Haywood Patterson: Scottsboro Boy

Context

The Scottsboro case began in many ways during Reconstruction, which preceded it by about sixty years. After the American Civil War, the United States promised to give equal rights, including the right to vote, to African Americans. To this end, the Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing equal protection of the laws and the right to due process, and the Fifteenth Amendment, requiring that the vote not be restricted on the basis of race, were passed. However, these guarantees were only as strong as the people enforcing them, and interest in equal rights for African Americans, both in the North and in the South, waned quickly. Americans disputed the outcome of the election of 1876 between the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and the Democrat Samuel Tilden, and the resulting Compromise of 1877 gave concessions to the Democrats in return for their accepting Hayes’s election. With that compromise, federal troops were withdrawn from the South, and southern whites were given free rein to treat blacks as they chose.

Most southern states limited opportunities for African Americans. Around 1900, Jim Crow laws sprang up in the South, segregating facilities and removing nearly all blacks from the voting rolls. The overall legal restrictions on blacks throughout the South were extensive. Separate schools, water fountains, bathrooms, and even separate Bibles in courtrooms existed—and the separate facilities were not at all equal. Extralegal measures such as lynchings were also used against African Americans; it has been estimated that between 1865 and 1930 more than four thousand lynchings took place in the United States, most in the South and with most victims being black. The alleged offenses that brought about lynchings of blacks could be anything from making an improper advance to a white woman to failing to step aside when a white approached. The most publicized cause (though it factored in only a small percentage of cases) was accusations of rape, almost always by a white woman against a black man. This was the accusation made against the Scottsboro boys, and it almost resulted in their lynchings.

The Scottsboro boys’ cases were also a product of the Great Depression. Besides causing millions to lose their jobs, the depression prompted huge numbers of people to migrate in search of work. While the most famous were the Okies, depicted in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, millions of others, both black and white, migrated as well. Three groups of migrants played a role in the Scottsboro incident: a group of white youths, a group of black youths (the Scottsboro boys), and two white girls.

In March of 1931, the nine Scottsboro boys, ranging in age from twelve to nineteen (Clarence Norris, Charles Weems, Haywood Patterson, Olen Montgomery, Ozie Powell, Willie Roberson, Eugene Williams, Roy Wright, and Andy Wright) were riding a freight train from Chattanooga to Memphis, Tennessee—four of them looking for work. (The youths were not all traveling together and did not all know each other.) Also traveling as hobos on the train was a group of white youths and two women. A few of the black youths got into a fight with the white youths and pushed some of the whites off the train. The white youths complained to the station master at Stevenson, Alabama, and the train was held at the next stop and searched by a deputized posse of fifty men. The nine African American youths, some of whom were in different parts of the train from where the fight occurred, were all arrested for assault. The two white girls, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, who were prostitutes, were found on the train as well. Bates and Price, fearing that they would be arrested, accused the blacks of raping them. The nine blacks were taken to Scottsboro, Alabama, and jailed for trial, giving the case its name.

The youths were indicted for rape (a capital offense) on March 30. None of them was represented by an attorney. Most of them were illiterate, and none had any knowledge of criminal law or court procedure. The judge had ordered the Alabama bar to find attorneys for the defense, but when the trial started on April 6, no attorney had come forward. Finally, the youths’ parents found two attorneys: a Chattanooga real estate lawyer, Stephen Roddy, and Milo Moody, a lawyer who had not defended a case at trial in decades. This was an inauspicious start to a complicated process that played out in the courts over the course of four trials and nineteen years. By 1950, all the Scottsboro boys had been released.

The Scottsboro boys’ case was unique in a number of ways. It was the first to focus long-term international attention on African Americans in the South. The Scottsboro cases were also the first that the U.S. Supreme Court heard twice, and they resulted in two landmark rulings. The first was Powell v. Alabama (1932), in which the Supreme Court reversed the convictions of the youths sentenced to death by the Alabama courts on the ground that they had lacked effective counsel and had not received a fair trial as mandated by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the second case, Norris v. Alabama (1935), the Court ruled that blacks had to be included on the voting rolls—and thus in the jury pool—in order to have a fair trial. African Americans had been systematically excluded from the grand jury that indicted Clarence Norris and from the trial jury that convicted him, and so his conviction was overturned.

These cases were some of the longest in American history, even though no physical evidence suggested that any rape had occurred. They also were among the first in nearly sixty years, since perhaps the end of Reconstruction, in which blatant racism received front-page coverage not just in African American newspapers but in many mainstream white newspapers as well. In addition to the racism of the trials, racism and chicanery became evident at the Supreme Court hearings. To attempt to answer the defense’s argument that there were no African Americans on the jury rolls, someone in the local government added the names of black voters at the end of the rolls before sending them to the Supreme Court. It was an inept and obvious forgery, and when the rolls were produced at the Supreme Court the justices were outraged.

In some ways, the cases also demonstrated progress toward civil rights. They showed that the national and international communities would pay attention to a case in the South and would put pressure upon the South to ensure that justice was done, even if it took nineteen years. They likewise showed progress, sadly enough, in that there was a trial at all. A lynch mob of nearly a hundred people gathered right after the nine were arrested, but this mob was unable to take any action. The state was also unable to carry out its own legal lynching, even though it tried to do so on several occasions, in that death sentences were often imposed simply on the word of one accuser. The fact that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Communist International Labor Defense were willing to spend the time and money to defend the boys also suggests a kind of progress. Before the 1930s such a case in the South might very well have been swept under the rug. That the cases went to the U.S. Supreme Court twice was unprecedented; before the 1930s the Supreme Court largely ignored race relations when it could. Progress is also evident in the Supreme Court’s willingness to twice rule in favor of the Scottsboro boys; before the 1930s most legal rulings disadvantaged blacks. No defense attorneys were required at all for anyone when the trial started, and prison officials were allowed to listen in on conversations between defense counsel and their clients at the time of the case. Such practices are no longer allowed.