Scottsboro case

 

In 1931 nine black youths were indicted at Scottsboro, Ala., on charges of having raped two white women in a freight car passing through Alabama. In a series of trials the youths were found guilty and sentenced to death or to prison terms of 75 to 99 years. The U.S. Supreme Court reversed convictions twice on procedural grounds (that the youths' right to counsel had been infringed and that no blacks had served on the grand or trial jury). At the second trial one of the women recanted her previous testimony. The Alabama trial judge set aside the guilty verdict as contrary to the weight of the evidence and ordered a new trial. In 1937 charges against five were dropped and the state agreed to consider parole for the others. Two were paroled in 1944, one in 1951. When the fourth escaped (1948) to Michigan, the state refused to return him to Alabama. In 1976, Alabama pardoned Clarence Norris, who had broken parole and fled the state in 1946. The belief that the case against the “Scottsboro boys” was unproved and that the verdicts were the result of racism caused 1930s liberals and radicals to come to the defense of the youths. The fact that Communists used the case for propaganda further complicated the affair.

Bibliography

See H. Patterson and E. Conrad, Scottsboro Boy (1950, repr. 1969); A. K. Chalmers, They Shall Be Free (1951); D. T. Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (1969); J. Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro (1994).

The case of the Scottsboro Boys arose in Scottsboro, Alabama during the 1930s, when nine black youths, ranging in age from twelve to nineteen, were accused of raping two white women, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, one of whom would later recant.

The four trials, in which the youths were convicted and sentenced to death by all-white juries despite the weak and contradictory testimonies of the witnesses, are regarded as one of the worst travesties of justice perpetrated against blacks in the post-Reconstruction South.

The case quickly became an international cause célèbre and the boys were represented by the American Communist Party's legal defense organization. The death sentences, originally scheduled to be carried out quickly, were postponed pending appeals that took the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the sentences were overturned. Despite the fact that one of the women later denied being raped, the retrials resulted in convictions. All of the defendants were eventually acquitted, paroled, or pardoned (besides one who escaped), some after serving years in prison.

The case later inspired Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize winning To Kill a Mockingbird.

Trials

After the nine youth were accused of raping the two white women, a lynch mob gathered around the jail, prepared to storm and kill the youths. Given the situation, the governor of Alabama, Benjamin M. Miller, was forced to call in the National Guard to protect the jail. Authorities pleaded against mob violence by promising speedy trials and executions. On March 30, the so-called Scottsboro Boys were indicted by a Grand Jury. In April, all were convicted and sentenced to death, except for one 13 year old, who was sentenced to life in prison. The NAACP and the International Labor Defense (legal arm of the Communist Party USA) both wanted to handle the defense and struggled to gain and retain the support of the boys and their parents; the ILD eventually won that battle and the NAACP dropped out of the case in January, 1932. The case quickly became widely known, with rallies held in northern U.S. cities, international press coverage and thousands of letters written in support of the defendants.

The Alabama Supreme Court upheld the convictions of seven of the boys who were on death row in March, 1932 (the eighth was determined to have been a juvenile), but in November the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Powell v. Alabama, reversed the convictions and ordered new trials based on the fact that the Boys didn't have proper representation. The first time they were tried, their parents scraped together $60 for a real-estate lawyer who urged them to plead guilty (no southern lawyer would try the case).

The ILD hired Samuel Leibowitz, a noted attorney from New York who was widely known for winning the vast majority of his criminal cases, to defend the Scottsboro Boys at the new trials, held in nearby Decatur. However, this would backfire on the boys as the whites from the south viewed Leibowitz as a total foreigner, a northerner, a communist, one that is representing blacks, as well as a Jew. This time one of the accusers, Ruby Bates, after disappearing for a time to escape from the pressure and the media attention, returned to testify in court and recanted her earlier testimony, now stating that she and Price had lied about being raped because they were afraid that, since they were found on a train with other homeless men where one party of homeless men was violently removed, and since they were homeless themselves, they might be charged with some offense. Jury members again voted for conviction, having apparently believed the prosecution's suggestion that Bates was now lying and had changed her testimony only because the defense had paid her to do so. The attorney of the prosecution, Attorney General (of Alabama) Knight attacked Bates, calling to attention her new clothes and accessories, and Bates could only answer that the Communists had supplied her with everything.

Eventually, Leibowitz with a motion to retry the sentences based on the fact that the juries were all white, such that the Boys weren't able to have a fair trial, was seconded by the Supreme Court of the United States, making it the fourth time that the Boys were to be tried. However this time, Leibowitz reluctantly recognized that the South viewed him as an encroacher upon their space, and following the conditions of the South, allowed a white southern lawyer to take over the defense. Shortly after Lebowitz let someone else take over, himself falling back to be the assistant attorney, the Boys sentences were sealed.

In July, 1937, Clarence Norris was convicted of rape and sexual assault and sentenced to death, Andy Wright was convicted of rape and sentenced to 99 years, and Charlie Weems was convicted and sentenced to 75 years in prison. Ozie Powell pleaded guilty to assaulting the sheriff and was sentenced to 20 years. Four of the boys were released after all charges against them were dropped: Roy Wright and Eugene Williams who had been twelve and thirteen at the time of the alleged crime; Olen Montgomery, who was nearly blind and had been found alone in a car at the end of the train; and Willie Roberson, who when accused was suffering from syphilis.

Later, Governor of Alabama Bibb Graves reduced Clarence Norris' death sentence to life in prison. Norris was later pardoned by Governor George Wallace. All of the Scottsboro Boys were eventually paroled, freed or pardoned, except for Haywood Patterson, who had been tried and convicted of rape and sentenced to the death penalty. He escaped north to Detroit, Michigan. When he was arrested more than 20 years later by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the 1950s, Governor of Michigan G. Mennen Williams would not allow him to be extradited back to Alabama.

In The Media

In 1976, NBC aired a TV movie called Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys, apparently under the impression that Victoria Price was no longer living. Price emerged to file a defamation and invasion of privacy suit against the network. The case was dismissed. Price died in 1982. Timothy Hutton starred as Leibowitz in the more recent film version, Heavens Fall.

After escaping from prison, Haywood Patterson wrote a book about his experiences, Scottsboro Boy. While attempting to sell copies of the book one night in a Detroit bar, Patterson got into an altercation with a man and stabbed him. Patterson was arrested, convicted, and died in prison from emphysema two years later.

Author, Kelly Covin, published a book about the case in 1972 titled, "Hear That Train Blow."

Samuel Leibowitz became a justice on the New York Supreme Court before his death in 1978.

In 1998 Court TV produced a television documentary on the Scottsboro trials for its "Greatest Trials of All Time" series[1]. Daniel Anker and Barak Goodman produced the story of the so-called Scottsboro Boys in a 2000 documentary[2]. Timothy Hutton stars in a 2006 film adaptation titled "Heavens Fall."[3]

See also

• James Edwin Horton - judge who presided over the retrials
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• Trenton Six
• The Great Depression
• Jena 6

Further reading

• Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South, by Dan T. Carter
• The Last of the Scottsboro Boys: An Autobiography by Clarence Norris and Sybil D. Washington
• Stories of Scottsboro by James Goodman
• Scottsboro Boy by Haywood Patterson and Earl Conrad
  • Joshua Dressler and George C. Thomas: Criminal Procedure: Principles, Policies, and Perspectives, 3d. Ed., pp. 8-19.

External links

• Biographies of Key Figures in "The Scottsboro Boys" Trials
• Scottsboro Trial Collection, Cornell Law Library
• Bienen, Leigh & Gilbert Geis. Crimes of the Century: From Leopold and Loeb to O. J. Simpson. Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1998. [4]

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