Haywood Patterson: Scottsboro Boy

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Scottsboro Boy covers Patterson’s interaction with the Alabama prison system during his trial and years of incarceration. After telling of the trial and his convictions, Patterson discusses his life over his seventeen years in various Alabama prisons. The eleven-chapter book ends with his escape from prison in 1948. Four chapters are excerpted here.

Chapter 1

The book begins with Patterson’s recounting of the train journey that led to the black youths’ arrests and trials. He assumes that everyone knows about riding the railways and does not explain why they were riding. Patterson then replays the interchange between himself and the white boys that led to the fight and explains why and how he resisted, noting how southern whites frequently felt that African Americans had no rights. He notes, too, that it is often forgotten that there were quite a few other African Americans on the train who were not arrested along with the Scottsboro boys. After the blacks had won a fight with some of the whites and forced them off the train, the whites complained to a station agent. The agent phoned ahead to the next stop, and the boys were arrested in the small town of Paint Rock, Alabama. Given the racial politics of the time, the word of the whites was accepted over any presumed innocence of the blacks. Further, the station agent failed to ask whether the whites were also fighting and to perhaps arrest them for illegally riding on the train. Patterson then describes the boys and points out that not all of those involved in the fight were arrested and that some were arrested solely for being black. After being taken to Scottsboro, they were accused of rape. Patterson describes the scene at night with the mob outside yelling for the chance to lynch the boys. He remarks that the lynchings might have happened if it were not for the opposition of the sheriff and his wife and the fact that the sheriff called for National Guard troops to protect them.

Chapter 2

Patterson then discusses the trial. The boys were moved to Gadsden, Alabama, where they were protected and quickly tried. None of them saw a lawyer before the trial, he says, and they did not even know whether their parents were aware of their predicament, for they were not allowed to make phone calls. Of course, the concept of the “rights” of defendants was still decades in the future. So-called Miranda warnings, for example, were not mandated until 1966.

Patterson includes much description of small-town culture. He describes a large throng gathered for the trial and explains it as a combination of interest in seeing a lynching and local custom. As gruesome as it may sound, lynchings typically drew huge crowds in this period, and sometimes picture postcards were even sold. The local custom that drew the crowd on April 6—the day the trial started—was Scottsboro’s fair day. Fair day took place on the first Monday of the month. In many small towns, people gathered on certain days to buy, sell, and trade and generally to meet and discuss things. For Scottsboro, this was the day when area farmers came to town to sell their produce and buy supplies. Patterson also notes how weak his defense team was, in the persons of a local lawyer who was actually opposed to the boys and an attorney from Chattanooga who had little interest in defending them. The account never explains how the lawyer from Chattanooga became connected with the case.

The decisions collectively took only two days to be handed down; thus the juries reached their conclusions in less than sixteen hours of work. According to Patterson, the same jury heard all three cases. He comments that “that was one jury that got exercise,” referring to how many times the jury had to walk in and out of the jury room (twelve times). In actuality there were three different juries. Patterson’s trial took only three hours. He had seen the girls he was accused of raping only twice before the trial, once when they were arrested and a second time in the jail. He observes that the women were much more presentable in court, wearing dresses rather than the overalls in which they had been traveling.

Patterson also discusses the racial hostility in the packed courtroom. One of the more extended bits of the trial he recounts is the prosecution’s closing argument to the jury, stating that the jury members should do their duty as men and quickly condemn the defendants. Patterson notes that there were very few African Americans in Scottsboro at the time of the trial and that the spectators in the courtroom cheered when the sentence was pronounced. Still, Patterson managed to keep his spirits up and told the prosecutor that he did not believe that the state would execute him quickly.

Patterson then launches into his own rebuttal of the charge of rape against him. He first notes that he prefers to be with African Americans and that he has always loved his own kind. He then argues that only a “fool or a crazy man” would attempt to rape a white woman, as all African Americans knew that death would result. Patterson adds that he did not ever have a desire to rape anyone, as plenty of women wanted him; he did not have to force himself on them. But he also says that his parents taught him to respect people, and so he would not have raped anyone. Patterson closes by saying that he is stating his views in this book for the first time. “No Alabama judge or jury in the four trials I had ever asked me for my views,” he notes ironically. “Those Alabama people, they didn’t believe I had any, nor the right to any.”

Chapter 3

The Scottsboro boys were taken back to the jail in Gadsden to await transfer to Kilby Prison in Montgomery, Alabama. There they started protesting, in large part because they knew that they were facing execution. “We didn’t like nothing at all about the place; we didn’t like our death sentence; and we decided to put on a kick.” The main thing they protested directly was the food; even after they received the pork chops they had asked for, they still were not satisfied and continued to protest. The National Guard was sent in to take control, and the boys were beaten and handcuffed together so that they could not move. The guards left them there that day and the next without food, Patterson says, before transferring them to the city jail.

There the boys were separated and jailed with other inmates. Patterson was threatened until the other inmates discovered that he was one of the Scottsboro boys. At that point, he says they were all treated better, at least by the inmates. They were directly threatened, though, by the guards. Patterson recounts how they were all gathered together to be fingerprinted and how the jailers beat Charlie Weems when he did not spit out his gum fast enough. As a deterrent, the jailer also showed the boys the various punishments used against recalcitrant prisoners, including where they hung inmates by the fingers above the ground. Horrific punishments were quite common for those in jail in the South. Many spent their time in brutal convict labor camps, where the death rates were high. Even so, Patterson does not describe being afraid.

Patterson then moves on to the start of their successful defense, noting the arrival of two Jewish lawyers from the International Labor Defense. He did not have a problem with that, he says, as he had dealt with Jews in Chattanooga and they had treated him fairly. In some ways, Patterson is stereotyping in the same way as whites did in the South—by assuming that all people of one race or one religion would act the same. The lawyers told the boys about the interest that their case was drawing. The jailer, Dick Barnes, came into the meeting and listened; this practice is illegal today, but “attorney-client privilege” was a right not granted for another thirty years. During the visit, the attorneys asked about the availability of medical care. As Patterson describes it, “The prison was very filthy. It was making me sick, making us all sick.” When Patterson asked to see an outside doctor, Barnes insisted that the prison doctor was fine. Patterson argued that he needed medicine for lice, as the lice had “stole his cap” the night before. All that gained him, though, was a threat from Barnes.

Patterson then goes on to explain the rush of mail that arrived, along with money to buy items such as cigarettes, which had long served as currency inside many prisons. The boys were emboldened by the attention and began to demand more. The increased demand in reality brought only more attention from the jailer, and so they were eventually transferred to Kilby Prison in Montgomery, which also housed death row. Patterson notes that Kilby Prison was more substantially built than the ones in which the boys had previously been held. “It was a bitter thing to see the door of Kilby Prison.… Those walls looked so high and hard to get over. They were concrete.” The boys were then moved to death row, but they could not see the execution chamber—only “a dozen cells facing each other, six to a side, and a thirteenth cell for toilet work.”

Chapter 4

Patterson tells of meeting a man called Gunboat at Kilby, who immediately asks him, “Do you want a Bible to make your soul right? … You going to die tonight, you know. You Scottsboros better get busy with the Lord.” And so Patterson took up reading the Bible. “You see, a man in the death cell, he clings to anything that gives him a little hope,” he says. He notes that he had little formal education before being imprisoned and that he could hardly read; he found himself “stumbling through the small printed words.” Two Scottsboro boys were imprisoned in each cell, which was big enough for only a single cot or a bunk bed. Patterson ends the chapter saying that he “dreamed bad dreams, with freight trains, guards’ faces, and courtrooms mixed up with the look of the sky at night.