Stories of Scottsboro.

• Author: Landsman, Stephan

1. AN INTRODUCTION TO THE SCOTTSBORO LITIGATION(1)

   On a chilly morning in March 1931, a score or more teenage hoboes boarded a Southern Railroad freight train in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Some time later, as the train pulled out of Stevenson, Alabama, on its westward journey to Memphis, Tennessee, black hoboes and white hoboes got into a fight. The blacks won and forced all but one of their white antagonists to alight from the moving train. The white boys immediately ran back to Stevenson to complain to the stationmaster about the blacks and to "press charges against 'em."(2) The stationmaster called ahead to the Jackson County, Alabama, Sheriff in Scottsboro to have the train stopped. As luck would have it, the train had just left Scottsboro. Undeterred, the Scottsboro Sheriff, M.L. Wann, called ahead to Paint Rock, Alabama, and ordered one of his deputies to assemble an armed posse to "capture every negro on the train and bring them to Scottsboro."(3)

   When the posse stopped the train, it took nine black youths into custody, thus beginning one of the most significant cases in American legal history. It began because, in addition to the nine black teenagers, the posse found two young white women on the train. After hesitating briefly, the women charged the youths with gang rape. The arrested boys were taken from Paint Rock to Scottsboro amidst growing public hostility. Confronted by an angry mob, Sheriff Wann called the Alabama Governor, Benjamin Meeks Miller, who dispatched the National Guard to Scottsboro to prevent the enraged citizens from lynching the black hoboes.

   The accused boys were indicted on March 31 and tried on capital rape charges beginning on April 6, 1931. No counsel agreed to represent them until the morning of the first day of the first trial. The lawyers who eventually took the boys' cases were incapable of preventing the proceedings from degenerating into travesties of justice in which prejudice and terror won out over fair consideration of the facts. Scottsboro juries condemned all the boys to death, save thirteen-year-old Roy Wright. In Wright's case, the jury hung eleven to one in favor of the death penalty despite the prosecution's specific request for life imprisonment.

   At this point, the Scottsboro trials departed from the pattern established in previous Southern interracial rape cases. Lawyers from the International Labor Defense (ILD), a Communist Party front organization, contacted the boys and eventually became their counsel. The ILD and its allies turned the Scottsboro case into a cause celebre discussed in newspapers and at rallies across the nation. The ILD lawyers appealed the verdicts in the boys' cases, first to the Alabama Supreme Court and later to the U.S. Supreme Court. The latter heard oral argument in the boys' cases on October 10, 1932. In its precedent-setting decision, Powell v. Alabama,(4) the Court ruled:

   In the light of the facts outlined in the forepart of this opinion -- the ignorance and illiteracy of the defendants, their youth, the circumstances of public hostility, the imprisonment and the close surveillance of the defendants by the military forces, the fact that their friends and families were all in other states and communication with them necessarily difficult, and above all that they stood in deadly peril of their lives -- we think the failure of the trial court to give them reasonable time and opportunity to secure counsel was a clear denial of due process.(5)

   The Powell decision was a dramatic departure for the intensely conservative Supreme Court of the early 1930s. It marked the beginning of heightened Supreme Court sensitivity to the inequitable treatment the criminal justice system accorded African Americans and demonstrated the Court's willingness to utilize the Constitution to redress palpably unfair criminal trial procedures.(6)

   The Court returned the Scottsboro case to the Alabama courts for retrial. The ILD persuaded one of the finest criminal trial lawyers of the day, New Yorker Samuel Leibowitz, to represent the boys. On March 27, 1933, after a change of venue, the first of the retrials began before Judge James E. Horton in Decatur, Alabama. Leibowitz vigorously challenged both the exclusion of African Americans from the jury and the merits of the State's case. Although Judge Horton ultimately overruled the defense challenge to the jury system, he found that Leibowitz had established a "prima facie" case regarding the exclusion of blacks from the jury. At trial Leibowitz brutally attacked the character and credibility of one of the alleged rape victims, Victoria Price, focusing especially on her lack of chastity and her sexual activity in the forty-eight hours before she claimed the boys assaulted her. Leibowitz convincingly demonstrated that a doctor's examination conducted shortly after Price made the charges undercut her claims. Leibowitz concluded the defense case by calling the second alleged rape victim, Ruby Bates, to the stand. She denied that any rape had taken place. Despite the defense's strong presentation and in the glare of national publicity, the all-white jury convicted defendant Haywood Patterson and sentenced him to death. In June 1933, Judge Horton overturned the jury verdict, holding that the prosecution had not proved Patterson's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and ordered a new trial.

   Judge Horton's ruling incensed the majority of white Alabamans. The Alabama Attorney General, Thomas Knight Jr., and others worked furiously to remove Judge Horton from the case and to try the defendants as speedily as possible. Knight realized both of these objectives in October 1933, when Horton withdrew and was replaced by Judge William Callahan, the second judge in the Decatur district. Callahan increased the pace of the litigation and sought to thwart the defense counsel at almost every turn. Despite the judge's resistance, however, Leibowitz again presented substantial proof of jury segregation. At trial Callahan placed a series of new impediments in the defense's way. He blocked virtually all references to Victoria Price's character and refused to allow any discussion of her sexual conduct in the hours before the rape. The latter decision was especially damaging because it prevented the defense from providing any alternative explanation for the semen found during Price's medical examination after the alleged assault. Without hesitation jurors convicted Haywood Patterson and Clarence Norris, the two Scottsboro defendants brought before them. The length and bitterness of the trials, however, led to the postponement of further hearings while Leibowitz appealed these two decisions.

   In the aftermath of these trials, the U.S. Supreme Court, for a second time, accepted a Scottsboro case for review, Norris v. Alabama.(7) In February 1935, the Court heard Samuel Leibowitz argue forcefully that the record clearly demonstrated Alabama's jury segregation and that such segregation was unconstitutional. The presence of a Jackson County, Alabama, jury roll that had been tampered with to make it appear that a small number of black residents were eligible to serve as jurors bolstered Leibowitz's argument. On April 1, 1935, the Supreme Court declared that Alabama had unlawfully excluded African Americans from its juries and required Alabama to overturn the Scottsboro convictions.(8)

   In the face of continuing national scrutiny, the case returned to Judge Callahan's Morgan County courtroom in January 1936. Again, Samuel Leibowitz appeared on behalf of Haywood Patterson. Again, Judge Callahan sharply curtailed the defendant's case. And, again, the jury convicted based on the dubious testimony of Victoria Price. The difference was that, for the first time, an Alabama jury fixed a penalty less than death -- a seventy-five-year jail term. This "loss" shocked the prosecution. It withdrew from a set of cooperative procedural agreements with the defense and, thereby, forced another postponement of the proceedings. As the angry defendants were being transferred back to jail after the Patterson trial, defendant Ozie Powell slashed the throat of a deputy sheriff. This act set off an uproar in Alabama, where people demanded swift punishment for the defendant, and across the nation, where many more sympathetic citizens called for an explanation of the brutal and suspicious conduct of corrections officials.

   Both sides were wearying of the courtroom contest and constant media scrutiny by the end of 1936. In December of that year Prosecutor Knight and Leibowitz negotiated an apparent bargain. Because of Judge Callahan's intractability, however, this deal fell apart, and in July 1937, another round of trials began. Alabama jurors convicted three defendants of rape, Clarence Norris, Andrew Wright, and Charley Weems. Ozie Powell pleaded guilty to assaulting the deputy in the throat-slashing incident. Immediately thereafter, under somewhat mysterious circumstances, the state released the remaining four Scottsboro boys -- Eugene Williams, Olen Montgomery, Willie Roberson, and Roy Wright -- without further proceedings. The prosecutions came to an end with five boys incarcerated and four boys free on precisely the same evidence. In June 1950, the state paroled the last of the defendants held in an Alabama prison. The defendants had been through eleven jury trials. They had been convicted in each trial on the flimsiest of evidence. They had been convicted despite overwhelming national criticism, representation by one of the best criminal defense lawyers in the country, and two favorable decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court. Although the Scottsboro boys escaped the death penalty, they were never able to convince an Alabama jury of their innocence.

   The Scottsboro saga has had a significant impact on American law and history. For Northerners it dramatized one of the most vicious aspects of Southern racism. For Southerners it raised all sorts of questions about...