Lecture 11 Notes

Scottsboro Boys

The Story

On March 25, 1931, a fight broke out between a group of white youths and a group of black youths on a freight train traveling through northern Alabama. It started when Haywood Patterson felt someone stand on his hand. Patterson was hanging from a freight train. The foot belonged to a white kid. Patterson told the kid, “The next time you want by, just tell me you want by and I let you by.” “Nigger I don’t ask you when I want by. What you doing on this train anyway?” “Look,” Patterson said, “I just tell you, the next time you want by you just tell me you want by and I let you by.” “Nigger bastard, this is a white man’s train. You better get off. All you black bastards better get off!” “You white sonsofbitches,” Patteron yelled, “we got as much right here as you.”

The train was traveling west through northern Alabama en route from Chattanooga to Memphis. It had just emerged from the tunnel under Lookout Mountain when the argument began. The black kids won the fight and threw the white kids from the train. One white kid, Orville Gilley, was the last to go and he was hanging from the side of the train. By the time the black kids got ready to throw him, the train was moving too fast so they pulled Gilley back into the car and he continued to travel with them. The black kids resumed their places in the various cars along the train.

An hour or so later, the train slowed, which was not uncommon as it had stopped every hour or so. A few of the black kids looked out of the cars and when they did they saw dozens of white men, armed with pistols, rifles, and shotguns, rushing towards them. The men grabbed Paterson, his three friends, and five others, questioned them briefly, and tied them to one another with a plow line. A crowd gathered outside the Scottsboro jail. Miraculously, the sheriff called the governor rather than give the boys over to the mob. The governor called out the National Guard and they dispersed the crowd.

The boys were arrested for assault and attempt to murder. They were in jail for hours before they found out that there would be an additional charge. They were taken out of their cell and lined up against the wall. Two women were brought in and asked if they could identify the boys who had “had them.” It was then the boys realized the true danger they were in for they were being accused of rape. Victoria Price pointed to six of them. The other woman, Ruby Bates, said nothing. One of the guards said that if those six had Ms. Price, then it stood to reason that the others had Ms. Bates.

Twelve days later the accused were put on trial for rape, and in four days four separate juries convicted eight of them and sentenced them to death. The boys still had not seen their parents.

The Interested Parties

There were a number of interested parties in the case, each with their own perspective and interests:

The defendants said they had been convicted of a crime they did not commit: the white boys attacked them; they hadn’t seen any white women on the train.
The women said they had been raped: the Negroes had attacked their companions, thrown them off the train, and then had their way.
Communist Party officials said the charge was a frame-up and the trial was a circus, nothing but a legal lynching: the women were prostitutes who had to be coerced to cry rape.
Whites in Alabama were proud of the citizens of Scottsboro. They had prevented a lynching and allowed the law to take its course. In all of the protest, they saw nothing but the Communists’ desire to foment race war and revolution.
The NAACP were as critical of the Communists as they were of the verdicts, and fought with the Party for control of the defense.

The Boys

There were nine of them. The two youngest, Roy Wrige and Eugene Williams, were thirteen. The oldest, Charlie Weems, was nineteen. They were poor, barely literate and illiterate, hungry, scared, tormented teenagers, two of whom were seriously ill.

Willie Roberson and Olen Montgomery had been nowhere near the disturbance. Ozie Powell had been in a gondola a few cars down from the train. None of the three had been in the fight on the train.

During the trials, six of the boys claimed innocence and said they had never seen the girls. Three claimed innocence but blamed the others, even claiming to have seen the other boys raping the girls.

The Verdict

Writers and editors all over the region agreed that it was the most atrocious crime ever recorded in that part of the country, perhaps in the United States, “a wholesale debauching of society…so horrible in its details that all the facts could never be printed.” “A heinous and unspeakable crime that savored of the jungle, the way back dark ages of meanest African corruption.”

They were revolted by the story, but not surprised. They expected black men to rape white women. Blacks were savages, more savage many argued, with some scientific theories to support them, then they had been as slaves.

The Communist Party

First on the scene. James Allen and Helen Marcy, editors of the Communist Party’s Southern Worker, heard the news of the arrest over a Chattanooga radio a few hours after the Posse stopped the train. A 25 year old New Yorker who taught philosophy before joining the Party, Allen had come south in 1930 to launch the paper. (For one example of Southern Worker coverage, click here.)

Allen attended the trial and published accounts in the CPUSA newspaper, Daily Worker, including criticisms of the NAACP.

For Party Theorists, the “reason for this murderous treatment of working class boys” was not hard to find. Southern landlords and industrialists used the charge of rape, the race prejudice of whites, to keep black and white workers enslaved.

In response to unemployment, small business failures, and starvation wages in the mills and factories, in response to the mounting repression of sharecroppers and tenant farmers, whom planters kept in a state of virtual slavery, black and white workers began to organize. The Scottsboro trial was a “legal” façade of capitalist justice.

The NAACP

The NAACP could not stay out of the case even though they wanted to because they had to respond to the Communists. They wanted to go slow, but the Communists wouldn’t allow it.