In the 1930s the economic situation was bad for poor people all over the United States. There was no work for men or for women. Hoboing, also called riding the rails, was a common method of traveling for people with no money who were looking for work. People jumped onto moving trains then climbed into an empty freight train box; that is unless they were lucky enough to sneak on while the train was at a stop. A lot of traveling was done this way by people looking for jobs so they could afford to eat.
The Event and Immediate Aftermath
On March 25, 1931 two women, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, both of them white and dressed in overalls, were hoboing on a Southern railroad train. They had been working at a cotton mill in Huntsville, Alabama that had shut down. On that day a group of nine young black males and some white men were also riding the rails on that train; a fight broke out between the black youths and the white men. The white men lost the fight and complained to the stationmaster about the boys. The stationmaster called ahead to Painted Rock. A posse of angry white Southern men stopped the train in Painted Rock, Arkansas. After the women had been taken off the train for about twenty minutes they started claiming that they had been raped by all of the nine black youths. The black youths were aged 13 years old to 20 years old. (Ritterhouse, 2009, 464)
All nine of the black males were taken to the Scottsboro prison and locked up. The Governor of Alabama was alerted by the sheriff to a lynch mob surrounding the jail. The Governor at the time, Governor Benjamin Meeks Miller, sent the National Guard to protect the prisoners. Five days later the nine Scottsboro Boys were indicted by a Grand Jury. After only nine days a death sentence had been passed on eight of the boys. The ninth boy was 13 years old at the time and the jury ended up with 11 voting for a death sentence and 1 juror voting for life imprisonment, a hung jury. None of the jury members were black they were all white. (Scottsboro, 2000, PBS)
The news of this situation traveled to the North fast and caused a shock wave among progressive people and organizations. Death sentences for a group of young black males decided in such a short period of time was called the ‘Alabama frame-up.’ The two organizations that immediately offered to pay for a good lawyer to launch an appeal were the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the International Labor Defense (I.L.D.), a Communist group. (Scottsboro, 2000, PBS)
The Scottsboro boys were Clarence Norris, Charlie Weems, Haywood Patterson, Olen Montgomery, Ozie Powell, Willie Roberson, Eugene William, Andy Wright and Roy Wright. They had the terrible misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Because the women were white and also hoboing on the train, a convenient charge of rape was made. It was convenient because the boys were African American.
Southern Race Relations
The three groups riding the rails that day had many things in common. The black boys, the white men and the white women were all at the same level of economic destitution caused by the Crash of 1929. Dorr (as cited by Bailey & Green, 1999) has thoroughly researched records of the time which denote race (white or black). Those records included birth, prison records and arrest records. She studied case of black males accused of raping white women and found that the myth was being kept alive of a great fear of black man on white woman rape, but in fact it was a myth. (Dorr as cited by Bailey & Green, 1999, 259)
In Alabama poor whites and blacks were living together in mixed communities. In the arrest and trial records against black men accused of raping white women she found many examples of white neighbors and white slave owners standing up for the rights of the accused black men. Based on Dorr’s meticulous research old research is being proved wrong. Bailey and Green (1999) note that the old studies reporting rigid roles for Southern blacks and whites may have been true for exceptionally dramatic cases that made the headlines but in daily life there was not the rigidity popularly assumed (259).
Bailey and Green (1999) discuss the complications and contradictions the boys were facing. At the time the upper white Southern class seemed to agree that the women were not pure and innocent as the prosecutors portrayed them. On the other hand, the fact that the I.L.D. was a Communist organization and the NACCP was “a nigger front for the communist Jews” then anything was possible (Bailey & Green, 1999, 112). The boys may have even been paid to commit the rapes by progressive Northern groups claimed some Southerners. (Bailey & Green, 1999, 112) Sommerville (2004) emphasizes the same point.
A courtroom observer in the Scottsboro rape trial in 1933 took exception to the defense attorney’s attempt to discredit the accuser’s testimony, claiming she was “a ‘lewd woman’” and a “’girl tramp.’” The observer countered, falling into step with white supremacy rhetoric, that she “might be a fallen woman, but by God she is a white woman.” Perhaps (though) we have erred in assuming that this white man spoke for the majority of white southerners. (Sommerville, 2004, 259)
Lawyers and Courts
An appeal was launched by the youths and their parents, the NAACP, the I.L.D. On June 22, 1931 due to their efforts and the power of the public support for the Scottsboro Boys the Alabama Supreme Court agreed to hear the case so the executions were delayed. On March 24, 1932 the Alabama Supreme Court upheld the death penalty for all the Scottsboro Boys except for the youngest Eugene Williams.
Although the U.S. Supreme Court does not usually take this type of case on May 27, 1932 it agreed to take the case of Powell v. Alabama. Their decision on November 7, 1932 held that their 14th Amendment rights had been denied because they had not been allowed counsel. The case was then sent to the lower courts. The NAACP was no longer involved in the trials but the I.L.D. asked Samuel Leibowitz to take the case in January of 1933. A new trial begins with Haywood Patterson on March 27, 1933. The venue had been changed to Decatur, Alabama and a new judge was presiding over the case.
The defense calls Ruby Davis as a witness and she admits the accusations had been fabricated. Both of the women had had sex with their boyfriends so that is why semen was evident during the doctor’s exam. The doctor who had examined the women agreed the semen was not fresh and that Price showed no bruises or other signs of a struggle. Yet the doctor does not answer to the question of the age of the semen. Despite all this new evidence Haywood Patterson on April 9, 1933 is found guilty and again receives the death penalty. Later in April the judge suspends Patterson’s sentence due to a new trial motion. He also postpones all the other trials due to the terrible tension in Decatur over the trials.
A new judge takes the cases in his court except for both Wright and Williams whose cases were now being heard in the Juvenile Court. Under the different judge both Patterson’s and Norris’s cases ended with guilty and death sentence jury decisions.
In the summer of 1934 Leibowitz calls for new trials because of tampering of the names on the jury rolls. No blacks were allowed on the juries. Since the Alabama Supreme Court denies the request, Leibowitz takes the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, Norris v. Alabama. Again the Supreme Court determines the defendants were not given their 14th Amendment rights to a trial of their peers so the case was overturned.
In December of 1935 a local attorney, Clarence Watts, takes on the defense because of the public opinion against Leibowitz (because he is Jewish) and against the I.L.D. (because they are a Communist organization).
Through all this time of trials and retrials the defendants were held in jail. Eventually some of the cases were dropped many years after the original arrests. Some were imprisoned and later paroled. In 1950 Andy Wright was released from jail at the age of about 38 or 39 years old. (Ogletree, 2009, 38 - 39). After coming forward in 1933 with the truth that the accusations were not true, Ruby Davis, apologized to the boys and their families. She joined in speaking tours to explain her part in the arrest and imprisonment of the Scottsboro Boys. (Scottsboro, 2000, PBS)
Conclusion
In August 2009 the U.S. Supreme Court acted on a similar case where a black was sentenced to death although the testimony of witnesses was contradictory. This was the trial of Troy Davis. People from all over the world were protesting the execution, even former President Carter and the Pope. The U.S. Supreme Court “direct(ed) a district court in Georgia to conduct an evidentiary hearing on the possible innocence of a death row inmate” (Roko, 2012, 107) the U.S. Justice Scalia wrote in a dissent to decision by upholding a new trial that “The Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is “actually” innocent.” ((Roko, 2012, 107) This statement demonstrates that even contradictory evidence, recanting of previous testimony by witnesses and other proofs of innocence are inconsequential. On September 11, 2011 Troy Davis was put to death by the state of Georgia. (Kuperstein, 2011)
Other cases of innocent blacks and whites (all poor) who have been executed by state court mechanisms are on record. There still seems to be a long distance to justice. The success of the Scottsboro Boys case was that the injustices are not held secret forever but are seeing the light of day. Juries need to be filled with the peers of the defendant. Defendants’ 14th Amendment Rights must be respected. But with the contemporary cases of injustice maybe the assumption that these cases are due to the deep racism in the South has to be reexamined. The racism of both the South and the North needs to be faced head on and healed in order to avoid more miscarriages in justice.
Bailey, F.Y. and Green, Alice P. Law never here: A social history of African-American responses to issues of crime and justice. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999.
Dorr, Lisa Lunquist in Sommerville Black on White Rape and retribution in Twentieth Century Virginia, After WWII events White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900-1960 as cited in Bailey, F.Y. and Green, Alice P. Law never here: A social history of African-American responses to issues of crime and justice. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999. p. 259.
Kuperstein, S. 2011 September 22 Troy Davis Executed After Supreme Court Denies Request For Stay Of Execution Accessed 8 May 2012 from <http://www.hiphopdx.com/index/news/id.16912/title.troy-davis-executed-after-supreme-court-denies-request-for-stay-of-execution>
Ritterhouse, J. ‘Scottsboro and Its Legacy: The cases that challenged American legal and social justice.’ Journal of Social History. 43(2). 2009, pp. 464+
Roko, E. ‘Finality, Habeas, Innocence, and the Death Penalty: Can Justice Be Done?’ Washington Law Review, 85(1), 2010, 107+.
Scottsboro: An American Tragedy. 2000. American Experience. PBS.org. Web. Accessed 1 May 2012 from <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/scottsboro/index.html>.
Sommerville, D. M. Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South. Chapel Hill, NC: NCUPress 2004
