Haywood Patterson: Scottsboro Boy

Essential Quotes

“But it happens in the South most poor whites feel they are better than Negroes and a black man has few rights.”

“Round about dusk hundreds of people gathered around the jail-house. ‘Let these niggers out,’ they yelled. We could hear it coming in the window. ‘If you don’t, we’re coming in after them.’ White people were running around like mad ants, white ants, sore that someone had stepped on their hill. We heard them yelling like crazy about how they were coming in after us and what ought to be done with us.”

“When Bailey [the prosecutor] finished with me he said to the jury: ‘Gentlemen of the jury, I don’t say give that nigger the chair. I’m not going to tell you to give him the electric chair. You know your duty. I’m not going to tell you to give the nigger a life sentence. All I can say is, hide him. Get him out of our sight.’”

“It was never in me to rape, not a black and not a white woman. Only a Negro who is a fool or a crazy man, he would chance his life for anything like that. A Negro with sound judgment and common sense is not going to do it. They are going to take his life away from him if he does. Every Negro man in the South knows that.”

“I could hardly make out the words in the book. The little training in reading I had had I never much followed up. Never read no papers, no books, nothing. I did not know how to pronounce things, could not even say ‘Alabama’ so you could understand me.… But the Bible felt solid in my hands.”