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EspañolSCOTTSBORO BOYS
(Redirected from Scottsboro case)
The case of the 'Scottsboro Boys' arose in Scottsboro, Alabama during the 1930s, when nine black youths, ranging in age from twelve to twenty, were accused of raping two white women, one of whom would later recant.
The trials, in which the youths were convicted and sentenced to death by all-white juries despite the weak and contradictory testimonies of the witnesses, are regarded as one of the worst travesties of justice perpetrated against blacks in the post-Reconstruction South.
The case quickly became an international ''cause célèbre'' and the boys were represented by the American Communist Party's legal defense organization. The death sentences, originally scheduled to be carried out quickly, were postponed pending appeals that took the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the sentences were overturned. Despite the fact that one of the women later denied being raped, the retrials resulted in convictions. All of the defendants were eventually acquitted, paroled, or pardoned (besides one who escaped), some after serving years in prison.
The Scottsboro case later inspired Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize winning ''To Kill a Mockingbird''.
On March 25, 1931,[1] a fight broke out between a group of black men and a group of white men riding in a car of a Southern Railway freight train.[2] All of the white men and boys, except Orville Gilley (key witness in trial) were forced to jump off. When the train stopped in Paint Rock, Alabama, the nine black youths were arrested on charges of assault. Two young white women dressed in boys' clothing — Victoria Price, aged 21, and Ruby Bates, aged 17 — were also found catching a free ride on the freight train. All were taken to Scottsboro, Alabama, the Jackson County seat. The two girls, unemployed mill workers and part-time prostitutes from nearby Huntsville, told authorities they had been brutally gang raped by the nine blacks taken into custody in Scottsboro. Some believe that the girls had said this only to get out of trouble with the law.
Twelve days after the men had been arrested the first trial took place. They were all kept in jail cells just feet away from the electric chair chamber where they were made to hear and smell the electrocutions of the other members of death row. Later deemed cruel and unusual punishment. Their lawyer was Milo Moody, a Tennessee lawyer unfamiliar with Alabama law, who met with the boys for just 25 minutes before the case was presented to a judge. Some accounts said that he was drunk for the duration of the trials. When called to testify the boys began to lay blame and accusations on each other which made the case worse. Haywood Patterson, along with the remaining 8 boys, were charged and found guilty of raping white girls.
The case was over turned by the supreme courts on account of fair and adequate legal representation, and moved the trials from Scottsboro to Decatur, AL. A well known lawyer, Samuel Liebowitz, from New York, came to the defense of the boys pro-bono. The prosecuting lawyer was Thomas E. Knight. Judge Horton presiding.
In the November 1932 re-trials the young Ruby Bates told the courts that she and Victoria Price had not been raped by the accused. The two had made up the story to avoid vagrancy charges. The prosecution accused her of being bought off by the communist party(which was supporting the 9 boys' case)And the jury believed the accusations. Later in the trials, a witness came forward who owned a farm near the railways, he claimed to have seen the alleged crime take place. When asked if he could identify what the two girls were wearing, he surely stated that they were both wearing dresses, when it was earlier established that they were in fact both wearing over-alls in an attempt to be passed off as boys. The witness was clearly fabricating the story. In the medical examinations the girls were found to have no scarring indicating rape. In fact they were found to be traveling with men the night before engaging in consensual sex. Despite the insurmountable evidence in their favor, all of the boys were found guilty for a second time and all sentenced to death.
June 22, 1933, Judge Horton throws out the verdict of the trial and subsequently looses his position as judge.
Upon the allegations of the two women, a lynch mob gathered around the jail, prepared to storm and kill the youths. Given the situation, the governor of Alabama, Benjamin M. Miller, was forced to call in the National Guard to protect the jail. Authorities pleaded against mob violence by promising speedy trials and executions. On March 30, the so-called Scottsboro Boys were indicted by a Grand Jury. In April, all were convicted and sentenced to death, except for one 13 year old, who was sentenced to life in prison. The NAACP and the International Labor Defense (legal arm of the Communist Party USA) both wanted to handle the defense and struggled to gain and retain the support of the boys and their parents; the ILD eventually won that battle and the NAACP dropped out of the case in January, 1932. The case quickly became widely known, with rallies held in northern U.S. cities, international press coverage and thousands of letters written in support of the defendants.
The Alabama Supreme Court upheld the convictions of seven of the boys who were on death row in March, 1932 (the eighth was determined to have been a juvenile), but in November the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Powell v. Alabama, reversed the convictions and ordered new trials based on the fact that the Boys didn't have proper representation. The first time they were tried, their parents scraped together $60 for a real-estate lawyer who urged them to plead guilty (no southern lawyer would try the case).
The ILD hired Samuel Leibowitz, a noted attorney from New York who was widely known for winning the vast majority of his criminal cases, to defend the Scottsboro Boys at the new trials, held in nearby Decatur. However, this would backfire on the boys as the whites from the south viewed Leibowitz as a total foreigner, a northerner, a communist, one that is representing blacks, as well as a Jew. This time one of the accusers, Ruby Bates, after disappearing for a time to escape from the pressure and the media attention, returned to testify in court and recanted her earlier testimony, now stating that she and Price had lied about being raped because they were afraid that, since they were found on a train with other homeless men where one party of homeless men was violently removed, and since they were homeless themselves, they might be charged with some offense. Jury members again voted for conviction, having apparently believed the prosecution's suggestion that Bates was now lying and had changed her testimony only because the defense had paid her to do so. The attorney of the prosecution, Attorney General (of Alabama) Knight attacked Bates, calling to attention her new clothes and accessories, and Bates could only answer that the Communists had supplied her with everything.
Eventually, Leibowitz with a motion to retry the sentences based on the fact that the juries were all white, such that the Boys weren't able to have a fair trial, was seconded by the Supreme Court of the United States, making it the fourth time that the Boys were to be tried. However this time, Leibowitz reluctantly recognized that the South viewed him as an encroacher upon their space, and following the conditions of the South, allowed a white southern lawyer to take over the defense. Shortly after Lebowitz let someone else take over, himself falling back to be the assistant attorney, the Boys sentences were sealed.
In July, 1937, Clarence Norris was convicted of rape and sexual assault and sentenced to death, Andy Wright was convicted of rape and sentenced to 99 years, and Charlie Weems was convicted and sentenced to 75 years in prison. Ozie Powell pleaded guilty to assaulting the sheriff and was sentenced to 20 years. Four of the boys were released after all charges against them were dropped: Roy Wright and Eugene Williams who had been twelve and thirteen at the time of the alleged crime; Olen Montgomery, who was nearly blind and had been found alone in a car at the end of the train; and Willie Roberson, who when accused was suffering from syphilis.
Later, Governor of Alabama Bibb Graves reduced Clarence Norris' death sentence to life in prison. Norris was later pardoned by Governor George Wallace. All of the Scottsboro Boys were eventually paroled, freed or pardoned, except for Haywood Patterson, who had been tried and convicted of rape and sentenced to the death penalty. He escaped north to Detroit, Michigan. When he was arrested more than 20 years later by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the 1950s, Governor of Michigan G. Mennen Williams would not allow him to be extradited back to Alabama.
In 1976, NBC aired a TV movie called ''Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys'', apparently under the impression that Victoria Price was no longer living. Price emerged to file a defamation and invasion of privacy suit against the network. The case was dismissed. Price died in 1982. Timothy Hutton starred as Leibowitz in the more recent film version, Heavens Fall.
After escaping from prison, Haywood Patterson wrote a book about his experiences, ''Scottsboro Boy''. While attempting to sell copies of the book one night in a Detroit bar, Patterson got into an altercation with a man and stabbed him. Patterson was arrested, convicted, and died in prison from emphysema two years later.
Author, Kelly Covin, published a book about the case in 1972 titled, "Hear That Train Blow."
Samuel Leibowitz became a justice on the New York Supreme Court before his death in 1978.
In 1998 Court TV produced a television documentary on the Scottsboro trials for its "Greatest Trials of All Time" series[1]. Daniel Anker and Barak Goodman produced the story of the so-called Scottsboro Boys in a 2000 documentary[2]. Timothy Hutton stars in a 2006 film adaptation titled "Heavens Fall."[3]
★ James Edwin Horton - judge who presided over the retrials
★ ''To Kill a Mockingbird''
★ Trenton Six
★ The Great Depression
1. Miller, Loren, ''The Petitioners: the story of the Supreme Court of the United States and the Negro'', (1966), Meridian Books, page 266, -- ASIN: B000GDGX66
2. Scottsboro Timeline. Retrieved 23 April 2007.
★ ''Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South'', by Dan T. Carter
★ ''The Last of the Scottsboro Boys: An Autobiography'' by Clarence Norris and Sybil D. Washington
★ ''Stories of Scottsboro'' by James Goodman
★ ''Scottsboro Boy'' by Haywood Patterson and Earl Conrad
★
★ Joshua Dressler and George C. Thomas: Criminal Procedure: Principles, Policies, and Perspectives, 3d. Ed., pp. 8-19.
★ Biographies of Key Figures in "The Scottsboro Boys" Trials
★ Scottsboro Trial Collection, Cornell Law Library
★ Bienen, Leigh & Gilbert Geis. ''Crimes of the Century: From Leopold and Loeb to O. J. Simpson''. Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1998. [4]
The case of the 'Scottsboro Boys' arose in Scottsboro, Alabama during the 1930s, when nine black youths, ranging in age from twelve to twenty, were accused of raping two white women, one of whom would later recant.
The trials, in which the youths were convicted and sentenced to death by all-white juries despite the weak and contradictory testimonies of the witnesses, are regarded as one of the worst travesties of justice perpetrated against blacks in the post-Reconstruction South.
The case quickly became an international ''cause célèbre'' and the boys were represented by the American Communist Party's legal defense organization. The death sentences, originally scheduled to be carried out quickly, were postponed pending appeals that took the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the sentences were overturned. Despite the fact that one of the women later denied being raped, the retrials resulted in convictions. All of the defendants were eventually acquitted, paroled, or pardoned (besides one who escaped), some after serving years in prison.
The Scottsboro case later inspired Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize winning ''To Kill a Mockingbird''.
| Contents |
| The event |
| Trials |
| In The Media |
| See also |
| References |
| Further reading |
| External links |
The event
On March 25, 1931,[1] a fight broke out between a group of black men and a group of white men riding in a car of a Southern Railway freight train.[2] All of the white men and boys, except Orville Gilley (key witness in trial) were forced to jump off. When the train stopped in Paint Rock, Alabama, the nine black youths were arrested on charges of assault. Two young white women dressed in boys' clothing — Victoria Price, aged 21, and Ruby Bates, aged 17 — were also found catching a free ride on the freight train. All were taken to Scottsboro, Alabama, the Jackson County seat. The two girls, unemployed mill workers and part-time prostitutes from nearby Huntsville, told authorities they had been brutally gang raped by the nine blacks taken into custody in Scottsboro. Some believe that the girls had said this only to get out of trouble with the law.
Twelve days after the men had been arrested the first trial took place. They were all kept in jail cells just feet away from the electric chair chamber where they were made to hear and smell the electrocutions of the other members of death row. Later deemed cruel and unusual punishment. Their lawyer was Milo Moody, a Tennessee lawyer unfamiliar with Alabama law, who met with the boys for just 25 minutes before the case was presented to a judge. Some accounts said that he was drunk for the duration of the trials. When called to testify the boys began to lay blame and accusations on each other which made the case worse. Haywood Patterson, along with the remaining 8 boys, were charged and found guilty of raping white girls.
The case was over turned by the supreme courts on account of fair and adequate legal representation, and moved the trials from Scottsboro to Decatur, AL. A well known lawyer, Samuel Liebowitz, from New York, came to the defense of the boys pro-bono. The prosecuting lawyer was Thomas E. Knight. Judge Horton presiding.
In the November 1932 re-trials the young Ruby Bates told the courts that she and Victoria Price had not been raped by the accused. The two had made up the story to avoid vagrancy charges. The prosecution accused her of being bought off by the communist party(which was supporting the 9 boys' case)And the jury believed the accusations. Later in the trials, a witness came forward who owned a farm near the railways, he claimed to have seen the alleged crime take place. When asked if he could identify what the two girls were wearing, he surely stated that they were both wearing dresses, when it was earlier established that they were in fact both wearing over-alls in an attempt to be passed off as boys. The witness was clearly fabricating the story. In the medical examinations the girls were found to have no scarring indicating rape. In fact they were found to be traveling with men the night before engaging in consensual sex. Despite the insurmountable evidence in their favor, all of the boys were found guilty for a second time and all sentenced to death.
June 22, 1933, Judge Horton throws out the verdict of the trial and subsequently looses his position as judge.
Trials
Upon the allegations of the two women, a lynch mob gathered around the jail, prepared to storm and kill the youths. Given the situation, the governor of Alabama, Benjamin M. Miller, was forced to call in the National Guard to protect the jail. Authorities pleaded against mob violence by promising speedy trials and executions. On March 30, the so-called Scottsboro Boys were indicted by a Grand Jury. In April, all were convicted and sentenced to death, except for one 13 year old, who was sentenced to life in prison. The NAACP and the International Labor Defense (legal arm of the Communist Party USA) both wanted to handle the defense and struggled to gain and retain the support of the boys and their parents; the ILD eventually won that battle and the NAACP dropped out of the case in January, 1932. The case quickly became widely known, with rallies held in northern U.S. cities, international press coverage and thousands of letters written in support of the defendants.
The Alabama Supreme Court upheld the convictions of seven of the boys who were on death row in March, 1932 (the eighth was determined to have been a juvenile), but in November the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Powell v. Alabama, reversed the convictions and ordered new trials based on the fact that the Boys didn't have proper representation. The first time they were tried, their parents scraped together $60 for a real-estate lawyer who urged them to plead guilty (no southern lawyer would try the case).
The ILD hired Samuel Leibowitz, a noted attorney from New York who was widely known for winning the vast majority of his criminal cases, to defend the Scottsboro Boys at the new trials, held in nearby Decatur. However, this would backfire on the boys as the whites from the south viewed Leibowitz as a total foreigner, a northerner, a communist, one that is representing blacks, as well as a Jew. This time one of the accusers, Ruby Bates, after disappearing for a time to escape from the pressure and the media attention, returned to testify in court and recanted her earlier testimony, now stating that she and Price had lied about being raped because they were afraid that, since they were found on a train with other homeless men where one party of homeless men was violently removed, and since they were homeless themselves, they might be charged with some offense. Jury members again voted for conviction, having apparently believed the prosecution's suggestion that Bates was now lying and had changed her testimony only because the defense had paid her to do so. The attorney of the prosecution, Attorney General (of Alabama) Knight attacked Bates, calling to attention her new clothes and accessories, and Bates could only answer that the Communists had supplied her with everything.
Eventually, Leibowitz with a motion to retry the sentences based on the fact that the juries were all white, such that the Boys weren't able to have a fair trial, was seconded by the Supreme Court of the United States, making it the fourth time that the Boys were to be tried. However this time, Leibowitz reluctantly recognized that the South viewed him as an encroacher upon their space, and following the conditions of the South, allowed a white southern lawyer to take over the defense. Shortly after Lebowitz let someone else take over, himself falling back to be the assistant attorney, the Boys sentences were sealed.
A marker commemorating the trial
In July, 1937, Clarence Norris was convicted of rape and sexual assault and sentenced to death, Andy Wright was convicted of rape and sentenced to 99 years, and Charlie Weems was convicted and sentenced to 75 years in prison. Ozie Powell pleaded guilty to assaulting the sheriff and was sentenced to 20 years. Four of the boys were released after all charges against them were dropped: Roy Wright and Eugene Williams who had been twelve and thirteen at the time of the alleged crime; Olen Montgomery, who was nearly blind and had been found alone in a car at the end of the train; and Willie Roberson, who when accused was suffering from syphilis.
Later, Governor of Alabama Bibb Graves reduced Clarence Norris' death sentence to life in prison. Norris was later pardoned by Governor George Wallace. All of the Scottsboro Boys were eventually paroled, freed or pardoned, except for Haywood Patterson, who had been tried and convicted of rape and sentenced to the death penalty. He escaped north to Detroit, Michigan. When he was arrested more than 20 years later by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the 1950s, Governor of Michigan G. Mennen Williams would not allow him to be extradited back to Alabama.
In The Media
In 1976, NBC aired a TV movie called ''Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys'', apparently under the impression that Victoria Price was no longer living. Price emerged to file a defamation and invasion of privacy suit against the network. The case was dismissed. Price died in 1982. Timothy Hutton starred as Leibowitz in the more recent film version, Heavens Fall.
After escaping from prison, Haywood Patterson wrote a book about his experiences, ''Scottsboro Boy''. While attempting to sell copies of the book one night in a Detroit bar, Patterson got into an altercation with a man and stabbed him. Patterson was arrested, convicted, and died in prison from emphysema two years later.
Author, Kelly Covin, published a book about the case in 1972 titled, "Hear That Train Blow."
Samuel Leibowitz became a justice on the New York Supreme Court before his death in 1978.
In 1998 Court TV produced a television documentary on the Scottsboro trials for its "Greatest Trials of All Time" series[1]. Daniel Anker and Barak Goodman produced the story of the so-called Scottsboro Boys in a 2000 documentary[2]. Timothy Hutton stars in a 2006 film adaptation titled "Heavens Fall."[3]
See also
★ James Edwin Horton - judge who presided over the retrials
★ ''To Kill a Mockingbird''
★ Trenton Six
★ The Great Depression
References
1. Miller, Loren, ''The Petitioners: the story of the Supreme Court of the United States and the Negro'', (1966), Meridian Books, page 266, -- ASIN: B000GDGX66
2. Scottsboro Timeline. Retrieved 23 April 2007.
Further reading
★ ''Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South'', by Dan T. Carter
★ ''The Last of the Scottsboro Boys: An Autobiography'' by Clarence Norris and Sybil D. Washington
★ ''Stories of Scottsboro'' by James Goodman
★ ''Scottsboro Boy'' by Haywood Patterson and Earl Conrad
★
★ Joshua Dressler and George C. Thomas: Criminal Procedure: Principles, Policies, and Perspectives, 3d. Ed., pp. 8-19.
External links
★ Biographies of Key Figures in "The Scottsboro Boys" Trials
★ Scottsboro Trial Collection, Cornell Law Library
★ Bienen, Leigh & Gilbert Geis. ''Crimes of the Century: From Leopold and Loeb to O. J. Simpson''. Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1998. [4]
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