than six hundred adult male Negroes in Jackson County had ever met the
requirements of Section 8603. Jefferson E. Moody, a member of the Jury
Commission from 1930 to 1931, couldn’t remember seeing any Negroes on
the list. C. A. Wann, who had been Clerk of the Circuit Court for five
years, said, “I do not know of one single instance where a Negro had
served on a grand jury in Jackson County, in all my experience.” Hamlin
Caldwell, a court reporter for the Ninth Judicial Circuit, who hadn’t
missed a session in Jackson County for twenty-four years, testified
that he had “never seen a colored man on the grand jury....” J. S.
Benson was the editor of _Progressive Age_, a Scottsboro newspaper.
Convinced that no Negro could possibly qualify as a grand juror (“They
all steal”), he had “never known of a single instance where any Negroes
were put on the jury roll.”
Then the defense called a number of Jackson County Negroes who seemed
to meet the standards of 8603. John Sandford, a fifty-year-old
plasterer, who could read and write and had no criminal record,
swore that he had “never been put on a jury roll and have never been
examined by any Jury Commission as to my qualifications....” He said
that he knew a great many eligible Negroes in the county who had also
never been called for jury service. Mark Taylor, who was a member of
the District No. 88 School Board, and Travis Mosely, who owned real
property in Scottsboro, told similar stories. Finally, after Leibowitz
had paraded five other seemingly qualified Negroes to the stand, Horton
called it quits and denied the defense motion to dismiss the indictment.
Then Leibowitz turned to another track. Anticipating a second
conviction, he decided to lay a more substantial foundation for an
eventual return to Washington and attacked the Morgan County petit
jury system as well. First, he called a great many Decatur Negroes who
clearly met all the statutory requirements to sit on juries. Among
others, there were Dr. Frank Sykes, a dentist, Dr. N. E. Cashin, a
physician, Reverend L. B. Womack, the pastor of the First Missionary
Baptist Church, and J. E. Pickett, a teacher in the Negro High School
for more than eighteen years. He followed them with Arthur J. Tidwell,
a member of the Jury Board of the Morgan County, who stated that “I
have never seen a Negro serve on a jury, never heard of one.” Neither
had his two fellow commissioners.
When Leibowitz threatened to call every person whose name appeared on
the jury roll “even if it breaks the state” and requested subpoenas
for almost four hundred other Morgan County Negroes, Judge Horton gave
up the ghost and conceded that it looked as if Alabama deliberately
excluded Negroes from its juries. With these preliminaries out of the
way, an all-white jury was impaneled and Victoria Price, “in dress-up
clothes,” sashayed up to the witness stand. In twelve minutes, she
repeated much the same story she had told in Scottsboro, a year back.
Victoria proved to be more than a match for Leibowitz. When he pointed
to a thirty-two-foot model of the freight train which he had brought
with him from New York and asked her to point out the gondola car, she
spiked his guns by mumbling, “The gondola I was in was much bigger than
that thing.” Since she had sworn at Scottsboro that she was twenty-one
when the defendants raped her, he asked her whether it wasn’t true
that she was actually four years older. “I ain’t that educated that I
can figure it out.” When he accused her of being “a little bit of an
actress,” she snapped back, “You’re a pretty good actor yourself.”
As her cross-examination developed, it was apparent that the defense
was staking everything on getting Victoria to admit that she had
invented the rape story in order to keep from being arrested for
traveling across the Alabama-Tennessee line with Carter and Gilley.
This, the witness passed off as “some of that Ruby Bates dope.” After
Ruby’s letter to “Dearest Earl” had been intercepted, it was obvious
to both prosecution and defense alike that the solid front presented
by the Gondola Girls in the first trials was about to split wide open.
As the trial unfolded, Knight did his best to prepare the jury for the
anticipated appearance of Ruby, who had been missing since early 1933,
as a witness for Patterson.
Leibowitz provoked Victoria into admitting that she had been married
twice before, first to a Henry Presley and then to one Ennis McClendon.
However, she insisted on calling herself Mrs. Price for reasons best
known to herself. When Leibowitz suggested that the presence of semen
in her vagina might have been the result of some shenanigans in a
hobo jungle just outside of Chattanooga the night before the freight
ride, she screamed, “You can’t prove it!” But, in the main, Knight was
successful in blocking most questions concerning Victoria’s previous
condition of rectitude or her sexual activities on the nights of March
23rd and 24th.
After Dr. Bridges, Lee Adams, Orry Dobbins and Tom Taylor Rousseau
had repeated their 1931 stories, Knight called Art Woodall who had
previously testified that he had found Victoria’s pen knife in Norris’s
pocket. Now, he insisted that he couldn’t remember which Negro had the
knife, but whoever it was had told him that he had taken it “from one
of the white girls.” When it was shown to Mrs. Price, she immediately
identified it as hers and swore that it had been held against her
throat during the rapes. This testimony so delighted the Attorney
General that he couldn’t refrain from applauding the witness and had to
be taken from the courtroom to regain his composure.
All of the defendants except Norris, Weems and Roy Wright took the
stand. Knight threw their previous admissions at them but each one
now insisted that, not only had he not attacked any white girls, but
that he had not seen any other defendant do so. Any incriminating
statements they had made at Scottsboro had been beaten or extorted
from them. As Patterson put it, “We was scared and I don’t know what I
said. They told me if we didn’t confess, they’d kill us, give us to the
mob outside.” They were followed by Dr. E. E. Reisman, a Chattanooga
gynecologist, who said that much of Victoria’s testimony about her
physical condition did not coincide with what one would expect to see
in a woman who had been violently raped six times. Dr. Bridges had
previously admitted that the most he could “say about the whole case is
that both of these women showed that they had intercourse.”
Lester Carter said he had first met Victoria when they both were
inmates of the Huntsville Jail. He confirmed that he and Tiller had
spent two nights with the girls in a hobo jungle and that he had
boarded the freight with them on the morning of March 25th. He and the
other six boys who had been in the gondola had been held in custody
in Scottsboro during the first trials but had never been called as
witnesses by the prosecution.
Then the bailiff called out the name of Ruby Bates. Shortly after the
interception of her “Dearest Earl” letter, the I.L.D. had sent her to
New York City for safekeeping. There she had stayed with Dr. Harry
Emerson Fosdick, who had urged her to return to Alabama and testify in
Patterson’s behalf. Once the hubbub in the courthouse had died down,
Leibowitz went straight to the point.
Q. You testified at each of the trials at Scottsboro, didn’t you?
A. Yes.
Q. You said you saw six Negroes rape Victoria Price and six raped you,
didn’t you?
A. Yes, but I was excited when I told it.
Q. You told at Scottsboro that one held a knife at your throat, and
what happened to you was just the same that happened to Victoria
Price. Did someone tell you to say that?
A. Victoria Price told me to say that. I said it like she told me to.
Q. Did she say what would happen if you didn’t do as she told you to?
A. Yes, she said we might have to lay out a sentence in jail.
She freely admitted that she had lied at the first trials because
“Victoria ... said we might have to stay in jail if we didn’t frame
a story for crossing the state line with men ... every time she said
‘rape’ I did not know what rape was.”
After the prosecution harangued the twelve Sand Mountain farmers in the
jury box with warnings about “justice ... bought and sold in Alabama
with Jew money from New York,” they retired at 12:45 p.m. on April 9,
1933. Twenty-two hours later their foreman handed a piece of paper up
to Judge Horton. On it, in large, laboriously printed letters, was
Patterson’s death warrant. “We find the defendant guilty as charged and
fix the punishment at death in the electric chair.” One week later,
Horton set June 16th as execution day.
Patterson was returned to the Jefferson County Jail pending a decision
by Judge Horton on a motion filed by Brodsky on April 16th asking
for a new trial because the conviction was against the weight of the
evidence. In the interim, Knight prepared to try the case of Charlie
Weems and asked Horton to call it for trial. But the judge refused
to do so, feeling as he did that statements made by both Leibowitz
and Knight had contributed to the “already heated atmosphere which
surrounds this case.” Back in New York, Leibowitz was referring to the
jury as “those bigots whose mouths are slits in their faces, whose
eyes popped out at you like frogs, whose chins dripped tobacco juice,
bewhiskered and filthy....” Knight was no less effusive in voicing
his opinion of “Jew justice.” Accordingly, Horton decided to adjourn
Weems’ trial “until such time when in [his] judgment a fair and
impartial trial may be had.”
But the biggest surprise of all was yet to come. On June 22nd, Horton
announced that he had decided to grant Brodsky’s routine motion for a
new trial. Not only did he disbelieve Victoria Price’s testimony, but
he felt that the other evidence in the case “preponderates in favor of
the defendant.” His 108-page opinion (which was to cost him his job at
the next November elections) clearly indicated that he had not believed
a word that Victoria had said. “The conclusion becomes clearer and
clearer,” he wrote, “that this woman was not forced into intercourse
with all of these Negroes upon that train, but that her condition was
clearly due to the intercourse that she had had on the night previous
to this time.”
On November 20, 1933, Patterson went back to Decatur for his third
trial. This time the judge was William Washington Callahan, who,
according to Patterson, was “the toughest, most freckle-faced,
baldheaded man I was ever up against.” After Leibowitz tried to show
that seven Negro names now found on the jury roll had been forged, the
principal actors went through their dreary lines again and, on December
1st, Patterson was convicted for the third time. When Callahan imposed
the death sentence, he forgot to include the customary prayer for
mercy. Perhaps even God was tired of re-runs.
A week later, Norris was also convicted and the two men were sent back
to Kilby’s death house. On June 28, 1934, Alabama’s highest court
affirmed the convictions and Leibowitz and Pollak promptly appealed
to the United States Supreme Court. On April 1, 1935, Chief Justice
Charles Evans Hughes announced that both convictions had been reversed
because Negroes had been barred from grand and petit jury duty in
Jackson and Morgan Counties. The immediate result was that the Jackson
County Grand Jury returned new indictments for rape against all nine
boys. But something new had been added: for the first time in as far
back as Alabamans cared to remember, a Negro--one Creed Conyer--sat on
a grand jury.
Haywood Patterson’s fourth trial began on January 20th, 1936, before
Judge Callahan again. The Scottsboro Defense Committee, which was a
composite of all the organizations which had been involved in the
case, was now running operations and Leibowitz took the long trek
south again. But the years didn’t seem to make much difference as far
as Morgan County juries were concerned and Patterson was convicted
once more. This time he was sentenced to seventy-five years in prison.
After the Alabama Supreme Court affirmed his conviction, the ninth
jury to listen to Victoria’s tale of woe found Norris guilty and he
was sentenced to death. Andy Wright was then sentenced to ninety-nine
and Charlie Weems to seventy-five years. Ozie Powell pleaded guilty to
assaulting a deputy sheriff and was given twenty years in state prison.
On July 24, 1937, after Weems and Powell were sentenced, “the
Scottsboro prosecution staff” announced that the charges against Roy
Wright, Olen Montgomery, Eugene Williams and Willie Roberson were being
dropped. “... after careful examination of the testimony, every lawyer
connected with the prosecution is convinced that the defendants Willie
Roberson and Olen Montgomery are not guilty.” As for Roy Wright and
Eugene Williams, “After careful examination of this crime one of these
juveniles was 12 years old and the other one was 13 ... the ends of
justice would be met at this time by releasing [them] on condition that
they leave the state, never to return.”
Negotiations for the release of the remaining five went on during
the rest of 1937. On December 21st, Governor Bibb Graves told three
members of the Scottsboro Defense Committee that he agreed that, if
four of the defendants were not guilty, the remaining five were equally
innocent. “The position of the State is untenable, with half out and
half in on the same charges and evidence ...” he told them. “When the
cases come before me, I intend to act promptly.” After ten months of
technicalities, Graves agreed to release all the imprisoned defendants,
with the exception of Ozie Powell, to the Defense Committee on Monday,
October 31, 1938. However, on October 29th, he wired the Committee that
he was forced to postpone their release.
It was not until January 8, 1944, that Alabama decided to open the
gates of Kilby Prison to Andy Wright and Clarence Norris. A few months
later, Charlie Weems followed them through “the little green gate”
to the outside world. Ozie Powell was paroled on June 16, 1946 and,
two years later, Patterson escaped from prison and fled to Michigan
where Governor Mennen Williams refused extradition. He died of cancer
on August 22, 1952 in a Michigan prison where he was serving a term
for manslaughter. Although Norris was picked up in 1944 as a parole
violator, he was finally released on September 26, 1946. Andy Wright
suffered the same fate in 1946 but gained his freedom a year later and
was last heard of in 1954 when he was picked up in Albany, N. Y., for
slashing his wife with a butcher knife.
Perhaps the saddest episode of all occurred on August 16, 1959, when
Roy Wright, the youngest of the Scottsboro Boys, shot and killed his
wife in New York City because he thought that she had been unfaithful
to him. He then committed suicide and was found dead on the floor of
his Harlem apartment with an open Bible by his side. According to Mrs.
Bill (Bojangles) Robinson, who, with her husband, had raised him after
Leibowitz had brought him north, “he made it a point through his life
since he came here to keep good company and to keep away from anything
that might get him into trouble. He didn’t want his background on the
Scottsboro thing hashed over again.”
7
_A Traitor from Harvard_
The United States of America
_versus_
Alger Hiss
A few minutes after eleven o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, August
3, 1948, a portly little man walked slowly to the front of the Ways
and Means Committee Room in which the House Committee on Un-American
Activities was holding an open session. After he had been sworn, he sat
down gingerly in a wooden chair that was perched directly in front of a
raised platform behind which acting Chairman Karl Mundt and five of his
colleagues were ensconced. Robert Stripling, the Committee’s counsel,
began the hearing.
Q. Will you state your full name?
A. My name is David Whittaker Chambers.
Q. Where and when were you born?
A. I was born April 1, 1901, in Philadelphia.
Q. How long have you been associated with _Time Magazine_?
A. Nine years.
Q. Prior to that time, what was your occupation?
A. I was a member of the Communist Party and a paid functionary of the
party.
The witness asked if he might read a prepared statement. In a voice
that was barely audible at the press table, he told of his fifteen
years’ service as a Soviet espionage agent. In 1939, two years after he
said that he had “repudiated Marx’ doctrines and Lenin’s tactics,” he
had gone to Washington to report what he knew “about the infiltration
of the United States Government by Communists.” At that time, he had
told Assistant Secretary of State Adolph A. Berle, Jr., that there was
an underground Communist movement in the government. “The head of the
underground group at the time I knew it was Nathan Witt, an attorney
for the National Labor Relations Board. Later, John Abt became the
leader. Lee Pressman was also a member of this group, as was Alger
Hiss, who, as a member of the State Department, later organized the
conferences at Dumbarton Oaks, San Francisco, and the United States
side of the Yalta Conference.”
In New York City, Alger Hiss, who was in the middle of his second year
as the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, had
just returned from a month’s vacation in Vermont. As soon as he heard
of Chambers’ charges, he sent a telegram to Chairman Mundt in which
he stated, “I do not know Mr. Chambers and insofar as I am aware have
never laid eyes on him.” He requested permission to “appear before
your Committee to make these statements formally and under oath.”
Hiss suggested Thursday, August 5th, and hoped that “that will be a
convenient time from the Committee’s point of view for me to appear.”
Mundt immediately wired back that it was.
On Thursday morning, Hiss had his chance. In the large Caucus Room in
the Old House Office Building, he told the Committee that he had never
heard of Whittaker Chambers until 1947 “when two representatives of
the Federal Bureau of Investigation had asked me if I knew him....
I said I did not know Chambers. So far as I know, I have never laid
eyes on him, and I should like to have the opportunity to do so.” As
far as Chambers’ accusations were concerned, they were all “complete
fabrications.” The witness was willing to let his Government service
speak for itself.
On Tuesday, Chambers had testified that, before he had broken with the
underground, he had tried to persuade Alger Hiss to do the same. In
a tearful scene at the Hiss home, his friend had “absolutely refused
to break.” Hiss denied that any such incident had ever occurred and
repeated his statement that, as far as he knew, the name Chambers
“means absolutely nothing to me.” When he was shown a recent photograph
of Chambers, the witness insisted that he “would much rather see the
individual.... I would not want to take an oath that I had never seen
that man. I would like to see him and then I think that I would be
better able to tell whether I had ever seen him.” When Mundt told
him that Chambers was not present in the hearing room, Hiss replied,
somewhat sharply, that “I hoped he would be.”
Even though the acting chairman wondered publicly “what possible motive
a man who edits _Time Magazine_ could have for mentioning Alger Hiss in
the same breath as Nathan Witt, Lee Pressman, John Abt and Harold Ware,
he thanked Mr. Hiss for his “very cooperative attitude” and “forthright
statements.” Furthermore, he stated that he had been impressed by
the fact that the witness was the first of all the people named by
Elizabeth Bentley and the other apostates to come forward voluntarily
and deny his guilt. Even Mississippi’s Rankin, who was not known for
his kinship with intellectuals, congratulated Hiss for not taking
advantage of the Fifth Amendment and for appearing without a lawyer “to
tell him what to say.” All in all, it had not been a bad day for the
gentleman from New York.
After Hiss had denied knowing Chambers, Stripling informed Mundt
that “there is a very sharp contradiction here in the testimony. I
certainly suggest Mr. Chambers be brought back before the Committee
and clear this up.” The chairman agreed and appointed a sub-committee
composed of California’s Nixon, Louisiana’s Hébert and Pennsylvania’s
McDowell to question Chambers in executive session. Two days later, the
sub-committee met in Room 101 of New York’s United States Courthouse.
With Nixon taking the lead, Chambers was questioned closely about his
claimed acquaintance with Alger Hiss and his family. The witness’
answers revealed such an intimate knowledge of the Hisses that it
was apparent that he had either known them extremely well or done
considerable homework.
First of all, Hiss had known him only as Carl, his party name. They had
been the best of friends and he had spent a great deal of time at the
various Hiss homes in Baltimore and Washington. The witness’ knowledge
of what Hiss later referred to as “petty housekeeping details” was
apparently inexhaustible. He knew that Mrs. Hiss called her husband
“Hilly,” that the Hisses had a cocker spaniel, and that “they both
had the same hobby--amateur ornithologists, bird observers.” In fact,
he remembered that “once, they saw, to their great excitement, a
prothonotary warbler.”
MR. McDOWELL: A very rare specimen?
MR. CHAMBERS: I never saw one. I am also fond of birds.
When he had first met the Hisses, they owned a Ford roadster which, he
remembered, “was black and it was very dilapidated.” In 1936, they had
purchased a new Plymouth, and J. Peters, the head of the underground
organization, had helped them dispose of the Ford through a Communist
service station in Washington. He described Hiss as a slender man,
“about 5 feet 8 or 9,” who walked with “a slight mince;” Priscilla
Hiss was “a short, highly nervous, little woman” who had “a habit of
blushing red when she is excited or angry, fiery red.” Timmy Hobson,
Mrs. Hiss’ son by a previous marriage, “was a puny little boy, also
rather nervous.” The boy’s father was paying for his education but the
Hisses were diverting “a large part of that money to the Communist
Party.”
MR. NIXON: Hiss told you that?
MR. CHAMBERS: Yes, sir.
MR. NIXON: Did he name the Communist Party as the recipient?
MR. CHAMBERS: Certainly.
MR. NIXON: He might have said simply “the party.” Could it have been
the Democratic Party or Socialist Party?
MR. CHAMBERS: No.
Hiss had told him that he had a sister who lived with his mother. In
fact “he once drove me past their house, which as I recall, was on or
near Linden Street.” But he had never seen either the mother or the
sister. As for Hiss’ younger brother, Donald, he had met him “within
the same week in which I met Alger Hiss.” But, whereas “my relationship
with Alger Hiss quickly transcended our formal relationship,” Chambers’
contact with Donald was confined to collecting party dues from him.
He couldn’t remember much about Donald except that he was married to
a non-Communist and that “everybody was worried about her.” He had a
general impression that the younger Hiss “was much less intelligent
than Alger” and that “he was interested in the social climb.”
Mrs. Hiss’ maiden name was Priscilla Fansler and “she came from the
Great Valley near Paoli, Pa.” In fact, Chambers had once taken a trip
with the family, and Mrs. Hiss had shown him “the road down which their
farm lay.”
MR. NIXON: You drove with them?
MR. CHAMBERS: Yes.
MR. NIXON: Did you ever go on a trip with them other than by
automobile?
MR. CHAMBERS: No.
MR. NIXON: Did you ever stay overnight on any of these trips?
MR. CHAMBERS: No.
While he was fairly certain that Mr. Hiss did not go to church because
he was forbidden to do so, he did not know about his wife who “came
from a Quaker family.”