This month in 1933, Morgan County Solictor Wade Wright shouted a question to an
all-white Alabama jury about to deliberate the fate of Haywood Patterson, one of
nine black teenagers accused of raping two white women on a Southern Railroad
freight train. Wright asked “whether justice in this case is going to be bought
and sold with Jew money from New York”? Ignoring the protests from Patterson’s
New York attorney, Samuel Liebowitz, the jury responded by convicting and
sentencing to death the young black–despite a mountain of evidence (including
the testimony of one of the two original complainants) that the rapes never
occurred.

Two months later, knowing that his action meant the end of his judicial career,
trial judge James Horton set aside the jury’s conviction of Patterson and
ordered a new trial. Asked about his decision, Horton said, “Let justice be
done, though the Heavens may fall.”

Horton’s decision did not end the “Scottsboro Boys” troubles. Trials and
retrials continued for years. Twice the U. S. Supreme Court would, in landmark
decisions, set aside the convictions of “Scottsboro Boys.” Not until 1950 would
the last innocent black find his way out of the Alabama prison system.

The trials of the Scottsboro Boys gave energy to a young civil rights movement,
brought attention to issues of racial, religious,and economic justice in the
South, and made and destroyed political careers. It is a story that shouldn’t
be forgotten.

Douglas Linder
University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law
linderd@umkc.edu

April 2000

No crime in American history– let alone a crime that never occurred–
produced as many trials, convictions, reversals, and retrials as did an
alleged gang rape of two white girls by nine black teenagers on a Southern
Railroad freight run on March 25, 1931.  Over the course of the two
decades that followed, the struggle for justice of the “Scottsboro Boys,”
as the black teens were called, made celebrities out of anonymities, launched
and ended careers, wasted lives, produced heroes, opened southern juries
to blacks, exacerbated sectional strife, and divided America’s political
left.

Hoboeing was a common pastime in the Depression year of 1931. 
For some, riding freights was an appealing adventure compared to the drudgery
and dreariness of their daily lives.  Others hopped rail cars to move
from  one fruitless job search to the next.  Two dozen or so
mainly male–and mainly young–whites and blacks rode the Southern Railroad’s
Chattanooga to Memphis freight on March 25, 1931. Among them were four
black Chattanooga teenagers hoping to investigate a rumor of government
jobs in Memphis hauling logs on the river and five other black teens from
various parts of Georgia.  Four  young whites, two males and
two females dressed in overalls, also rode the train, returning to Huntsville
from  unsuccessful job searches in the cotton mills of Chattanooga.
(LINK TO DIAGRAM OF TRAIN).

Sometime after the train crossed the Alabama border, a white youth walked
across the top of a tank car.  He stepped on the hand of a black youth
named Haywood Patterson, who was hanging on
to its side.  Patterson had friends aboard the train.  A stone-throwing
fight erupted between white youths and a larger group of black youths. 
Eventually, the blacks succeeded in forcing all but one of the members
of the white gang off the train.  Patterson pulled the one remaining
white youth, Orville Gilley, back onto the
train after it had accelerated to a life-endangering speed.  Some
of the whites forced off the train went to the stationmaster in Stevenson
to report what they described as an assault by a gang of  blacks. 
The stationmaster wired ahead. A posse in Paint Rock, Alabama stopped the
train. (LINK TO MAP OF NORTHERN ALABAMA).
Dozens of men with guns rushed at the train as it ground to a halt. 
The armed men rounded up every black youth they could find.  Nine
captured blacks, soon to be called “The Scottsboro
Boys,” were tied together with plow line, loaded on a flatback truck,
and taken to a jail in Scottsboro.

Also greeted by the posse in Paint Rock were two  millworkers from
Huntsville, Victoria Price and Ruby
Bates.  One or the other of the girls, either in response to a
question
or on their own initiative, told one of the posse members that they had
been raped by a gang of twelve blacks with pistols and knives.  In
the jail that March 25th, Price pointed out six of the nine boys and said
that they were the ones who raped her.  The guard reportedly replied,
“If those six had Miss Price, it stands to reason that the others had Miss
Bates.”  When one of the accused,
Clarence Norris, called the girls liars he was struck by a bayonet. 
A crowd of several hundred men, hoping for a good old-fashioned lynching,
surrounded the Scottsboro jail the night of their arrest for rape. 
Their plans were foiled, however, when Alabama’s governor, B. M. Miller,
ordered the National Guard to Scottsboro to protect the suspects.

Trials of the Scottsboro Boys began twelve days after their arrest in
the courtroom of  Judge A. E. Hawkins.  Haywood Patterson described
the scene as “one big smiling white face.”  Many local newspapers
had made their conclusions about the defendants before the trials began. 
One headline read: “ALL NEGROES POSITIVELY IDENTIFIED BY GIRLS AND ONE
WHITE BOY WHO WAS HELD PRISONER WITH PISTOL AND KNIVES WHILE NINE BLACK
FIENDS COMMITTED REVOLTING CRIME.”  Representing the Boys in their
uphill legal battle were Stephen Roddy and Milo Moody. They were no “Dream
Team.”  Roddy was an unpaid and unprepared Chattanooga real estate
attorney who, on the first day of trial, was “so stewed he could hardly
walk straight.”  Moody was a forgetful seventy-year old local attorney
who hadn’t tried a case in decades.

The defense lawyers demonstrated their incompetence in many ways. 
They expressed a willingness to have all nine defendants tried together,
despite the prejudice such a trial might cause to
Roy Wright, for example, who at age twelve was the youngest of the
nine Scottsboro Boys.  (The prosecution, fearing that a single trial
might constitute reversible error, decided to try the defendants in groups
of two or three.)   The cross-examination of Victoria Price lasted
only minutes, while examining doctors R. R. Bridges and John Lynch were
not cross-examined at all. Ruby Bates was not asked about contradictions
between her testimony and that of Price.  The defense offered only
the defendants themselves as witnesses, and their testimony was rambling,
sometimes incoherent, and riddled with obvious misstatements.  Six
of the boys (Andy Wright, Willie Roberson, Charles Weems, Ozie Powell,
Olen Montgomery, and Eugene Williams) denied raping or even having seen
the two girls.  But three others, all who later claimed they did so
because of beatings and threats, said that a gang rape by other defendants
did occur.  Clarence Norris provided what one paper called “the highlight
of the trial” when he said of the other blacks, “They all raped her, everyone
of them.”  No closing argument was offered by defense attorneys. A
local editorialist described the state’s case as “so conclusive as to be
almost perfect.”

Guilty verdicts in the first trial were announced while the second trial
was underway.  The large crowd outside the courthouse let out a roar
of approval that was clearly heard by the second jury inside. When the
four trials were over, eight of the nine Scottsboro Boys had been convicted
and sentenced to death.  A mistrial was declared in the case of twelve-year
old Roy Wright, when eleven of the jurors held out for death despite the
request of the prosecution for only a life sentence in view of his tender
age.

The NAACP, which might have been expected to rush to the defense of
the Scottsboro Boys, did not.  Rape was a politically explosive charge
in the South, and the NAACP was concerned about damage to its effectiveness
that might result if it turned out some or all of the Boys were guilty. 
Instead, it was the Communist Party that moved aggressively to make the
Scottsboro case their own.  The Party saw the case as providing a
great recruiting tool among southern blacks and northern liberals. 
The Communist Party, through its legal arm, the International Labor Defense
(ILD), pronounced the case against the Boys a “murderous frame-up” and
began efforts, ultimately successful,  to be named as their attorneys. 
The NAACP, a slow-moving bureaucracy, finally came to the realization that
the Scottsboro Boys were most likely innocent and that leadership in the
case would have large public relations benefits.  As a last-ditch
effort to beat back the ILD in the battle over representation, NAACP officials
persuaded renowned defense attorney Clarence
Darrow to take their case to Alabama.
But it was by then too late.  The Scottsboro Boys, for better or worse,
cast their lots with the Communists who, in the South, were “treated with
only slightly more courtesy than a gang of rapists.”

In January, 1932, the Alabama Supreme Court, by a 6 – 1 vote, affirmed
all but one of the eight convictions and death sentences.  (The court
ruled that Eugene Williams, age thirteen, should have not been tried as
an adult.)  The cases were appealed to the United States Supreme Court
which overturned the convictions in the landmark case of Powell
vs Alabama.  The Court, 7 – 2, ruled that the right
of the defendants under the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause to 
competent legal counsel had been denied by Alabama.  There would have
to be new trials.

The prosecutor in the retrials was Alabama’s newly elected attorney
general, Thomas Knight, Jr.  Knight’s
father, Thomas Knight, Sr., had authored the Alabama Supreme Court decision
upholding the original convictions.

The ILD selected two attorneys to represent the Scottsboro Boys in the
retrials.  The ILD quieted skeptics who saw the organization caring
more about the benefits it could derive from the case than the Boys’ welfare
by asking Samuel Liebowitz to serve as the lead
defense attorney.  Liebowitz was a New York criminal attorney who
had secured an astonishing record of seventy-seven acquittals and one hung
jury in seventy-eight murder trials.  Liebowitz was often described
as”the next Clarence Darrow.” Liebowitz was a mainline Democrat with no
connections with or sympathies toward the Communist Party. Joseph Brodsky,
the ILD’s chief attorney, was selected to assist Liebowitz.

The Scottsboro Boys spent the two years between their first trials and
the second round, scheduled to begin in March, 1933 in Decatur, in the
deplorable conditions of Depression-era Alabama prisons. While on death
row at Kilby prison, on the very date originally set for their own executions, 
they watched as another inmate was carried off to unsoundproofed death
chamber adjacent to their cells, then listened to the sounds of his electrocution. 
Once or twice a week they were allowed to leave their tiny cells, as they
were handcuffed and walked a few yards down the hall to a shower. An early
visitor found them “terrified, bewildered” like “scared little mice, caught
in a trap.” (LINK TO UNPUBLISHED
1931 RANSDALL REPORT). They fought, they wrote letters if they
could write at all, they thought about girls and life on the outside, they
dreamed of their executions.  As their trial date approached, they
were moved to the Decatur jail, a rat-infested facility that two years
earlier had been condemned as “unfit for white prisoners.”

The second trial of Haywood Patterson opened on March 30, 1933, in the
courtroom of Judge James Horton.  Liebowitz
moved to quash the indictments on the ground that Negroes had been systematically
excluded from jury rolls.  He raised some eyebrows by questioning
the veracity of local jury commissioners and many more when he insisted
that prosecutor Knight stop his practice of calling black witnesses, who
Liebowitz had called to show had never served on juries, by their first
names.  To many local observers it was one thing to defend rapists–
that, after all, is part of the American justice system–, but it was another,
unforgivable thing to come to Alabama and attack their social order and
way of life.  Unsurprisingly, the motion to quash the indictment was
denied.

On April 3, Victoria  (“Big Leg”) Price was called to the stand. 
Direct examination was brief, only sixteen minutes.  Price recounted
her job-hunting trip to Chattanooga, the fight on the train between whites
and blacks, and the gang rape in which Haywood Patterson was one of her
attackers. Prosecutor Knight’s strategy on direct was to cover the essential
facts in a condensed, unadorned way that would provide  few 
opportunities for defense attorneys to expose contradictions with the more
detailed (and implausible)  story she told in the first trials. Liebowitz’s
cross-examination was merciless.  His questions suggested his answers.
There was no Callie Brochie’s boardinghouse in Chattanooga, as Price claimed. 
She was an adulterer who had consorted with Jack Tiller in the Huntsville
freight yards two days before the alleged rape, and it was his semen (or
that of Orville Gilley) that was found in her vagina.  She was a person
of low repute, a prostitute.  She was neither crying, bleeding, or
seriously bruised after the alleged gang rape.  She was fearful of
being arrested for a Mann Act violation (crossing state lines for immoral
purposes) when she met the posse in Paint Rock, so she and Bates made groundless
accusations of rape to deflect attention from their own sins.  Thoughout
the four-hour cross, Price remained sarcastic, evasive, and venomous. 
She used her ignorance and poor memory to her advantage and proved to be
a difficult witness to corner.  On re-direct, Price added a new dramatic
and inflammatory elaboration to her previous account: while she was being
penetrated, she said, her attacker told her that when he pulled his “thing”
out, “you will have a black baby.” (LINK
TO PRICE TESTIMONY).

Dr. R. R. Bridges, the Scottsboro doctor
who examined the girls less than two hours after the alleged rapes, was
the next prosecution witness to take the stand.  He turned out to
be a better witness for the defense.  He did confirm that semen was
found in the vaginas of the two girls (more in the case of Bates than of
Price).   Liebowitz, however,  was able to show on cross-examination
that  the girls were both calm, composed, and free of bleeding and
vaginal damage.  Moreover, the semen that Bridges examined was non-motile,
even though sperm generally live from twelve to forty-eight hours after
intercourse. (LINK TO BRIDGES TESTIMONY).

The prosecution’s best moment came when Arthur Woodall, a member of
the posse who searched the defendants at Paint Rock, was on the stand. 
Woodall testified that he had found a knife on one of the defendants, though
he couldn’t remember which one.  Liebowitz asked Woodall if he had
asked the boy whether it was his knife.  Woodall said that he had,
and that the boy said he had taken it “off the white girl, Victoria Price.” 
The surprised look on Liebowitz’s face caused Knight to clap his hands
and then dash out of the courtroom to hide his glee. Liebowitz moved for
a mistrial, but Judge Horton denied the motion and instead told jurors
they should ignore Knight’s reaction. (LINK
TO WOODALL TESTIMONY).

The prosecution’s only eyewitness to the crime was a farmer named Ory

Dobbins who said he saw the defendants grab Price and Bates as they were
about to leap from the train.  The credibility of the farmer’s testimony
was seriously damaged by Liebowitz on cross, when he asked how it was that
Dobbins could even be sure, given the speed of the train and his considerable
distance from it, that  it was a woman that he saw.  Dobbins
answered, “She was wearing women’s clothes.”  Everyone who had followed
the case knew that Bates and Price both were wearing overalls.  “Are
you sure it wasn’t overalls or a coat?,” Judge Horton asked.  “No
sir, a dress,” Dobbins said. (LINK
TO DOBBINS TESTIMONY).

Defense witnesses were all called to serve a single purpose: to prove
Price a liar and convince the jury that no rape had occurred aboard the
Southern Railroad freight.   Dallas Ramsey, a Chattanooga resident,
testified that he saw Price in the hobo jungle she denied ever having visited.(LINK
TO RAMSEY TESTIMONY).   George
Chamlee, a Chattanooga attorney, testified that his investigation could
turn up no evidence of a Callie Brochie or the boardinghouse that Price
said she owned, and in which Price and Bates allegedly spent the night
prior to her return train trip to Alabama.
(LINK TO CHAMLEE TESTIMONY).Six
of the accused testified, including Willie
Roberson, who testified that on the day of the alleged rape he was
suffering from a serious case of venereal disease and was so weak that
he could not walk without a cane, let alone leap from boxcar to boxcar
as Price had claimed. (LINK
TO ROBERSON TESTIMONY). Ozie Powell proved the weakest of the
accused on the stand, confused and bewildered when asked by Knight on cross
to affirm or disaffirm answers he had given to prosecution questions at
the first trial.  In an attempt to minimize the damage, Liebowitz
asked only, when Knight’s barrage was finished, “Ozie tell us about how
much schooling you have had in your life?”  Powell answered, “about
three months.” (LINK TO POWELL
TESTIMONY).  Knight had considerably less luck with Haywood
Patterson.  In desperation Knight asked Patterson, “Were you tried
in Scottsboro?”  Patterson replied, “I was framed in Scottsboro.” 
An angry Knight shot back, “Who told you to say that?”  Patterson
answered, “I told myself to say it”.(LINK
TO PATTERSON TESTIMONY).

Lester Carter, the twenty-three-year-old traveling companion of Bates
and Price, was one of the defense’s most spectacular witnesses.  Carter,
who Price had denied having known until the day of the alleged crime, testified
that he had met Bates, Price, and Prices’ boyfriend Jack Tiller in a Huntsville
hobo jungle the night before he would travel with the two girls to Chattanooga. 
He told the jury that the night the four were together in the hobo jungle,
and while he began making love to Ruby Bates while Price did the same with
Tiller.  Carter testified that two days later, on the return trip
to Hunstville from Chattanooga, he jumped off the freight train when fighting
broke out between blacks and the outnumbered whites. (LINK
TO CARTER TESTIMONY).

The appearance of the defense’s final and most dramatic witness, Ruby
Bates, might have been taken from the script of a hokey Hollywood movie. 
In the months before the trial, Bates’ whereabouts were a mystery. 
Liebowitz announced that he was resting his case, then approached the bench
and asked for a short recess.  Minutes later National Guardsmen open
the back doors of the courtroom, and– to the astonished gasps of spectators
and the dismay of Knight– in walked Ruby Bates.  Under direct examination,
Bates said a troubled conscience and the advice of famous New York minister
Harry Emerson Fosdick prompted her to return to Alabama to tell the truth
about what happened on March 25, 1931.  Bates said that there was
no rape, that none of the defendants touched her or even spoke to her,
and that the accusations of rape were made after Price told her “to frame
up a story” to avoid morals charges.  On cross-examination, Knight
ripped into Bates, confronting her both with her conflicting testimony
in the first trials and accusations that her new versions of events had
been bought with new clothes and other Communist Party gifts.  He
demanded to know whether he hadn’t told her months before in his office
that he would “punish anyone who made her swear falsely” and that he “did
not want to burn any person that wasn’t guilty.”  “I think you did,”
Bates answered. (LINK TO BATES
TESTIMONY)

In the summations that followed, none was more controversial than that
of Wade Wright, Solicitor of Morgan County, who was assisting Attorney
General Knight in the prosecution.  In a line that would move thousands
of Jews around the country to protest, Wright asked the Patterson jurors
“whether justice in this case is going to be bought and sold with Jew money
from New York?” Liebowitz jumped up and demanded a mistrial, which Judge
Horton refused to declare.  Knight seemed to be embarrassed by his
colleague’s blatantly anti-Semitic appeal and in his own summation told
the jurors, “I do not want a verdict based on racial prejudice or religious
creed.” Knight, however, was himself no model of decorum, referring to
Patterson as “that thing.”

Liebowitz, in his summation, called the accusations of Price the “foul,
contemptible, outrageous lie” of an “abandoned” woman.  He closed
with the Lord’s Prayer and an all-or-nothing appeal to the jury: acquit
them or give them the chair.

At one o’clock on April 8, 1933, the jury was sent out to deliberate
the fate of Haywood Patterson after Judge Horton reminded the jury that
“You are not trying lawyers; you are not trying state lines.”  The
next day the jury emerged from the jury room laughing, leading some in
the defense camp to think that they must have won an acquittal.  They
were wrong.  The jury pronounced Patterson guilty and sentenced him
to death.   The decision on guilt took only five minutes. 
The testimony of Bates wasn’t even considered.  Liebowitz was stunned. 
Safely back in New York after the trial Liebowitz said of the jury that
had just found his client guilty: “If you ever saw those creatures, those
bigots whose mouths are slits in their faces, whose eyes popped out at
you like frogs, whose chins dripped tobacco juice, bewhiskered and filthy,
you would not ask how they could do it.” Ruby Bates returned East with
Liebowitz, then became the leading lady at ILD-sponsored Scottsboro rallies,
where she would beg forgiveness, plead for justice for “The Boys,” and
join in singing The Internationale.

On June 22, 1933, Judge James Horton, described as looking like “Lincoln
without the beard,” convened court in his hometown of Athens, Alabama to
hear a defense motion for a new trial.  Hardly anyone held out hope
that the motion would be granted.  Horton, however, had become convinced
that Price was lying.  Not only was her story full of inconsistencies,
but it was not corroborated by other witnesses or the medical evidence. 
Judge Horton had one additional reason to believe that Patterson was innocent
that remained a secret until years after the trial.  After Dr. Bridges
presented his medical testimony, the prosecution had requested that Dr.
John Lynch, originally listed as a prosecution witness, be excused from
testifying.  His testimony would only be redundant, according to Knight. 
After Horton excused the young doctor, he was approached by Lynch who said
he wanted to talk privately.  Horton and Lynch talked in the courthouse
men’s bathroom while armed guards stood outside the door.  Lynch told
Horton he was convinced that the girls were lying, had told them so to
their faces, and that they merely laughed at him.  Horton urged Lynch
to testify, but Lynch, only a few years out of medical school and just
building a practice in Scottsboro, resisted, saying that to do so would
ruin his career.  Sympathizing with Lynch’s predicament, Horton withdrew
his demand.  Judge Horton, who had to face re-election the next year, 
had been warned that setting aside the jury’s verdict in this case would
be political suicide.  Horton, however, believed one should “let justice
be done, though the heavens may fall.”  To a stunned courtroom, he
announced that he was setting aside the verdict and death sentence, and
ordering a new trial.(LINK TO HORTON
DECISION)  (Horton, who was unopposed the previous time
he ran,  lost his judgeship in the next election.)

Attorney General Knight wasted no time in announcing that the state
was convinced of the Scottsboro Boys’ guilt and would press ahead with
prosecutions.  At the next trial, Knight promised, there would be
corroboration for Price’s story.  Orville Gilley, the one white boy
left on the train when the alleged rapes took place, had agree to testify
for the prosecution. The prosecution had one additional ground for optimism. 
Pressure in the right places had succeeded in getting the new trials transferred
out of Judge Horton’s courtroom.  William
Callahan, a septuagenarian, no nonsense judge, would preside at Haywood
Patterson’s next trial, scheduled for November, 1933.

Judge Callahan was no Judge Horton.  His stated goal was “to debunk”
the Scottsboro cases– to get them off the front pages of America’s newspapers.
(LINK
TO STORIES ON CALLAHAN TRIALS). To cut the trials down to size,
he made it as difficult as possible for reporters to do their job, refused
to ask for troops to protect the defendants or their attorneys, and set
three days as a goal for completing each trial.  During the trials
he acted more like a second prosecutor than a judge, sustaining virtually
every prosecution objection and  overruling virtually every defense
objection.  He cut off all defense inquiry into Price’s chastity,
character, or reputation. When Liebowitz persisted with questioning designed
to suggest Price might have had sex with someone other than a Scottsboro
Boy around March 25, 1931, Callahan sternly reprimanded him.  In his
instructions to the jury, Callahan told them that they should presume that
no white woman in Alabama would consent to sex with a black.  At the
close of his instructions in the Patterson trial, Callahan failed to provide
the jury with the form for an acquittal until the prosecution, fearing
reversible error, urged him to do so.  Patterson said of Callahan,
“He couldn’t get me to the chair fast enough.”

The undisputed star of the third Patterson trial, and the second Norris
trial which immediately followed, was Orville Gilley. Gilley was a charming
and entertaining witness, even offering to recite some of his poetry until
the dour Callahan cut him off, saying “I don’t like poetry.”  Gilley’s
account of the onboard fight and rape differed in many details from that
of Price, but he corroborated her on the essential fact.  Gilley claimed
that the rapes ended only when he convinced the Negroes to stop before
“they killed that woman.”  Why did Gilley suddenly appear as a prosecution
witness when they most needed him?  Knight admitted that he sent weekly
checks to Gilley’s mother and occasional spending money to Gilley. 
Liebowitz contended that Gilley’s reluctant lies were simply a result of
the prosecutor calling in his chips.

Guilty verdicts were quickly returned by juries in both the Patterson
and Norris trials.(LINKS TO NORRIS
TRIAL TESTIMONY: (1)
PRICE
(2)
BRIDGES
(3)
BATES).  Both defendants were sentenced to death. 
Liebowitz angrily promised to appeal the verdicts “to Hell and back.” 
Judge Callahan, in the interest of judicial economy, agreed to postpone
the trials of the remaining seven Scottsboro Boys until the appeals of
the first two had run their course.

On February 15, 1935, the United States Supreme Court heard arguments
in the Patterson and Norris cases.  Liebowitz argued that the convictions
should be overturned because Alabama excluded blacks from its jury rolls
in violation of the equal protection clause of the Constitution. 
The names of blacks that appeared on the jury rolls introduced in Judge
Callahan’s courtroom were, Liebowitz told the justices, forged sometime
after the start of Patterson’s trial.  Chief Justice Charles Evans
Hughes asked Liebowitz if he could prove that allegation.  Liebowitz
had a page bring in the actual jury rolls and a magnifying glass. 
Hughes looked at the rolls, then passed it to the next seated justice,
who then passed it to the next.  Looks of disgust appeared on their
faces.  Six weeks later the Supreme Court announced their decision
in Norris vs. Alabama, unanimously holding
that the Alabama system of jury selection unconstitutional and reversing
the convictions of Norris and Patterson.  Liebowitz said, “I am thrilled
beyond words.”  He hoped that the Court’s decision would convince
Alabama that the Scottsboro cases were no longer worth their economic and
political cost.

The state decided to press ahead with prosecutions as the defense tried
to deal with its own internal problems.  Two ILD lawyers in Nashville
were arrested and charged with trying to bribe Victoria Price to change
her testimony, infuriating Liebowitz, who said the ILD was “assassinating”
the Scottsboro Boys.  Liebowitz, meanwhile, was under criticism himself
for having through his actions at previous trials alienated potential jurors. 
As Haywood Patterson’s fourth trial began in January, 1936, in Judge Callahan’s
courtroom, Liebowitz agreed to let a local attorney named Charles Watts
play the more visible role while he coached from a seat behind.

No surprise to anyone, Patterson was again convicted of rape. 
What was surprising, however, was that the jury sentenced him to seventy-five
years in prison rather than giving him the death sentence the prosecution
requested.  One determined Methodist on the jury succeeded in persuading
the other eleven to go along with his “compromise.”  The verdict represented
the first time in the history of Alabama that a black man convicted of
raping a white woman had not been sentenced to death.

Another surprising development occurred as the Scottsboro Boys, who
had been in Decatur to testify in Patterson’s trial, were being transported
by guards back to their Birmingham prison. 
Ozie Powell, while handcuffed in the backseat of a car, managed to
extract a pen knife from a pocket and slash the neck of a deputy sheriff,
seriously injuring him.  The sheriff, who was driving, slammed on
the brakes, got out of the car, and shot Powell in the head.  The
sheriff called Powell’s action an escape attempt. Powell said he took the
action out of a growing fear that they would be murdered on the road, and
complained that  his hands were raised in the air when he was shot. 
Powell teetered on the verge of death, but survived.  He suffered
permanent brain damage, however.  According to Clarence Norris, Powell
was never the same again.

In 1936 there was the first serious talk of compromise in what had become,
in the eyes of many, the case of The White People of Alabama vs. The
Rest of the World.  Allan Knight Chalmers, head of the Scottsboro
Defense Committee, eschewed diatribe and worked to build an understanding
of the facts of the case among influential Alabamians by, for example,
distributing copies of Judge Horton’s decision throughout the state. 
In December of 1936, while Patterson’s appeal was still pending and the
other eight blacks awaited their trials, Thomas Knight met secretly with
Samuel Liebowitz in New York to discuss a compromise.  Knight told
Liebowitz that the cases were draining Alabama financially and politically,
and that he himself was sick of it all.  He offered to drop the prosecutions
of three, and give the others no more than ten years for either rape or
assault. Liebowitz was understandably reluctant to accept any deal that
included more jail time time for any of his innocent clients, but Knight
had a strong bargaining position: guilty or not, any trial was almost certain
to result in conviction.  Liebowitz agreed to the compromise “with
a heavy heart.”  Before it could be implemented, however, the compromise
was thrown into doubt by the sudden death of Thomas Knight in May, 1937. 
One week later, Judge Callahan announced that the next round of trials
would begin in July.

Seven of the nine Scottsboro Boys had been held in jail for over six
years without trial by the time jury selection began in the third trial
of Clarence Norris on Monday, July 12, 1937.  Trying to beat the hundred
degree heat, Judge Callahan rushed the trial even more than usual, and
by Wednesday morning the prosecution had a death sentence. Andy Wright’s
trial was next; he got ninety-nine years.  On Saturday, July 24 at
eleven o’clock, Charlie Weem’s jury
returned and gave him seventy-five years. Moments later, Ozie Powell was
brought into court and the new prosecutor, Thomas Lawson, announced that
the state was dropping rape charges against Powell and that he was pleading
guilty to assaulting a deputy.  Then came the big news.  Lawson
announced that all charges were being dropped against the remaining four
defendants: Willie Roberson, Olen Montgomery,
Eugene
Williams, and Roy Wright.  He said that after “careful consideration”
every prosecutor was “convinced” that Roberson and Montgomery were “not
guilty.”  Wright and Williams, regardless of their guilty or innocence,
were twelve and thirteen at the time and, in view of the jail time they
had already served, justice required that they also be released. Liebowitz
led the four from the jail to an awaiting car, and with an escort of state
troopers they were driven to the Tennessee border. (LINK
TO PHOTO OF LIEBOWITZ AND FOUR AFTER RELEASE). Free of Alabama,
but not of the label “Scottsboro Boy” or from the wounds inflicted by six
years in prison, they went on with their separate lives: to marriage, to
alcoholism, to jobs, to fatherhood, to hope, to disillusionment, to disease,
or to suicide.

For the five Scottsboro Boys left in Alabama, they had a new demon with
which to contend.  Each of the five was convinced that their continued
confinement bought the freedom of the others, and they resented it deeply. 
They struggled with life in hellholes of prisons.  Atmore Prison,
near Mobile, was a desperate place teeming with poisonous snakes, sadistic
guards, and rapacious prisoners.  Kilby Prison, near Birmingham, housed
Alabama’s electric chair; one of Haywood Patterson’s jobs was to carry
out the bodies of electrocuted inmates.  They sodomized or were sodomized;
they assaulted or were assaulted.  They survived, but barely.

In 1938, a pardon for all of the Scottsboro Boys left in Alabama seemed
all but assured.  Governor Bibb Graves
was anxious to end the whole Scottsboro episode before he left office,
and told Scottsboro Defense Committee head Allan Chalmers that the five
would be released after he had his traditional pre-pardon interviews with
each in his office.  The interviews, however, could hardly have gone
worse.  First, Haywood Patterson was found to be carrying a knife
when he was searched on his way to the interview.  Patterson claimed
he always carried a knife for protection, but authorities assumed the worst. 
Second, brain-damaged Ozie Powell refused to answer Graves questions, saying
“I don’t want to say nothing to you.”  Third, according to Graves’
account, Clarence Norris threatened to kill Haywood Patterson, with whom
he had been feuding bitterly, after his release.  Finally, none of
the Scottsboro Boys admitted any knowledge or guilt concerning a rape aboard
the Chattanooga to Memphis freight–a rape that Graves still believed occurred.
Graves left office without issuing the pardons.

Either through paroles or escapes all of the Scottsboro Boys eventually
found their way out of Alabama.  Charles Weems was paroled in 1943,
Ozie Powell and  Clarence Norris in 1946, and Andy
Wright, the last to leave Alabama for good (Wright had been paroled
earlier, then returned because of a parole violation) in June, 1950. 
Haywood Patterson managed a dramatic escape in 1948.  Patterson and
Norris each went on to participate in the writing of books about their
lives.  Patterson’s book, Scottsboro Boy, was published in
1950 while he was a fugitive.  Shortly after its publication, Patterson
was arrested by the FBI, but the Governor G. Mennen Williams of Michigan
refused Alabama’s extradition request.  Norris published his book,
The
Last of the Scottsboro Boys, in 1979.  Ten years later, on January
23, 1989, the last of the Scottsboro Boys was dead.

The story of the Scottsboro Boys lives on through the efforts of artists
and scholars.  Leadbelly recorded a song, “Scottsboro Boys.” (LINK
TO AUDIO CLIP FROM SONG).  Dan T. Carter published his
award-winning Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South in 1969.
A movie, Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys, was shown on NBC
in 1976. ( One inaccuracy in Carter’s book was relied on to the movie producer’s
detriment: Carter reported that Ruby Bates and Victoria Price had died
in 1961, when in fact at the time of the movie’s release they were both
alive and well, and Victoria Price at least was ready to sue for defamation.
Her suit was dismissed by a federal appeals court.) (LINK
TO INFORMATION ABOUT PRICE’S CIVIL SUIT). James
Goodman published Stories of Scottsboro, a superb recounting
of the Scottsboro tragedy from multiple perspectives,  in 1994. 
At this writing, in October, 1998, a new documentary on the Scottsboro
Boys is in production.

The story of the Scottsboro Boys is one of the most shameful examples
of injustice in our nation’s history.  It makes clear that in the
Deep South of the 1930’s, jurors were not willing to accord a black charged
with raping a white woman the usual presumption of innocence.  In
fact, one may argue that the presumption seemed reversed: a black was presumed
guilty unless he could establish his innocence beyond a reasonable doubt. 
The cases show that to jurors, black lives didn’t count for much. 
The jurors that in April, 1933 had just voted to sentence Haywood Patterson
to death were seen laughing as they emerged from the juryroom.  Hannah
Arendt wrote of “the banality of evil.”  Evil rarely comes in the
form of monsters, but rather in the form of relatively normal people who,
for reasons of careers, ideology,  or a desire for society’s approval,
are indifferent to the human consequences of their actions.  Because
of indifferent jurors and career-motivated prosecutors,  the self-serving
and groundless accusations of a single woman were allowed to change forever
the lives of nine black teenagers who found themselves in the wrong place
at the wrong time.

It is easy, especially for a Minnesota native like myself, to look at
the story of the Scottsboro Boys and to condemn a whole region of the country. 
That, however, is unfair.  There were good people of the South–courageous
newspaper editors, attorneys, ministers, and others– who fought for justice
for the Scottsboro Boys. One southerner’s actions stand out above all others. 
The decision of Judge James Horton to set aside the conviction of Haywood
Patterson, despite the dire consequences that decision would have for his
own career, was heroism, pure and simple.