Haywood Patterson: Scottsboro Boy

About the Author

Haywood Patterson, one of the leading defendants in the Scottsboro case, was born in Elberton, Georgia, in 1913 and then moved to Tennessee. He quit school after the third grade and took to riding the railways in the early years of the Great Depression, in search of work. He was viewed as the most violent and strong-willed of the defendants. For his alleged role in the Scottsboro affair, he was tried for rape four times and was sentenced to death three times. Two of the sentences were overturned, and a third was set aside. The fourth time, Patterson was sentenced to seventy-five years in jail, but he escaped from prison in 1948, ending up in Detroit.

While in Detroit, he wrote his memoir, Scottsboro Boy, which was published in June of 1950. Soon after its publication, he was arrested by the FBI. Alabama sought his extradition in order to return him to prison, but a large outcry and letter-writing effort persuaded the governor of Michigan not to extradite him. Later that year he was arrested after a barroom brawl in which a man died. Patterson was charged with murder and convicted of manslaughter in his third trial on the counts. He served about a year in prison, dying in 1952 from cancer at the age of thirty-nine.

Earl Conrad was born in 1912 in New York and worked primarily as a journalist. He also authored more than twenty books of history and criticism and ghostwrote several biographies, including one of the actor Errol Flynn. Several of his works focus on African Americans, including Harriet Tubman: Negro Soldier and Abolitionist (1942). Conrad died in 1986.