, though the reasons for this are disputed. After jumping off the train, they reported to the nearby train stationmaster that two women and a group of black men were riding on the train, and the train was then stopped in Paint Rock. Once the train stopped, 19-year-old Clarence Norris and the eight other young black men (referred to as the “Scottsboro Boys”) found aboard the train were arrested. Victoria Price and Ruby Bates were transported by police and interviewed. Price and Bates claimed the black teens forced the white teens to jump from the train and then proceeded to attack and rape the two of them. The nine Scottsboro Boys were each charged with rape. Several weeks after their arrest, in early April 1931, the nine were divided into four groups for trial. It is estimated that a crowd of 8,000 to 10,000 spectators gathered in small Scottsboro for the trial, with armed soldiers on hand to keep the crowd at bay. The primary evidence against the defendants was the testimony of Price and Bates. At the first trial, 19-year-old Clarence Norris and 20-year-old Charlie Weems were convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to death in less than two hours on April 7. Within a span of three days, eight of the Scottsboro Boys, all under age 21, had been convicted and sentenced to death, with their execution date set for July 10, 1931. The trial of the ninth boy –14-year-old Roy Wright – ended in a mistrial. He was never tried again, but he remained in jail until the charges against him were dropped in 1937. Both the International Labor Defense, a group affiliated with the Communist party, and the NAACP quickly backed the cause of the Scottsboro Boys. While the group’s appeal was pending in court, they received a stay of their executions. In January 1932, the NAACP withdrew from the case because of the great tension that had developed between the NAACP and the ILD as each group attempted to gain control of the representation and legal strategy of the Scottsboro Boys. Also in January 1932, accuser Ruby Bates wrote a letter in which she denied that she had been raped. Over the course of the following year, Bates formally recanted her rape and assault claims in court, admitting that the story in which she accused the Scottsboro Boys of these crimes was completely false. The appeal reached the U.S. Supreme Court in November 1932. The Court reversed the convictions of the Scottsboro Boys based on its determination that the defendants had been deprived of their constitutional right to due process when they were not provided adequate legal representation at their trials. Two months later, the first retrial of one of the Scottsboro Boys – Haywood Patterson – began. On April 9, 1933, Patterson was again found guilty and sentenced to death. Following his conviction, protests broke out both locally and nationally, and the remainder of the retrials of the Scottsboro Boys were postponed. Three months later, the trial judge, Judge James Horton, set aside Patterson’s conviction. The cases of the Scottsboro Boys were then removed from Judge Horton’s jurisdiction, and Patterson and Clarence Norris were quickly tried again in the nearby court of Judge William Callahan. Both were once again convicted and sentenced to death. The Alabama Supreme Court affirmed the convictions in June 1934. In January 1935, the U.S. Supreme Court again reviewed the convictions of Patterson and Norris. The Court overturned the convictions on the basis that black people had been excluded from the jury, ruling that the systematic exclusion of prospective black jurors from jury service violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Retried again in January 1936, Patterson was convicted, and this time received a sentence of 75 years in prison. The Alabama Supreme Court upheld this conviction in June of the following year. The next month, July 1937, Norris, Weems, and Andy Wright were all retried and convicted. Norris was again sentenced to death. In July 1937, the charges against Willie Roberson, Olen Montgomery, Ozie Powell and Eugene Williams (as well as Roy Wright) were finally dismissed. The State Attorney announced that the prosecution was “convinced they were not guilty.” This group was released from prison, except for Powell, who remained incarcerated on charges relating to an altercation with a prison guard. The other four Scottsboro Boys – Clarence Norris, Andy Wright, Charlie Weems and Haywood Patterson – remained in prison, having been labeled by the prosecution as the ringleaders of the alleged assault on Bates and Price. In 1943 and 1944, Charlie Weems, Clarence Norris and Andy Wright were paroled. In 1948, Haywood Patterson escaped from prison, though he was arrested again and died in prison shortly thereafter. In 1976, Clarence Norris was pardoned by the Alabama Governor George Wallace. Norris, the last surviving member of the Scottsboro Boys, lived until 1989. For several years, Norris unsuccessfully sought $10,000 in compensation from the State of Alabama. In November 2013, more than eighty years after the conviction of the Scottsboro Boys, the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles granted posthumous pardons to Charlie Weems, Andy Wright and Haywood Patterson in order to formally exonerate them as well. - Meghan Barrett Cousino Two whiteCharles Weems, at age nineteen was the oldest of the Scottsboro Boys when he was arrested in March, 1931. Weems, of Atlanta, was involved in the fight aboard the Southern Railroad freight. He was convicted of rape first in 1931, then in a second trial in 1937. He kept a clean prison record and was paroled in 1943. Weems had a hard childhood. His mother died when he was four, and only one other of his seven siblings survived childhood. Weems finished the fifth grade, then took a jobs in a pharmacy. Prison life was also difficult for Weems. He complained about being "half fed" and said he spent a lot of time thinking about "the ladies out in the world and I'm shut in here." In 1934, he was beaten and tear-gassed for reading Communist literature that had been sent to him. The gassing caused permanent eye injuries. In 1937, he contracted tuberculosis. In 1938, he was stabbed by a prison guard who had mistaken him for his intended target, Andy Wright. After his release in 1943, Weems moved back to Atlanta where he married and took a job in a laundry. (BACK) Clarence Norris Clarence Norris died in Bronx Community Hospital on Janurary 23, 1989 at the age of seventy-six. He was, as the title of a book he helped write suggested, the last of the Scottsboro Boys. Norris was the second of eleven children born to Georgia sharecroppers. He attended school only to second grade, then at age seven began working in the cotton fields. Norris had a job in a Goodyear plant, working up to sixteen hours a day, when his girlfriend left and he decided to hit the railroad tracks. When Norris, who had been one of those involved in the train fight with white boys, was accused of rape he thought he "was as good as dead." According to Norris, on the night before the first trial, he was removed from his cell, beaten and told to turn state's evidence if he wanted to save his life. At the first trial in Scottsboro, Norris testified that theother blacks raped Price and Bates and that he alone was innocent: "They all raped her, everyone of them." Norris's second conviction was overturned by the U. S. Supreme Court in the landmark case of Norris vs Alabama, which found Alabama's system of excluding blacks from jury rolls to violate the Fourteenth Amendment. Norris was convicted a third time in 1937 (in what Norris termed "a Kangaroo Court"), and again sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life in prison by Governor Graves. Norris was bitter over developments which left him and four others in prison, while four boys were released. He believed that he was paying the price for their freedom. Norris fought often in prison. One incident in 1943 landed him ten days in the hole with only a blanket, bread, and water. Another incident brought on a beating with a leather strap. Norris was first paroled in 1944. He moved to New York in violation of his parole, and was returned to prison. In 1946, he was a paroled a second time. He got a job shoveling coal in Cleveland for three years, then moved to New York City. Unemployed in 1956, Norris visited Samuel Liebowitz who arranged a job for him as a dishwasher. In the 1960's, Norris asked the help of the NAACP in obtaining a pardon from the State of Alabama. Norris had violated parole when he left Alabama and was a fugitive subject to parole revocation and a return to prison. A successful full-scale campaign was mounted, and in 1976 Norris received his pardon from Governor George Wallace. (BACK) Andy Wright Andy Wright, nineteen at the time of his arrest, was the older brother of Scottsboro Boy Roy Wright. Wright attended school, doing well, in Chattanooga until the sixth grade, when his father died and he quit to help his mother support the family. He started driving a truck for a produce distributor at age twelve, a job he kept up for seven years until the distributor's insurance company learned of his young age and raised rates. In March of 1931, the two Wrights, Patterson, and Williams all boarded the Southern Railroad freight, planning to ride it to Memphis where they heard government jobs hauling logs on the Mississippi might be available. Wright admitted to having fought with white boys on the train, but denied ever having seen Price or Bates until he got off the train. In prison, despite a 1937 Life Magazine piece which described him as "the best natured" of the Scottsboro Boys, Wright was frequently ill and depressed. He was also said to be mistrustful, something of a loner, and to have a mean streak. Wright was beaten by both prison guards and other inmates, on more than one occassion severely enough to require hospitalization. He wrote that "It seems as though I've been in here for century an century." Wright was first paroled in January, 1944. He married a woman from Mobile later that year. He took a job, which he held for two years, driving a grocery delivery truck. Wright left Alabama in violation of his parole in 1946, was arrested, and for the next four years was in and out of the Alabama prison system. He left Kilby prison for good on June 6, 1950, the last Scottsboro Boy to be freed. Wright moved to New York, living for times in Albany and New York City. In 1951, he was accused of raping a thirteen-year-old girl (NAACP investigators viewed the charges as false; Wright had been dating the girl's mother and his accuser), but acquitted by an all-white jury. (BACK) Ozie Powell Ozie Powell, sixteen when arrested, was from Atlanta. Powell was not involved in the train fight, but said that he witnessed it. He did not know any of the other Scottsboro Boys prior to his arrest. Powell, whose IQ was measured at "64-plus," could write only his name. Powell who was born in rural Georgia, had only one year of schooling. He had spent most of the three years prior to his arrest working in lumber camps. He described himself as quiet, shy, and bashful. In February of 1936, after testifying at Haywood Patterson's fourth trial, Powell was loaded into a car with Clarence Norris and Roy Wright. The three were handcuffed together in the backseat, while a sherrif and his deputy rode in front. Powell and the deputy got into an argument. The deputy hit Powell on his head. With his one free hand, Powell took a pen knife that had escaped detection during a search out of his pants and slashed the deputy's throat, wounding him. The sheriff stopped the car, got out, and fired a bullet at Powell (who, along with the others, had his hands in the air) which lodged in his brain. (The sheriff and deputy described the incident as an escape attempt). Powell survived, but suffered permanent brain damage. He had trouble speaking and hearing, memory loss, and weakness in his right leg and arm. On the operating table Powell told his mother, "I done give up...cause everybody in Alabama is down on me and is mad at me." According to those who knew him, like Clarence Norris, Powell was never the same again. In what was to be his pre-parole interview with Governor Graves in 1938, Powell refused to answer the Governor's questions saying, "I don't want to say nothing to you." Graves decided not to parole Powell. He was finally released from prison in June, 1946. He moved to back to Georgia. (BACK) Olen Montgomery Olen Montgomery, seventeen at the time of his arrest, was born in Monroe, Georgia, where he attended school through the fifth grade. Montgomery was riding alone in a tank car near the rear of the train when the fight and alleged rape took place on the Chattanooga to Memphis freight. Montgomery stuck consistently to his story, and by 1937 every prosecutor connected with the Scottsboro cases agreed Montgomery was innocent. Montgomery was one of four Scottsboro Boys released in July, 1937. During his six years in jail, Montgomery, who was severely nearsighted in both eyes and nearly blind in one, wrote frequent letters to his supporters asking for such things as six-string guitars (Montgomery hoped to be "the Blues King" after his release) and money to buy a night with a woman. After his release in 1937, Montgomery said that he wanted to be a lawyer or musician. Despite the assistance of the Scottsboro Defense Committee, however, none of his career dreams were realized. Montgomery bought a saxophone, then a guitar, and practiced as much as possible. Most of the job opportunities that came his way-- dishwasher, porter, laborer-- Montgomery despised, believing they just were getting in the way of his musical calling. He did agree to tour the country with Roy Wright for the Defense Committee and spoke at a number of SDC-arranged meetings. Montgomery bounced back and forth between New York City and Georgia, drinking heavily, and rarely holding a job for more than a few months. Sometime after 1960, Montgomery settled for good in Georgia. (BACK) Eugene Williams Eugene Williams was thirteen when arrested along with his friends the Wright brothers and Haywood Patterson in March, 1931. Prior to boarding the Southern Railroad freight, Williams had worked as a dishwasher in a Chattanooga cafe. At trial, Williams admitted that he fought with white boys on the train, but denied having seen Price or Bates until after his arrest. In prison, Williams said that "getting out is the main thing I think about." A 1937 Life Magazine article described Williams as "a sullen, shifty mulatto" who "tries to impress interviewers with his piety." The state dropped charges against Williams in July, 1937, citing his youth at the time of the alleged incident. After his release he told Samuel Liebowitz that he hoped to land a job someday in a jazz orchestra. He moved to St. Louis where he had relatives, and where his sponsors hoped that he would enroll in a Baptist seminary. (BACK) Willie Roberson When Willie Roberson, age seventeen, allegedly raped Ruby Bates aboard the Chattanooga to Memphis freight we was suffering from a serious case of syphillis, with sores all over his genitals, that would have made intercourse very painful. Moreover, Roberson was unable to walk without a cane, and clearly was in in no condition to leap from railroad car to railroad car, as his accusers alleged. Nonetheless, on the strength of Price's and Bate's allegations Roberson was prosecuted and convicted. Price testified that Roberson held her legs apart while other boys yelled "pour it to her." The prosecution even managed to use Roberson's syphillitic condition to its advantage, suggesting that the syphillis Ruby Bates contracted in 1931 was caused by his having had sex with her. In fact, Roberson was no where near the scene of the alleged rape, but alone in a boxcar near the caboose. He had left his job as a hotel busboy in Georgia to go to Chattanooga in search of better work. Finding none available, he boarded the freight for Memphis. Throughout the several trials in which he testified, Roberson stuck to his story. Finally, even prosecutors came to believe him, and Roberson was one of four Scottsboro Boys released in July, 1937. After his release, Roberson lived in New York City where he found steady work. Roberson's six years in jail were difficult. Roberson suffered from asthma, and the lack of fresh air available aggravated his condition. He was diagnosed (as were four other Scottsboro Boys) with "prison neurosis." He said of his situation, "If I don't get free I just rather they give me the electric chair and be dead out of my misery." (BACK) Roy Wright Roy Wright, twelve or thirteen when arrested, was the youngest of the Scottsboro Boys. He was the brother of Andy Wright, who was also arrested upon disembarking the Chattanooga to Memphis freight on March 25, 1931. Wright was on his first trip away from his home in Chattanooga, where he worked in a grocery store. His only trial ended in a mistrial when eleven jurors held out for death, even though, in view of his age, the prosecution had only asked for a life sentence. At the first trials in Scottsboro, Wright testified that he saw other defendants rape the white girls. He later said that he did so after having been threatened and severely beaten by authorities. Wright kept a Bible with him at all times in jail, where he was held six years without retrial. He needed whatever comfort he could find. In a letter to his mother he wrote, "I am all lonely and thinking of you...I feel like I can eat some of your cooking Mom." Wright went over a year without getting fresh air. Alabama dropped all charges against Wright in 1937. After his release, he told Samuel Leibowitz that wanted to be a lawyer or a teacher. After going on a national tour for the Scottsboro Defense Committee, Wright served in the army, got married, and took a job with the merchant marine. In 1959, after returning from an extended stay at sea, Wright became convinced that his wife had been unfaithful. Wright shot and killed his wife, then killed himself. (BACK)Norris, Weems, and Andy Wright were all retried and convicted. Norris was again sentenced to death. In July 1937, the charges against Willie Roberson, Olen Montgomery, Ozie Powell and Eugene Williams (as well as Roy Wright) were finally dismissed. The State Attorney announced that the prosecution was “convinced they were not guilty.” This group was released from prison, except for Powell, who remained incarcerated on charges relating to an altercation with a prison guard. The other four Scottsboro Boys – Clarence Norris, Andy Wright, Charlie Weems and Haywood Patterson – remained in prison, having been labeled by the prosecution as the ringleaders of the alleged assault on Bates and Price. In 1943 and 1944, Charlie Weems, Clarence Norris and Andy Wright were paroled. In 1948, Haywood Patterson escaped from prison, though he was arrested again and died in prison shortly thereafter. In 1976, Clarence Norris was pardoned by the Alabama Governor George Wallace. Norris, the last surviving member of the Scottsboro Boys, lived until 1989. For several years, Norris unsuccessfully sought $10,000 in compensation from the State of Alabama. In November 2013, more than eighty years after the conviction of the Scottsboro Boys, the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles granted posthumous pardons to Charlie Weems, Andy Wright and Haywood Patterson in order to formally exonerate them as well. - Meghan Barrett Cousino Clarence Norris, the last survivor of the ''Scottsboro Boys'' rape case, which became a symbol of racial injustice in the Deep South in the 1930's, died Monday at Bronx Community Hospital after a long illness. He was 76 years old. Mr. Norris, who was sentenced to death three times in a series of trials involving nine black teen-agers accused of raping two white women, spent 15 years in prison. He was then a fugitive for 30 years after he violated his parole and fled Alabama. He came to New York City, where he worked as a warehouseman. It was not until 1976, when he was 64 years old, that the Alabama Pardon and Parole Board unanimously found that Mr. Norris was innocent of the rape charges. Gov. George C. Wallace signed the pardon order. Attention of the World The ''Scottsboro Boys'' case won worldwide attention as the nine defendants, aged 13 to 19 at the time of the alleged crime, became symbols in the conflict between Northeastern liberals and Southern conservatives. The case began March 25, 1931, when the youths, who had caught a freight as they headed north to seek jobs, were taken off the train at Paint Rock, Ala., and taken to the nearby jail at Scottsboro. They were all charged with rape. Continue reading the main story Mr. Norris and the other youths were caught on the same train, but in different cars, with two white women, who said they had been raped. Following one of a series of trials, which dragged on until 1937, one of the women withdrew her accusation. In ''The Last of the Scottsboro Boys,'' his 1979 autobiography written with Sybil D. Washington, Mr. Norris contended that the black youths were scapegoats, caught at the wrong place at the wrong time with two white women who were afraid they would be accused of fraternizing with blacks. Pawns in a Struggle Once arrested and charged, the youths became pawns in a political struggle between the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Communist Party and the socialist International Labor Defense. ''Neither group wanted to handle the case unless all of us signed with them exclusive,'' Mr. Norris said. ''I never did understand why they couldn't work together, since they all said they wanted to see us free.'' The International Labor Defense won the right to defend the youths and hired a well known New York lawyer, Samuel S. Liebowitz, who in the course of the trials was reviled publicly by some as a ''meddling New York Jew.'' He received so many threats on his life that at one point Mayor Fiorello La Guardia sent two New York city detectives to Alabama to guard him. Rungs on a Ladder Mr. Norris was sentenced to death three times. In fact, all but the youngest defendant were sentenced to death. Although none was executed, all went to prison. In the end, they served as rungs on a ladder for a lot of people involved in the case. ''Reputations were won and lost,'' said Mr. Norris. ''Organizations became larger and better known. Newspapers sold better, deputies became sheriffs, elected sheriffs were re-elected and went on to better positions.'' Finally having gotten his death sentences reduced to life imprisonment, Mr. Norris was paroled in 1946. But he said he could not escape the ''Scottsboro boy'' stigma, and so he took his brother's name and came north to live. He said that in 1970 he decided to clear his name, and he did so with the conspicuous help of the N.A.A.C.P., in particular an association lawyer, James I. Meyerson, who handled his appeal for a pardon. The appeal also had the backing of William J. Baxley, who was then the Attorney General of Alabama. ''A man should never give up hope,'' Mr. Norris said after receiving his pardon. ''I'm just so glad to be free. They had said that I was a nobody, a dog, but I stood up and I said the truth. Somebody's got to do these things in life.'' Mr. Norris, who was born in Warm Springs, Ga., on July 12, 1912, is survived by his wife, Melba, and two daughters, Deborah N. Webster and Adele Norris, all of Brooklyn, and three sisters, Evaneza Ward and Virginia Ferrier, both of Cleveland, and Blanche Norris, of Zebulon, Ga. Plans for a funeral service tomorrow were incomplete yesterday. The Scottsboro Boys were nine African American teenagers, ages 13 to 20, falsely accused in Alabama of raping two white women on a train in 1931. The landmark set of legal cases from this incident dealt with racism and the right to a fair trial. The cases included a lynch mob before the suspects had been indicted, all-white juries, rushed trials, and disruptive mobs. It is commonly cited as an example of a miscarriage of justice in the United States legal system. On March 25, 1931, two dozen people were 'hoboing' on a freight train traveling between Chattanooga and Memphis, Tennessee, the hoboes being an equal mix of African-Americans and Caucasians. A group of white teenage boys saw 18-year-old Haywood Patterson on the train and attempted to push him off the train, claiming that it was "a white man's train".[1] A group of whites gathered rocks and attempted to force all of the black men from the train. Patterson and the other black passengers were able to ward off the group. The humiliated white teenagers jumped or were forced off the train and reported to the city's sheriff that they had been attacked by a group of black teenagers. The sheriff deputized a posse comitatus, stopped and searched the train at Paint Rock, Alabama and arrested the black Americans. Two young white women also got off the train and accused the African American teenagers of rape. The case was first heard in Scottsboro, Alabama, in three rushed trials, in which the defendants received poor legal representation. All but 12-year-old Roy Wright were convicted of rape and sentenced to death, the common sentence in Alabama at the time for black men convicted of raping white women,[2] even though there was medical evidence to suggest that they had not committed the crime.[3] With help from the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the case was appealed. The Alabama Supreme Court affirmed seven of the eight convictions, and granted 13-year-old Eugene Williams a new trial because he was a minor. Chief Justice John C. Anderson dissented, ruling that the defendants had been denied an impartial jury, fair trial, fair sentencing, and effective counsel. While waiting for their trials, eight of the nine defendants were held in Kilby Prison. The cases were twice appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which led to landmark decisions on the conduct of trials. In Powell v. Alabama (1932), it ordered new trials.[4] The case was first returned to the lower court and the judge allowed a change of venue, moving the retrials to Decatur, Alabama. Judge Horton was appointed. During the retrials, one of the alleged victims admitted to fabricating the rape story and asserted that none of the Scottsboro Boys touched either of the white women. The jury found the defendants guilty, but the judge set aside the verdict and granted a new trial. The judge was replaced and the case tried under a judge who ruled frequently against the defense. For the third time a jury—now with one African-American member—returned a guilty verdict. The case was sent to the US Supreme Court on appeal. It ruled that African-Americans had to be included on juries, and ordered retrials.[5] Charges were finally dropped for four of the nine defendants. Sentences for the rest ranged from 75 years to death. All but two served prison sentences; all were released or escaped by 1946. One was shot while being escorted to prison by a Sheriff's Deputy and permanently disabled. Two escaped, were later charged with other crimes, convicted, and sent back to prison. Clarence Norris, the oldest defendant and the only one sentenced to death in the final trial, "jumped parole" in 1946 and went into hiding. He was found in 1976 and pardoned by Governor George Wallace, by which time the case had been thoroughly analyzed and shown to be an injustice. Norris later wrote a book about his experiences. The last surviving defendant[who?] died in 1989. "The Scottsboro Boys", as they became known, were defended by many in the North and attacked by many in the South. The case is now widely considered a miscarriage of justice, highlighted by use of all-white juries. Black Americans in Alabama had been disenfranchised since the late 19th century and were likewise not allowed on juries. The case has been explored in many works of literature, music, theatre, film and television. On November 21, 2013, Alabama's parole board voted to grant posthumous pardons to the three Scottsboro Boys who had not been pardoned or had their convictions overturned.[6] Contents 1 Arrests and accusations 2 Lynch mob 3 The trials 3.1 Defense attorneys 3.2 Norris and Weems trial 3.3 Patterson trial 3.4 Powell, Roberson, Williams, Montgomery and Wright trial 3.5 Roy Wright trial 3.6 Death sentences 3.7 Help from Communist Party and NAACP 3.8 Appeal to Alabama Supreme Court 3.9 Williams' ruling 3.10 Weems and Norris ruling 3.10.1 Dissent 3.11 Appeal to United States Supreme Court 4 Decatur trials 4.1 Patterson trial 4.1.1 Defense 4.2 Closing arguments 4.3 Verdict 4.3.1 Irwin Craig 4.4 Horton grants Patterson a new trial 4.5 New trials under Callahan 4.6 Norris' retrial 4.7 United States Supreme Court reverses Decatur convictions 4.8 Final round of trials 4.9 Final decisions 4.10 Aftermath 4.11 2013 pardon 4.12 Fates of the defendants 4.13 In popular culture 5 Notes and references 5.1 Notes 5.2 References 6 Further reading 7 External links Arrests and accusations Victoria Price (left) and Ruby Bates (right) in 1931 Historical marker in Paint Rock recalling the arrests On March 25, 1931, the Southern Railway line between Chattanooga and Memphis, Tennessee, had nine black youths who were hoboing on a freight train with several white males and two white women.[7][8][9] A fight broke out between the white and black groups near the Lookout Mountain tunnel, and the whites were kicked off the train. The whites went to a sheriff in the nearby town Paint Rock, Alabama, and claimed that they were assaulted by the blacks on the train. The sheriff gathered a posse and gave orders to search for and "capture every Negro on the train."[10] The posse arrested all black passengers on the train for assault.[11] The unfortunate black teenagers were: Haywood Patterson (age 18) who claimed that he had ridden freight trains for so long that he could light a cigarette on the top of a moving train; Clarence Norris (age 19), who had left behind ten brothers and sisters in rural Georgia[citation needed]; Charlie Weems (age 19); brothers Andy Wright (age 19) and Roy Wright (age 12), who were leaving home for the first time; the nearly blind Olin Montgomery (age 17), who was hoping to get a job in order to pay for a pair of glasses that he so desperately needed; Ozie Powell (age 16); Willie Roberson (age 16), who suffered from such severe syphilis that he could barely walk; and Eugene Williams (age 13);[7] Of these nine boys, only four knew each other prior to their arrest. Two white women who were also aboard the train, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, told a member of the posse that they had been raped by a group of black teenagers.[12] The posse brought the women to the jail where the accused were being held, and they identified them as their attackers. A doctor was summoned to examine Price and Bates for signs of rape, but none was found. A widely published photo showed the two women shortly after the arrests in 1931.[citation needed] There was no evidence (beyond the women's testimony) pointing to the guilt of the accused, yet that was irrelevant due to the prevalent racism in the South at the time, according to which black men were constantly being policed by white men for signs of sexual interest in white women, which could be punishable by lynching. Price and Bates may have told the police that they were raped to divert police attention from themselves. They were both suspected of being prostitutes and not only risked being arrested for it, but they could also have been prosecuted for violating the Mann Act by crossing a state line "for immoral purposes." Lynch mob In the Jim Crow South, lynching of black males accused of raping or murdering whites was common; word quickly spread of the arrest and rape story. Soon a lynch mob gathered at the jail in Scottsboro, demanding the youths be surrendered to them.[13] The crowd at Scottsboro on April 6, 1931 Sheriff Matt Wann stood in front of the jail and addressed the mob, saying he would kill the first person to come through the door.[14] He removed his belt and handed his gun to one of his deputies. He walked through the mob and the crowd parted to let him through; Wann was not touched by anyone. He walked across the street to the courthouse where he telephoned Governor Benjamin M. Miller, who mobilized the Alabama Army National Guard to protect the jail.[14][15] He took the defendants to the county seat of Gadsden, Alabama, for indictment and to await trial. Although rape was potentially a capital offense in Alabama, the defendants at this point were not allowed to consult an attorney.[citation needed] The trials The prisoners were brought to court by 118 Alabama guardsmen, armed with machine guns. It was market day in Scottsboro, and farmers were in town to sell produce and buy supplies. A crowd of thousands soon formed.[16] Courthouse access required a permit due to the salacious nature of the testimony expected.[17] As the Supreme Court later described this situation, "the proceedings ... took place in an atmosphere of tense, hostile, and excited public sentiment."[18] For each trial, all-white juries were selected. There were few African Americans in the jury pool, as most had been disenfranchised since the turn of the century by a new state constitution and white discriminatory practice, and were thus disqualified from jury service.[citation needed] Defense attorneys The pace of the trials were very fast before the standing-room-only, all-white audience. The judge and prosecutor wanted to speed the nine trials to avoid violence, so the first trial took a day and a half, and the rest took place one right after the other, in just one day. The judge had ordered the Alabama bar to assist the defendants, but the only attorney who volunteered was Milo Moody, a 69-year-old attorney who had not defended a case in decades.[17] The judge persuaded Stephen Roddy, a Chattanooga, Tennessee, real estate lawyer, to assist him. Roddy admitted he had not had time to prepare and was not familiar with Alabama law, but agreed to aid Moody.[19] Against accepted practice, Roddy presented both the testimony of his clients and the case of the girls. Because of the mob atmosphere, Roddy petitioned the court for a change of venue, entering into evidence newspaper and law enforcement accounts[20] describing the crowd as "impelled by curiosity".[21][22] Judge Hawkins found that the crowd was curious and not hostile.[23] Norris and Weems trial Clarence Norris and Charlie Weems were tried first. During prosecution testimony, Victoria Price stated that she and Ruby Bates witnessed the fight, that one of the black men had a gun, and that they all raped her at knife point. During cross-examination by Roddy, Price livened her testimony with wisecracks that brought roars of laughter.[24] Clarence Norris Charlie Weems Dr. Bridges testified that his examination of Victoria Price found no vaginal tearing (which would have indicated rape), and that she had had semen in her for several hours. Ruby Bates failed to mention that either she or Price was raped until she was cross-examined.[25] The prosecution ended with testimony from three men who claimed the black youths fought the white youths, put them off the train, and "took charge" of the white girls. The prosecution rested without calling any of the white youths as witness.[26] During the defense testimony, defendant Charles Weems testified that he was not part of the fight, that Patterson had the pistol, and that he had not seen the white girls on the train until the train pulled into Paint Rock.[citation needed] Defendant Clarence Norris stunned the courtroom by implicating the other defendants. He denied participating in the fight or being in the gondola car where the fight took place. But he said that he saw the alleged rapes by the other blacks from his spot atop the next boxcar.[25][27] The defense put on no further witnesses.[citation needed] During closing, the prosecution said, "If you don't give these men death sentences, the electric chair might as well be abolished."[28] The defense made no closing argument, nor did it address the sentencing of the death penalty for their clients.[28] The Court started the next case while the jury was still deliberating the first. The first jury deliberated less than two hours before returning a guilty verdict and imposed the death sentence on both Weems and Norris.[29] Patterson trial Haywood Patterson The trial for Haywood Patterson occurred while the Norris and Weems cases were still under consideration by the jury. When the jury returned its verdict from the first trial, the jury from the second trial was taken out of the courtroom. When the verdicts of guilty were announced, the courtroom erupted in cheers, as did the crowd outside. A band, there to play for a show of Ford Motor Company cars outside, began playing Hail, Hail the Gang's All Here and There'll be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.[29][30] The celebration was so loud that it was most likely heard by the second jury waiting inside.[31] After the outburst, the defense of Patterson moved for a mistrial, but Judge Hawkins denied the motion and testimony continued.[32] The second trial continued. During the second trial's prosecution testimony, Victoria Price mostly stuck with her story, stating flatly that Patterson raped her. She accused Patterson of shooting one of the white youths. Price volunteered, "I have not had intercourse with any other white man but my husband. I want you to know that."[29][30] Dr. Bridges repeated his testimony from the first trial.[30] Other witnesses testified that "the negroes" had gotten out of the same gondola car as Price and Bates; a farmer claimed to have seen white women [on the train] with the black youths.[33] Patterson defended his actions, testifying again that he had seen Price and Bates in the gondola car, but had nothing to do with them. On cross-examination he testified that he had seen "all but three of those negroes ravish that girl", but then changed his story. He said that he had not seen "any white women" until the train "got to Paint Rock."[34] The younger Wright brother testified that Patterson was not involved with the girls, but that nine black teenagers had sex with the girls.[30] On cross examination, Roy Wright testified that Patterson "was not involved with the girls, but that, "The long, tall, black fellow had the pistol. He is not here." He claimed also to have been on top of the boxcar, and that Clarence Norris had a knife.[35] Co-defendants Andy Wright, Eugene Williams, and Ozie Powell all testified that they did not see any women on the train. Olen Montgomery testified that he sat alone on the train and did not know of any of the referenced events.[36] The jury quickly convicted Patterson and recommended death by electric chair.[37] Powell, Roberson, Williams, Montgomery and Wright trial This trial began within minutes of the previous case. Ozie Powell   Willie Roberson   Eugene Williams   Olen Montgomery   Andy Wright Price repeated her testimony, adding that the black teenagers split into two groups of six to rape her and Ruby Bates. Price accused Eugene Williams of holding the knife to her throat, and said that all of the other teenagers had knives.[38] Under cross examination she gave more detail,[37] adding that someone held a knife to the white teenager, Gilley, during the rapes.[37] This trial was interrupted and the jury sent out when the Patterson jury reported; they found him guilty.[39] There was no uproar at the announcement. Ruby Bates took the stand, identifying all five defendants as among the 12 entering the gondola car, putting off the whites, and "ravishing" her and Price.[37] Dr. Bridges was the next prosecution witness, repeating his earlier testimony. On cross examination, Bridges testified detecting no movement in the spermatozoa found in either woman, suggesting intercourse had taken place some time before. He also testified that defendant Willie Roberson was "diseased with syphilis and gonorrhea, a bad case of it." He admitted under questioning that Price told him that she had had sex with her husband and that Bates had earlier had intercourse as well, before the alleged rape events.[40] The defense called the only witnesses they had had time to find – the defendants. No new evidence was revealed. The next prosecution witnesses testified that Roberson had run over train cars leaping from one to another, and that he was in much better shape than he claimed.[40] Sim Gilley testified that he saw "every one of those five in the gondola,"[41] but did not confirm that he had seen the women raped. The defense again waived closing argument, and surprisingly the prosecution then proceeded to make more argument. The defense objected vigorously, but the Court allowed it.[41] Judge Hawkins then instructed the jury, stating that any defendant aiding in the crime was as guilty as any of the defendants who had committed it. The jury began deliberating at four in the afternoon. Roy Wright trial The prosecution agreed that 13-year-old Roy Wright[2] was too young for the death penalty; it did not seek it. The prosecution presented only testimony from Price and Bates. His case went to the jury at nine that evening. His jury and that from the trial of five men were deliberating at the same time. Roy Wright At nine on Thursday morning, April 9, 1931, the five defendants in Wednesday's trial were all found guilty. Roy Wright's jury could not agree on sentencing, and was declared a hung jury that afternoon. All the jurors agreed on his guilt, but seven insisted on the death sentence while five held out for life imprisonment (in cases like this, that was often an indication that the jurors believed the suspect was innocent but they were unwilling to go against community norms of conviction). Judge Hawkins declared a mistrial.[42] Death sentences The eight convicted defendants were assembled on April 9, 1931, and sentenced to death by electric chair. The Associated Press reported that the defendants were "calm" and "stoic" as Judge Hawkins handed down the death sentences one after another.[42] Judge Hawkins set the executions for July 10, 1931, the earliest date Alabama law allowed. While appeals were filed, the Alabama Supreme Court issued indefinite stays of executions 72 hours before the defendants were scheduled to die. The men's cells were next to the execution chamber, and they heard the July 10, 1931 execution of William Hokes,[43] a black man from St. Clair County convicted of murder.[44] They later recalled that he "died hard."[45] Help from Communist Party and NAACP After a demonstration in Harlem, the Communist Party USA took an interest in the Scottsboro case. Chattanooga Party member James Allen edited the Communist Southern Worker, and publicized "the plight of the boys".[46] The Party used its legal arm, the International Labor Defense (ILD), to take up their cases,[47] and persuaded the defendants' parents to let the party champion their cause. The ILD retained attorneys George W. Chamlee, who filed the first motions, and Joseph Brodsky. The NAACP also offered to handle the case, offering the services of famed criminal defense attorney Clarence Darrow. However, the Scottsboro defendants decided to let the ILD handle their appeal.[2] Chamlee moved for new trials for all defendants. Private investigations took place, revealing that Price and Bates had been prostitutes in Tennessee, who regularly serviced both black and white clientele.[48] Chamlee offered judge Hawkins affidavits to that effect, but the judge forbade him to read them out loud. The defense argued that this evidence proved that the two women had likely lied at trial.[49] Chamlee pointed to the uproar in Scottsboro that occurred when the verdicts were reported as further evidence that the change of venue should have been granted. Appeal to Alabama Supreme Court Following Judge Hawkins' denial of the motions for new trial, attorney George W. Chamlee filed an appeal and was granted a stay of execution. Chamlee was joined by Communist Party attorney Joseph Brodsky and ILD attorney Irving Schwab. The defense team argued that their clients had not had adequate representation, had insufficient time for counsel to prepare their cases, had their juries intimidated by the crowd, and finally, that it was unconstitutional for blacks to have been excluded from the jury. In the question of procedural errors, the state Supreme Court found none. Williams' ruling On March 24, 1932, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled against seven of the eight remaining Scottsboro Boys, confirming the convictions and death sentences of all but the 13-year-old Eugene Williams. It upheld seven of eight rulings from the lower court. The Alabama Supreme Court granted 13-year-old Eugene Williams a new trial because he was a juvenile, which saved him from the immediate threat of the electric chair.[50] Weems and Norris ruling The Court upheld the lower court's change of venue decision, upheld the testimony of Ruby Bates, and reviewed the testimony of the various witnesses. As to the "newly discovered evidence", the Court ruled: "There is no contention on the part of the defendants, that they had sexual intercourse with the alleged victim ... with her consent ... so the defendants would not be granted a new trial."[51] As to representation, the Court found "that the defendants were represented by counsel who thoroughly cross examined the state's witnesses, and presented such evidence as was available."[51] Again, the Court affirmed these convictions as well. The Alabama Supreme Court affirmed seven of the eight convictions and rescheduled the executions. Dissent Chief Justice John C. Anderson dissented, agreeing with the defense in many of its motions. Anderson stated that the defendants had not been accorded a fair trial and strongly dissented to the decision to affirm their sentences.[52] He wrote, "While the constitution guarantees to the accused a speedy trial, it is of greater importance that it should be by a fair and impartial jury, ex vi termini ("by definition"), a jury free from bias or prejudice, and, above all, from coercion and intimidation."[53] He pointed out that the National Guard had shuttled the defendants back and forth each day from jail, and that this fact alone was enough to have a coercive effect on the jury.[53] Anderson criticized how the defendants were represented. He noted that Roddy "declined to appear as appointed counsel and did so only as amicus curiae." He continued, "These defendants were confined in jail in another county ... and local counsel had little opportunity to ... prepare their defense."[53] Moreover, they "would have been represented by able counsel had a better opportunity been given."[53] Justice Anderson also pointed out the failure of the defense to make closing arguments as an example of underzealous defense representation.[53] About the courtroom outburst, Justice Anderson noted that "there was great applause ... and this was bound to have influence."[54] Anderson noted that, as the punishment for rape ranged between ten years and death, some of the teenagers should have been found "less culpable than others", and therefore should have received lighter sentences. Anderson concluded, "No matter how revolting the accusation, how clear the proof, or how degraded or even brutal, the offender, the Constitution, the law, the very genius of Anglo-American liberty demand a fair and impartial trial."[54] Appeal to United States Supreme Court Main article: Powell v. Alabama The case went to the United States Supreme Court on October 10, 1932, amidst tight security. The ILD retained Walter Pollak[55] to handle the appeal. Alabama Attorney General Thomas Knight, Jr. represented the State. Pollak argued that the defendants had been denied due process first due to the mob atmosphere, and second, because of the strange attorney appointment and their poor performance at trial. Last, he argued that African Americans were systematically excluded from jury duty contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment. Knight countered that there had been no mob atmosphere at the trial, and pointed to the finding by the Alabama Supreme Court that the trial had been fair and representation "able." He told the Court that he had "no apologies" to make.[56] In a landmark decision, the United States Supreme Court reversed the convictions on the ground that the due process clause of the United States Constitution guarantees the effective assistance of counsel at a criminal trial. In an opinion written by Associate Justice George Sutherland, the Court found the defendants had been denied effective counsel. Chief Justice Anderson's previous dissent was quoted repeatedly in this decision. The Court did not fault Moody and Roddy for lack of an effective defense, noting that both had told Judge Hawkins that they had not had time to prepare their cases. They said the problem was with the way Judge Hawkins "immediately hurried to trial."[4] This conclusion did not find the Scottsboro defendants innocent, but ruled that the procedures violated their rights to due process under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. The Supreme Court sent the case back to Judge Hawkins for a retrial. Decatur trials When the case, by now a cause celebre, came back to Judge Hawkins, he granted the request for a change of venue. The defense had urged for a move to the city of Birmingham, Alabama, but the case was transferred to the small, rural community of Decatur. This was near homes of the alleged victims and in Ku Klux Klan territory.[57] The American Communist Party maintained control over defense of the case, retaining the New York criminal defense attorney Samuel Leibowitz. He had never lost a murder trial and was a registered Democrat, with no connection to the Communist Party. They kept Joseph Brodsky as the second chair for the trial. The case was assigned to District Judge James Edwin Horton and tried in Morgan County. His appointment to the case drew local praise. The judge carried a loaded pistol in his car throughout the time he presided over these cases.[why?][57] The two years that had passed since the first trials had not dampened community hostility for the Scottsboro Boys. But others believed they were victims of Jim Crow justice, and the case was covered by numerous national newspapers. At the trial, some 100 reporters were seated at the press tables. Hundreds more gathered on the courthouse lawn. National Guard members in plain clothes mingled in the crowd, looking for any sign of trouble. The Sheriff's department brought the defendants to Court in a patrol wagon guarded by two carloads of deputies armed with automatic shotguns. In the courtroom, the Scottsboro Boys sat in a row wearing blue prison denims and guarded by National Guardsmen, except for Roy Wright, who had not been convicted. Wright wore street clothes. The Birmingham News described him as "dressed up like a Georgia gigolo."[58] Leibowitz asserted his trust in the "God fearing people of Decatur and Morgan County";[58] he made a pretrial motion to quash the indictment on the ground that blacks had been systematically excluded from the grand jury. Although the motion was denied, this got the issue in the record for future appeals. To this motion, Attorney General Thomas Knight responded, "The State will concede nothing. Put on your case."[58] Leibowitz called the editor of the Scottsboro weekly newspaper, who testified that he'd never heard of a black juror in Decatur because "they all steal."[59] He called local jury commissioners to explain the absence of African-Americans from Jackson County juries. When Leibowitz accused them of excluding black men from juries, they did not seem to understand his accusation. It was as if the exclusion was so ordinary as to be unconscious.[60] (Note: Since most blacks could not vote after having been disenfranchised by the Alabama constitution, the local jury commissioners probably never thought about them as potential jurors, who were limited to voters.) Leibowitz called local black professionals as witnesses to show they were qualified for jury service. Leibowitz called John Sanford, an African-American of Scottsboro, who was educated, well-spoken, and respected. The defense attorney showed that "Mr. Sanford" was evidently qualified in all manner except by virtue of his race to be a candidate for participation in a jury. During the following cross examination, Knight addressed the witness by his first name, "John." The first two times that he did so, Leibowitz asked the court to have him alter his behavior. He did not, and this insult eventually caused Leibowitz to leap to his feet saying, "Now listen, Mr. Attorney-General, I've warned you twice about your treatment of my witness. For the last time now, stand back, take your finger out of his eye, and call him mister", causing gasps from the public seated in the gallery.[61] The judge abruptly interrupted Leibowitz.[62] While the pretrial motion to quash the indictment was denied, Leibowitz had positioned the case for appeal. The issue of composition of the jury was addressed in a second landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that race could not be used to exclude anyone from candidacy for participation on a jury anywhere in the United States. This astonished (and infuriated) many residents of Alabama and many other Southern states. Patterson trial See also: Patterson v. Alabama Judge Horton called the first case against Haywood Patterson and began jury selection. Leibowitz objected that African-American jurors had been excluded from the jury pool. He called the jury commissioner to the stand, asking if there were any blacks on the juror rolls, and when told yes, suggested his answer was not honest.[59] The locals resented his questioning of the official and "chewed their tobacco meditatively."[63] The National Guard posted five men with fixed bayonets in front of Leibowitz's residence that night.[63] The jury was selected by the end of the day on Friday and sequestered in the Lyons Hotel.[63] Attorney General Thomas Knight, Jr A large crowd gathered outside the court house for the start of the Patterson trial on Monday, April 2. Without the "vivid detail" she had used in the Scottsboro trials, Victoria Price told her account in 16 minutes.[64] The defense had what she had said before under oath on paper, and could confront her with any inconsistencies. The only drama came when Knight pulled a torn pair of step-ins from his brief case and tossed them into the lap of a juror to support the claim of rape.[64] Leibowitz used a 32-foot model train set up on a table in front of the witness stand to illustrate where each of the parties was during the alleged events, and other points of his defense.[64] When asked if the model in front of her was like the train where she claimed she was raped, Price cracked, "It was bigger. Lots bigger. That is a toy."[64] Leibowitz later conceded that Price was "one of the toughest witnesses he ever cross examined."[65] Her answers were evasive and derisive. She often replied, "I can't remember" or "I won't say." Once when Leibowitz confronted her with a contradiction in her testimony, she exclaimed, sticking a finger in the direction of defendant Patterson, "One thing I will never forget is that one sitting right there raped me."[64] The attorney tried to question her about a conviction for fornication and adultery in Huntsville, but the court sustained a prosecution objection.[65] Price insisted that she had spent the evening before the alleged rape at the home of a Mrs. Callie Brochie in Chattanooga. Leibowitz asked her whether she had spent the evening in a "hobo jungle" in Huntsville, Alabama, with a Lester Carter and Jack Tiller, but she denied it. Leibowitz said that Callie Brochie was a fictional character in a Saturday Evening Post short story and suggested that Price's stay with her had been equally fictional.[66] Victoria Price responded on cross-examination at the trial: "You're a pretty good actor yourself, Mr. Leibowitz" As the historian James Goodman wrote: Price was not the first hardened witness [Leibowitz] had faced, and certainly not the most depraved. Nor was she the first witness who tried to stare him down and, failing that, who seemed as if she were about to leap out of her seat and strike him. She was not the first witness to be evasive, sarcastic and crude. She was, however, the first witness to use her bad memory, truculence, and total lack of refinement, and at times, even ignorance, to great advantage.[67] Many of the whites in the court room likely resented Leibowitz as a Jew from New York hired by the Communists, and for his treatment of a southern white woman, even a low-class one, as a hostile witness.[67] Some wondered if there was any way he could leave Decatur alive. The National Guard Captain Joe Burelson promised Judge Horton that he would protect Leibowitz and the defendants "as long as we have a piece of ammunition or a man alive."[67] Once Captain Burelson learned that a group was on their way to "take care of Leibowitz", he raised the drawbridge across the Tennessee River, keeping them out of Decatur.[citation needed] Judge Horton learned that the prisoners were in danger from locals. Once he sent out the jury and warned the courtroom, "I want it to be known that these prisoners are under the protection of this court. This court intends to protect these prisoners and any other persons engaged in this trial."[68] Threats of violence came from the North as well. One letter from Chicago read, "When those Boys are dead, within six months your state will lose 500 lives."[69] Dr. R.R. Bridges testifying in Decatur Leibowitz systematically dismantled each prosecution witness' story under cross-examination. He got Dr. Bridges to admit on cross-examination that "the best you can say about the whole case is that both of these women showed they had sexual intercourse."[70] Paint Rock ticket agent W. H. Hill testified to seeing the women and the black youths in the same car, but on cross-examination admitted to not seeing the women at all until they got off the train. Posse member Tom Rousseau claimed to have seen the women and youths get off the same car but under cross-examination admitted finding the defendants scattered in various cars at the front of the train. Lee Adams testified that he had seen the fight, but later saying that he was a quarter mile from the tracks. Ory Dobbins repeated that he'd seen the women try to jump off the train, but Leibowitz showed photos of the positions of the parties that proved Dobbins could not have seen everything he claimed. Dobbins insisted he had seen the girls wearing women's clothing, but other witnesses had testified they were in overalls.[71] The prosecution withdrew the testimony of Dr. Marvin Lynch, the other examining doctor, as "repetitive." Many years later, Judge Horton said that Dr. Lynch confided that the women had not been raped and had laughed when he examined them. He said that if he testified for the defense, his practice in Jackson County would be over. Thinking Patterson would be acquitted, Judge Horton did not force Dr. Lynch to testify, but the judge had become convinced the defendants were innocent.[72] Defense Leibowitz began his defense by calling Chattanooga resident Dallas Ramsey, who testified that his home was next to the hobo jungle mentioned earlier. He said that he had seen both Price and Bates get on a train there with a white man on the morning of the alleged rape.[73] Train fireman Percy Ricks testified that he saw the two women slipping along the side of the train right after it stopped in Paint Rock, as if they were trying to escape the posse. Leibowitz put on the testimony of Chattanooga gynecologist, Dr. Edward A. Reisman, who testified that after a woman had been raped by six men, it was impossible that she would have only a trace of semen, as was found in this case.[74] Leibowitz next called Lester Carter, a white man who testified that he had had intercourse with Bates. Jack Tiller, another white, said he had had sex with Price, two days before the alleged rapes. He testified that he had been on the train on the morning of the arrests. He had heard Price ask Orville Gilley, a white youth, to confirm that she had been raped. However, Gilley had told her to "go to hell." Morgan County Solicitor Wade Wright cross-examined Carter. Wright tried to get Carter to admit that the Communist Party had bought his testimony, which Carter denied. But he said that the defense attorney Joseph Brodsky had paid his rent and bought him a new suit for the trial.[75] Five of the original nine Scottsboro defendants testified that they had not seen Price or Bates until after the train stopped in Paint Rock. Willie Roberson testified that he was suffering from syphilis, with sores that prevented him from walking, and that he was in a car at the back of the train.[citation needed] Olen Montgomery testified that he had been alone on a tank car the entire trip, and had not known about the fight or alleged rapes. Ozie Powell said that while he was not a participant, he had seen the fight with the white teenagers from his vantage point between a box car and a gondola car, where he had been hanging on. He said he saw the white teenagers jump off the train. Roberson, Montgomery, and Powell all denied they had known each other or the other defendants before that day. Andy Wright, Eugene Williams, and Haywood Patterson testified that they had previously known each other, but had not seen the women until the train stopped in Paint Rock. Knight questioned them extensively about instances in which their testimony supposedly differed from their testimony at their trial in Scottsboro. They did not contradict themselves in any meaningful way.[76] Haywood Patterson testified on his own behalf that he had not seen the women before stopping in Paint Rock; he withstood a cross examination from Knight who "shouted, shook his finger at, and ran back and forth in front of the defendant."[77] At one point, Knight demanded, "You were tried at Scottsboro?" Patterson snapped, "I was framed at Scottsboro." Knight thundered, "Who told you to say that?" Patterson replied, "I told myself to say it."[77] Just after the defense rested "with reservations", someone handed Leibowitz a note. The attorneys approached the bench for a hushed conversation, which was followed by a short recess. Leibowitz called one final witness. Thus far in the trial, Ruby Bates had been notably absent. She had disappeared from her home in Huntsville weeks before the new trial, and every sheriff in Alabama had been ordered to search for her, to no avail.[62] Now, two guardsmen with bayonets opened the courtroom doors, and Bates entered, "in stylish clothes, eyes downcast."[78] Her dramatic and unexpected entrance drew stares from the residents of the courtroom. Victoria Price, brought out for Bates to identify, glared at her. Attorney General Knight warned Price to "keep your temper."[78] Bates proceeded to testify, and explained that no rape had occurred. She said none of the defendants had touched her or even spoken to her. When asked if she had been raped on March 25, 1931, Bates said, "No sir." When asked why she had initially said she had been raped, Bates replied, "I told it just like Victoria did because she said we might have to stay in jail if we did not frame up a story after crossing a state line with men." Bates explained that Price had said "she didn't care if all the Negroes in Alabama were put in jail." This recantation seemed to be a severe blow to the prosecution.[78] Bates admitted having intercourse with Lester Carter in the Huntsville railway yards two days before making accusations. Finally, she testified she had been in New York City and had decided to return to Alabama to tell the truth, at the urging of Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick of that city.[78] Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick Ruby Bates testifying. With his eye tuned to the southern jury, Knight cross-examined her. He noted her stylish dress and demanded where she had gotten her fine clothes. When she responded that the Communist Party had paid for her clothes, any credibility she had with the jury was destroyed. Judge Horton warned spectators to stop laughing at her testimony or he would eject them.[78][citation needed] Closing arguments By the time Leibowitz closed, the prosecution had employed anti-semitic remarks to discredit him.[79] Wade Wright added to this, referring to Ruby's boyfriend Lester Carter as "Mr. Caterinsky" and called him "the prettiest Jew" he ever saw. He said, "Don't you know these defense witnesses are bought and paid for? May the Lord have mercy on the soul of Ruby Bates. Now the question in this case is this—Is justice in the case going to be bought and sold in Alabama with Jew money from New York?"[79] Leibowitz objected and moved for a new trial. Judge Horton refused to grant a new trial, telling the jury to "put [the remarks] out of your minds."[80] One author describes Wright's closing argument as "the now-famous Jew-baiting summary to the jury."[81] He goes on to say that, "Until Wright spoke, many of the newspapermen felt that there was an outside chance for acquittal, at least a hung jury. But ... From then on the defense was helpless."[81] In his closing, Leibowitz called Wright's argument an appeal to regional bigotry, claiming talk about Communists was just to "befuddle" the jury. He described himself as a patriot, a "Roosevelt Democrat", who had served the "Stars and Stripes" in World War I, "when there was no talk of Jew or Gentile, white or black."[82] As to Wright's reference to "Jew money", Leibowitz said that he was defending the Scottsboro Boys for nothing and was personally paying the expenses of his wife, who had accompanied him.[82] "I'm interested", Leibowitz argued, "solely in seeing that that poor, moronic colored boy over there and his co-defendants in the other cases get a square shake of the dice, because I believe, before God, they are the victims of a dastardly frame up."[83] He called Price's testimony "a foul, contemptible, outrageous lie."[83] He ended with the Lord's Prayer and a challenge to either acquit or render the death sentence—nothing in between.[83] Attorney General Knight delivered his rebuttal, roaring that if the jury found Haywood not guilty, they ought to "put a garland of roses around his neck, give him a supper, and send him to New York City." Considering the evidence, he continued, "there can be but one verdict—death in the electric chair for raping Victoria Price."[84] Verdict The jury began deliberating Saturday afternoon and announced it had a verdict at ten the next morning, while many residents of Decatur were in church. The jury foreman, Eugene Bailey, handed the handwritten verdict to Judge Horton. The jury found the defendant guilty of rape, and sentenced Patterson to death in the electric chair.[85] Bailey had held out for eleven hours for life in prison, but in the end agreed to the death sentence.[85] According to one account, juror Irwin Craig held out against imposition of the death penalty, because he thought that Patterson was innocent.[86] Irwin Craig Irwin "Red" Craig (died 1970) (nicknamed from the color of his hair) was the sole juror to refuse to impose the death penalty in the retrial of Haywood Patterson, one of the Scottsboro Boys, in what was then the small town of Decatur, Alabama. His son, Sonny, later recalled him as saying: "Those young men were innocent; everybody knew that but they were going to be punished for what they didn't do." The Ku Klux Klan staked a burning cross in his family yard. He was called in to see the judge presiding over that retrial, James Horton, who exhorted him to change his vote to guilty. "If you don't, they will kill you, Red", said the judge. Craig protested: "I can't change my vote, judge." Horton replied: "Don't worry about that, I'll take care of it."[86] Horton grants Patterson a new trial The defense moved for a retrial and, believing the defendants innocent, Judge James Edwin Horton agreed to set aside the guilty verdict for Patterson. Horton ruled the rest of defendants could not get a fair trial at that time and indefinitely postponed the rest of the trials, knowing it would cost him his job when he ran for re-election.[87] Judge Horton heard arguments on the motion for new trial in the Limestone County Court House in Athens, Alabama, where he read his decision to the astonished defense and a furious Knight: These women are shown ... to have falsely accused two Negroes ... This tendency on the part of the women shows that they are predisposed to make false accusations ... The Court will not pursue the evidence any further. Horton ordered a new trial— which would turn out to be the third for Patterson. When Judge Horton announced his decision, Knight stated that he would retry Patterson. He said that he had found Orville "Carolina Slim" Gilley, the white teenager in the gondola car, and that Gilley would corroborate Price's story in full. At Knight's request, the court replaced Judge Horton with Judge William Washington Callahan, described as a racist. He later instructed the jury in the next round of trials that no white woman would voluntarily have sex with a black man.[88] New trials under Callahan During the Decatur retrial, held from November 1933 to July 1937, Judge Callahan wanted to take the case off "the front pages of America's newspapers."[89] He banned photographers from the courthouse grounds and typewriters from his court room.[85] "There ain't going to be no more picture snappin' round here", he ordered. He also imposed a strict three-day time limit on each trial, running them into the evening.[90] He removed protection from the defense, convincing Governor Benjamin Meek Miller to keep the National Guard away. The defense moved for another change of venue, submitting affidavits in which hundreds of residents stated their intense dislike for the defendants, to show there was "overwhelming prejudice" against them.[91] The prosecution countered with testimony that some of the quotes in the affidavits were untrue, and that six of the people quoted were dead.[92] The defense countered that they had received numerous death threats, and the judge replied that he and the prosecution had received more from the Communists. The motion was denied.[93] Leibowitz led Commissioner Moody and Jackson County Circuit Clerk C.A. Wann through every page of the Jackson County jury roll to show that it contained no names of African-Americans. When, after several hours of reading names, Commissioner Moody finally claimed several names to be of African-Americans,[94] Leibowitz got handwriting samples from all present. One man admitted that the handwriting appeared to be his. Leibowitz called in a handwriting expert, who testified that names identified as African-American had been added later to the list, and signed by former Jury Commissioner Morgan.[95] Judge Callahan did not rule that excluding people by race was constitutional, only that the defense had not proven that African-Americans had been deliberately excluded. By letting Leibowitz go on record on this issue, Judge Callahan provided grounds for the case to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court for a second time. It was the basis for the court's finding in Norris v. Alabama (1935), that an exclusion of African-American grand jurors had occurred, violating the due process clause of the Constitution. Haywood Patterson's Decatur retrial began on November 27, 1933. Thirty-six potential jurors admitted having a "fixed opinion" in the case,[95] which caused Leibowitz to move for a change of venue. Callahan denied the motion.[93] Callahan excluded defense evidence that Horton had admitted, at one point exclaiming to Leibowitz, "Judge Horton can't help you [now]."[90] He routinely sustained prosecution objections but overruled defense objections. Price testified again that a dozen armed negro men entered the gondola car. She said Patterson had fired a shot and ordered all whites but Gilley off the train.[96] She said the negros had ripped her clothes off and repeatedly raped her at knife point, and pointed out Patterson as one of the rapists.[97] She said they raped her and Bates, afterward saying they would take them north or throw them in the river.[95] She testified that she had fallen while getting out of the gondola car, passed out and came to seated in a store at Paint Rock. Leibowitz questioned her until Judge Callahan stopped court for the day at 6:30. When he resumed the next morning, he pointed out many contradictions among her various versions of the rape. Judge Callahan repeatedly interrupted Leibowitz's cross-examination of Price, calling defense questions "arguing with the witness", "immaterial, "useless", "a waste of time" and even "illegal."[98] The many contradictions notwithstanding, Price steadfastly stuck to her testimony that Patterson had raped her.[99] Orville Gilley's testimony at Patterson's Decatur retrial was a mild sensation.[97] He denied being a "bought witness", repeating his testimony about armed blacks ordering the white teenagers off the train.[96] He confirmed Price's rape account, adding that he stopped the rape by convincing the "negro" with the gun to make the rapists stop "before they killed that woman."[100] Leibowitz cross-examined him at length about contradictions between his account and Price's testimony, but he remained "unruffled."[100] Gilley testified to meeting Lester Carter and the women the evening before the alleged rapes, and getting them coffee and sandwiches. Callahan interrupted before Leibowitz could find out if Gilley went "somewhere with [the women]" that night.[101] The prosecution called several white farmers who testified that they had seen the fight on the train and saw the girls "a-fixin' to get out", but they saw the defendants drag them back.[96][102] Lester Carter took the stand for the defense. He had testified in the first Decatur trial that Price and Bates had had sex with him and Gilley in the hobo jungle in Chattanooga prior to the alleged rapes, which could account for the semen found in the women. But Judge Callahan would not let him repeat that testimony at the trial, stating that any such testimony was "immaterial." Ruby Bates was apparently too sick to travel. She had had surgery in New York, and at one point Leibowitz requested that her deposition be taken as a dying declaration. While she was not dying, committed to his three-day time limit for the trial, Judge Callahan denied the request to arrange to take her deposition.[103] Although the defense needed her testimony, by the time a deposition arrived, the case had gone to the jury and they did not hear it at all.[104] Haywood Patterson took the stand, admitting he had "cussed" at the white teenagers, but only because they cussed at him first. He denied seeing the white women before Paint Rock. On cross-examination Knight confronted him with previous testimony from his Scottsboro trial that he had not touched the women, but that he had seen the other five defendants rape them. Leibowitz objected, stating that the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled previous testimony illegal. Judge Callahan allowed it, although he would not allow testimony by Patterson stating that he had not seen the women before Paint Rock.[102] Patterson explained contradictions in his testimony: "We was scared and I don't know what I said. They told us if we didn't confess they'd kill us—give us to the mob outside."[105] Patterson claimed the threats had been made by guards and militiamen while the defendants were in the Jackson County jail. He said threats were made even in the presence of the judge. Patterson pointed at H.G. Bailey, prosecutor in his Scottsboro trial, stating, "And Mr. Bailey over there—he said send all the niggers to the electric chair. There's too many niggers in the world anyway."[105] Closing arguments were made November 29 through November 30, without stopping for Thanksgiving. Callahan limited each side to two hours of argument.[106] Knight declared in his closing that the prosecution was not avenging what the defendants had done to Price. "What has been done to her cannot be undone. What you can do now is to make sure that it doesn't happen to some other woman." Leibowitz objected that the argument was "an appeal to passion and prejudice" and moved for a mistrial. Knight agreed that it was an appeal to passion, and Callahan overruled the motion. Knight continued, "We all have a passion, all men in this court room to protect the womanhood in Alabama."[107] For his summation, solicitor Wade Wright reviewed the testimony and warned the jury, "that this crime could have happened to any woman, even though she was riding in a parlor car, instead of box car."[102] Solicitor H.G. Bailey reminded the jury that the law presumed Patterson innocent, even if what Gilley and Price had described was "as sordid as ever a human tongue has uttered." Finally he defended the women, "Instead of painting their faces ... they were brave enough to go to Chattanooga and look for honest work."[102] Bailey attacked the defense case. They say this is a frame-up! They have been yelling frame-up ever since this case started! Who framed them? Did Ory Dobbins frame them? Did brother Hill frame them? We did a lot of awful things over there is Scottsboro, didn't we? My, my, my. And now they come over here and try to convince you that that sort of thing happened in your neighboring county.[108] Judge Callahan charged the jury that Price and Bates could have been raped without force, just by withholding their consent. He instructed them, "Where the woman charged to have been raped is white, there is a strong presumption under the law that she will not and did not yield voluntarily to intercourse with the defendant, a Negro."[109] He instructed the jury that if Patterson was so much as present for the "purpose of aiding, encouraging, assisting or abetting" the rapes "in any way", he was as guilty as the person who committed the rapes.[109] He told them that they did not need to find corroboration of Price's testimony. If they believed her, that was enough to convict. Judge Callahan said he was giving them two forms – one for conviction and one for acquittal, but he supplied the jury with only a form to convict. He supplied them with an acquittal form only after the prosecution, fearing reversible error, urged him do so.[110] As Time described it, "Twenty-six hours later came a resounding thump on the brown wooden jury room door. The bailiff let the jurors out [from the Patterson trial]. The foreman unfisted a moist crumpled note, handed it to the clerk. A thin smile faded from Patterson's lips as the clerk read his third death sentence."[111] In May 1934, despite having run unopposed in the previous election for the position, James Horton was soundly defeated when he ran for re-election as a circuit judge. The vote against him was especially heavy in Morgan County. In the same election, Thomas Knight was elected Lieutenant Governor of Alabama.[112] Norris' retrial Judge Callahan started jury selection for the trial of defendant Norris on November 30, 1933, Thanksgiving afternoon. At this trial, Victoria Price testified that two of her alleged assailants had pistols, that they threw off the white teenagers, that she tried to jump off but was grabbed, thrown onto the gravel in the gondola, one of them held her legs, and one held a knife on her, and one raped both her and Ruby Bates.[113] She claimed Norris raped her, along with five others. Callahan would not allow Leibowitz to ask Price about any "crime of moral turpitude." Nor would he allow Leibowitz to ask why she went to Chattanooga, where she had spent the night there, or about Carter or Gilley. Neither would he allow questions as to whether she'd had sexual intercourse with Carter or Gilley. During more cross-examination, Price looked at Knight so often Leibowitz accused her of looking for signals. Judge Callahan cautioned Leibowitz he would not permit "such tactics" in his courtroom.[114] Dr. Bridges was a state witness, and Leibowitz cross-examined him at length, trying to get him to agree that a rape would have produced more injuries than he found. Callahan sustained a prosecution objection, ruling "the question is not based on the evidence."[115] Ruby Bates had given a deposition from her hospital bed in New York, which arrived in time to be read to the jury in the Norris trial. Judge Callahan sustained prosecution objections to large portions of it, most significantly the part where she said that she and Price both had sex voluntarily in Chattanooga the night before the alleged rapes. Leibowitz read the rest of Bates' deposition, including her version of what happened on the train.[116] She said that there were white teenagers riding in the gondola car with them, that some black teenagers came into the car, that a fight broke out, that most of the white teenagers got off the train, and that the blacks "disappeared" until the posse stopped the train at Paint Rock. She testified that she, Price and Gilley were arrested, and that Price made the rape accusation, instructing her to go along with the story to stay out of jail. She reiterated that neither she nor Price had been raped.[117] Leibowitz chose to keep Norris off the stand.[116] Closing arguments were on December 4, 1933. In his closing argument, Leibowitz called the prosecution's case "a contemptible frame-up by two bums."[118] He attempted to overcome local prejudice, saying "if you have a reasonable doubt, hold out. Stand your ground, show you are a man, a red-blooded he-man."[118] The prosecution's closing argument was shorter and less "barbed" than it had been in the Patterson case. It was addressed more to the evidence and less to the regional prejudice of the jury.[118] Leibowitz made many objections to Judge Callahan's charge to the jury. The New York Times described Leibowitz as "pressing the judge almost as though he were a hostile witness."[119] New York City Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia had dispatched two burly New York City police officers to protect Leibowitz. During the long jury deliberations, Judge Callahan also assigned two Morgan County deputies to guard him. The jury began deliberation on December 5. After 14 hours of deliberation, the jury filed into the court room; they returned a guilty verdict and sentenced Norris to death. Norris took the news stoically. Leibowitz's prompt appeal stayed the execution date, so Patterson and Norris were both returned to death row in Kilby Prison. The other defendants waited in the Jefferson County jail in Birmingham for the outcome of the appeals. Leibowitz was escorted to the train station under heavy guard, and he boarded a train back to New York.[120] United States Supreme Court reverses Decatur convictions See also: Patterson v. Alabama Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes The case went to the United States Supreme Court for a second time as Norris v. Alabama. The court reversed the convictions for a second time on the basis that blacks had been excluded from the jury pool because of their race.[121] Attorneys Samuel Leibowitz, Walter H. Pollak and Osmond Frankel argued the case from February 15 to 18, 1935. Leibowitz showed the justices that the names of African Americans had been added to the jury rolls. The Justices examined the items closely with a magnifying glass. Thomas Knight maintained that the jury process was color blind. Alabama Governor Bibb Graves Because the case of Haywood Patterson had been dismissed due to the technical failure to appeal it on time, it presented different issues. Attorneys Osmond Frankel and Walter Pollak argued those.[122] On April 1, 1935, the United States Supreme Court sent the cases back a second time for retrials in Alabama. Writing for the Court, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes observed the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution clearly forbade the states from excluding citizens from juries due solely to their race.[123] He noted that the Court had inspected the jury rolls, chastising Judge Callahan and the Alabama Supreme Court for accepting assertions that black citizens had not been excluded. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, "something more" was needed. The Court concluded, "the motion to quash ... should have been granted."[5] The Court ruled that it would be a great injustice to execute Patterson when Norris would receive a new trial, reasoning that Alabama should have opportunity to reexamine Patterson's case as well.[124] Alabama Governor Bibb Graves instructed every solicitor and judge in the state, "Whether we like the decisions or not ... We must put Negroes in jury boxes. Alabama is going to observe the supreme law of America."[125] Final round of trials After the case was remanded, on May 1, 1935, Victoria Price swore new rape complaints against the defendants as the sole complaining witness. An African American, Creed Conyer, was selected as the first black person since Reconstruction to sit on an Alabama grand jury. Indictment could be made with a two-thirds vote, and the grand jury voted to indict the defendants. Thomas Knight, Jr. by now (May 1935) Lieutenant Governor, was appointed special prosecutor to the cases.[126] Leibowitz recognized that he was viewed by Southerners as an outsider, and allowed the local attorney Charles Watts to be the lead attorney; he assisted from the sidelines. Judge Callahan arraigned all the defendants except the two juveniles in Decatur; they all pleaded not guilty. Watts moved to have the case sent to the Federal Court as a civil rights case, which Callahan promptly denied. He set the retrials for January 20, 1936.[127] Final decisions Ozie Powell in hospital By January 23, 1936 Haywood Patterson was convicted of rape and sentenced to 75 years—the first time in Alabama that a black man had not been sentenced to death in the rape of a white woman.[2] Patterson escaped from prison in 1948; he published The Scottsboro Boy in 1950. That year he was caught by the FBI in Michigan. The governor of the state refused to extradite Patterson to Alabama. He was later arrested for stabbing a man in a bar fight and convicted of manslaughter. Patterson died of cancer in prison in 1952, after serving one year of his second sentence. On January 24, 1936, Ozie Powell was involved in injuring a deputy. During May 1937, Thomas Knight died. On July 15, 1937, Clarence Norris was convicted of rape and sexual assault and sentenced to death. Governor Bibb Graves of Alabama in 1938 commuted his death sentence to life in prison. He was paroled in 1946 and moved north, where he married and had children. In 1970 he began seeking a pardon, with the help of the NAACP and Alabama's attorney. In 1976 Governor George Wallace pardoned Norris, declaring him "not guilty." Norris' autobiography, The Last of the Scottsboro Boys, was published in 1979. Norris died on January 23, 1989, of Alzheimer's disease. On July 22, 1937, Andrew Wright was convicted of rape and sentenced to 99 years. He was paroled, but returned to prison after violating parole. Finally released in 1950, he was paroled in New York State. On July 24, 1937, Charlie Weems was convicted of rape and sentenced to 105 years in prison. He was paroled in 1943. On July 24, 1937, 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. He was sentenced to 20 years. The state dropped the rape charges as part of this plea bargain.[7] Powell was released from prison in 1946. On July 24, 1937, the state of Alabama dropped all charges against Willie Roberson, Olen Montgomery, Eugene Williams, and Roy Wright. The four had spent over six years in prison on death row, as "adults" despite their ages. Thomas Lawson announced that all charges were being dropped against the remaining four defendants: 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 12 and 13 at the time and, in view of the jail time they had already served, justice required that they also be released. After Alabama freed Roy Wright, the Scottsboro Defense Committee took him on a national lecture tour. He joined the United States Army. Later he married and joined the Merchant Marine. After Wright came back from a lengthy time at sea in 1959, he thought his wife had been unfaithful. He shot and killed her before turning the gun on himself and committing suicide.[128] On July 26, 1937, Haywood Patterson was sent to Atmore State Prison Farm. The remaining "Scottsboro Boys" in custody, that of Norris, A Wright and Weems were at this time in Kilby Prison. Aftermath Governor Graves had planned to pardon the prisoners in 1938, but was angered by their hostility and refusal to admit their guilt. He refused the pardons but did commute Norris' death sentence to life in prison. Ruby Bates toured for a short while as an ILD speaker. She said she was "sorry for all the trouble that I caused them", and claimed she did it because she was "frightened by the ruling class of Scottsboro." Later, she worked in a New York state spinning factory until 1938; that year she returned to Huntsville. Victoria Price worked in a Huntsville cotton mill until 1938, then moved to Flintville, Tennessee. Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (1969) by Dan T. Carter was widely thought to be authoritative, but it wrongly asserted that Price and Bates were dead. An NBC TV movie, Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys (1976), asserted that the defense had proven that Price and Bates were prostitutes; both sued NBC over their portrayals. Bates died in 1976 in Washington state, where she lived with her carpenter husband, and her case was not heard. Price's case was initially dismissed but she appealed. When the US Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in 1977, Price disregarded the advice of her lawyer and accepted a settlement from NBC. She used the money to buy a house. Price died in 1983, in Lincoln County, Tennessee.[129][130] Most residents of Scottsboro have acknowledged the injustice that started in their community.[131] In January 2004, the town dedicated a historical marker in commemoration of the case at the Jackson County Court House.[132] According to a news story, "An 87-year-old black man who attended the ceremony recalled that the mob scene following the Boys' arrest was frightening and that death threats were leveled against the jailed suspects. Speaking of the decision to install the marker, he said, 'I think it will bring the races closer together, to understand each other better.'"[131] Sheila Washington founded the Scottsboro Boys Museum and Cultural Center in 2010 in Scottsboro.[133] It is located in the former Joyce Chapel United Methodist Church, and is devoted to exploring the case and commemorating the search for justice for its victims.[134] 2013 pardon In early May 2013, the Alabama legislature cleared the path for posthumous pardons.[133] On November 21, 2013, the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles granted posthumous pardons to Weems, Wright and Patterson, the only Scottsboro Boys who had neither had their convictions overturned nor received a pardon.[135][136] Governor Robert J. Bentley said to the press that day: While we could not take back what happened to the Scottsboro Boys 80 years ago, we found a way to make it right moving forward. The pardons granted to the Scottsboro Boys today are long overdue. The legislation that led to today's pardons was the result of a bipartisan, cooperative effort. I appreciate the Pardons and Parole Board for continuing our progress today and officially granting these pardons. Today, the Scottsboro Boys have finally received justice.[137] Fates of the defendants In 1936, Haywood Patterson was convicted of rape and sentenced to 75 years in prison. He escaped in 1949 and in 1950 was found in Michigan, but the governor refused to extradite him. In 1951 he was convicted of an assault and sentenced to prison, where he died of cancer in 1952. In 1936, Ozie Powell was involved in an altercation with a guard and shot in the face, suffering permanent brain damage. In 1937 He pleaded guilty to assault, and the rape charges were dropped. He was paroled in 1946. 1937, Charlie Weems was convicted and sentenced to 105 years. He was paroled in 1943 after having been held in prison for a total of 12 years in some of Alabama's worst institutions. 1937, Andy Wright was convicted and sentenced to 99 years. He was paroled and returned to prison after violating parole. He was paroled in New York State in 1950. 1937, Clarence Norris was convicted of rape and was the only defendant sentenced to death. Governor Bibb Graves of Alabama in 1938 commuted his death sentence to life. Given parole in 1946, he "jumped" and went into hiding. In 1976 he was found in Brooklyn, New York. Governor George Wallace pardoned him that year, declaring him "not guilty". Norris published an autobiography, The Last of the Scottsboro Boys (1979). He died of Alzheimer's disease on January 23, 1989. In 1937, the state dropped all charges for Willie Roberson, Olen Montgomery, Eugene Williams, and Roy Wright, who had already been in prison for six years. Roy Wright had a career in the US Army and Merchant Marine. In 1959, believing his wife had been unfaithful during his tour, he shot and killed her, and shot himself, committing suicide.[128] 2013, the state of Alabama issues posthumous pardons for Patterson, Weems, and Andy Wright. In this Ryan Walker editorial cartoon — published four days after the conclusion of the Scottsboro trial — a member of the Ku Klux Klan seizes a black baby from a cradle and charges him with rape. The jury instantly convicts the baby, and the judge instantly sentences him to death; the Klansman emphasizes that this has been a fair trial, and is preferable to a lynching. In popular culture Literature African-American poet and playwright Langston Hughes wrote about the trials in his work Scottsboro Limited. The novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is about growing up in the Deep South in the 1930s. An important plot element concerns the father, attorney Atticus Finch, defending a black man against a false accusation of rape. The trial in this novel is often characterized as based on the Scottsboro case. But Harper Lee said in 2005 that she had in mind something less sensational, although the Scottsboro case served "the same purpose" to display Southern prejudices.[138] Ellen Feldman's Scottsboro: A Novel (2009) was shortlisted for the Orange Prize; it is a fictionalized account of the trial, told from the point of view of Ruby Bates and a fictional journalist, Alice Whittier. Richard Wright's 1940 novel Native Son (New York: Harper, 1940) was influenced by the Scottsboro Boys case. There is a parallel between the court scene in Native Son in which Max calls the "hate and impatience" of "the mob congregated upon the streets beyond the window" (Wright 386) and the "mob who surrounded the Scottsboro jail with rope and kerosene" after the Scottsboro boys' initial conviction. (Maxwell 132)[139] The poet Allen Ginsberg references the Scottsboro Boys in his poem America Music The American folk singer and songwriter Lead Belly commemorated the events in his song "The Scottsboro Boys".[140] In the song, he warns "colored" people to watch out if they go to Alabama, saying that "the man gonna get ya", and that the "Scottsboro boys [will] tell ya what it's all about." Metal/Rap band Rage Against The Machine provides imagery of the Scottsboro Boys in their music video "No Shelter", along with imagery of the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, two men who were also denied a fair trial in court and were executed by authorities.[141] Film and television In 1976, NBC aired a TV movie called Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys, based on the case. In 1998, Court TV produced a television documentary on the Scottsboro trials for its Greatest Trials of All Time series.[142] Daniel Anker and Barak Goodman produced the story of the Scottsboro Boys in the 2001 documentary Scottsboro: An American Tragedy, which received an Oscar nomination. Timothy Hutton starred in a 2006 film adaptation titled Heavens Fall.[143] Theater Jean-Paul Sartre's 1946 play The Respectful Prostitute (La Putain respectueuse), in which a black man is wrongfully blamed for an incident on a train involving a white prostitute, is believed to have been based on the Scottsboro case.[144] The Scottsboro Boys is a staged musical portrayal of the Scottsboro case. The show premiered Off Broadway in February 2010[145] and moved to Broadway's Lyceum Theatre in October 2010. The show received good reviews, but closed on December 12, 2010.[146][147] The musical opened in London's Young Vic Theatre in 2013 before moving to the Garrick Theatre in October 2014. Direct from Death Row The Scottsboro Boys, a black ensemble vaudevillesque "play with music and masks" Mark Stein production, directed by Michael Menendian, and presented at Chicago's Raven Theatre during the 2015 and 2016 seasons.[148] In March of 1931, nine young African-American men were accused of raping two white women on a train. The African-American men ranged in age from thirteen to nineteen. Each young man was tried, convicted and sentenced in a matter of days. African-American newspapers published news accounts and editorials of the events of the case. Civil rights organizations followed suit, raising money and providing defense for these young men. However, it would take several years for these young men's cases to be overturned. 1931 March 25: A group of young African-American and white men engage in a scuffle while riding a freight train. The train is stopped in Paint Rock, Ala and nine African-American teens are arrested for assault. Soon after, two white women, Victoria Price, and Ruby Bates charge the young men with rape. The nine young men are taken to Scottsboro, Ala. Both Price and Bates are examined by doctors. By the evening, the local newspaper, Jackson County Sentinel calls the rape a "revolting crime." March 30: The nine "Scottsboro Boys" are indicted by a grand jury. April 6 - 7: Clarence Norris and Charlie Weems, were placed on trial, convicted and given the death sentence. April 7 - 8: Haywood Patterson meets the same sentence as Norris and Weems. April 8 - 9: Olen Montgomery, Ozie Powell, Willie Roberson, Eugene Williams, and Andy Wright are also tried, convicted and sentenced to death. April 9: 13-year-old Roy Wright is also tried. However, his trial ends with a hung jury as 11 jurors want the death sentence and one vote for life in imprisonment. April through December: Organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as well as the International Labor Defense (ILD) are astonished by the age of the defendants, length of their trails, and sentences received. These organizations provide support to the nine young men and their families. The NAACP and IDL also raise money to for appeals. June 22: Pending an appeal to the Alabama Supreme Court, the executions of the nine defendants are stayed. 1932 January 5: A letter written from Bates to her boyfriend is uncovered. In the letter, Bates admits she was not raped. January: The NAACP withdraws from the case after the Scottsboro Boys decide to let the ILD handle their case. March 24: The Alabama Supreme Court upholds the convictions of seven defendants in a vote of 6-1. Williams is granted a new trial because he was considered a minor when he was originally convicted. May 27: The United States Supreme Court decides to hear the case. November 7: In the case of Powell v. Alabama, the Supreme Court ruled that the defendants were denied the right to counsel. This denial was considered a violation of their right to due process under the Fourteenth Amendment. The cases are sent to the lower court. 1933 January: Noted attorney Samuel Leibowitz takes the case for the IDL. March 27: Patterson's second trial begins in Decatur, Ala before Judge James Horton. April 6: Bates comes forward as a witness for the defense. She denies being raped and further testifies that she was with Price for the duration of the train ride. During the trial, Dr. Bridges says that Price showed very little physical signs of rape. April 9: Patterson is found guilty during his second trial. He is sentenced to death by electrocution. April 18: Judge Horton suspends Patterson's death sentence after a motion for a new trial. Horton also postpones the trials of the eight other defendants as racial tensions are high in town. June 22: Patterson's conviction is set aside by Judge Horton. He is granted a new trial. October 20: The cases of the nine defendants are moved from Horton's court to Judge William Callahan. November 20: The cases of the youngest defendants, Roy Wright, and Eugene Williams, are moved to Juvenile Court. The other seven defendants appear in Callahan's courtroom. November to December: Patterson and Norris' cases both end in the death penalty. During both cases, Callahan's bias is revealed through his omissions—he does not explain to Patterson's jury how to deliver a not guilty verdict and also does not ask for the mercy of God upon Norris' soul during his sentencing. 1934 June 12: In his bid for re-election, Horton is defeated. June 28: In a defense motion for new trials, Leibowitz argues that qualified African-Americans were kept off jury rolls. He also argues that names added on the current rolls were forged. The Alabama Supreme Court denies the defense motion for new trials. October 1: Lawyers associated with ILD are caught with $1500 bribe that was to be given to Victoria Price. 1935 February 15: Leibowitz appears before the Supreme Court of the United States, describing the lack of African-American presence on juries in Jackson County. He also shows the Supreme Court justices the jury rolls with forged names. April 1: In the case of Norris v. Alabama, the United States Supreme Court decides that the exclusion of African-Americans on jury rolls did not protect African-American defendants of their rights to equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. The case is overturned and sent to a lower court. However, Patterson's case is not included in the argument because of filing date technicalities. The Supreme Court suggests that lower courts review Patterson's case. December: The defense team is reorganized. The Scottsboro Defense Committee (SDC) is established with Allan Knight Chalmers as chairman. Local attorney, Clarence Watts serves as co-counsel. 1936 January 23: Patterson is retried. He is found guilty and sentenced to 75 years in prison. This sentence was a negotiation between the foreman and the rest of the jury. January 24: Ozie Powell pulls a knife and slashes a police officer's throat while being transported to Birmingham Jail. Another police official shoots Powell in the head. Both the police officer and Powell survive. December: Lieutenant Governor Thomas Knight, the prosecuting attorney for the case, meets with Leibowitz in New York to come to a compromise. 1937 May: Thomas Knight, a justice on the Alabama Supreme Court, dies. June 14: Patterson's conviction is upheld by the Alabama Supreme Court. July 12 - 16: Norris is sentenced to death during his third trial. As a result of the pressure of the case, Watts becomes sick, causing Leibowitz to steer the defense. July 20 - 21: Andy Wright's is convicted and sentenced to 99 years. July 22 - 23: Charley Weems is convicted and sentenced to 75 years. July 23 - 24: Ozie Powell's rape charges are dropped. He pleads guilty to assaulting a police officer and is sentenced to 20 years. July 24: The rape charges against Olen Montgomery, Willie Roberson, Eugene Williams, and Roy Wright are dropped. October 26: The United States Supreme Court decides not to hear the appeal of Patterson. December 21: Bibb Graves, the governor of Alabama, meets with Chalmers to discuss clemency to the five convicted defendants. 1938 June: The sentences given to Norris, Andy Wright, and Weems are affirmed by the Alabama Supreme Court. July: Norris' death sentence is commuted to life imprisonment by Governor Graves. August: A denial of parole is recommended for Patterson and Powell by an Alabama parole board. October: A denial of parole is also recommended for Norris, Weems, and Andy Wright. October 29: Graves meets with the convicted defendants to consider parole. November 15: The pardon applications of all five defendants are denied by Graves. November 17: Weems is released on parole. 1944 January: Andy Wright and Clarence Norris are released on parole. September: Wright and Norris leave Alabama. This is considered a violation of their parole. Norris returns to jail in October 1944 and Wright in October 1946. 1946 June: Ozie Powell is released from prison on parole. September: Norris receives parole. 1948 July: Patterson escapes from prison and travels to Detroit. 1950 June 9: Andy Wright is released on parole and finds a job in New York. June: Patterson is caught and arrested by the FBI in Detroit. However, G. Mennen Williams, governor of Michigan does not extradite Patterson to Alabama. Alabama does not continue its attempts to return Patterson to prison. December: Patterson is charged with murder after a fight in a bar. 1951 September: Patterson is sentenced to six to fifteen years in prison after being convicted of manslaughter. 1952 August: Patterson dies of cancer while serving time in prison. 1959 August: Roy Wright dies 1976 October: George Wallace, governor of Alabama, pardons Clarence Norris. 1977 July 12: Victoria Price sues NBC for defamation and invasion of privacy after its broadcast of Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys airs. Her claim, however, is dismissed. 1989 January 23: Clarence Norris dies. He is the last surviving Scottsboro Boys. The Scottsboro Boys  INJUSTICE IN ALABAMA  By Jay Bellamy With scant media coverage and little fanfare, on November 22, 2013, a three-judge panel of the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles posthumously pardoned Haywood Patterson, Charlie Weems, and Andy Wright, three black men wrongly convicted of raping and assaulting two white women more than 82 years earlier. Although long deceased, the three were the last of a larger group to have their convictions cleared from the official record. Many believe the Scottsboro Boys, as they would become known, were the catalyst for the civil rights movement in the United States. This is their story. The Scottsboro Boys case began on March 25, 1931, when nine young black men and boys hopped aboard a Southern Railway train in search of work in Memphis, Tennessee. The youngest were 13-year-olds Eugene Williams and Roy Wright. The other seven were Charlie Weems, 19; Andy Wright (Roy’s brother), 19; Clarence Norris, 19; Haywood Patterson, 18; Olen Montgomery, 17; Willie Roberson, 17; and Ozie Powell, 16. Patterson, Williams, and the Wright brothers traveled together; the others were Georgia natives unknown to each other. As the train passed through northern Alabama, a fight broke out between the young black men and a group of white youths. One of the white men, walking atop a tank car, stepped on the hand of Patterson, who was hanging from the side. After an exchange of angry words, the whites jumped off when the train slowed and began pummeling Patterson and the others with gravel before jumping back on. The fight began anew near Stevenson, Alabama, with the black youths prevailing and throwing all but one of the white antagonists off the train. Meanwhile, several of those forced to jump off had run back to the Stevenson depot and accused the black youths of assaulting them. A posse of armed men met the train when it pulled into the Paint Rock, Alabama, station. They quickly boarded the train, rounded up the nine black youths, and took them off to the Scottsboro jail. Opposite: The Scottsboro Boys were visited by Juanita E. Jackson of the NAACP (fourth from left) in January 1937. Jackson campaigned for their release and helped them write letters. Above: Haywood Patterson, age 18, during his second trial in early April 1933 with New York attorney Samuel Leibowitz at left.The Supreme Court found in late 1932 that all the defendants deserved new trials. The Scottsboro Boys Prologue 27 Also on board were 21-year-old Victoria Price and 17-year-old Ruby Bates. Bates was a minor with a history of prostitution, and Price had a questionable reputation, being described by one former neighbor in a defense affidavit as a “common street prostitute of the lowest type.” Both worked at a local cotton mill, where they could depend on just a few days of work a month. It was for this reason, Price claimed, that she and Bates had gone to Chattanooga seeking new employment. Fearful of being charged with vagrancy due to their failure to purchase a train ticket, the two accused the prisoners of rape. Facing charges of assaulting two white women, the nine young black men would now have to fight for their lives. Many whites of that place and time harbored extremely negative feelings about black men consorting in any way with white women and would have been happy to see the youths lynched, saving the state the expense of a trial. Several hundred men gathered at the police station but were turned back when the National Guard arrived to protect the prisoners. When Price identified only six of the young men as her attackers, the jail guard replied: “It stands to reason that the others had Miss Bates.” On March 30, an all-white jury handed down indictments charging the defendants with rape. Not only were the prisoners denied the opportunity to contact family, but they were given just one hour to consult with an attorney. Trouble for the “Scottsboro Boys” was only just beginning. Prosecution’s Case Relies On Questionable Testimony After the defense agreed to divide the cases, the trial of Clarence Norris and Charlie Weems began on April 6. Representing the state was Circuit Solicitor H. G. Bailey, and defending the prisoners were Milo C. Moody, a local attorney who hadn’t tried a case in years, and Stephen R. Roddy, a real-estate attorney with no experience in criminal law. Where the 69-year-old Moody was frequently prone to forgetfulness, Roddy often appeared incapacitated due to heavy drinking. The judge was Alfred E. Hawkins, who, according to defendant Clarence Norris, was “a low down bastard. He let it be known that we were guilty and a trial was a waste of time and money ‘for niggers.’” The prosecution’s case against Norris and Weems relied heavily on the testimony of Victoria Price, who was often evasive in her answers, pretended not to understand the question, or flat-out lied. In trying to cast doubt upon Price’s credibility, the defense asked her if she had ever engaged in prostitution. When she claimed not to know what prostitution meant, she was asked, “Haven’t you made it a practice to have intercourse with other men?” “No, sir, I absolutely haven’t,” she answered. Price also claimed that she and Bates had arrived in Chattanooga on March 24 and spent the evening at a boardinghouse. Price went on to say that she and Bates were hiding in a gondola car on the train when the fight broke out the following afternoon. She testified that after the white youths were thrown off, six of the defendants entered the car and raped her at knifepoint. The prosecutor, Bailey, then called on Dr. R. R. Bridges to describe any injuries Price might have sustained during the rape. Surprisingly, he testified that he found only a few small bruises and scratches and that she was “not lacerated at all.” He further declared that there was no blood on either victim and that neither had seemed particularly upset. When asked if either girl had been raped, the best he could offer was that it was “possible.” Dr. Marvin Lynch, who also examined Price and Bates, then testified that he could find no evidence of any internal violence coming from a rape. Ruby Bates then took the witness stand, but she was not as brash and confident as Price. Price even made wisecracks at times during her testimony—mostly directed at defense attorney Roddy—that caused considerable laughter in the courtroom. Bates, however, seemed shy and nervous. Up to this point, she had spoken very little of the alleged rape, but she now supported her friend’s story. She was, however, unable to identify any of her attackers. When the defense called defendant Charlie Weems to testify, he was very sure of himself and conducted himself well on the stand. He told how Haywood Patterson had come to him and told him of the fight with the white boys and how he had agreed to help Patterson and his friends if the fight were to continue. He further claimed that, although he had been part of the fight, he had raped no one and that he had seen no women on the train. “There wasn’t a soul in that car with me and Patterson except those negroes and one white boy,” he testified. Clarence Norris stunned all those in attendance when he announced during his testimony that “every one of them [his codefendants] have something to do with those girls after they put the white boys off the train.” He claimed that a gang rape had indeed taken place, but he was the only one who did not participate. He said that Roy Wright held a knife on the women while the others took turns assaulting them. Many believe the Scottsboro boys . . . were the catalyst for the civil rights movement. 28 Prologue Spring 2014 Norris later explained his testimony: “We was scared and I don’t know what I said. They [the prison guards] told us if we didn’t confess they’d kill us—give us to the mob outside.” When Roddy offered to enter a guilty plea in exchange for life sentences, Bailey refused the deal. Verdicts Come for Weems, Norris As Patterson’s Trial Begins The trial of Haywood Patterson had already begun when the Weems-Norris verdict was announced. Hearing that both were found guilty, crowds gathered around the courthouse to cheer. Roddy complained that the cheers might bias the Patterson jury, but his request for a mistrial was denied. It took only three hours for the jury to convict Patterson, and a mere 15 days after their arrests, five of the six remaining defendants were also found guilty and sentenced to death. The lone exception was 13-year-old Roy Wright. His case ended in a hung jury when he was found guilty but punishment could not be agreed on. Although the prosecution recommended a life sentence, 11 jurors held out for the death penalty. When the remaining juror refused to vote likewise, the court was forced to declare a mistrial. A representative from the International Labor Defense (ILD, the legal arm of the Communist Party) who attended the proceedings recognized the potential the case might provide in recruiting new members, especially African Americans. Although the Communist Party supposedly represented the idea of racial equality for all, it was still perceived as a white man’s organization. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which first chose to stay out of the case for fear that the accused might actually be guilty, now recognized the likely innocence of the Scottsboro nine. NAACP representatives went to Alabama to offer their services to appeal the verdicts. The NAACP argued Above: Witness Victoria Price testifying during the April 1933 trial of Haywood Patterson, one of nine men accused of rape. She claimed that six of the defendants entered the railcar and raped her at knifepoint. Her testimony was later discredited. Below: Dr. R. R. Bridges testified on April 3, 1933, with Judge James E. Horton (leaning forward) presiding, that he found no blood on either Victoria Price or Ruby Bates, or that they sustained internal damage consistent with rape. The Scottsboro Boys Prologue 29 Spring 2014 that “communist involvement in the case” would prejudice a jury. With support from the mothers of the boys, the ILD convinced the nine young men to choose them as their legal representatives. With July 10 set as the execution date, the ILD sprang into action and managed to secure a stay of execution until the cases could be reviewed by the Alabama Supreme Court. In March 1932 the Alabama Supreme Court upheld all but one of the original convictions. Eugene Williams was the lone exception, and the court ruled that he never should have been tried as an adult. The ILD lawyer, Joseph Brodsky, argued that the remaining defendants had been unfairly judged because there were no blacks on the jury, but the court ruled that the state had the right “to fix qualifications for jurors.” When the ILD turned to the Supreme Court of the United States for relief, the Court announced in November that the defendants had received inadequate counsel and therefore would be granted new trials. The second trial of Haywood Patterson began on March 27, 1933, with Samuel Leibowitz—a New York lawyer hired in part for his amazing record of 77 acquittals and 1 hung jury in 78 murder trials—now appearing as lead defense counsel. Accuser Changes Her Testimony As Patterson Trial Moves Ahead Victoria Price was called to the stand on April 3. After a short examination by the state, Leibowitz wasted no time going on the attack. He brought up Price’s reputation before painting her as a liar by pointing out untruths in her previous testimony. His next witness testified to having seen Price engage in sexual activity two days before the alleged rape. Leibowitz suggested that this might account for a small amount of semen found during her examination. Doctor Bridges was then called to the stand to restate his previous testimony that there Judge James Horton received numerous messages, some threatening, during the Patterson trial. An April 6, 1933, telegram from the District Committee International Labor Defense in Detroit urged a change of trial venue to Birmingham. was no blood found on either woman and that neither Price or Bates sustained internal damage consistent with rape. When Ory Dobbins, a farmer who claimed to have seen the defendants pull Price and Bates back on the train as they attempted to escape, was called to the witness stand, Leibowitz quickly discredited him. Knowing that both women were wearing men’s overalls when they were taken from the train, Leibowitz asked how it was that Dobbins knew it was a woman the defendants had pulled back onboard. “She was wearing women’s clothes,” he answered. When Judge James Horton asked if it could have been overalls they were wearing, Dobbins was even more specific and said, “No sir, a dress.” To learn more about   The biggest surprise came when Ruby Bates entered the courtroom. After disappearing from public view following the first trial, some thought she might have been kidnapped or worse. Now testifying for the defense, she said that her conscience had gotten the better of her and that she was there to tell the truth. There was no rape, she said, and it was Price’s idea to accuse the defendants of the crime in order to keep from being arrested themselves. Attorney General Thomas Knight, however, pounded away on cross-examination until Bates admitted that the ILD had paid for her clothes and her trip back to Alabama (she had been in hiding in New York), suggesting that she was nothing more than a paid witness for the defense. She either lied • The treatment of African Americans in the post– Civil War South, go to www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2008/fall/. • How the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law, go to www.archives.gov/publications/ prologue/2004/summer/. • The beginnings of the A frican American migration from the South, go to www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2008/summer/. 30 Prologue The International Labor Defense (legal arm of the Communist Party) provided defense counsel for the Scottsboro Boys. Its Action Committee planned a march in Washington in early May 1933 and asked for a meeting with the President to urge presidential intervention and adoption of a bill of rights for blacks. during the first trial, Knight implied, or she was lying now; therefore, her testimony could not be believed. In closing summation, the assistant prosecutor asked the jury to “show them that Alabama justice cannot be bought and sold with Jew money from New York.” Leibowitz angrily demanded a mistrial be declared, but Judge Horton denied the motion. On April 9, 1933, the jury returned with its verdict—Haywood Patterson was guilty as charged. It was later learned that it took only five minutes for the jury to reach a decision. The defense immediately filed a motion with Judge Horton for a new trial. While awaiting the judge’s decision, the ILD planned a march on Washington, D.C., in support of the Scottsboro Boys for early May. On May 8, 4,000 marchers converged on Washington. Among them was Ruby Bates, who marched alongside Janie Patterson, Haywood Patterson’s mother. When the marchers reached the White House, they were disappointed by President Franklin Roosevelt’s refusal to meet with them. Instead, a petition signed by 145,000 people calling for presidential intervention was handed to the White House appointments secretary. A letter presented along with this petition called for the President to use his “good office to influence the granting of a desired change of venue, to a largely populated center” and further urged him to issue “a new declaration of civil, political and economic justice and freedom, in the authentic voice of the Chief Executive of the nation, aiming at the future strict enforcement of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Federal Constitution, for the purpose of safeguarding the life, liberty and prosperity, and guaranteeing the pursuit of happiness of twelve millions of black Americans.” Judge Horton Risks His Career, Orders New Trial for Patterson At considerable risk to his professional career, Judge Horton, believing that Price was lying about the rape, announced on June 22 that he was setting aside the verdict and ordering a new trial for Patterson. In his decision he pointed out several discrepancies between Price’s story and the evidence presented. While Price claimed to have been hit on the head with the butt end of a gun during the supposed rape, the doctors found no sign of a head injury. She also stated that the doctors had seen her bloodsoaked coat, but Judge Horton wondered why neither had mentioned it during their testimony. Price also testified that at the time of the rape she was lying in a car full of chert (crushed gravel), causing the sharp jagged rock to dig into her back. However, despite finding a few bruises in that location, the doctors found no visible lacerations. The judge also questioned why none of the seven white boys were called to testify. In conclusion, he wrote that history had proven “that women of the character shown in this case are prone for selfish reasons to make false accusations both of rape and insult upon the slightest provocation for ulterior motives.” The Scottsboro Boys Prologue 31 The White House felt public pressure for fairness in the Scottsboro cases. In a December 1933 letter, 15-yearold Pearl Blumkin wrote that “seven mothers . . . will sit alone, mourning and brooding for their sons.” She asked naively why they could not be tried in the north “where Negroes are considered as we are?” noticeable, as he overruled nearly every defense objection and denied Leibowitz the opportunity to question Price’s character and credibility. It was his opinion—and he openly shared it with the jury—that a white woman would never consent to sex with a black man. Haywood Patterson would later say of Callahan: “He couldn’t get us to the chair fast enough.” Appearing for the prosecution was Orville Gilley, the lone white man allowed to remain He further declared that “this tendency on the part of the women shows that they are predisposed to make false accusations upon any occasion whereby their selfish ends may be gained.” Judge Horton failed to win reelection the following year. Using his political connections, Attorney General Knight managed to have Patterson’s third trial, which began that November, transferred to the court of Judge William Callahan. Callahan’s prejudice was immediately on the train after the others were thrown off. At Patterson’s retrial, and later at Norris’s, he claimed that the attacks on Price and Bates ended only when he begged the black youths to stop before they killed the two women. To the dismay of the defense, Ruby Bates had moved to New York and refused to return to Alabama after receiving letters suggesting she should be lynched along with the defendants. When both Patterson and Norris were found guilty, the remaining trials were delayed until the appeals process for both could be exhausted. In 1934 the special assistant to the U.S. attorney general reported to President Roosevelt that he found the testimony of both Gilley and Price to be filled with inconsistencies and that if the Scottsboro Boys continued to face execution, it was his advice that the President intervene. Roosevelt then met with incoming Alabama governor David Bibb Graves at Warm Springs, Georgia, and asked him to do all he could to “clear it up.” The governor promised to look into the matter but later backed out of a plan to pardon the prisoners when they refused to acknowledge any guilt. White House Flooded with Mail; FDR Refuses to Get Involved Ruling that the paperwork in Patterson’s trial had not been submitted in time, the Alabama state Supreme Court refused to review the case. Two ILD officials then foolishly contacted Victoria Price and attempted to bribe her into changing her story. After first agreeing to do so, she then changed her mind and contacted the police. When ILD representatives arrived in Alabama carrying $1,500 in cash for Price, they were immediately arrested. Angered by the actions of the ILD, Leibowitz and Communist Party officials reached a compromise. He would represent Clarence Norris, who still believed in him, while ILD attorneys would speak for Haywood Patterson. 32 Prologue Spring 2014 Correspondence began arriving at the White House shortly after the arrests of the Scottsboro Boys. One particularly poignant letter was received from 15-year-old Pearl Blumkin in December 1933. She wrote: “Christmas is coming. It is a night of happiness and joy. Yet, in seven little homes sits seven mothers who will sit alone, mourning and brooding for their sons.” She then asks somewhat naively: “Why can’t these boys be given a fair trial in the Northern states where Negroes are considered as we are?” But by 1935 much of the public was growing frustrated with Roosevelt for his failure to intervene. Mr. Ernest Pierce wrote the President, addressing him as “Franklin Deflated Roosefelt,” saying: All the way down the historical line there have been so-called great men who, viewed from the more acute angle of greater distance, proved to be DAMNED FOOLS. ARE YOU AWAKE ENOUGH TO KNOW THAT TOM MOONEY [convicted of a San Francisco bombing in 1916] and the SCOTTSBORO BOYS ARE STILL SUFFERING THE INJUSTICE OF OUR CRIMINAL COURTS? WHAT COULD BE MORE CRIMINAL THAN YOUR FAILURE TO ACT? Even Andy and Roy Wright wrote to the President, asking him to bring their case to a conclusion, as they were the sole support for their mother and sister. Eleanor Roosevelt herself was not immune from the pressure. A Mrs. Davis of Indianapolis appealed to the First Lady’s motherly instincts, writing: “You as a mother can easily understand just how the mothers of those boys feel.” The New Deal Girls Social Club in New York asked her to “use your influence with the President in behalf of the Scottsboro Boys.” Rev. Pearl Burnett of Flint, Michigan, inquired about the President’s refusal to meet with a contingent who had come to the White House. “I did not believe Pres. Roosevelt would deliberately refuse to see anyone,” Burnett wrote, adding “these boys have been punished enough by their three years of incarceration.” Despite public sentiment that was clearly on the side of the Scottsboro Boys, Roosevelt chose to stay out of the fray, believing this was a state issue and not a federal one. On April 1, 1935, the Supreme Court decided Norris v. Alabama and Patterson v. Alabama. Leibowitz had argued that the verdict in the Norris trial should be overturned because the exclusion of black residents from the jury rolls in Alabama prevented the defendant from receiving a fair trial from a jury of his peers. For Patterson, the ILD’s Walter Pollak contended that a mere technicality about paperwork should not preclude the defendant from receiving a new trial. The Court agreed with both arguments and sent the cases back to Alabama. In the Norris decision they wrote that the defendant had been denied his 14th Amendment right of equal protection under the law, while in Patterson’s case they simply saw the unfairness of allowing him to be executed while at the same time granting Norris a new trial. The fourth trial of Haywood Patterson began on January 21, 1936, with the ILD, the NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union, the League for Industrial Democracy, and the Methodist Federation for Social Services now working together on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys. With the ILD no longer in sole control of the defense, Leibowitz had agreed to return. However, because of harsh comments he had made about Alabama, not to mention his religion and his affiliation with the communists, the Jewish lawyer from New York was now considered a liability. Leibowitz, whose first concern was always his clients, agreed to take on an advisory role and accepted Clarence Watts, a Southern attorney with local ties to the community, as lead counsel for the defense. Life Takes Different Tur ns For the Scottsboro Boys From the witness stand, Patterson declared that not only was he innocent of rape, but he also claimed to have seen neither woman on the train that day. During cross-examination, prosecutor Melvin C. Hudson, the local solicitor, simply mocked Patterson’s answers and treated him with utter contempt throughout the questioning. Hudson then called Obie Golden, a guard at Kilby prison, to testify to a supposed confession Patterson had made two years earlier. When asked on cross-examination why he never told anyone of this in the past, Golden was unprepared and had no answer. In summation, Hudson made an impassioned plea for the jury to protect the “womanhood of Alabama.” If Patterson were allowed to go free, he told them, women would “have to buckle six-shooters to their middles.” Watts then took his turn for the defense and asked the jury to consider the evidence carefully and to administer fair justice for the defendant. When the jury returned with a guilty verdict, Patterson was given a sentence of 75 years rather than the death penalty the prosecution had hoped for. For the first time in state history, a black man had escaped the death penalty after being convicted of raping a white woman. [The Supreme Court] wrote that the defendant had been denied his 14th Amendment right of equal protection under the law. Prologue 33 The Scottsboro Boys Spring 2014 Clarence Norris’s trial began nearly a year and a half later, and for the first time Judge Callahan allowed the defense to call witnesses to testify to Victoria Price’s character. Despite two deputy sheriffs from Huntsville, Alabama, telling the jury that they “would not believe her under oath,” and Doctor Bridges’s earlier testimony (he had died the previous March) regarding the lack of any serious injury found on Price, the jury returned with a guilty verdict and once again sentenced Norris to death. This proved too much for Watts to handle, and he fell ill. Leibowitz was once again left to represent the remaining defendants. The next two trials ended with Andy Wright receiving a 99-year sentence and Charlie Weems getting 75 years. Ozie Powell, who was seriously wounded after being shot in the head while attempting to escape the previous year, was next brought into the courtroom. It was then announced that rape charges against Powell were being dropped and that he would instead plead guilty to assaulting a police deputy during his escape attempt. State Attorney General Thomas Lawson then shocked everyone in the courtroom when he announced that all charges against Olen Montgomery, Willie Roberson, Eugene Williams, and Roy Wright were being dropped as well. In 1943 Charlie Weems was paroled, followed by both Clarence Norris and Andy Wright in 1944. Norris, however, was returned to jail after violating the conditions of his parole by leaving the state without permission. Two years later, he was again paroled and once again fled. In 1973, after spending a number of years in New York, Norris contacted the Alabama governor’s office to see if he was still wanted for his last skip. When told that he was, Norris enlisted the NAACP to help him obtain a pardon. In October of 1976, after a media blitz and public relations campaign launched by the NAACP, the state of Alabama granted Norris his pardon. Ozie Powell, who was never the same after being shot in the head, was released in 1946. Andy Wright, like Norris, violated his parole by leaving Montgomery, Alabama, without permission. He was captured the following year and paroled for good in 1950. In 1951 he was accused of raping a 13-yearold girl (the daughter of a girlfriend) in New York but was acquitted by an all-white jury. Roy Wright, the youngest of the Scottsboro Boys, joined the military after his release from prison and served until 1959. Upon returning home, believing his wife had been unfaithful to him, Wright took both of their lives in a murder-suicide. Although they each suffered from various problems on the outside, Willie Roberson, Eugene Williams, Olen Montgomery, Ozie Powell, and Charlie Weems eventually settled into everyday society and started new lives for themselves. Life behind bars was not an easy one for Haywood Patterson. Not especially liked by any of his co-defendants, he found this to be the case as well with many of the prisoners and guards at Atmore prison near Mobile, Alabama. In fact, one guard had paid another prisoner to kill Patterson, but he miraculously survived despite being stabbed 20 times. Because of this and other abuses suffered at the hands of prison guards, he twice attempted to escape, the second attempt being a successful one. On July 17, 1947, Patterson was working on a prison farm when he and several other inmates simply ran off from their assigned duties. After swimming through snake-infested creeks and evading pursuing dogs, Haywood reached Atlanta, Georgia, before eventually arriving at his sister’s home in Detroit. He was arrested there in 1950 after killing a man in a barroom brawl. Two years later, Haywood Patterson died in prison at age 39. • As scholar David Pitts has remarked, the Scottsboro case resulted in a “more widereaching interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of ‘equal protection under the law.’” Whereas in most cases whites could feel confident about the protection of their 14th Amendment right guaranteeing them a fair trial, blacks, especially those in the South and of lower financial and economic status, could not always feel as secure. As stated earlier, the Alabama Supreme Court had ruled that the state had the right to “fix qualifications for jurors,” preventing the defendants from being judged by a jury of their peers. The Scottsboro Boys deserved the same protection under the law that the Constitution grants to all Americans. They didn’t always get it. P Note on Sources My special thanks go to Christina Jones and Tab Lewis at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland, and Kirsten Carter at the Franklin Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York, for their help in locating documents related to the Scottsboro case. Thanks also go to Karen Needles for bringing the Scottsboro Boys case to my attention. Letters to President Roosevelt are in the Straight Numerical File 158260-46 section 1-13, General Records of the Department of Justice, Record Group 60. Records regarding the Scottsboro march on Washington are from File 104-32—Scottsboro Demonstrations May 8, 1933, Central Classified Files, 1937– 1950, Records of the U.S. Secret Service, Record Group 87. Two books were helpful in writing this article: The Scottsboro Boys by James Haskins published by Henry Holt and Company, Inc. 1994, and “The Scottsboro Boys and Fundamental Rights” by David Pitts, published in Issues of Democracy (July 2001). The quotation from Clarence Norris about Judge Hawkins is from “The 1930s in America: Facing Depression” published by the Center for Gifted Education at the College of William and Mary, published in 2003. Author This account of the Scottsboro case, appearing in two parts and concluding in the spring issue of the Cornell Law Forum, was derived from a summer 2001 Cornell Adult University class on great American trials that the author co-taught with Glenn C. Altschuler, the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell.1 “No crime in American history – let alone a crime that never occurred—produced as many trials, convictions, reversals, and retrials as did the alleged gang rape of two white girls by nine black teenagers on the Southern Railroad freight run from Chattanooga to Memphis on March 25, 1931. Over the course of the next two decades, the struggle for justice of the ‘Scottsboro Boys,’ as the black teens were called, made celebrities out of anonymous people, launched and ended careers, wasted lives and produced heroes, opened southern juries to blacks, exacerbated sectional strife and divided America’s political left.”2 In the course of their struggle against prejudice and an unresponsive court system, the Scottsboro Boys, together or separately, endured 16 trials, two United States Court reversals, as many as four series of death sentences, and prison terms ranging from 6 to nearly 17 years. Although the State of Alabama, try as it might, was unable to execute the Scottsboro youths, their lives were left in shambles. The Setting The setting for this saga is Alabama in 1931. To understand what happened, we need to be reminded of the contextual background, and particularly of three major aspects of life in the Deep South. First, during the Depression, economic hard times were prevalent everywhere but were particularly bad in Tennessee, Alabama, and many of the southern rural areas. There was a substantial underclass of unemployed persons, whites and blacks both, who often lived together in so-called hobo jungles or shacks in sections of larger southern cities. In this surprisingly integrated society the common elements were poverty and joblessness. Women mill workers who became unemployed Above: Fearing a mob lynching, Alabama Governor B. M. Miller called in the National Guard to protect the accused: Clarence Norris, Olen Montgomery, Andy Wright, Willie Roberson, Ozzie Powell, Eugene Williams, Charlie Weems, Roy Wright, and Haywood Patterson The Scottsboro Boys endured 16 trials, two United States Court reversals, as many as four series of death sentences, and prison terms ranging from 6 to nearly 17 years. 2 Cornell Law Forum often resorted to prostitution in order to earn enough to survive. The two white women, the alleged rape victims, came from this milieu. In the constant search for jobs, a preferred method of transportation was to hop a freight train. Hoboing, “riding the rails,” was a way of life for many. Second, there was the extreme racism that prevailed in southern society—a ruthless oppression of black people. Most white citizens of the south were not cruel in their daily lives but they expected blacks to keep their place. They believed that black people were inferior. There was often a suspicion that young black males, if not controlled, would always be prone to rape a white woman. Even a well-educated, moderate Southerner of this period who would oppose lynchings and violence would doubtlessly support segregation, and would see nothing wrong in the fact that blacks could not vote or serve on juries. Such a person would certainly resent northern troublemakers who would try to meddle by criticizing southern customs. Third, on a national level, the law was largely unresponsive to the plight of black people. In 1868, the Federal Constitution was amended to provide that no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person the equal protection of the laws. These Constitutional guarantees, articulated in the 14th Amendment, meant that the national government pledged to enforce legal equality between blacks and whites. After Reconstruction, however, the federal government and the courts—including the United States Supreme Court—failed to breathe life into these legal rules. The words were there, the promise was there, but the reality was ignored. Yes, black people were now entitled to vote, but somehow they didn’t. Yes, black people were now entitled to sit on juries, but somehow they didn’t. In the absence of specific evidence of actual state discrimination, little was done. And specific evidence usually meant an admission by state officials that they were intentionally discriminating. Our nation declined to enforce the 14th Amendment on behalf of black people. There was a reluctance in the federal government to meddle with state procedures when it came to civil rights issues. It reflected the tendency of the rest of the nation to let Southerners handle the race question as they pleased.3 In addition, another aspect of the law was undeveloped. The protections afforded to criminal defendants, white or black, were not clearly defined. The 14th Amendment imposes limitations on the states but these limitations are phrased in the somewhat vague and general words “due process” and “equal protection.” On the other hand, The protections afforded to criminal defendants, white or black, were not clearly defined. The Scottsboro defendants leaving jail in Decatur, Alabama Winter 2002 3 the Bill of Rights—the first 10 amendments, enacted in 1791 when our Constitution was originally adopted—are more specific. The Sixth Amendment, for example, speaks of the right to the assistance of counsel in a criminal case, the right to confront witnesses, and the right to trial by jury. But the Bill of Rights was framed to limit federal power, not state power. Thus, the question was whether these specific protections, like the right to counsel and the right to a jury trial, were included in the 14th Amendment phrase, “due process,” or in the meaning of “equal protection.” In 1931, the answer was not clear. In many instances, the United States Supreme Court had not yet decided which portions of the specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights were incorporated into 14th Amendment due process. It was unclear, in other words, which of the specific limitations on the federal government and on federal courts were also limitations on state governments and on state courts.4 The Tragedy Begins The Scottsboro tragedy began on March 25, 1931. A Southern Railroad freight train left Chattanooga, Tennessee, on its way to Memphis. Scattered among the cars were some two dozen people— some white, some black. The train followed the course of the Tennessee River. It traveled west, then dipped south into rural northern Alabama, where its path would take it through places like Stevenson, Paint Rock, and Huntsville until it ran north again to Memphis. Shortly after the slow-moving train crossed the Alabama border, a white youth walked across the top of a railroad car and stepped on the hand of an 18-year-old black man named Haywood Patterson. A fight broke out between the whites and blacks. The larger group of blacks got the better of it and forced all the whites except one off the train. The whites who were ejected from the train complained at a nearby depot that they had been assaulted by a gang of blacks. The stationmaster telegraphed ahead to the Paint Rock station. Word reached the county sheriff, who deputized every man in Paint Rock who had a gun and lined them up along the tracks at the depot. This posse was ordered to arrest every black person on the train when it stopped at Paint Rock. The train arrived and was searched. The posse found nine black males ranging in age from 12 to 20 years old. Only four of the nine had known each other before they were arrested. Then came a surprise. Two young white women, with men’s caps on their heads and dressed in men’s overalls, were also found on the train. They were unemployed mill workers named Victoria Price and Ruby Bates. They had gone to Chattanooga, they said, in search of work; having found none, they were now returning home to Huntsville. As the deputies were tying the blacks together, one of the girls told a deputy that she and the other woman had been raped by the nine of them. Everyone was transported to Scottsboro, the county seat. In the jail, the older of the two girls, Victoria Price, identified six of the nine blacks as her assailants. The guard concluded that “if those six had Miss Price, it stands to reason the others had Miss Bates.” One of the accused, Clarence Norris, protested and called Vickie Price a liar. The guard hit him with a rifle butt. The women were promptly sent downtown to be examined by two local physicians. Farmers from the nearby hills began gathering. By dusk, a crowd of several hundred had assembled. They surrounded the dilapidated twostory jail. There were shouts of “Give them to us,” and “If you don’t, we’ll come in and get them!” The sheriff called the governor in Montgomery and the governor ordered the National Guard to Scottsboro. There would be no lynching tonight. The idea that a capital case could be tried less than two weeks after the crime seems incredible even by the prevailing standards of 1931. 4 Cornell Law Forum The First Trials Now events moved rapidly. Under the threat of mob violence, with the National Guard’s constant presence and manned machine guns on the courthouse steps deterring hostile crowds of thousands, the nine blacks were hustled to trial just 12 days after their arrest. The idea that a capital case could be tried less than two weeks after the crime seems incredible even by the prevailing standards of 1931. Of the nine defendants, one was 12 years old and away from home for the first time. Another was 13. A third was practically blind. Another was suffering from a venereal disease so acute that any act of intercourse would have been extremely painful; to walk, this man needed a cane. All the blacks were illiterate, far from their homes, and without access to their families. They were not asked whether they had or could get a lawyer. They were not asked whether they had relatives who could be called and who might be able to hire a lawyer for them. They were not told that a lawyer could be appointed to defend them. Just before the proceedings began, the judge asked simply if the case was ready for trial. Yes, said the prosecutor. No one answered for the defendants. A Tennessee real estate lawyer, not a member of the Alabama bar and unfamiliar with Alabama law, stood up and said he was not representing the defendants but was willing to advise them. An elderly local lawyer who had not tried a case in many years agreed to advise the Tennessee lawyer. It was never clear whether either of these “advisors,” or anyone else, represented the accused. The Tennessee lawyer did participate on behalf of the Scottsboro defendants—in a manner of speaking. He was allowed 25 minutes to confer with his clients. No time was provided for a reasonable investigation of the alleged crime or of the backgrounds of the alleged victims. There was no time to find witnesses. So the trials began. The defendants were tried in four groups. Clarence Norris and Charlie Weems were tried first, because they were the oldest. Next came Haywood Patterson, the one whose hand had been stepped on. The third trial involved a group of five defendants: Ozzie Powell, Willie Roberson, Andy Wright, Eugene Williams, and Olen Montgomery. The fourth and final trial was that of Roy Wright, the 12-year-old. Before each of the four juries, the key prosecution testimony was that of the alleged victims, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, and the local doctors, Bridges and Lynch. Both doctors testified to having found semen in the vaginas of the two Haywood Patterson The prosecutor did not ask for the death penalty—only life imprisonment. That act of mercy disappointed the jury, a majority of which held out for the death penalty. Winter 2002 5 women. The adviser, or “lawyer,” for the accused did not question the medical testimony, did not make much of an opening statement, and, incredibly, saw no purpose in giving a summation. Worse still, because the adviser did not have the opportunity to speak to his clients at length, he could not prepare them to testify. He called them to the stand nonetheless, so they could say whatever they wanted. As you might expect, some of the nine said, in effect, “Not me and not my two or three friends, but, yes, these other defendants, they are the ones who did it.” No single lawyer can represent multiple clients if the latter blame each other for the crime charged. It would constitute a gross conflict of interest. But these “technicalities” went unnoticed or were ignored. In short, the defense, insofar as it existed at all, was a disaster. These rapid-fire trials were over in three days. Most took five hours or less. The jury deliberations for most of the trials averaged about 30 minutes. The verdict for eight of the nine was “guilty of rape” and the penalty in each case was death. The exception was the trial of Roy Wright, the 12-year-old. Here the jury could not agree and the result was a hung jury. Why couldn’t the jury agree? Well, because Mr. Wright was only 12, the prosecutor did not ask for the death penalty—only life imprisonment. That act of mercy disappointed the jury, a majority of which held out for the death penalty. As a result, they could not render the required unanimous verdict. From the time of arrest to the time of the death sentences only two weeks had passed. Saviors The Scottsboro Boys did not die in the electric chair. Not then, and not later. Who saved them? In this tragedy there were heroes—individuals or groups whose skill or courage or commitment saved the lives of these young victims. In chronological order of appearance, the first of these saviors was the American Communist Party (ACP). The initial media response to the convictions was limited to a few brief stories in several newspapers. There was no national media presence at the trial. Soon after the convictions, the ACP became involved. They knew a good issue when they saw it. The convictions, the ACP argued, were a dramatic example of capitalistic repression of the poor. Obviously, their motive in helping the Scottsboro Boys was propaganda. But were their motives important? When you are powerless and facing death, when no one else is aiding your cause, you take what help you can get. The ACP had the means and the network to mobilize mass protests that brought the case national and international attention. Within days, demonstrations throughout the United States, as well as in Germany, Spain, and Moscow, raised a storm of protest. Moreover, the communists had a well-established legal defense team; the International Labor Defense and its chief lawyer, Joseph Brodsky, were experienced and dedicated. The Scottsboro Boys now had support and competent legal representation. The next savior to enter the picture was the United States Supreme Court. After the convictions were affirmed in the Alabama courts, they were appealed to the United States Supreme Court. In the landmark decision of Powell v. Alabama,5  the Court reversed the Scottsboro convictions. This decision appears in all the constitutional law and criminal procedure casebooks. Let me explain why. There was no question that the Justices regarded the legal representation of the Scottsboro Boys inadequate. It was never clear whether the TennesThe convictions, the American Communist Party argued, were a dramatic example of capitalistic repression of the poor. 6 Cornell Law Forum see lawyer was really representing the defendants. He seemed tentative, probably because of the mob atmosphere. He had no time to prepare. Counsel was never formerly appointed by the court. The unfairness was obvious. But the Supreme Court needed a legal basis on which to reverse. The specific Sixth Amendment right to counsel would do nicely except, as I’ve mentioned, the Sixth Amendment operated only against the federal government, not against the states. The 14th Amendment’s “due process” clause does apply to the states but what does “due process” entail? There was no precedent that said the right to counsel applies to the states through the operation of 14th Amendment due process—no precedent, that is, until Powell v. Alabama created it in 1932. This decision is a legal landmark because it extended and clarified the meaning of due process. It is a seminal right-to-counsel decision—seminal because it is the basis of the decisions that followed. In Powell, the Court said two things. First, it read the right to counsel into the due process clause. Therefore, this guarantee would now apply to all state trials. Second, it applied that principle to the Scottsboro trial and found that due process was lacking. That insufficiency saved the Scottsboro Boys from being executed—at least for now. To understand the long-term significance of this decision, we have to appreciate that the actual holding was a narrow one. What the Court said was that 14th Amendment due process requires the effective right to counsel in this case because in this case the defendants were all young, uneducated, and illiterate. A mob atmosphere surrounded the trial and this was a capital case. The Court left open a host of questions that would be answered later. Does the right to counsel apply to all capital cases—even if the defendants are mature and educated, and there are no mobs? Yes, said the Court in a later decision. Does the right to counsel apply to non-capital, serious felony cases? Yes, said the Court some years later. Does the right to counsel apply to all felonies, whether serious or not? Yes, said the Court in another decision. When in the trial process does the right to counsel attach—only at the time of trial? No—earlier; at least at the time of indictment, answered the Court. Why not even earlier than that, such as at the time of initial arraignment? Good point, said the Court, and it so held. Why not still earlier? The Court ultimately agreed, and held that the right to counsel attaches at the time of custodial interrogation. If the police arrest a suspect and the suspect asks for a lawyer, at that point all interrogation of the suspect must stop. But how will the suspect know he has this right to counsel? Ultimately, the Court held in Miranda v. Arizona6 that if the police take a suspect into custody, they must advise him that he has the right to a lawyer and that if he cannot afford one, a lawyer will be appointed for him. Thus, over the course of 35 years, in decision after decision, the Supreme Court expanded the right to counsel in state as well as federal trials. Where did all this begin? It began with Powell v. Alabama. This is not the end of the story. Now the nine Scottsboro defendants must return to the Alabama courts to be tried again. And back in Alabama, not much has changed. This account of the Scottsboro case, appearing in two parts and concluding in the spring issue of the Cornell Law Forum, was derived from a summer 2001 Cornell Adult University class on great American trials that the author co-taught with Glenn C. Altschuler, the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell.1 “No crime in American history – let alone a crime that never occurred—produced as many trials, convictions, reversals, and retrials as did the alleged gang rape of two white girls by nine black teenagers on the Southern Railroad freight run from Chattanooga to Memphis on March 25, 1931. Over the course of the next two decades, the struggle for justice of the ‘Scottsboro Boys,’ as the black teens were called, made celebrities out of anonymous people, launched and ended careers, wasted lives and produced heroes, opened southern juries to blacks, exacerbated sectional strife and divided America’s political left.”2 In the course of their struggle against prejudice and an unresponsive court system, the Scottsboro Boys, together or separately, endured 16 trials, two United States Court reversals, as many as four series of death sentences, and prison terms ranging from 6 to nearly 17 years. Although the State of Alabama, try as it might, was unable to execute the Scottsboro youths, their lives were left in shambles. The Setting The setting for this saga is Alabama in 1931. To understand what happened, we need to be reminded of the contextual background, and particularly of three major aspects of life in the Deep South. First, during the Depression, economic hard times were prevalent everywhere but were particularly bad in Tennessee, Alabama, and many of the southern rural areas. There was a substantial underclass of unemployed persons, whites and blacks both, who often lived together in so-called hobo jungles or shacks in sections of larger southern cities. In this surprisingly integrated society the common elements were poverty and joblessness. Women mill workers who became unemployed Above: Fearing a mob lynching, Alabama Governor B. M. Miller called in the National Guard to protect the accused: Clarence Norris, Olen Montgomery, Andy Wright, Willie Roberson, Ozzie Powell, Eugene Williams, Charlie Weems, Roy Wright, and Haywood Patterson The Scottsboro Boys endured 16 trials, two United States Court reversals, as many as four series of death sentences, and prison terms ranging from 6 to nearly 17 years. 2 Cornell Law Forum often resorted to prostitution in order to earn enough to survive. The two white women, the alleged rape victims, came from this milieu. In the constant search for jobs, a preferred method of transportation was to hop a freight train. Hoboing, “riding the rails,” was a way of life for many. Second, there was the extreme racism that prevailed in southern society—a ruthless oppression of black people. Most white citizens of the south were not cruel in their daily lives but they expected blacks to keep their place. They believed that black people were inferior. There was often a suspicion that young black males, if not controlled, would always be prone to rape a white woman. Even a well-educated, moderate Southerner of this period who would oppose lynchings and violence would doubtlessly support segregation, and would see nothing wrong in the fact that blacks could not vote or serve on juries. Such a person would certainly resent northern troublemakers who would try to meddle by criticizing southern customs. Third, on a national level, the law was largely unresponsive to the plight of black people. In 1868, the Federal Constitution was amended to provide that no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person the equal protection of the laws. These Constitutional guarantees, articulated in the 14th Amendment, meant that the national government pledged to enforce legal equality between blacks and whites. After Reconstruction, however, the federal government and the courts—including the United States Supreme Court—failed to breathe life into these legal rules. The words were there, the promise was there, but the reality was ignored. Yes, black people were now entitled to vote, but somehow they didn’t. Yes, black people were now entitled to sit on juries, but somehow they didn’t. In the absence of specific evidence of actual state discrimination, little was done. And specific evidence usually meant an admission by state officials that they were intentionally discriminating. Our nation declined to enforce the 14th Amendment on behalf of black people. There was a reluctance in the federal government to meddle with state procedures when it came to civil rights issues. It reflected the tendency of the rest of the nation to let Southerners handle the race question as they pleased.3 In addition, another aspect of the law was undeveloped. The protections afforded to criminal defendants, white or black, were not clearly defined. The 14th Amendment imposes limitations on the states but these limitations are phrased in the somewhat vague and general words “due process” and “equal protection.” On the other hand, The protections afforded to criminal defendants, white or black, were not clearly defined. The Scottsboro defendants leaving jail in Decatur, Alabama Winter 2002 3 the Bill of Rights—the first 10 amendments, enacted in 1791 when our Constitution was originally adopted—are more specific. The Sixth Amendment, for example, speaks of the right to the assistance of counsel in a criminal case, the right to confront witnesses, and the right to trial by jury. But the Bill of Rights was framed to limit federal power, not state power. Thus, the question was whether these specific protections, like the right to counsel and the right to a jury trial, were included in the 14th Amendment phrase, “due process,” or in the meaning of “equal protection.” In 1931, the answer was not clear. In many instances, the United States Supreme Court had not yet decided which portions of the specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights were incorporated into 14th Amendment due process. It was unclear, in other words, which of the specific limitations on the federal government and on federal courts were also limitations on state governments and on state courts.4 The Tragedy Begins The Scottsboro tragedy began on March 25, 1931. A Southern Railroad freight train left Chattanooga, Tennessee, on its way to Memphis. Scattered among the cars were some two dozen people— some white, some black. The train followed the course of the Tennessee River. It traveled west, then dipped south into rural northern Alabama, where its path would take it through places like Stevenson, Paint Rock, and Huntsville until it ran north again to Memphis. Shortly after the slow-moving train crossed the Alabama border, a white youth walked across the top of a railroad car and stepped on the hand of an 18-year-old black man named Haywood Patterson. A fight broke out between the whites and blacks. The larger group of blacks got the better of it and forced all the whites except one off the train. The whites who were ejected from the train complained at a nearby depot that they had been assaulted by a gang of blacks. The stationmaster telegraphed ahead to the Paint Rock station. Word reached the county sheriff, who deputized every man in Paint Rock who had a gun and lined them up along the tracks at the depot. This posse was ordered to arrest every black person on the train when it stopped at Paint Rock. The train arrived and was searched. The posse found nine black males ranging in age from 12 to 20 years old. Only four of the nine had known each other before they were arrested. Then came a surprise. Two young white women, with men’s caps on their heads and dressed in men’s overalls, were also found on the train. They were unemployed mill workers named Victoria Price and Ruby Bates. They had gone to Chattanooga, they said, in search of work; having found none, they were now returning home to Huntsville. As the deputies were tying the blacks together, one of the girls told a deputy that she and the other woman had been raped by the nine of them. Everyone was transported to Scottsboro, the county seat. In the jail, the older of the two girls, Victoria Price, identified six of the nine blacks as her assailants. The guard concluded that “if those six had Miss Price, it stands to reason the others had Miss Bates.” One of the accused, Clarence Norris, protested and called Vickie Price a liar. The guard hit him with a rifle butt. The women were promptly sent downtown to be examined by two local physicians. Farmers from the nearby hills began gathering. By dusk, a crowd of several hundred had assembled. They surrounded the dilapidated twostory jail. There were shouts of “Give them to us,” and “If you don’t, we’ll come in and get them!” The sheriff called the governor in Montgomery and the governor ordered the National Guard to Scottsboro. There would be no lynching tonight. The idea that a capital case could be tried less than two weeks after the crime seems incredible even by the prevailing standards of 1931. 4 Cornell Law Forum The First Trials Now events moved rapidly. Under the threat of mob violence, with the National Guard’s constant presence and manned machine guns on the courthouse steps deterring hostile crowds of thousands, the nine blacks were hustled to trial just 12 days after their arrest. The idea that a capital case could be tried less than two weeks after the crime seems incredible even by the prevailing standards of 1931. Of the nine defendants, one was 12 years old and away from home for the first time. Another was 13. A third was practically blind. Another was suffering from a venereal disease so acute that any act of intercourse would have been extremely painful; to walk, this man needed a cane. All the blacks were illiterate, far from their homes, and without access to their families. They were not asked whether they had or could get a lawyer. They were not asked whether they had relatives who could be called and who might be able to hire a lawyer for them. They were not told that a lawyer could be appointed to defend them. Just before the proceedings began, the judge asked simply if the case was ready for trial. Yes, said the prosecutor. No one answered for the defendants. A Tennessee real estate lawyer, not a member of the Alabama bar and unfamiliar with Alabama law, stood up and said he was not representing the defendants but was willing to advise them. An elderly local lawyer who had not tried a case in many years agreed to advise the Tennessee lawyer. It was never clear whether either of these “advisors,” or anyone else, represented the accused. The Tennessee lawyer did participate on behalf of the Scottsboro defendants—in a manner of speaking. He was allowed 25 minutes to confer with his clients. No time was provided for a reasonable investigation of the alleged crime or of the backgrounds of the alleged victims. There was no time to find witnesses. So the trials began. The defendants were tried in four groups. Clarence Norris and Charlie Weems were tried first, because they were the oldest. Next came Haywood Patterson, the one whose hand had been stepped on. The third trial involved a group of five defendants: Ozzie Powell, Willie Roberson, Andy Wright, Eugene Williams, and Olen Montgomery. The fourth and final trial was that of Roy Wright, the 12-year-old. Before each of the four juries, the key prosecution testimony was that of the alleged victims, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, and the local doctors, Bridges and Lynch. Both doctors testified to having found semen in the vaginas of the two Haywood Patterson The prosecutor did not ask for the death penalty—only life imprisonment. That act of mercy disappointed the jury, a majority of which held out for the death penalty. Winter 2002 5 women. The adviser, or “lawyer,” for the accused did not question the medical testimony, did not make much of an opening statement, and, incredibly, saw no purpose in giving a summation. Worse still, because the adviser did not have the opportunity to speak to his clients at length, he could not prepare them to testify. He called them to the stand nonetheless, so they could say whatever they wanted. As you might expect, some of the nine said, in effect, “Not me and not my two or three friends, but, yes, these other defendants, they are the ones who did it.” No single lawyer can represent multiple clients if the latter blame each other for the crime charged. It would constitute a gross conflict of interest. But these “technicalities” went unnoticed or were ignored. In short, the defense, insofar as it existed at all, was a disaster. These rapid-fire trials were over in three days. Most took five hours or less. The jury deliberations for most of the trials averaged about 30 minutes. The verdict for eight of the nine was “guilty of rape” and the penalty in each case was death. The exception was the trial of Roy Wright, the 12-year-old. Here the jury could not agree and the result was a hung jury. Why couldn’t the jury agree? Well, because Mr. Wright was only 12, the prosecutor did not ask for the death penalty—only life imprisonment. That act of mercy disappointed the jury, a majority of which held out for the death penalty. As a result, they could not render the required unanimous verdict. From the time of arrest to the time of the death sentences only two weeks had passed. Saviors The Scottsboro Boys did not die in the electric chair. Not then, and not later. Who saved them? In this tragedy there were heroes—individuals or groups whose skill or courage or commitment saved the lives of these young victims. In chronological order of appearance, the first of these saviors was the American Communist Party (ACP). The initial media response to the convictions was limited to a few brief stories in several newspapers. There was no national media presence at the trial. Soon after the convictions, the ACP became involved. They knew a good issue when they saw it. The convictions, the ACP argued, were a dramatic example of capitalistic repression of the poor. Obviously, their motive in helping the Scottsboro Boys was propaganda. But were their motives important? When you are powerless and facing death, when no one else is aiding your cause, you take what help you can get. The ACP had the means and the network to mobilize mass protests that brought the case national and international attention. Within days, demonstrations throughout the United States, as well as in Germany, Spain, and Moscow, raised a storm of protest. Moreover, the communists had a well-established legal defense team; the International Labor Defense and its chief lawyer, Joseph Brodsky, were experienced and dedicated. The Scottsboro Boys now had support and competent legal representation. The next savior to enter the picture was the United States Supreme Court. After the convictions were affirmed in the Alabama courts, they were appealed to the United States Supreme Court. In the landmark decision of Powell v. Alabama,5  the Court reversed the Scottsboro convictions. This decision appears in all the constitutional law and criminal procedure casebooks. Let me explain why. There was no question that the Justices regarded the legal representation of the Scottsboro Boys inadequate. It was never clear whether the TennesThe convictions, the American Communist Party argued, were a dramatic example of capitalistic repression of the poor. 6 Cornell Law Forum see lawyer was really representing the defendants. He seemed tentative, probably because of the mob atmosphere. He had no time to prepare. Counsel was never formerly appointed by the court. The unfairness was obvious. But the Supreme Court needed a legal basis on which to reverse. The specific Sixth Amendment right to counsel would do nicely except, as I’ve mentioned, the Sixth Amendment operated only against the federal government, not against the states. The 14th Amendment’s “due process” clause does apply to the states but what does “due process” entail? There was no precedent that said the right to counsel applies to the states through the operation of 14th Amendment due process—no precedent, that is, until Powell v. Alabama created it in 1932. This decision is a legal landmark because it extended and clarified the meaning of due process. It is a seminal right-to-counsel decision—seminal because it is the basis of the decisions that followed. In Powell, the Court said two things. First, it read the right to counsel into the due process clause. Therefore, this guarantee would now apply to all state trials. Second, it applied that principle to the Scottsboro trial and found that due process was lacking. That insufficiency saved the Scottsboro Boys from being executed—at least for now. To understand the long-term significance of this decision, we have to appreciate that the actual holding was a narrow one. What the Court said was that 14th Amendment due process requires the effective right to counsel in this case because in this case the defendants were all young, uneducated, and illiterate. A mob atmosphere surrounded the trial and this was a capital case. The Court left open a host of questions that would be answered later. Does the right to counsel apply to all capital cases—even if the defendants are mature and educated, and there are no mobs? Yes, said the Court in a later decision. Does the right to counsel apply to non-capital, serious felony cases? Yes, said the Court some years later. Does the right to counsel apply to all felonies, whether serious or not? Yes, said the Court in another decision. When in the trial process does the right to counsel attach—only at the time of trial? No—earlier; at least at the time of indictment, answered the Court. Why not even earlier than that, such as at the time of initial arraignment? Good point, said the Court, and it so held. Why not still earlier? The Court ultimately agreed, and held that the right to counsel attaches at the time of custodial interrogation. If the police arrest a suspect and the suspect asks for a lawyer, at that point all interrogation of the suspect must stop. But how will the suspect know he has this right to counsel? Ultimately, the Court held in Miranda v. Arizona6 that if the police take a suspect into custody, they must advise him that he has the right to a lawyer and that if he cannot afford one, a lawyer will be appointed for him. Thus, over the course of 35 years, in decision after decision, the Supreme Court expanded the right to counsel in state as well as federal trials. Where did all this begin? It began with Powell v. Alabama. This is not the end of the story. Now the nine Scottsboro defendants must return to the Alabama courts to be tried again. And back in Alabama, not much has changed. Who were the Scottsboro Boys? They were nine black unemployed youths who made a most unfortunate decision to hobo a train that left Chattanooga for Memphis and passed through Scottsboro and Huntsville, Ala., along the way. They were called “boys”because their agesranged from 13 (Roy Wright and Eugene Williams) to 19 (Charlie Weems). The authorities charged all nine of them with death penalty offenses for allegedly gang raping two hobo white women.A jury convicted the youths simply because of their race at a time when no jury composed of all white males in a deep Southern state would reject a white woman’s uncorroborated and unquestionably false testimony against a person of color no matter how unjust and absurd — even while the whole world watched. Olen Montgomery, age 18, was completely blind in one eye and nearly blind in the other. He could only get around by placing his hand on someone’s shoulder and being led from one place to another. The so-called rape occurred in a gondola car, and Olen Montgomery was riding on an oil tanker car at the end of the train and knew nothing about any rape occurring until he was arrested for it. Willie Robinson had untreated gonorrhea and syphilis. His private parts were covered with sores and swollen to the extent that he walked with a cane and was impotent. Sex for him would have been extremely painful and he would most assuredly have infected any partner (neither of the “victims” contracted venereal disease). Robinson had an IQ of 64 and a mental age of nine. He had not been in the gondola car at all on the day the alleged rape occurred. Fateful Day in 1931 On a cool March day in 1931, a slow-moving freight train left Chattanooga headed west toward Huntsville. Just as the train left Stevenson, Ala., two bleeding white hobos ran to the stationmaster. They complained that a “bunch of Negroes” had beaten them up and thrown them from the train without provocation. The truth was that the two transients had told all the black people in the gondola car to either jump off the train or find another car to ride in because they did not want to “ride with niggers.” The fight was short; it was two against seven. The stationmaster telephoned Sheriff M.L. Wann, and he in turn called a deputy to stop the train at Paint Rock station. His instructions to the deputy were to “capture every Negro on the train and bring them to Scottsboro,” which was the county seat of Jackson County. The Jackson County deputy did as he was told. There were nine black youths aboard, and to everyone’s surprise, also on board were two white females wearing men’s overalls and caps. In 1931, riding a train in Alabama without a ticket or the money to purchase one constituted the crime of vagrancy and customarily resulted in a fine of $30 or 30 days on the county work crew. To avoid the vagrancy B Y J O H N E D M O N D M AY S A N D R I C H A R D S . J A F F E History Corrected — The Scottsboro Boys Are Officially Innocent © Library of Congress,NAACP W W W . N A C D L . O R G T H E C H A M P I O N arrest, Ruby Bates claimed that she and her friend, Victoria Price, had been raped by the nine black youths. The deputy who stopped the train was there to investigate a simple misdemeanor assault. Upon hearing the rape allegation,the police took the two females to a doctor in Scottsboro and took the nine youths to the county jail. As word of the accusation spread, a mob formed outside the jail.TheAlabama National Guard was called out to protect the prisoners. In the Courts An all-white grand jury, which had met the week before, reconvened and indictments for rape, a capital crime at the time, were returned against all nine. The trial in Scottsboro was a travesty. The court appointed a local attorney who was experiencing senility, Milo Moody, along with an “advisor,” Stephen R. Roddy from Chattanooga. Roddy’s practice consisted primarily of writing title opinions. Ada Wright of Chattanooga, the mother of two of the boys, Andrew and Roy Wright, had paid him a small fee to assist their Alabama attorney. The grand jury returned the nine indictments on a Tuesday morning and Judge Alfred E. Hawkins set the trials for the following Monday. The court appointed counsel on the date set fortrial. On that day lawyer Roddy was reported to be drunk (“he couldn’t even walk straight”). 1 The court gave the two lawyers less than half an hour to confer with their nine clients in a capital case before starting the voir dire. The drunken Roddy agreed that all nine defendants could be tried at the same time even though Alabama law at that time permitted each co-defendant, on motion, the absolute right to a separate trial if he requested one.When questioned by the trial judge, Roddy said he wanted no severances. District Attorney H.C. Bailey told the court he wanted three trials — one for 13-year-old Charley Weems, one for Clarence Norris and Roy Wright, and one for the other six. The trials resulted in nine guilty verdicts. As to Roy Wright, who was only 13, the jury voted seven for death and five for life imprisonment even though the prosecution asked for life imprisonment for Wright. Thus, there was a mistrial as to Wright. The other eight transients were sentenced to die.These were the first death sentences for Judge Hawkins as a jurist, and he cried as he pronounced them. The Alabama Appellate Court affirmed the convictions and death sentences. It was a different story in the U.S. Supreme Court. In the landmark case of Powell v. Alabama, 2 the Supreme Court held it to be ineffective assistance of counsel and a denial of due process for a trial court to put a capital defendant on trial with counsel who had only 30 minutes to interview his client and prepare before striking a jury. Later in a subsequent appeal to the Supreme Court in Norris v. Alabama, 3 the Court deemed it a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to have a “gentlemen’s agreement” among the Jury Commissioners of Alabama that no blacks be considered for grand jury or petit jury service. These commissioners in each county compiled the jury rolls from which potential jurors were chosen and the Jackson County Grand Jury returning the nine indictments was all white. Neither Jackson County nor any other Alabama county had ever had a black grand or petit juror. After the Court decided Powell v. Alabama, the youths filed a motion for change of venue. Judge Hawkins determined that the case should be moved to the town of Decatur in Morgan County as opposed to Birmingham, where the defendants wanted it to go. The case was assigned to Judge James Edwin Horton. The year was 1933, and Judge Horton was nearing the end of his second term as circuit judge. He was the son and grandson of Confederate veterans.A product of the Old South, he nonetheless possessed a strong sense of justice and a firm belief that all persons must be equal before the law. Judge Horton’s life ambition was to be an appellate justice. When the case was assigned to Horton, Gov. Bibb Graves sent an assistant to see him with a promise that if he handled the Scottsboro cases “with the least embarrassment to the state of Alabama,” the governor would appoint him to a place on the Supreme Courtsoon to be vacated by a justice who had a serious heart condition. Famed New York lawyer Sam Leibowitz and Joseph Brodsky represented the Scottsboro Boys in Decatur. The evidence at trial overwhelmingly proved that they were innocent. Ruby Bates recanted her previous testimony in Scottsboro. Bates testified that she was never raped and that she and Victoria Price made up the whole story to keep from being arrested for vagrancy. The gondola car where the supposed rape occurred had been used to haul crushed gravel. While Victoria Price testified she was forced down, held down and raped, there was not a scratch on her from the sharp edges of the gravel remaining in the gondola. Lester Carter, one of the hobos thrown from the train,testified that he had sex with Ruby Bates the night before in the hobo jungle in Chattanooga. He further testified that several feet away, Victoria Price had sex with Price’s boyfriend, Jack Tiller. The semen found inside Victoria Price was small in quantity and the sperm were dead. A physician in Scottsboro examined Victoria and Ruth immediately after the rape accusation. The medical testimony supported the defense, not the prosecution, in that the doctors found nothing consistent with forcible intercourse and certainly not by nine different people. In fact, Victoria Price testified that she was never in a hobo jungle in Chattanooga but stayed at a ladies’ boarding house owned by Callie Brochie. Sam Leibowitz proved that no such person lived inChattanooga and that therewas no such boarding house there. Leibowitz established that Callie Brochie was a fictional character who owned a boarding house in a Saturday Evening Post series. In his closing argument, Morgan County Solicitor Wade Wright repeatedly insulted Sam Leibowitz for his Jewish faith. Because Sam Leibowitz bought Lester Carter a suit, tie and shoes to wear to court, the solicitor made the following argument in his closing: Lester Carter sold his Alabama birthright for a suitcase full of New York Jew ready mades. 4 Judge Horton never realized his dream of an appellate judgeship. Instead, he chose conscience and justice over politics and ambition. In a rare and singular act of courage, after the jury convicted Haywood Patterson and sentenced him to die, Judge Horton granted Sam Leibowitz’s motion for a new trial, for Patterson based on the “verdict of the jury being against the great weight of the evidence.” His ruling ended his political career forever and he was overwhelmingly defeated for re-election in 1934. After Judge Horton granted the motion for new trial, the case went to Judge William Callahan of the same circuit. Judge Callahan proved to be the antithesis of Judge Horton by resorting to heavy-handed tactics and braised rulings. In the new trial of Haywood Patterson, due to a number of complications the tenacious legal giant Sam Leibowitz was forced to relegate his role as lead attorney to that of an advisor to newly appointed Huntsville attorney Clarence Watts. Watts did his best, but just as in the 1950s classic To Kill a Mockingbird, powerful societal codes trumped any semblance of justice. In his closing argument he said these words: W W W . N A C D L . O R G M A R C H 2 0 1 4 T H E S C O T T S B O R O B O Y S 29 Gentlemen of the jury, the hardest thing in life is to do what you know is right when everyone around you is urging you to do what you know is wrong. 5 Guilty verdicts and death penalties followed for the defendants. The Aftermath No one was executed. Haywood Patterson, ultimately convicted in four trials,went to prison.In 1948 he escaped and hoboed a train to Detroit. The governor of Michigan refused his extradition back to Alabama. He died in 1950 in Michigan while serving a sentence for manslaughter. After six and one-half years of confinement, the state moved to dismiss the charges against the blind Olen Montgomery, the crippled William Robinson, Roy Wright, and Eugene Williams. The charges were not dismissed upon insufficient evidence, but solely on the basis of the defendants having served a sufficient amount of time behind bars. Charlie Weems made parole in 1943. He had contracted tuberculosis and would soon die in Atlanta, Ga. The state paroled Andy Wright in 1943. He also had tuberculosis and would be returned to Kilby Prison several more times for minor felonies (thefts and assaults). Roy Wright made parole and died by his own hand in 1959 after killing his wife. Ozie Powell had stabbed a Morgan County deputy while awaiting a new trial. The rape charges against him were dismissed in return for his plea to a 20-year sentence for assault from Judge Callahan. He made parole in 1944. Clarence Norris remained under a death sentence that was commuted by Gov. Graves. Paroled in 1943, he returned to prison on a parole violation and in 1946 was paroled again. In 1974 he learned that he was wanted in Alabama for a parole violation. He was living in Queens. The governor at the time, George Wallace, signed a pardon for Clarence Norris in 1975. When he died in 1989, Norris was the last living “Scottsboro Boy.” It is not often one can actually witness history corrected. Yet this is precisely what happened onApril 19, 2013, in Scottsboro, Ala.,when Gov.Robert Bentley signed two pieces of legislation into law. The Alabama Legislature passed a resolution recommending a posthumous pardon for all the defendants against whom charges were not dismissed. Legislators also passed a resolution declaring all nine Scottsboro Boys to be innocent. Even the pardon given Clarence Norris by Gov. Wallace did not declare him innocent. The two acts unanimously passed both houses of the Alabama Legislature, all Republicans and all Democrats voting in the affirmative. At the side of Gov. Bentley, with tears in his eyes, stood Clarence Norris Jr., witnessing the complete exoneration of his father. Seven months later, on November 21, 2013, the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles granted posthumous pardons to Charles Weems, Andy Wright, and Haywood Patterson. They were the final three defendants to have convictions from the case on their records. 6 So much time has passed since the early 1930s, and all the Scottsboro Boys are dead. The pardons and exonerations never helped them while they were alive, yet it is nevertoo late to do the right thing. Equal justice before the law cannot be a dream.Advocates involved in the criminal justice system must make it a reality. It is nevertoo late to right awrong— especially one in the name of justice. History has been corrected. The Scottsboro Boys are all, each and every one, innocent. The authors are honored to have participated in this long overdue fight for justice. Notes The Scottsboro Boys were nine black defendants in a 1931 rape case initiated in Scottsboro, Alabama. The case was heard by the United States Supreme Court twice and the decisions established the principles that criminal defendants are entitled to effective assistance of counsel [1] and that people may not be de facto excluded from juries because of their race. [2] Nine young black defendants were accused of raping two fellow homeless white women on a freight train, and eight were quickly convicted in a mob atmosphere. The juries were entirely white, and the defense attorneys had little experience in criminal law and no time to prepare their cases. As each of the nine cases successively went to the jury, the next trial was immediately begun. All but one of the defendants was found guilty, and these eight were sentenced to death on rape charges. These eight, however, later had their death sentences lifted by the Supreme Court, serving instead between six and nineteen years in prison. The nine black youths, Olen Montgomery (age 17), Clarence Norris (age 19), Haywood Patterson (age 18), Ozie Powell (age 16), Willie Roberson (age 17), Charlie Weems (age 19), Eugene Williams (age 13), and brothers Andy (age 19) and Roy Wright (age 12) were accused of the rapes of Ruby Bates and Victoria Price on March 25, 1931, on the Southern Railroad line from Chattanooga to Memphis. [4][5] Several people were "hoboing" on the freight train including the nine black youths, two white women, and several white youths. Four of the blacks, Patterson, Williams, and the Wright brothers had hoped to find work hauling logs on the Missouri River. The other black youths on the train were from Georgia and were unacquainted with the other four. The white hobos on the train were also in search of work and included several boys or men and Victoria Price and Ruby Bates. The women were Huntsville, Alabama residents who had gone to Chattanooga, Tennessee to find work in cotton mills. Failing to obtain those jobs, they hopped this freight train back to Huntsville, completely without money. [6] A fight began between the white youths and the black youths, allegedly when a white youth stepped on Patterson's hand as he hung on to the side of a tank car. The off-and-on fight involved name-calling, stone throwing and fisticuffs. Most of the white youths were forced off the slow moving train near Stevenson, Alabama. Several of them told the Stevenson stationmaster about the fight and said they wanted to press charges. [7] The stationmaster called Jackson County Sheriff Matt L. Wann to report the incident. The Sheriff called Deputy Charlie Latham, who lived near the next scheduled stop for the train, Paint Rock, Alabama and told him to deputize as many citizens as he needed to "capture every negro on the train. I am giving you authority to deputize every man you can find." [8] A posse of some fifty white men armed with shotguns, rifles and pistols prepared for their arrival. Even before the slow moving train stopped about 2 p.m., the posse had searched all forty-eight cars. Within ten minutes they had arrested all nine of the "raggedly dressed" black youths at gun point. From the time of their arrest until the first trial twelve days later, none of the boys were permitted to call or speak to anyone, not even each other. [8] The initial arrest was for the assault and attempted murder of the white youths ejected from the train at Stevenson. [9] To Kill a Mockingbird Lesson Plan for Laws of Life Essay Writing 5.1T Scottsboro Notes The School for Ethical Education www.ethicsed.org 2 Crowd outside the courthouse. The posse was surprised to find Ruby Bates and Victoria Price on the train, dressed in men's overalls covering dresses. When discovered, they scrambled out of the open gondola car used to haul gravel where they had been riding. They ran in the direction of the engine, where they ran into other members of the posse coming the other way. They turned and started to run back in the other direction where other members of the posse stopped them. Twenty minutes after the train left Paint Rock, its station agent W. H. Hill asked the women whether any of the "negroes" had bothered them. At that point, Ruby Bates told Hill that they had been raped by them. In the Jim Crow South, a black male was said to risk lynching by just looking at a white woman. [13] Word quickly spread and a lynch mob gathered in front of the jail in Scottsboro and prepared to storm the jail. The crowd of farmers with many of their wives and children looking on grew into the hundreds. [note 2] The newly elected Jackson County Sheriff, Matt L. Wann barricaded the door to the jail. At 8:30 that evening, he decided to move the accused youths to a jail in another community, but could not, because the wires to the headlights on the squad cars had been cut. Mayor James David Snodgrass begged the crowd to leave. However, they refused and demanded that the youths be surrendered to them for immediate lynching. [14] At the request of Sheriff Wann, Alabama Governor Benjamin M. Miller, called in the National Guard to protect the jail. [15] Authorities pleaded against mob violence by promising speedy trials and asking "the Judge to send them to the chair". [16] The editor of the local Scottsboro Progressive Age was very self congratulatory that Scottsboro had not lynched these defendants outright. The editor wrote, "If ever there was an excuse for taking the law into their own hands, surely this was one. Nevertheless, the People of Jackson County have saved the good name of the county and state by remaining cool and allowing the law to take its course." [16] [without benefit of any research or preparation time by lawyers who were not experience or familiar with Alabama trial law, individual trials moved forward quickly with large crowds in the streets outside the courthouse.] When the guilty verdicts were announced, the courtroom erupted in cheers and some of the celebrating crowd poured out into the street in front of the courthouse. Judge Hawkins' heavy gavel pounding did not restore order in the courtroom. He ended up ordering the national guardsmen to restore order, who ended up throwing eight of the shouting spectators out of the courthouse. When word of the guilty verdicts reached the crowd outside, another roar of celebration went up. The band, supplied for the occasion by the Ford Motor Company for a show of its cars outside, struck up Hail, Hail the Gang's All Here and There'll be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight. [39][40] The eight convicted defendants were assembled together on April 9, 1931 to be sentenced by the Court to death by electrocution, the first time Judge Hawkins had pronounced the death sentence in his five years on the bench. The Associated Press reported that the defendants were "calm" and "stoic", as Judge Hawkins handed down the death sentences one after another. [53] Judge Hawkins fixed their executions for July 10, 1931, which was the earliest date Alabama law allowed. The defendants were immediately sent to death row in Kilby Prison in Montgomery, Alabama. Their cells were next to the execution chamber. While appeals were filed for them, the Alabama Supreme Court issued indefinite stays of executions for them only seventy-two hours before they were scheduled to die. During their wait on death row, another prisoner, Will Stokes, was executed on July 10, 1931, which they could hear. They later recalled that Stokes had "died hard". [54] To Kill a Mockingbird Lesson Plan for Laws of Life Essay Writing 5.1T Scottsboro Notes The School for Ethical Education www.ethicsed.org 3 Many in the North were outraged by the decision of the Alabama Supreme Court and many in the South were outraged by the outrage, since, to their way of looking at it, the whole fuss was caused by "outside agitators." They had, after all, given these defendants a trial, rather than just lynching them the first night. Many in the South asked, "What more did those Communist trouble makers want?" [76] The ILD retained prominent constitutional attorney Walter Pollak[77] to appeal the case to the United States Supreme Court which appeal, the Supreme Court agreed to hear. [Twice the US Supreme Court heard and overturned convictions from the Alabama Courts.] [After multiple re-trails which included two hearings before the US Supreme Court, all the Scottsboro Boys were ultimately released (or escaped) from prison. Individual outcomes included] 1-Haywood Patterson: On January 23, 1936, in this retrial, Haywood Patterson was again convicted of rape but was sentenced to 75 years in prison rather than the death penalty—the first time a black man had been sentenced to anything other than death in the rape of a white woman in Alabama. There was a Methodist minister on the jury who persuaded the others to agree to this sentence as a "compromise." Victoria Price expressed her extreme disappointment that Patterson escaped the death sentence this time, pronouncing bitterly that it was extremely unfair that he would get off with only 75 years. Haywood Patterson escaped in 1948 and fled to Detroit, Michigan. 2. On July 15,1937, Clarence Norris was again convicted of rape and sexual assault and sentenced to death. Governor of Alabama Bibb Graves later reduced Clarence Norris' death sentence to life in prison. He was paroled in 1946. In 1979 his autobiography The Last of the Scottsboro Boys was published in which he described his ordeal. The last living Scottsboro Boy wanted to clear his name. Norris died January 23, 1989 when at 76. 3. On July 22, 1937, Andrew Wright was again convicted of rape and sentenced to 99 years. He was paroled, but returned to prison after violating his parole. He was finally released for good in 1950. 4. On July 24, 1937, Charlie Weems was convicted of rape and sentenced to 105 years in prison. He was paroled in 1943, having served 12 years in some of the worst prisons in the nation. 5. Ozie Powell pleaded guilty to assaulting a Deputy Sheriff named Edgar Blaylock with intent to murder him during an escape attempt and was sentenced to 20 years. Judge Callahan did not give him any credit for the six years he had already served on the rape charge. However, the state did drop the rape charges against him as part of this plea bargain. The incident happened on January 24, 1936. Powell was finally released for good in 1946. 6.On July 24, 1937, Roy Wright had all charges against him dropped; the state said that they felt that given his age, and time served, he should now be released. He joined the United States Army. When he got out of the Army, he married and joined the Merchant Marine. After Wright came back from a lengthy time at sea in 1959, he came to believe that his wife had been unfaithful to him during his absence. As a result, he shot his wife to death and then took his own life. 7.On July 24, 1937, Eugene Williams had all charges against him dropped, for the same reasons given for Wright. 8.On July 24, 1937, Olen Montgomery had all charges against him dropped, as the state announced that after consideration, it now believed him to be not guilty. 9.On July 24, 1937, Willie Roberson had all charges against him dropped, for the same reasons given for Montgomery. While it has sometimes been suggested that the case inspired Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize winning To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee denied this, claiming it was a far less sensational case that moved her to write the One of America‘s most infamous legal episodes began on March 25, 1931. Nine black youths from Georgia and Tennessee were accused of raping two white women on a freight train in northern Alabama. In hastily arranged trials, eight of them received death sentences. Their appeals, retrials, and subsequent legal proceedings riveted the attention of the nation and the world and ultimately produced two Supreme Court rulings in their favor and nearly twenty years of legal wrangling. Known to history as Scottsboro, this episode teaches several lessons relevant to students of American constitutional law and history. The Scottsboro Cases illuminate why the modern revolution in American criminal procedure began mainly with cases involving black criminal defendants from the South. The episode also reveals how Supreme Court interventions in southern race cases tended to incite political backlashes that undermined implementation of the Court‘s decisions—thus making Scottsboro an important forerunner of Brown v. Board of Education. 1  The competition between the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the International Labor Defense (ILD) for the right to represent the Scottsboro defendants on appeal illustrates competing perspectives on the use of law as a method of social reform—a debate that reverberates to the * Kirkland & Ellis Professor, Harvard Law School. This Article was published in conjunction with my delivery of the Boden Lecture at Marquette Law School in September 2009. I am grateful to Dean Joseph Kearney for extending that invitation. Thanks to Bill Stuntz for comments on an earlier draft and to Carrie DeCell, Kelsey Israel-Trummel, Jessica King, Gabe Mendel, Asieh Narriman, Sheri Shepherd, and Sarah Teich for research assistance. The research for this Article was greatly facilitated by the remarkable reference librarians at the University of Virginia School of Law, where I had the privilege to serve as a faculty member for over twenty years; special thanks are due to Cathy Palombi. Anyone working on Scottsboro must acknowledge the extraordinary contributions to our understanding of that episode made by Dan Carter and James Goodman. An earlier, abbreviated version of this Article was published as Michael J. Klarman, Powell v. Alabama: The Supreme Court Confronts ―Legal Lynchings,‖ in CRIMINAL PROCEDURE STORIES: AN IN-DEPTH LOOK AT LEADING CRIMINAL PROCEDURE CASES 1–44 (Carol S. Steiker ed., 2005). My footnoting practices in this Article combine those used by historians and those of law professors. In general, I have combined the sources relevant to a particular paragraph in a single footnote at the end of that paragraph. However, for quotations and for other sentences containing specific details, I have adhered to conventional law review practices. 1. 347 U.S. 483, 495–96 (1954); see MICHAEL J. KLARMAN, FROM JIM CROW TO CIVIL RIGHTS: THE SUPREME COURT AND THE STRUGGLE FOR RACIAL EQUALITY 385–442 (2004). 380 MARQUETTE LAW REVIEW [93:379 present day.2  The limited impact of the Supreme Court rulings in Scottsboro on the southern criminal justice system sheds light on another great debate in American constitutional law and theory: the capacity of the Supreme Court to compel social change.3  Finally, the Scottsboro litigation illustrates not only some of the indirect benefits of litigation as a method of organizing social protest,4 but also the intangible costs generated by Court victories that fail to appreciably change oppressive social practices.5 II. THE STORY OF SCOTTSBORO A. A Fateful Train Ride The freight train left Chattanooga for Memphis at 10:20 a.m. on March 25, 1931. Thirty minutes after it had pulled out of Stevenson, Alabama, the stationmaster there saw a group of white hoboes walking along the train tracks back toward the station. They told him that several black youths had thrown them off the train after a fight. The stationmaster telephoned ahead to the next stop, Scottsboro, but the train had already passed through. It was finally stopped at Paint Rock, where a sheriff‘s posse discovered nine black youngsters and, to everyone‘s surprise, two young white women dressed in men‘s overalls.6 The nine blacks, known to history as the Scottsboro boys, ranged in age from thirteen to twenty. Five of them were from Georgia, though they claimed not to know one another. The other four did know one another; they were from Chattanooga, Tennessee. All of the nine were vagrants, and most of them were illiterate. Twenty minutes after the train had been stopped, one of the women, Ruby 2. See, e.g., Thomas M. Keck, Beyond Backlash: Assessing the Impact of Judicial Decisions on LGBT Rights, 43 LAW & SOC‘Y REV. 151 (2009); Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Elites, Social Movements, and the Law: The Case of Affirmative Action, 105 COLUM. L. REV. 1436 (2005); William N. Eskridge, Jr., Some Effects of Identity-Based Social Movements on Constitutional Law in the Twentieth Century, 100 MICH. L. REV. 2062 (2002); Reva B. Siegel, Text in Contest: Gender and the Constitution from a Social Movement Perspective, 150 U. PA. L. REV. 297 (2001). 3. See, e.g., JOEL F. HANDLER, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND THE LEGAL SYSTEM: A THEORY OF LAW REFORM AND SOCIAL CHANGE 192–209 (1978); GERALD N. ROSENBERG, THE HOLLOW HOPE: CAN COURTS BRING ABOUT SOCIAL CHANGE? (1st ed. 1991); Bradley C. Canon, The Supreme Court and Policy Reform: The Hollow Hope Revisited, in LEVERAGING THE LAW: USING THE COURTS TO ACHIEVE SOCIAL CHANGE 215 (David A. Schultz ed., 1998); JEFFREY A. SEGAL & HAROLD J. SPAETH, THE SUPREME COURT AND THE ATTITUDINAL MODEL 333–55 (1993); STEPHEN L. WASBY, THE IMPACT OF THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT: SOME PERSPECTIVES (1970). 4. HANDLER, SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND THE LEGAL SYSTEM, supra note 3, at 214–22 (discussing indirect benefits from law reform activity); KLARMAN, FROM JIM CROW TO CIVIL RIGHTS, supra note 1, at 93–95, 162–67, 284–86, 365–69, 463–68; MICHAEL W. MCCANN, RIGHTS AT WORK: PAY EQUITY REFORM AND THE POLITICS OF LEGAL MOBILIZATION 10, 56–57, 279 (1994) (discussing indirect benefits of reform litigation activity). 5. KLARMAN, FROM JIM CROW TO CIVIL RIGHTS, supra note 1, at 95–96, 282–84. 6. DAN T. CARTER, SCOTTSBORO: A TRAGEDY OF THE AMERICAN SOUTH 3–5 (rev. ed. 1979); JAMES GOODMAN, STORIES OF SCOTTSBORO 3–4 (1994). 2009] SCOTTSBORO 381 Bates, called over a posse member and told him that she and her companion, Victoria Price, had been gang-raped by the blacks. The boys were immediately arrested and taken to the Scottsboro jail. As the sheriff sent the women to two local doctors for medical examinations, news of the alleged attacks spread. By day‘s end, a crowd of several hundred people had gathered outside of the jail, demanding that the ―niggers‖ be turned over for lynching. 7 Sheriff M.L. Wann pleaded with the mob to allow the law to take its course and threatened to shoot anyone who rushed the jail. He also telephoned the governor for assistance, and by 11:00 p.m., twenty-five armed guardsmen were on their way to Scottsboro. To ensure the boys‘ safety, they were moved to a sturdier jail in nearby Etowah. The local circuit judge, Alfred E. Hawkins, convened a special session of the grand jury to indict them; local citizens complained of the five-day delay. One local newspaper remarked, ―It is best for the county that these things be disposed of in a speedy manner as it gives no excuse for people taking the law into their own hands.‖8 A decade or two earlier, black men charged with raping white women under similar circumstances might well have been executed without trial. Lynchings in the South peaked in the late 1880s and early 1890s, when well over a hundred were reported annually and in some years over two hundred. Most lynchings occurred in response to allegations of crime—usually murder or rape—though occasionally the alleged ―offense‖ was as minor as breach of racial etiquette or general uppityness. Prior to World War I, lynchings typically enjoyed the support of local communities; efforts to prosecute even known lynchers were rare, and convictions were virtually nonexistent.9 By 1930, however, the number of reported lynchings had declined dramatically—from an average of 187.5 per year in the 1890s to 16.8 in the later years of the 1920s.10  This decline was attributable to many factors, including the possibility of federal anti-lynching legislation, the diminishing insularity of the South, more professional law enforcement, and better 7. CARTER, SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 6–8 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). 8. Id. at 6–9, 16–17 n.11 (quoting the PROGRESSIVE AGE (Scottsboro, Ala.), Apr. 2, 1931) (internal quotation marks omitted); GOODMAN, STORIES OF SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 21–22. 9. CARTER, SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 105; KLARMAN, FROM JIM CROW TO CIVIL RIGHTS, supra note 1, at 118–19; see generally W. FITZHUGH BRUNDAGE, LYNCHING IN THE NEW SOUTH: GEORGIA AND VIRGINIA, 1880–1930 (1993); GRACE ELIZABETH HALE, MAKING WHITENESS: THE CULTURE OF SEGREGATION IN THE SOUTH, 1890–1940, at 199–227 (1998); LEON F. LITWACK, TROUBLE IN MIND: BLACK SOUTHERNERS IN THE AGE OF JIM CROW 280–325 (1998); NEIL R. MCMILLEN, DARK JOURNEY: BLACK MISSISSIPPIANS IN THE AGE OF JIM CROW 224–56 (1989); ARTHUR F. RAPER, THE TRAGEDY OF LYNCHING (1933); UNDER SENTENCE OF DEATH: LYNCHING IN THE SOUTH (W. Fitzhugh Brundage ed., 1997) (discussing lynching in relation to racial violence, its regional and cultural contexts, and its legacy). 10. RAPER, TRAGEDY OF LYNCHING, supra note 9, at 25, 46–47. 382 MARQUETTE LAW REVIEW [93:379 education.11  But the decline in lynchings probably also depended on their replacement with speedy trials that reliably produced guilty verdicts, death sentences, and rapid executions.12  Some jurisdictions actually enacted laws designed to prevent lynchings by providing for special terms of court to convene within days of alleged rapes and other incendiary crimes.13  In many instances, law enforcement officers explicitly promised would-be lynch mobs that black defendants would be quickly tried and executed if the mob desisted, and prosecutors appealed to juries to convict in order to reward mobs for good behavior and thus encourage similar restraint in the future.14 In such cases, guilt or innocence usually mattered little. As one white southerner candidly remarked in 1933, ―If a white woman is prepared to swear that a Negro either raped or attempted to rape her, we see to it that the Negro is executed.‖15  Prevailing racial norms did not permit white jurors to believe a black man‘s word over that of a white woman; prevailing gender norms did not allow defense counsel to closely interrogate a white woman about allegations involving sex. As one contemporary southern newspaper observed, the honor of a white woman was more important than the life of a black man.16  And because most southern white men believed that black males secretly lusted after ―their‖ women, they generally found such rape allegations credible. Congressman George Huddleston of Birmingham, whom the NAACP initially approached to represent the Scottsboro boys on appeal, repulsed the overtures, observing that they had been ―found riding on the same freight car with two white women, and that‘s enough for me!‖17 Scottsboro whites told an investigator from the American Civil Liberties 11. See, e.g., GUNNAR MYRDAL, AN AMERICAN DILEMMA: THE NEGRO PROBLEM AND MODERN DEMOCRACY 565 (1944); GEORGE BROWN TINDALL, THE EMERGENCE OF THE NEW SOUTH 1913–1945, at 174, 554 (1967); Todd E. Lewis, Mob Justice in the ―American Congo‖: ―Judge Lynch‖ in Arkansas During the Decade After World War I, 52 ARK. HIST. Q. 156, 179–84 (1993). 12. On these ―legal lynchings,‖ see MCMILLEN, DARK JOURNEY, supra note 9, at 206–17; George C. Wright, By the Book: The Legal Executions of Kentucky Blacks, in UNDER SENTENCE OF DEATH, supra note 9, at 250–70. 13. See, e.g., Bettis v. State, 261 S.W. 46, 47 (Ark. 1924); CHARLES S. MANGUM, JR., THE LEGAL STATUS OF THE NEGRO 298 (1940); LAWRENCE D. RICE, THE NEGRO IN TEXAS 1874–1900, at 253 (1971). 14. See, e.g., RICHARD C. CORTNER, A ―SCOTTSBORO‖ CASE IN MISSISSIPPI: THE SUPREME COURT AND BROWN V. MISSISSIPPI 3–4, 8 (1986); Anne S. Emanuel, Lynching and the Law in Georgia Circa 1931: A Chapter in the Legal Career of Judge Elbert Tuttle, 5 WM. & MARY BILL RTS. J. 215, 228 (1996). 15. John Gould Fletcher, Letter to the Editor, Is This the Voice of the South?, 137 NATION 734, 734 (1933). 16. CARTER, SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 134. 17. Excerpt from a Confidential Report on the Scottsboro Cases (May 7, 1931), microformed on Papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, pt. 6, reel 2, frames 893–94 (August Meier ed., Univ. Publ‘ns of Am. 1982) [hereinafter NAACP Papers]. 2009] SCOTTSBORO 383 Union (ACLU) that, ―We white people just couldn‘t afford to let these niggers off because of the effect it would have on other niggers.‖18 The Scottsboro defendants received precisely the sort of ―justice‖ that often prevailed in trials that substituted for lynchings. Both local newspapers treated the defendants as obviously guilty even before the trial. The hometown newspaper of the alleged victims, the Huntsville Daily Times, ―described the rapes as the most atrocious ever recorded in this part of the country, a wholesale debauching of society.‖19  Judge Hawkins tried to assign all seven members of the Scottsboro bar to represent the defendants, but all but one of them declined. That one was Milo Moody, nearly seventy years old and later described by one investigator as ―a doddering, extremely unreliable, senile individual who is losing whatever ability he once had.‖20 The trials began on April 6, just twelve days after the train incident. A crowd estimated at five to ten thousand gathered outside the courthouse, which was protected by national guardsmen wielding machine guns. Hawkins appointed as trial counsel a Tennessee lawyer, Stephen R. Roddy, who had been sent to Scottsboro by the defendants‘ families to look after their interests. Roddy was an alcoholic, and one observer reported that ―he could scarcely walk straight‖ that morning.21  When Roddy objected to his appointment on the grounds that he was unprepared and unfamiliar with Alabama law, Hawkins appointed Moody, the local septuagenarian, to assist him. Roddy was permitted less than half an hour with his clients before the trial began. Defense counsel moved for a change of venue based on the inflammatory newspaper coverage and the attempted lynching of the defendants. But Sheriff Wann now denied that the defendants had been threatened, and Judge Hawkins denied the motion.22 The state sought the death penalty against eight of the nine defendants— all but the one who was identified as being only thirteen years old. The nine were tried in four groups, beginning with Clarence Norris and Charley Weems. Victoria Price was the main prosecution witness, and she testified that the black youths had thrown the white boys off the train and then gangraped her and Bates. According to one secondhand account, Price testified 18. Hollace Ransdell, Report on the Scottsboro Case (May 27, 1931) [hereinafter Ransdell Report], microformed on NAACP Papers, supra note 17, at pt. 6, reel 3, frame 175. 19. CARTER, SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 20 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). 20. Memorandum from Mrs. Hollace Ransdall [sic] on Visit to National Office on May 18, 1931 (May 19, 1931), microformed on NAACP Papers, supra note 17, at pt. 6, reel 3, frame 27; CARTER, SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 17–18; GOODMAN, STORIES OF SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 26. 21. CARTER, SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 21–22 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). 22. Id. at 19–24. 384 MARQUETTE LAW REVIEW [93:379 ―with such gusto, snap and wise-cracks, that the courtroom was often in a roar of laughter.‖23 Judge Hawkins blocked defense counsel‘s efforts to elicit admissions that the women were prostitutes and that they had had sexual intercourse with their boyfriends the night before the train incident, which could have explained the semen found in their vaginas during medical examinations. Testimony provided by the examining doctors raised serious doubts as to whether the girls had been raped: They were not hysterical when examined, nor had they incurred any serious physical injuries. Moreover, Price had so little semen in her vagina that a sequential rape by six men, as she alleged, was highly improbable. Finally, the sperm found in the women was non-motile, which virtually ruled out the possibility of intercourse within the preceding few hours. In their testimony, the two women also provided inconsistent accounts of various details of the incident, such as whether they had spoken with the white boys on the train and how long the interracial fracas had lasted. One man present when the train was stopped testified that he had not heard Price make any rape allegations.24 However, the admission by Norris on cross-examination that the women had been raped by all of the other eight defendants, though not by him, severely undercut his defense. (It later came out that Sheriff Wann had warned Norris that he would be killed if he did not admit that the girls had been raped.) Defense counsel prodded the illiterate and confused Norris to change his story, but he held firm. The defense called no witnesses and made no closing argument.25 While the jury deliberated on the fate of Norris and Weems, the trial of Haywood Patterson began. When the first jury returned to the courtroom to announce guilty verdicts and death sentences, crowds in and out of the courthouse erupted with delight. According to defense lawyer Roddy, ―[i]nstantly, a wild and thunderous roar went up from the audience and was heard by those in the Court House yard where thousands took up the demonstration and carried it on for fifteen or twenty minutes.‖26  Even though Patterson‘s jury heard this commotion, Judge Hawkins refused to declare a mistrial.27 The prosecution‘s case grew stronger with each trial, as previously 23. Ransdell Report, supra note 18, at frame 181; see also CARTER, SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 24–26. 24. CARTER, SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 26–30. 25. Id. at 33–35. 26. Letter from Stephen R. Roddy, Attorney, to the Friends and Relatives of the Nine Negro Boys Charged with Rape, in Jackson County, Alabama (Apr. 11, 1931), microformed on NAACP Papers, supra note 17, at pt. 6, reel 2, frame 627. 27. CARTER, SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 35–38. 2009] SCOTTSBORO 385 unhelpful witnesses were dropped and the alleged victims improved their stories with each recounting. Within a five-minute span on the witness stand, Patterson contradicted himself as to whether he had seen the girls being raped or indeed had seen them on the train at all. Several of the other defendants also testified inconsistently. After less than twenty-five minutes of deliberation, the jury convicted Patterson and sentenced him to death.28 Five of the defendants were prosecuted together in a third trial. The state‘s case against them was even weaker because these defendants did not incriminate each other on cross-examination, the women were less certain in identifying them as the rapists, and one of the defendants was nearly blind while another had such a severe case of venereal disease that raping a woman would have been very difficult. The jury nonetheless returned five more death sentences. Judge Hawkins declared a mistrial in the case of the last defendant, Roy Wright, when the jury could not agree on whether to sentence the thirteen-year-old to life imprisonment or to death—a sentence the prosecution had not even sought. None of the four trials lasted more than a few hours.29 B. Representation on Appeal The Communist Party quickly realized the potential for propaganda and fund-raising afforded by the Scottsboro episode, which it saw as the Sacco and Vanzetti case of the 1930s. Communists denounced the trials as ―legal lynchings‖ and assailed the ―parasite landlords and capitalist classes of the South.‖30  Less radical voices also protested this ―barbarous penalty‖ imposed on eight black youngsters.31  By contrast, the NAACP, which was generally reluctant to intervene in criminal cases unless reasonably certain that the defendants were innocent, was slow to act. The NAACP‘s hesitation enabled the ILD, the legal arm of the Communist Party, to secure the defendants‘ consent to its representing them.32 Stung by criticism from supporters for its dilatory response and discovering that ―public interest is so deep that we cannot afford not to be in the case,‖ NAACP leaders aggressively challenged the ILD for control of the boys‘ appeals.33  The NAACP convinced some black leaders in Chattanooga, 28. Id. at 38–43; GOODMAN, STORIES OF SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 14–15. 29. CARTER, SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 42–48. 30. Id. at 49 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). 31. Id. at 50 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). 32. Id. at 49–60; GOODMAN, STORIES OF SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 7–8, 25–29. 33. Letter from Walter White, Secretary, NAACP, to Bob & Herbert (May 3, 1931), microformed on NAACP Papers, supra note 17, at pt. 6, reel 2, frame 829; see also Letter from Roy Wilkins, Assistant Secretary, NAACP, to Walter White, Secretary, NAACP (May 7, 1931), microformed on id., frame 889 (noting that while the NAACP had been silent on the Scottsboro case, 386 MARQUETTE LAW REVIEW [93:379 which was home to several of the defendants, that communist involvement would be a millstone around the boys‘ necks, and the defendants were persuaded to retract their consent to ILD representation. The ILD responded by publicly attacking the NAACP as ―[b]ourgeois [r]eformists‖ and ―secret allies of the lynchers‖ who would help ―lead the boys to the electric chair.‖34 The communists declared that the boys could be saved only by mass protest, not by appeals to the ruling class. They ridiculed the NAACP for its willingness to ―kiss the rope that hangs their brothers, if only the rope is blessed by a ruling class judge,‖ and they accused the association generally of ignoring the interests of the black masses.35 In response, the NAACP accused the communists of using the case for their own selfish advantage and warned that their incendiary rhetoric would harm the defendants‘ chances of winning reversal on appeal or securing a commutation of their sentences from the governor. Walter White, the general secretary of the NAACP, told the mother of one of the boys, Eugene Williams, that ―the odds against her son were terrific at best—that when Red prejudice was added to Black, she would practically insure her boy‘s execution by remaining tied up with the Communists.‖36  White even accused the communists of calculating that ―the boys dead will be worth more for propaganda purposes than alive.‖37  By contrast, the NAACP‘s strategy on appeal would be to hire an eminent white lawyer from the South who would avoid publicity and try to win reversal or commutation on narrow legal grounds.38 the ILD and the Communist Party had been publicizing it and ―generally whooping it up‖ and that this was causing ―no little embarrassment to the Association‖). 34. CARTER, SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 56–57, 61–62 (citations and internal quotation marks omitted). 35. Id. at 67 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted); see also Letter from William Patterson, Secretary, ILD, to NAACP (June 30, 1933), microformed on NAACP Papers, supra note 17, at pt. 6, reel 2, frames 459–72 (arguing that the freedom of the Scottsboro boys could be won ―only by rousing the Negro masses in alliance with the white workers to a relentless struggle against the whole system of national oppression of the Negro people,‖ and attacking the NAACP for trying to block such alliances while placing excessive faith in the courts). 36. Letter from Walter White, Secretary, NAACP, to Bob & Herbert, supra note 33, at frame 826. 37. Letter from Walter White, Secretary, NAACP, to Messrs. Fort, Beddow & Ray (Aug. 19, 1931), microformed on NAACP Papers, supra note 17, at pt. 6, reel 4, frame 146; see also Letter from Walter White, Secretary, NAACP, to Roy Wilkins, Assistant Secretary, NAACP (May 13, 1931), microformed on id., at reel 2, frames 973–75 (noting that the NAACP had cause to believe that ―some of the Communists [felt] that if the boys [were] electrocuted after at least a semblance of legal action to save them [had] been made, it [would have been] even more valuable for the Communists in their appeal to Negroes for support‖). 38. Murder from Afar, PHILA. TRIB., Aug. 27, 1931, microformed on NAACP Papers, supra note 17, at pt. 6, reel 8, frame 351; CARTER, SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 69–72; see also Letter from Walter White, Secretary, NAACP, to Ludwell ―Lud‖ Denny (Apr. 29, 1931), microformed on 2009] SCOTTSBORO 387 NAACP leaders were torn between wanting not to jeopardize the defendants‘ chances of winning the support of moderate whites in the South and wishing not to alienate those of its members who demanded a vociferous condemnation of the white South for its willingness to execute the defendants on dubious evidence. By distancing itself from the ILD, the NAACP alienated the many blacks who saw little reason to repudiate the communists‘ assistance, which they saw as ―sincere and wholehearted.‖39  The editor of one black newspaper observed that the NAACP had ―outlived its usefulness if it now feels that fighting the spread of communism is more important than fighting white Southerners who will lynch, massacre, and slaughter and expect to get away with it.‖40  Another black editor accused the NAACP of having an ―Uncle Tom attitude‖ in this case.41  Yet Walter White was convinced that it would be ―suicidal‖ for the NAACP ―to be tied up in any way with that outfit of lunatics [the communists].‖42  Most black newspaper editors saw the battle between the NAACP and the ILD as ―deplorable‖43 and a ―sad spectacle,‖44 and one observed that ―we have too few friends to have the quarrel as to which we shall lend a helping hand in any given case.‖45 After months of repeatedly changing their minds over the choice of legal representative, by the end of 1931 all of the defendants had settled on the ILD, partly because of the NAACP‘s occasionally condescending attitude toward them and their parents. For example, one NAACP official, William Pickens, referred to some of the boys‘ parents as ―the densest and dumbest animals it has yet been my privilege to meet‖—a statement that the ILD ensured the parents heard about.46  The communists also sent small monthly checks to the NAACP Papers, supra note 17, at pt. 6, reel 2, frames 748–49 (noting that this case would have been ―difficult enough to handle under normal circumstances, but the tactics of the Communists have inflamed feeling against the boys to fever pitch‖ and observing that the only way to save the boys‘ lives was to find a lawyer, ―preferably an Alabamian, whose standing is such as to help mobilize effectively the considerable sentiment which, we are informed, exists in Alabama among white people of the decent sort, that the boys are innocent‖). 39. CARTER, SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 69 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). 40. Id. at 96 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). 41. The Conservative N.A.A.C.P, OKLA. CITY BLACK DISPATCH, May 14, 1931, microformed on NAACP Papers, supra note 17, at pt. 6, reel 8, frame 118. 42. Letter from Walter White to Bob & Herbert, supra note 33, at frame 828. 43. Editorial, This We Regret, CAL. NEWS, Jan. 7, 1932, microformed on NAACP Papers, supra note 17, at pt. 6, reel 8, frame 469. 44. An Offensive Defense, CAROLINA TIMES, Jan. 9, 1932, microformed on NAACP Papers, supra note 17, at pt. 6, reel 8, frame 507. 45. The Reds at Scottsboro, AFRO–AM. (Balt.), Jan. 9, 1932, microformed on NAACP Papers, supra note 17, at pt. 6, reel 8, frame 489; see also CARTER, SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 85–90. 46. Letter from William Pickens, Field Secretary, NAACP, to Walter White, Secretary, NAACP (June 6, 1931), microformed on NAACP Papers, supra note 17, at pt. 6, reel 3, frames 355–57. 388 MARQUETTE LAW REVIEW [93:379 defendants‘ families and treated their parents with kindness and respect.47 In a final effort to win back control of the cases, the NAACP persuaded Clarence Darrow to participate in the appeals.48  Not wishing to be perceived as rejecting assistance from the nation‘s most eminent criminal defense lawyer, the ILD professed eagerness to have Darrow‘s help. But the organization insisted that Darrow sever his connections with the NAACP and take orders from the ILD. Confronted with such an ultimatum, Darrow and the NAACP withdrew from the case. One black newspaper predicted that the consequence of Darrow‘s withdrawal ―is almost surely to be murder in Scottsboro‖ and warned that the defendants‘ ―innocent blood will be a crimson stain on the [ILD].‖49 Because communists generally viewed courts as simply ―instruments of . . . class oppression,‖ they did not place much faith in litigation.50  Rather, they favored ―revolutionary mass action outside of courts and bourgeois legislative bodies.‖51  Communists believed that the Scottsboro cases could educate the masses and increase party membership, especially among blacks. Throughout the spring and summer of 1931, communists organized large demonstrations in the North—often featuring the defendants‘ mothers—to protest the boys‘ treatment and to petition Governor Benjamin Meeks Miller of Alabama and President Herbert Hoover for redress. In Dresden, Germany, communists threw rocks through the windows of the American consulate and 47. CARTER, SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 91. 48. Letter from Walter White, Secretary, NAACP, to Clarence Darrow, Attorney (Aug. 31, 1931), microformed on NAACP Papers, supra note 17, at pt. 6, reel 4, frame 259 (stating that he had hoped it would have been unnecessary to ask Darrow to enter the Scottsboro case, but that with the white lawyers from Birmingham withdrawing, ―we are frankly up against what is probably the most delicate and difficult situation of our history‖); see also Letter from Walter White, Secretary, NAACP, to Willie Robinson [sic] (Sept. 11, 1931), microformed on id., frame 268 (expressing great pleasure in telling Roberson that the NAACP had succeeded in retaining Darrow, ―the greatest criminal lawyer in the United States if not in the world‖). 49. Murder in Scottsboro, PHILA. TRIB., Jan. 7, 1932, microformed on NAACP Papers, supra note 17, at pt. 6, reel 8, frame 464; see also CARTER, SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 97–103; GOODMAN, STORIES OF SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 37–38. 50. CARTER, SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 138 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted); see also Appeal to the American Workers for Effective Mass Action to Save the Scottsboro Boys, DAILY WORKER (N.Y.), Jan. 20, 1932, microformed on NAACP Papers, supra note 17, at pt. 6, reel 8, frame 532 [hereinafter Appeal to the American Workers] (asserting that the ―main function‖ of courts ―is to administer law made specifically as a means of persecuting the Negroes‖). 51. CARTER, SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 138 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted); see also Appeal to the American Workers, supra note 50 (―[T]he hope for the nine Scottsboro victims of American lynch democracy, does not lie in the chambers of the Supreme Court of Alabama. It lies with the masses of American workers, who in vigorous protests and demonstrations will show their determination to end lynch law and to stop Negro persecution. . . . Confidence in the courts cannot bring justice. Only confidence in the might and power of the organized efforts of the American working class is the method of obtaining the freedom of these innocent boys.‖). 2009] SCOTTSBORO 389 condemned the ―bloody lynching of our Negro co-workers‖—a scene that was repeated elsewhere in Europe that summer.52  Even in Tallapoosa County, Alabama, communists used the ―Scottsboro lynch verdict‖ to organize black sharecroppers into a union demanding higher wages and the release of the boys; whites responded with violence and murder.53 By the summer of 1931, Governor Miller was receiving thousands of abusive letters from around the world. One typical protest condemned ―the brutal slave drivers of Alabama acting through a Ku Klux Klan judge and jury inflamed by race hatred . . . to send nine innocent children to the electric chair.‖54  ILD attacks on white Alabamians as ―lynchers‖ were reprinted in local newspapers, increasing resentment toward the Scottsboro boys. Local whites grew more defensive, insisting that the defendants had been given ―as fair a trial as they could have gotten in any court in the world.‖55  The Commission on Interracial Cooperation, which often supported the appeals of southern blacks convicted in obviously unfair trials, refused to support the Scottsboro defendants because of hostile public opinion. The governor‘s secretary explained that Scottsboro had become ―a white elephant‖ for Miller and that the ILD‘s inflammatory statements had ―tied his hands.‖56  One white constituent warned the governor not to let any ―threat or demand from dirty yankees or damn communists from the North and throughout the world . . . sway you.‖57  Judge Hawkins confided to defense lawyer Roddy that he did not ―really think the boys should be put to death, but . . . the Communists are more of an issue than are the FACTS of the case.‖58  One white Alabamian captured the view of many, observing that ―I might have been for acquittin‘ them at the first trial, but now after all this stink‘s been raised, we‘ve got to 52. CARTER, SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 142 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted); see also Fight for Doomed Negroes, N.Y. TIMES, July 1, 1931, at 9 (noting that communists protesting Scottsboro were responsible for recent mob attacks on the American consulates at Dresden and Leipzig, Germany); Communist Uprising Is Police Idea, BIRMINGHAM AGE-HERALD, June 18, 1931, at 1 (noting that youth in Dresden threw bottles through the windows of the American consulate containing messages stating, ―Down with the bloody lynch law on our Negro comrades‖). 53. CARTER, SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 121–30, 138–46, 167; Labor Defense Charges ―Murder,‖ N.Y. TIMES, July 18, 1931, at 30; Volleys Disperse Alabama Negroes, N.Y. TIMES, July 18, 1931, at 30. 54. CARTER, SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 145 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). 55. Id. at 112 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). 56. Letter from William Pickens, Field Secretary, NAACP, to Walter White, Secretary, NAACP (June 1, 1931), microformed on NAACP Papers, supra note 17, at pt. 6, reel 3, frame 252. 57. CARTER, SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 136 n.90 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). 58. Id. at 119 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). 390 MARQUETTE LAW REVIEW [93:379 hang ‘em.‖59 C. Alabama Supreme Court It was in this climate that the Scottsboro verdicts were appealed to the Alabama Supreme Court. In recent decades, state supreme courts in the South had become somewhat more protective of the procedural rights of black criminal defendants, frequently reversing convictions, even in cases of murder or rape, on grounds such as prejudicial racial statements by prosecutors, the refusal of trial judges to change venue or grant defense counsel adequate time to prepare, and the use of coerced confessions.60  To be sure, criminal justice for southern blacks remained grossly unequal: Blacks still could not serve on southern juries; black lawyers could not command fair hearings in southern courtrooms; black witnesses were treated as less credible than white witnesses; and the death penalty was never imposed on white rapists or on men who raped black women. Still, some progress had been made. Yet in explosive cases that generated outside criticism of the South or that were otherwise perceived to threaten white supremacy, southern courts regressed in their treatment of black defendants.61 Alabama whites were especially incensed by criticism over Scottsboro because they felt that they deserved praise for avoiding a lynching. The Scottsboro Progressive Age complimented local citizens for ―their patience and chivalry‖62 after the alleged rapes, and the Chattanooga Daily Times praised them for setting ―the rest of the South an impressive example in selfrestraint.‖63  A Georgia newspaper warned that appealing the convictions of black men for raping white women was ―playing with fire‖; a hasty trial was preferable to a lynching and indeed was ―a first step, and a very important one.‖64  Many southern newspapers predicted a resurgence in lynchings if outsiders persisted in criticizing trials such as those at Scottsboro.65 59. Id. at 136 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). 60. E.g., Tannehill v. State, 48 So. 662, 662 (Ala. 1909); Williams v. State, 146 So. 422, 424 (Ala. 1933); Bell v. State, 20 S.W.2d 618, 622 (Ark. 1929); Graham v. State, 82 S.E. 282, 286 (Ga. 1914); State v. Jones, 53 So. 959, 961 (La. 1911); Byrd v. State, 123 So. 867, 870–71 (Miss. 1929); Story v. State, 97 So. 806, 807 (Miss. 1923); Sykes v. State, 42 So. 875, 875 (Miss. 1907); MANGUM, LEGAL STATUS OF THE NEGRO, supra note 13, at 343–49, 356–63; MCMILLEN, DARK JOURNEY, supra note 9, at 197–223. 61. KLARMAN, FROM JIM CROW TO CIVIL RIGHTS, supra note 1, at 130–31. 62. CARTER, SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 105 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). 63. Id. at 106 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). 64. Emanuel, Lynching and the Law in Georgia, supra note 14, at 246–47 n.161 (quoting Editorial, Playing with Fire, FORUM (Washington, Ga.), June 25, 1931) (internal quotation marks omitted). 65. CARTER, SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 105–16; see also The Steffens–Dreiser Nonsense, unidentified newspaper, May 22, 1931, microformed on NAACP Papers, supra note 17, at pt. 6, reel 2009] SCOTTSBORO 391 When the Scottsboro appeal reached the state supreme court, its justices were said to be seething with anger at the protests and threats directed at them.66  The Communist Party newspaper, the Daily Worker, had called the court an ―instrument of the Wall Street Imperialists,‖ which would surely affirm the boys‘ convictions.67  Chief Justice John C. Anderson publicly criticized such statements, which he said had been made with ―the evident intent to bulldoze this court,‖68 and he insisted that the justices ―will not be intimidated.‖69 In their appeals, the ILD lawyers briefly raised the issues of race discrimination in jury selection and the inadequacy of defense counsel, but they emphasized the unfairness of the trials and especially the mob‘s influence on the juries. In reply, the state attorney general denied that ―a curious mob‖ had influenced the outcome of the trials.70  The headline in the Montgomery Advertiser‘s report of the oral argument observed, ―Negro Partisans ‗Dictate‘ Course to High Court.‖71 The Alabama Supreme Court had previously reversed convictions in similar cases of mob domination.72  Other southern courts in less publicized cases had reversed convictions when defense counsel had been appointed even a couple of days before trial.73  Yet on March 24, 1932, the Alabama Supreme Court voted 6–1 to uphold the death sentences of four of the defendants. The court granted a new trial to Eugene Williams because he had been a juvenile—thirteen years old—at the time of conviction.74  The court emphasized that the speed of the trials was ―highly desirable‖ because it instilled greater respect for the law and that the presence of national guardsmen surrounding the courthouse gave ―notice to everybody that the strong arm of the state was there to assure the accused a lawful trial.‖75  The 8, frame 134 (probably appearing in the MONTGOMERY ADV. and applauding the citizens of Jackson County for deporting themselves ―with dignity and self-restraint‖ and noting that prompt action like that taken by the court in the Scottsboro cases is what critics of mob violence had always urged as a substitute for lynchings). 66. CARTER, SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 156. 67. Id. at 156 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). 68. Id. (citation and internal quotation marks omitted); GOODMAN, STORIES OF SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 49. 69. Defers New Action in Scottsboro Case, N.Y. TIMES, Nov. 8, 1932, at 13. 70. CARTER, SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 157. 71. Id. at 158 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). 72. Seay v. State, 93 So. 403, 405 (Ala. 1922); Thompson v. State, 23 So. 676, 676 (Ala. 1898). 73. E.g., McDaniel v. Commonwealth, 205 S.W. 915, 918 (Ky. 1918); Stroud v. Commonwealth, 169 S.W. 1021, 1022–23 (Ky. 1914); State v. Collins, 29 So. 180, 181–82 (La. 1900) (discussing numerous additional Louisiana cases). 74. Powell v. State, 141 So. 201, 213–14 (Ala. 1932), rev’d, 287 U.S. 45, 73 (1932). 75. Powell, 141 So. at 211, 213; see also CARTER, SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 158 (internal quotation marks omitted). 392 MARQUETTE LAW REVIEW [93:379 court also ruled sufficient the appointment of counsel on the morning of trial. In a letter to the NAACP‘s Walter White, Chief Justice Anderson, the sole dissenter, explained that the communists had ―been very imprudent and injected a lot of irrelevant bunk into the controversy and instead of helping it possibly injured these defendants.‖76  Anderson, who had much preferred that ―these defendants be tried under different circumstances,‖ regretted that his colleagues had not been ―above permitting outside influence to prejudice these defendants.‖77  As a reward for his efforts, Anderson received a telegram from an ILD branch assailing him as a ―traitor to the masses‖ for his willingness to abide by the majority‘s decision.78 The Montgomery Advertiser opined that the court‘s ruling ―should satisfy all reasonable persons‖ that the Scottsboro boys had received fair trials.79  Yet several other Alabama newspapers regretted that the court had not granted a new trial to allay doubts regarding the defendants‘ guilt. The Birmingham Age-Herald observed, ―[t]he fact remains that there was an element of mob feeling in the air,‖80 and the Birmingham News insisted there was ―ground for divergence of opinions concerning these cases.‖81  Moderate whites in Alabama blamed the ruling on communist efforts at intimidation, which they suspected the state jurists had ―leaned unconsciously backwards‖ to resist.82 A black newspaper similarly concluded, ―it is possible that the highest legal tribunal in Alabama affirmed these death sentences because it did no[t] want to appear as being swayed, cowed or bluffed by a group of radicals.‖83 Communists thought the ruling revealed the ―highest courts working hand in glove with owners of America against [the] working class.‖84 76. Letter from John C. Anderson, Chief Justice, Supreme Court of Alabama, to Walter White, Secretary, NAACP (Apr. 25, 1932), microformed on NAACP Papers, supra note 17, at pt. 6, reel 5, frame 792. 77. Id. 78. CARTER, SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 170 n.98 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). 79. Id. at 159 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). 80. Id. (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). 81. Editorial, The Affirmation of the Scottsboro Cases, BIRMINGHAM NEWS, Mar. 25, 1932, microformed on NAACP Papers, supra note 17, at pt. 6, reel 8, frame 586. 82. CARTER, SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 159 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). See also Scottsboro Boys Doomed, SAVANNAH TRIB. (Ga.), Apr. 14, 1932, microformed on NAACP Papers, supra note 17, at pt. 6, reel 8, frame 651 (―Even if the judges were inclined to be more merciful, the bombarding of them with letters and telegrams, many of these containing threats, would cause less favorable action.‖). 83. The Scottsboro Appeal, SAN ANTONIO INQUIRER, Apr. 8, 1932, microformed on NAACP Papers, supra note 17, at pt. 6, reel 8, frame 631 (excerpting editorial from the HOUSTON DEFENDER, Apr. 2, 1932). 84. Backs Conviction of Seven Negroes, N.Y. TIMES, Mar. 25, 1932, at 6 (quoting a telegram from the ILD to Governor Miller of Alabama). 2009] SCOTTSBORO 393 The Daily Worker predicted that review by the U.S. Supreme Court—just another ―capitalist court‖85—would be a ―mere gesture aimed at facilitating the legal lynching of these children.‖86  A black newspaper in the North professed greater faith in the high court, reasoning that ―America, grasping for the moral leadership of the world, cannot afford to set the example of staging a legal lynching.‖87  The liberal Nation agreed that the boys‘ prospects were ―very bright‖ because ―the conscience of the world [would] be profoundly shocked‖ if the Court affirmed their convictions and thus ―encourag[ed] legal lynching in the South.‖88 D. The U.S. Supreme Court In 1932 the U.S. Supreme Court was hardly the champion of racial equality that it would one day become in popular mythology. Around 1900, the Court had sustained the constitutionality of laws mandating racial segregation89 and disfranchising blacks,90 leading the fledging NAACP to conclude in 1915 that the Court ―has virtually declared that the colored man has no civil rights.‖91  To be sure, the Court in the second decade of the twentieth century struck down residential segregation ordinances,92 certain laws that promoted peonage (compulsory labor to discharge debts),93 and the grandfather clause (a device insulating illiterate whites from the disfranchising effect of literacy tests).94  But in 1927 the Court strongly implied that state-mandated racial segregation in public schools was constitutionally permissible,95 and in 1935 the Court would unanimously sustain the exclusion of blacks from Democratic Party primaries—the only 85. CARTER, SCOTTSBORO, supra note 6, at 160 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). 86. Id. at 160 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). 87. IOWA BYSTANDER, Jan. 30, 1932, microformed on NAACP Papers, supra note 17, at pt. 6, reel 8, frame 562. 88. The Scottsboro Case, 135 NATION 320 (1932), microformed on NAACP Papers, supra note 17, at pt. 6, reel 8, frame 745. 89. Berea Coll. v. Kentucky, 211 U.S. 45, 58 (1908); Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 550–52 (1896). 90. E.g., Giles v. Teasley, 193 U.S. 146, 166–67 (1904); Giles v. Harris, 189 U.S. 475, 485–88 (1903); Williams v. Mississippi, 170 U.S. 213, 225 (1898); see generally KLARMAN, FROM JIM CROW TO CIVIL RIGHTS, supra note 1, at 8–60 (surveying the Court‘s performance in race-related cases during the Jim Crow era). 91. NAACP, FIFTH ANNUAL REPORT: REPORT OF THE CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS (1914), reprinted in 9 CRISIS 286, 293 (1915). 92. Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U.S. 60, 82 (1917). 93. United States v. Reynolds, 235 U.S. 133, 150 (1914); Bailey v. Alabama, 219 U.S. 219, 245 (1911). 94. Guinn v. United States, 238 U.S. 347, 367 (1915); Myers v. Anderson, 238 U.S. 368, 382– 83 (1915); see generally KLARMAN, FROM JIM CROW TO CIVIL RIGHTS, supra note 1, at 61–97 (surveying the Court‘s performance in race-related cases during the Progressive era). 95. Gong Lum v. Rice, 275 U.S. 78, 85–87 (1927). 394 MARQUETTE LAW REVIEW [93:379 elections that mattered in the one-party South.96  In 1932, virtually nobody thought of the Court as a heroic defender of the rights of racial minorities.97 Nor had the Court yet taken substantial strides toward protecting the procedural rights of criminal defendants in state courts. Prior to Moore v. Dempsey98 in 1923, the Court had reversed state criminal convictions on federal constitutional grounds in only a handful of cases involving race discrimination in jury selection.99  In other cases, the Court had denied that the Fourteenth Amendment converted the procedural protections of the federal Bill of Rights into safeguards against state governments and had narrowly construed the Due Process Clause of that Amendment, which does explicitly constrain the states.100 Moore was the progenitor of modern American criminal procedure. The case arose from an infamous racial massacre in Phillips County, Arkansas, in 1919. Black tenant farmers and sharecroppers had tried to organize a union and hire white lawyers to sue planters for peonage practices. Local whites cracked down with a vengeance. When whites shot into a church where black unionists were meeting, blacks returned the gunfire. A white man was killed, and mayhem quickly ensued. Marauding whites, supported by federal troops ostensibly dispatched to quell the disturbance, went on a rampage, tracking down blacks throughout the countryside and killing dozens of them. Seventynine blacks, and no whites, were prosecuted and convicted for their actions during this ―race riot,‖ and twelve received the death penalty. The trials of those twelve lasted only an hour or two each, and the juries, from which blacks had been systematically excluded, deliberated for only a few minutes. Huge mobs of angry whites surrounded the courthouse, menacing the 96. Grovey v. Townsend, 295 U.S. 45, 53–55 (1935) (sustaining the exclusion of blacks from Democratic Party primaries when the decision to exclude was made by the party convention). But cf. Nixon v. Condon, 286 U.S. 73, 89 (1932) (striking down a state law authorizing party executive committees to exclude groups from participating in party primaries); Nixon v. Herndon, 273 U.S. 536, 541 (1927) (striking down a state law barring blacks from participating in primary elections). See generally KLARMAN, FROM JIM CROW TO CIVIL RIGHTS, supra note 1, at 98–170 (surveying the Court‘s performance in race-related cases during the interwar period). 97. Compare Zechariah Chafee Jr., Liberal Trends in the Supreme Court, 35 CURRENT HISTORY 338, 339, 343 (1931) (noting a recent liberal trend on the Supreme Court in cases involving economic regulation and freedom of speech, but saying nothing about such a trend on race issues) with FRANK FREIDEL, F.D.R. AND THE SOUTH 92–94 (1965) (noting that some southern senators opposed President Roosevelt‘s Court-packing plan in 1937 partly because they saw the Court as a bulwark of white supremacy). 98. 261 U.S. 86, 91–92 (1923). 99. Rogers v. Alabama, 192 U.S. 226, 231 (1904); Carter v. Texas, 177 U.S. 442, 448–49 (1900); Neal v. Delaware, 103 U.S. 370, 397–98 (1881); Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303, 310, 312 (1880). 100. Twining v. New Jersey, 211 U.S. 78, 99 (1908); Maxwell v. Dow, 176 U.S. 581, 592–93 (1900); Hurtado v. California, 110 U.S. 516, 534–35 (1884). 2009] SCOTTSBORO 395 defendants and the jurors and threatening a lynching. Five of the defendants appealed their death sentences to the Supreme Court, arguing that mobdominated trials violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. By a vote of 6–2, the Supreme Court agreed, reversed the convictions, and ordered a federal district judge to conduct a hearing on whether the defendants‘ trials had been influenced by the mob.101 Moore offered some hope that the Scottsboro defendants might find justice in the Supreme Court. Their lawyers raised three constitutional claims in their appeal: mob domination of the trials in violation of the Due Process Clause; intentional exclusion of blacks from the grand and petit juries in violation of the Equal Protection Clause; and denial of the right to counsel in violation of the Due Process Clause.102 On the day of the oral argument, extra police officers patrolled the Supreme Court building and grounds; the plaza facing the Capitol was cleared; and elaborate preparations were made to preempt the mass communist demonstrations that had been promised.103 Mary Mooney, mother of the imprisoned California labor leader Tom Mooney (who had been wrongfully convicted for the Preparedness Day bombing in San Francisco in 1916), attended the Court session, noting her interest in seeing that other mothers‘ sons received justice.104  Several of Alabama‘s congressmen also attended the argument, as did an unusually large number of blacks.105 A few weeks later, the Court reversed the defendants‘ convictions on the ground that the right to counsel had been denied, declining to reach the other two issues.106  Perhaps the justices chose the basis for decision that they deemed least controversial. For the Court to have reversed the Scottsboro convictions on the basis of Moore might have required basic changes in Jim Crow justice: The Scottsboro trials were not quite so farcical as those of the Phillips County defendants. The Scottsboro boys received a genuine defense; their trials lasted for several hours (not forty-five minutes); the juries trying them deliberated more than the five minutes in Moore; their cases did not 101. RICHARD C. CORTNER, A MOB INTENT ON DEATH: THE NAACP AND THE ARKANSAS RIOT CASES 7–23 (1988); KLARMAN, FROM JIM CROW TO CIVIL RIGHTS, supra note 1, at 98, 120– 23; O.A. Rogers, Jr., The Elaine Race Riots of 1919, 19 ARK. HIST. Q. 142, 142–50 (1960). 102. See Brief for Petitioners at 3–4, 34–62, Powell v. Alabama, 287 U.S. 45 (1932) (Nos. 98, 99, and 100), reprinted in 27 LANDMARK BRIEFS AND ARGUMENTS OF THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES: CONSTITUTIONAL LAW 299–300, 330–58 (Philip B. Kurland & Gerhard Casper eds., 1975). 103. Guarded High Court Hears the Negro Pleas, N.Y. TIMES, Oct. 11, 1932, at 19, microformed on NAACP Papers, supra note 17, at pt. 6, reel 8, frame 743. 104. Id.; Hugo Adam Bedau & Michael L. Radelet, Miscarriages of Justice in Potentially Capital Cases, 40 STAN. L. REV. 21, 98 (1987). 105. Guarded High Court Hears the Negro Pleas, supra note 103. 106. Powell, 287 U.S. at 73. 396 MARQUETTE LAW REVIEW [93:379 raise the broader implications of the Phillips County race riot; and they had not been tortured into confessing.107  Similarly, to invalidate their convictions because of race discrimination in jury selection would have been far more provocative to white southerners because preserving white supremacy in the courtroom required excluding blacks from juries.108  By contrast, overturning the convictions because the defendants had been denied the right to counsel was unlikely to affect the outcome of any retrials or Jim Crow justice in general.109 Prior to 1932, the Court had never ruled that due process requires the states to provide counsel to indigent defendants in capital cases, but neither had it rejected that position. Every state court confronting that issue had required the government to appoint counsel in such circumstances.110  To be sure, Ozie Powell, whose appeal was the focus of the Supreme Court‘s first intervention in Scottsboro, had received a court-appointed lawyer. He made two arguments as to why this appointment failed to satisfy federal constitutional standards.111  First, the state had not afforded him adequate opportunity to hire counsel of his own choice. Second, the court appointment was inadequate because it had been made the morning of the trial, and thus defense counsel was denied an adequate opportunity to consult clients, interview witnesses, and prepare a defense. The Alabama court had deemed this last-minute appointment of counsel sufficient to satisfy the state constitutional requirement of a court-appointed lawyer in capital cases. In general, the U.S. Supreme Court has no authority to review state court interpretations of state law. Thus, for the Court to reverse Powell‘s conviction, it would have had to construe the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to require the assistance of counsel in capital cases. American constitutional history reveals that the justices are least reluctant to expand constitutional rights when doing so involves holding a few renegade states to the norm already espoused by the vast majority.112 As of 1932, not a single state had rejected the right of indigent defendants in capital cases to state-appointed counsel. Indeed, one reason that state courts 107. See generally Brief for Respondent at 27–28, Powell, 287 U.S. 45 (Nos. 98, 99, and 100), reprinted in 27 LANDMARK BRIEFS, supra note 102, at 399–400 (arguing that the mob-domination claim was stronger in Moore than in Powell). 108. See KLARMAN, FROM JIM CROW TO CIVIL RIGHTS, supra note 1, at 273. 109. Alfred J. Cilella & Irwin J. Kaplan, Note, Discrimination Against Negroes in Jury Service, 29 ILL. L. REV. 498, 505–06 (1934). 110. Otto M. Bowman, Comment, Constitutional Law—Due Process—Right of Counsel, 12 OR. L. REV. 227, 228–30 (1933). 111. Brief for Petitioners at 48–59, Powell, 287 U.S. 45 (Nos. 98, 99, and 100), reprinted in 27 LANDMARK BRIEFS, supra note 102, at 344–55. 112. Michael J. Klarman, Rethinking the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Revolutions, 82 VA. L. REV. 1, 16–17 (1996) (listing examples). 2009] SCOTTSBORO 397 had not yet considered whether the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed such a right is that all of them confronting the issue had interpreted their own state constitutions to do so. Once the justices determined that due process required the appointment of counsel for indigent capital defendants, reversing Powell‘s conviction was easy. First, Powell had been denied the opportunity to hire a lawyer of his own choice. Second, to most disinterested observers, the trial judge‘s appointment of counsel had been obviously inadequate. At the trials, although defense counsel did cross-examine prosecution witnesses, they made only a feeble effort to change the trial venue, presented neither opening nor closing arguments, and called none of their own witnesses other than the defendants, some of whom implicated each other in a desperate effort to avoid the death penalty.113  The Scottsboro trials may not have been quite the sham affair under review in Moore, yet most lawyers would have considered obviously inadequate the representation afforded to the defendants. Moreover, the trial record revealed a high probability that the defendants were innocent—a circumstance likely to be significant to Supreme Court justices reviewing their convictions, even if technically irrelevant to the merits of their appeal. Because criminal procedure safeguards often shield the guilty from punishment, they are usually controversial, and the justices are probably more inclined to identify new rights in cases where defendants have a strong claim of innocence. As we have seen, the medical evidence introduced at the Scottsboro trials raised serious doubts as to whether any rape had occurred, and the accusers had provided inconsistent testimony.114  Moreover, the women possessed a clear motive for fabrication: avoiding a possible Mann Act prosecution for traveling across state lines for immoral purposes (prostitution). Many newspapers, even in parts of the South, applauded the high court‘s decision in Powell. The Richmond Times-Dispatch went so far as to say that the ruling ―will be welcomed throughout the country, with the possible exception of Alabama.‖115  The New York Times likewise hailed the ruling, which it said ―ought to abate the rancor of extreme radicals, while confirming the faith of the American people in the soundness of their institutions and especially in the integrity of their courts.‖116  Professor Felix Frankfurter of 113. See Brief for Petitioners at 9–14, 51–59, Powell, 287 U.S. 45 (Nos. 98, 99, and 100), reprinted in 27 LANDMARK BRIEFS, supra note 102, at 305–10, 347–55 (enumerating the inadequacies of defense counsel). 114. See supra text accompanying notes 23–24. 115. The Scottsboro Case, RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH, Nov. 9, 1932, at 10. 116. The Scottsboro Case, N.Y. TIMES, Nov. 8, 1932, at 20. For other newspapers applauding the decision, see The Scottsboro Case, N.Y. HERALD TRIB., Nov. 8, 1932, at 20; The Scottsboro Cases, BALT. SUN, Nov. 9, 1932, at 10 (noting that the decision is ―in conformity with the principles of fair dealing and will awaken approving echoes in every part of the nation‖); Righteously 398 MARQUETTE LAW REVIEW [93:379 the Harvard Law School called the decision ―a notable chapter in the history of liberty‖ and observed that the same Court that had recently served the interests of property owners was now protecting ―illiterate‖ and ―vagrant‖ blacks from oppression.117  A black newspaper proclaimed the ruling ―a great stroke in the name of justice,‖118 and the NAACP saw it as a ―vindicat[ion]‖ of its view that victories for racial justice ―are best won by strictly legal means.‖119  By contrast, the Daily Worker condemned Powell for instructing Alabama authorities on ―how ‗properly‘ to carry through such lynch schemes.‖120  The liberal lawyer Morris Ernst likewise assailed the decision as ―empty and meaningless‖ and ―cunningly uncourageous‖ because it disregarded the issues of ―deep social significance‖ and left the defendants in ―horrid shape‖ for a retrial, which was likely to feature a half-hearted lawyer ―who will saunter . . . before a white jury while mobs outside sing anthems and shout for hangings.‖121

PicClick Insights - Scarce Scottsboro Boy African American Clarence Norris Autograph Signed Book PicClick Exclusive

  •  Popularity - 0 watchers, 0.0 new watchers per day, 7 days for sale on eBay. 0 sold, 1 available.
  •  Best Price -
  •  Seller - 808+ items sold. 0% negative feedback. Great seller with very good positive feedback and over 50 ratings.

People Also Loved PicClick Exclusive