anti-evolution speech which he looked forward to delivering in the
courtroom. But Darrow’s carefully planned capitulation on the trial’s
last day had deprived him of his national forum. Such a speech,
however, could not remain locked up in the frustrated soul of a veteran
Chautauquian who was not in the habit of keeping his thoughts to
himself. After trying excerpts out on roadside audiences in Jasper and
Winchester, Tennessee, he persuaded the _Chattanooga News_ to publish
it. But he was never to see it in print. On Sunday, July 26th, he died
of what Darrow, with more candor than good taste, termed “indigestion
caused by over-eating.” As for the great oration, Mrs. Bryan released
it for general publication two days after her husband’s death. It went
largely unnoticed.
Everything else was anti-climatic. A year and a half later, the
Tennessee Supreme Court sustained the constitutionality of the Butler
Act. But its four members reversed Scopes’ conviction because Raulston
had violated the state constitution when he, and not the jury, had
fixed the fine. Unless the prosecution insisted on bringing Scopes to
trial again, the case was cold turkey, and Chief Justice Green did his
best to keep it that way. “We see nothing to be gained,” he urged, “by
prolonging the life of this bizarre case.” The Attorney General took
the rather broad hint Green had dropped, and immediately nolle prossed
the indictment.
Although the school board offered to reinstate Scopes, he decided to
take advantage of his notoriety and accepted a graduate scholarship.
As for the Butler Act, it was never to be enforced again--in Tennessee
or anywhere else for that matter. In 1951, a bill proposing its repeal
was introduced by, of all people, Rhea County’s representative in
the Tennessee Legislature, but it was soundly defeated. Another
attempt, ten years later, was voted down, 69 to 17, in the House
of Representatives. Today, it still lurks in the statute books, a
remembrance of things past. But as far as the “victorious defeat” that
clipped its wings was concerned, Darrow never grew tired of saying that
“I believed that the cause was worth while, and was always glad that I
helped.”
6
_Their Skin was Black_
The State of Alabama
_versus_
Haywood Patterson
In 1931, Huntsville was a rickety industrial town in the northern
reaches of Alabama. Most of its 30,000 inhabitants depended on one or
another of the seven mills that were just beginning to be hit by the
depression that had already paralyzed other parts of the country. By
March, Margaret Mill, for example, had cut its work week to two days
and its average daily wage to $1.20.
One of Margaret’s employees was a seventeen-year-old girl named
Ruby Bates whose nomadic family lived in a shack on Depot Street,
Huntsville’s Negro section. The only whites on the block, the Bateses
had migrated to Huntsville from the cotton fields of central Alabama.
Sharecropping had not brought in enough to feed five mouths and, after
Mr. Bates had deserted his brood and left for parts unknown, Ruby and
her mother decided to move into a town where both women could work at
one of the mills. First it was Athens and then Huntsville.
Monday, March 23, 1931, was a sunny day on the cool side. Ruby, who
hadn’t worked for more than a week, was standing near her front window,
watching her brother and sister playing with the Negro children on
Depot Street, when Victoria Price, a Margaret co-worker, strolled up
the front walk. Twenty-five-year-old Victoria, who lived with her
mother on Arms Street, supplemented her meager mill earnings with some
slack-time prostitution. By 1931, she had a sizable arrest record even
though Walter Sanders, Huntsville’s deputy sheriff, described her as
“a quiet prostitute [who] don’t go rarin’ around cuttin’ up in public.”
Victoria had an idea. Jack Tiller, her current boy friend, had run into
Lester Carter who had just been released from a Huntsville chain gang.
The two men had suggested that Victoria find a girl for Lester and then
they would shake the Alabama dust from their feet. Ruby was more than
willing and, after packing her few belongings, hurried over to the
Price’s two-room shack where Tiller and Carter were waiting. Both girls
had on overalls, under which they were wearing their entire wardrobes.
The two couples spent the night in a nearby hobo jungle where, between
some semi-public lovemaking, they made plans to go West and “hustle the
towns.”
But, in the cold light of dawn, Tiller suddenly realized that he had a
wife who might not take too kindly to his proposed cross-country tour
with Victoria, and decided to give up the venture and go home. Carter
and the girls jumped a freight for Chattanooga, almost one hundred
miles away, where they bedded down in some woods just outside of the
city. There, they were joined by a street poet named Orville Gilley,
otherwise known as “Carolina Slim,” who was swiftly enlisted as a
replacement for Tiller. At eleven o’clock the next morning, the quartet
boarded a forty-car freight which was bound for Memphis. They settled
down in an open gondola car which was almost filled to the gunwales
with crushed rock. Five other white boys were sitting at the opposite
end of the car.
The freight, which was following the tracks of the Southern Railroad,
crossed into Alabama at Bridgeport, and passed through Stevenson,
Fackler, Hollywood, Scottsboro, Lim Rock and Woodville before it came
to a stop at Paint Rock, less than thirty miles east of Huntsville.
Shortly after Gilley, Carter and the two girls had boarded the gondola,
the train stopped for water at a siding in Stevenson. Seconds later,
a dozen or so colored boys climbed into the gondola from an adjoining
box car. A fight immediately ensued between the invaders and the seven
white boys in the gondola, the net result of which was the forcible
eviction of all the whites with the exception of Gilley.
The boys who had been thrown off the slowly moving train limped back
into Stevenson where they reported the incident to the stationmaster.
He telephoned ahead to Paint Rock, some thirty-eight miles west of
Stevenson, and, when the train pulled into that northern Alabama hamlet
at 2:30 p.m., a posse of seventy-five armed white men was waiting for
it. Nine Negro boys between thirteen and twenty years of age, as well
as Ruby Bates, Victoria Price and Orville Gilley, were removed from
the gondola. The girls were taken to a doctor’s office for a physical
examination while the Negroes were locked up in Scottsboro’s tiny
jailhouse. When an ugly crowd began to gather, Sheriff M. L. Wann asked
Governor B. M. Miller to send in the National Guard. The troops arrived
at four the next morning and escorted the nine suspects to Gadsden,
Alabama. Four days later, they were returned to Scottsboro where they
were all indicted on the charge that they “forcibly ravished ... a
woman against the peace and dignity of the State of Alabama.”
Their trials started on Monday, April 6, 1931, in the Jackson County
Circuit Court. H. G. Bailey, the State Solicitor, asked Judge Alf E.
Hawkins to sever the trials, a request that was promptly granted.
Charlie Weems and Clarence Norris, who were twenty and nineteen
respectively, were first tried; their trial was followed by that
of eighteen-year-old Haywood Patterson. The third involved five
boys--Andy Wright (19), Willie Roberson (17), Olen Montgomery (17),
Ozie Powell (16) and Eugene Williams (15). The youngest defendant,
thirteen-year-old Roy Wright, was to stand trial by himself.
The boys’ pedigrees were much the same. They were all destitute,
illiterate and unskilled southern Negroes who came from Tennessee and
Georgia. Roberson was suffering from both gonorrhea and syphilis while
Montgomery was practically blind. According to Patterson, “All nine
of us were riding the freight for the same reason, to go somewhere
and find work.” These were the “nine black fiends” who, according to
the _Jackson County Sentinel_ of March 26, 1931, had “committed [the]
revolting crime.”
When the trials started, none of the defendants was in any position to
retain an attorney. Judge Hawkins had appointed “all members of the bar
for the purpose of arraigning the defendants, and then, of course, I
anticipated them to continue to help if no counsel appears.” A Stephen
W. Roddy, a Chattanooga lawyer, who had been approached by members of
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, told
Hawkins that, although he had not been paid and would not “appear as
counsel,” he was willing to do what he could on the defendants’ behalf.
He was joined by Milo Moody, a member of the Scottsboro bar, who
expressed his willingness “to help Mr. Roddy in anything I can do about
it under the circumstances.” The judge was quite obviously relieved
that the niceties of justice would be scrupulously observed.
Roddy’s first step was to present a petition signed with nine X’s
asking for a change of venue. In view of the hostile crowd which filled
the courthouse lawn, he insisted that a fair trial was impossible in
Scottsboro. Bailey made it quite clear that he considered Roddy’s
suggestion impertinent and called Major Joe Starnes, the commanding
officer of the National Guard, to rebut it. Starnes assured the court
that “the crowd here was here out of curiosity and not as a hostile
demonstration toward these defendants.” The major’s opinion was enough
for Hawkins and he overruled Roddy’s motion.
The four trials were over by Thursday morning. On Friday, eight of the
Negroes were sentenced to die in the Kilby Prison electric chair early
the following July. Because one juror refused to vote for Roy Wright’s
execution, his trial resulted in a hung jury. But eight out of nine was
a good batting average in anybody’s league and the crowd outside the
courthouse, which sang “There’ll be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight”
as each guilty verdict was announced, was more than satisfied with the
week’s work.
In all four trials, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates were the
witnesses-in-chief for the prosecution. Their stories left little to be
desired as far as the State Solicitor was concerned. After the Negroes
had invaded the gondola car, they had cowed the white boys by “telling
them that they would kill them, that it was their car and we were
their women from now on.” Victoria accused Norris of having “sexual
intercourse with me” while Weems threatened her with a .45 pistol and
a knife. Norris had “pulled my overalls over me” and “the little one,
the smallest one, was holding my legs.” To add insult to injury, Norris
had not only raped her but stolen her knife, $1.50 of her money, and
a pocket handkerchief. Twelve Negroes had entered the gondola car but
“three got off.” She denied that she was travelling with any of the
seven white boys who had been involved in the fight at Stevenson. In
all, she and Ruby had each been raped by six boys but “three of hers
got away.”
Ruby said that the Negroes had ordered the white boys in the gondola
car “to unload” before the rapes took place. Then, while some of the
defendants threatened her with knives and pistols, she had been thrown
to the gravel-covered floor of the car and attacked. “There were
three Negroes to each girl,” she told the spellbound jury, “one for
intercourse, one for holding the knife and one for holding the pistol.
They never did remove the knife or pistol.”
Two physicians--Drs. R. R. Bridges and M. H. Lynch--had examined both
girls a little more than an hour after they had been removed from
the train. Although he had found no “recent lacerations” on either
woman, Bridges said that he had “found semen in the vagina of each
one.” Two years later, he was to state that “the semen did not move
and we don’t swear as to whether it is dead or alive unless we see
it move.” No lacerations, tears or bruises were found in the genital
region of either girl. Both Victoria and Ruby had seemed quite calm
during Bridge’s first examination but when he visited them in jail
the next day they were somewhat hysterical. Lynch, who was the head
of the Jackson County Health Department, confirmed his colleague’s
observations.
Hawkins, who was determined to get the trials over with as soon as
possible, refused to let Roddy and Moody do more than present a token
defense. Nowhere was this more apparent than in their cross-examination
of the two physicians. When they tried to show that Victoria and Ruby
were far from virgins, the judge said such evidence was irrelevant.
While Dr. Bridges was on the stand, Roddy asked him whether either
girl showed any indications of gonorrhea or syphilis. Hawkins refused
to let the physician answer the question despite the fact that Willie
Roberson was suffering from both diseases. Although Bridges confirmed
that Roberson had “a bad case of it,” he was sure that “it is possible
for him to have intercourse.”
Lynch and Bridges were followed by a number of Stevenson residents who
had seen the fight on the gondola car. Luther Morris had been in a barn
loft, some thirty yards away from the Southern roadbed, when the train
passed. He had seen a “bunch of Negroes put off five white men and take
charge of two white girls. The two white girls were doing their best to
jump and the Negroes got the two white girls and they were pulled back
down in the car.” Two of the boys who had been thrown off the train by
the Negroes passed by Morris’s barn on their way to Stevenson but were
too stunned to talk to him. “They just said: ‘I am dying’ ... they were
badly hurt.”
Orry Robbins had been standing near a woodpile, a hundred yards away
from the tracks, when the train passed. He said that “I saw two girls
and these colored people ... one of the colored men grabbed a woman and
threw her down.” T. L. Dobbins, who was only a few feet away from the
train, had observed the scuffling in the gondola car but, as far as the
participants were concerned, he “could not tell whether they were white
or black.” Lee Adams, who was two hundred yards away, had watched “a
bunch of people in a car ... striking and about that time I saw someone
go over the top of the car.” Later, he saw two of the boys who had
been thrown off the train running toward Stevenson and “the blood was
running down their faces.” By the time the train passed Sam Mitchell,
it was going between thirty and forty miles per hour. As for the fight,
“we see’d them wrestlin’, ’peared like. That’s all I seen; the train
was going pretty fast.”
When the train stopped at Paint Rock, the armed posse was waiting for
it. Bailey used some of its members to add what little they could to
the case against the defendants. Tom Taylor Rousseau was certain that
Victoria “was unconscious” when “they toted her off the train. She had
her eyes closed and was lying over this way ... she was in no condition
to walk.” Victoria had previously testified that “I was unconscious
after I got off the train ... I became unconscious when I fell off the
stirrup on the side of the gondola.” T. M. Latham, a deputy sheriff,
testified that the girl “could not walk” when he first saw her. Jim
Broadway said, “The Bates girl seemed to be in fairly good shape but
the other could not hardly talk and couldn’t walk.”
Both women told Latham that “we have been mistreated” but Broadway,
who was only a few feet away, said, “I did not hear Victoria Price make
no complaint, either to me or to anyone else about the treatment they
received at the hands of these defendants over there.” Victoria herself
had admitted that the defendants’ arrest had not been “on account of
any complaint of mine.” Lastly, Jackson County Deputy Sheriff Arthur
W. Woodall testified that he had found Victoria’s pen knife in Norris’
pocket.
Orville Gilley, who was the only white boy who had not been thrown off
the train as it pulled out of Stevenson, was used in the third trial.
Outside of the girls, he was the sole white eyewitness to what had
occurred in the gondola car. Yet Bailey used him only for the limited
purpose of identifying five of the defendants as having been present in
the car. “I saw those five in the car ... every one of those five in
the gondola.”
Q. Were the girls in there?
A. Yes, sir.
Evidently, Sam Gilley’s son had been singularly unconcerned with what
was happening to his traveling companions for he made no attempt either
to notify the engineer or the conductor or to leave the train.
When the state rested, all of the defendants took the stand. Weems
accused Haywood Patterson of forcing him, at the point of a pistol,
to fight the white boys on the train. But he insisted that he “didn’t
see the girls. I never did see the girls.... If anybody had anything
to do with the girls, I don’t know nothing about it.” Clarence Norris
on the other hand, had “seen every one of them have something to do
with those girls, all eight of them, but I didn’t.” According to him,
Patterson had said that “he was going over there to run the white boys
off and going to have something to do with them.” Patterson swore that
he had been sitting on the box car behind the gondola, from which
vantage point he had seen Weems and several others rape Victoria. “But
I had nothing to do with those girls,” he insisted. Roy Wright also
said that “there was nine Negroes down there with the girls and all had
intercourse with them ... I saw that with my own eyes.”
The other defendants insisted that they were completely innocent.
They denied that they had seen the girls until the freight stopped
at Paint Rock. Ozie Powell “never did see the girls” from the time he
boarded the freight at Chattanooga until it was stopped at Paint Rock.
Olen Montgomery, who claimed that he had been “back in the seventh car
from the end of the train ... by my lonely ... first saw them at Paint
Rock,” and Eugene Williams “did not see the girls at all until we got
to Paint Rock.” Andy Wright swore that “I did not have intercourse with
a woman on that train” while Willie Roberson testified that, because of
his venereal diseases, “I am not able to have sexual intercourse.”
After the eight convicted defendants had been sent to the Kilby Prison
death row, Roddy filed four motions for new trials. Among other
grounds, he urged that the defendants were not given sufficient time in
which to prepare their defense and that the atmosphere in Scottsboro
was so hostile that a fair trial was impossible. On June 22nd, Hawkins
denied all the motions and, in Kilby’s Cell 222, Haywood Patterson “was
busy living from minute to minute” while he and the Scottsboro Boys,
as they came to be called, were waiting for their July 10th date with
current supplied free of charge by the Alabama Light and Power Company.
But July 10th came and went and the only man executed at Kilby that
night was one Will Stokes, an ax-murderer, who went to his death a few
minutes after midnight. An appeal to the Alabama Supreme Court from
Judge Hawkin’s refusal to grant new trials had resulted in a stay of
execution for Patterson & Company. It wasn’t until the following Spring
that the judgments were affirmed and seven of the defendants were
re-sentenced to die on May 13, 1932. Because Eugene Williams was under
sixteen, Alabama law required that he be tried as a juvenile delinquent
and his conviction was reversed on that ground alone.
When the appeals were argued before the Alabama Supreme Court, neither
Roddy’s nor Moody’s names appeared on the briefs for the defendants.
George W. Chamlee, Senior, and his son, George, Junior, two Chattanooga
lawyers, now represented the Scottsboro boys. They had been selected
by the International Defense League, a Communist affiliate devoted
to defending any member of the “working class” who ran afoul of
“capitalist justice.” Through Joseph R. Brodsky, its general counsel,
it had financed the appeals to Alabama’s highest court.
On April 9, 1932, the judges refused to rehear the appeals and it
looked very much as if the year-long fight to save eight nondescript
lives was about over. But the I.L.D. was not one to leave any stone
unturned (or unhurled) and it asked the United States Supreme Court to
intervene. Early in October, Walter H. Pollak, another I.L.D. attorney,
argued in Washington that the defendants had not received a fair and
impartial trial, had been denied the right of counsel and sufficient
time in which to prepare their defense, and had been tried before
juries from which qualified Negroes were deliberately excluded.
On November 7, 1932, seven of the nine justices reversed the
convictions and ordered new trials for all the defendants. In their
opinion, the Scottsboro Boys had not been given an opportunity to
secure counsel of their own choice. “Not only was that not done
here, but such designation of counsel as was attempted was either so
indefinite or too close upon the trial as to amount to a denial of
effective and substantial aid.... We hold that the defendants were
not accorded the right of counsel in any substantial sense. To decide
otherwise, would simply be to ignore actualities.”
After the first trials, Ruby Bates had returned to Depot Street. On
January 5, 1933, she sat down at the kitchen table and wrote a letter
to a “Dearest Earl,” evidently a successor in interest to Lester
Carter. In it, she told him that “those Negroes did not touch me or
those white boys ... i know it was wrong too let those Negroes die on
account of me i hope you will believe my statement because it is the
gods truth ... i wish those Negroes are not Burnt on account of me.”
The messenger to whom she gave the letter never delivered it. Ten
minutes after he started out, he was in the Huntsville lockup, accused
of starting a street fight. The police turned the letter over to the
prosecution and it took the I.L.D. until the end of January to get a
court order permitting its attorneys to photostat it.
On March 6th, a motion for a change of venue was granted by Judge
Hawkins and Decatur was selected as the _mise en scène_ in a case that
was now as well known in Berlin and Paris as it was in Birmingham and
Memphis. A week later, William Patterson, the I.L.D.’s executive
secretary, persuaded Samuel S. Leibowitz, who, at thirty-nine, was New
York’s best known criminal lawyer, to come south and see what he could
do to convince twelve Morgan County jurymen to give “this poor scrap of
colored humanity a fair, square deal....” Act II was about to begin.
In Kilby’s death row, Guard L. J. Burrs told the defendants to get
ready for a trip to town. On the first day of spring, they were taken
to the Jefferson County Jail in Birmingham to await their second
trials. Six days later, Patterson’s began in Decatur’s white-columned
courthouse before Judge James E. Horton who, according to the
defendant, “looked like pictures of Abe Lincoln.” This was to be no
one-day outing. To counteract Leibowitz, Thomas Knight, Jr., Alabama’s
Attorney General, with State Solicitor Bailey and Morgan County Circuit
Solicitor Wade Wright at his elbow, entered the lists for Alabama. On
March 27th, Horton granted the State’s motion to sever Patterson’s case
from those of the other defendants and, on the following morning, his
trial was off and running.
Leibowitz’s opening gambit was to move to dismiss the indictment
because Negroes had been systematically excluded from the grand jury
rolls of Jackson County. According to Section 8603 of the Alabama
Code, all male citizens between the ages of twenty-one and sixty-five
who could read English and had not been convicted of any offense
involving moral turpitude could serve on grand and petit juries if
they were “generally reputed to be honest and intelligent men, and are
esteemed in the community for their integrity, good character and sound
judgment.” Literacy could be waived if the prospective juror was a
“freeholder or householder.”