Part 12

After the furor had died down, Arthur Garfield Hays finished reading the statements which had been prepared by the scientists and clergymen Darrow had brought to Dayton, and whose testimony had been excluded by Raulston’s ruling. Seven geologists, anthropologists and zoologists as well as three Protestant ministers and a Jewish rabbi were represented as Hays, in a tired voice, tried his best to educate an increasingly exasperated Raulston. When the defense attorney had finished his readings, he offered into evidence two Bibles and sat down. Darrow whispered something in his ear, and Hays was back on his feet again. “The defense desires to call Mr. Bryan as a witness,” he announced. “We should want to take Mr. Bryan’s testimony for the purposes of our record, even if your Honor thinks it is not admissable in general, so we wish to call him now.”

Despite Bryan’s obvious discomfiture at having to take the stand, there was no escape. He was being called as an expert on the Bible, a status he had assumed before Chautauquas up and down the land, and he simply could not refuse to accept Darrow’s challenge. After gaining a few minutes to collect his thoughts by insisting that the lawyers for the defense be ordered to take the stand when he was finished, Bryan perched himself in the spindle-legged chair that passed for a witness chair. What the _New York Times_ later described as the most amazing court scene in Anglo-Saxon history was about to be launched.

With the observation that he was sure that the witness would tell the truth, Darrow waived having him sworn. Then he got down to cases. He asked Bryan whether he had given considerable study to the Bible, and the old Democrat assured him that he had, “for about fifty years.” With slight exceptions, he was convinced that everything in the Scriptures should be taken literally. “When I read that a big fish swallowed Jonah,” he bellowed, “I believe it, and I believe in a God who can make a whale and can make a man and make them both do what he pleases. One miracle is just as easy to believe as another.”

As Darrow led his perspiring adversary through the Bible from Creation to the Battle of Jericho, many of the reporters sprawled on the benches that had been placed under the square’s maple trees remembered that he had asked many of the same questions in the pages of the _Chicago Tribune_ two years earlier. Bryan had refused to answer them then, but he was forced to do so now. When the long day drew to a close, Bryan was a defeated and humiliated man who had left whatever reputation he had brought into Dayton among the empty pop bottles and cracker jack boxes that littered the courthouse lawn. As Will Rogers put it, “He might make Tennessee the side show of America, but he can’t make a street carnival of the whole United States.”

With Bryan committed to defending the literalness of every incredible occurrence in the Bible, Darrow’s task was a comparatively simple one. A man who believed that Joshua made the sun stand still, or that Eve was created out of Adam’s rib, or that a giant flood destroyed all life on earth, was a sitting duck for an experienced and shrewd cross-examiner. As the day wore on, it was quite apparent that Bryan’s answers were destroying him in the eyes of even his friends, and that Darrow had succeeded in turning a rout into what had all the earmarks of a shattering victory.

Bryan’s observation that he was “more interested in the Rock of Ages than the age of rocks” set the tone of the entire interrogation. For example, when Darrow took up the subject of Eve’s temptation, the witness was certain that labor pains had originated with God’s wrath at apple larceny.

Q. And for that reason, every woman born of woman who has to carry on the race, has childbirth pains because Eve tempted Adam in the Garden of Eden?

A. I will believe just what the Bible says. I ask you to put that in the language of the Bible, for I prefer that to your language. Read the Bible and I will answer.

Q. All right, I will do that: “‘And I will put enmity between thee and the woman’”--that is referring to the serpent?

A. The serpent.

Q. “‘... and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.’ Unto the woman he said, ‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee.’” That is right, is it?

A. I accept it as it is.

Q. And you believe that came about because Eve tempted Adam to eat the fruit?

A. Just as it says.

As for the serpent, he had to “crawl upon his belly” for his nefarious part in the episode.

Q. Do you think that is why the serpent is compelled to crawl on his belly?

A. I believe that.

Q. Have you any idea how the snake went before that time?

A. No, sir.

Q. Do you know whether he walked on his tail or not?

A. No, sir. I have no way to know.

The laughter that accompanied Darrow’s last question about the earthbound snake marked the beginning of the end. A few minutes earlier Bryan had admitted that the six days of Creation did not amount to “six days of twenty-four hours.” His impression was that “they were periods” but he had no idea as to their length. The defender of the Word, who had refused to question Joshua’s sun-stopping maneuver or Jonah’s sojourn in the alimentary canal of a whale, knew that it took more than a week to build a makeshift barn, and somehow couldn’t swallow a six-day Creation. But as far as the fundamentalists on the courthouse lawn were concerned, he had betrayed them all. When he walked home later that afternoon, only one man accompanied him. The rest of the crowd followed Darrow all the way to the Morgan house.

The next morning dawned cool and rainy, and Raulston ordered the circus back into the courthouse, cracks or not. After expunging Bryan’s testimony, because he felt it could “shed no light upon any issues that will be pending before the higher courts,” he ordered the jury, which had been cooling its collective heels for more than a week just inside loudspeaker range, to get back to work. Darrow said that he thought it would save a great deal of time if the judge would instruct it to bring back a verdict of guilty so that the case could “get to a higher court.” At 11:14 on the morning of Wednesday, July 22nd, Captain Thompson led his colleagues down the stairs to the courthouse lawn where, after some eight minutes of palavar and one ballot, they found Scopes guilty of violating the Butler Act. As to the fine, they were willing to leave that to Raulston, who had told them in advance that he intended to fix it at one hundred dollars, the minimum under the statute.

The judge was as good as his word. He asked Scopes to stand up and informed him that he was indebted to the State of Tennessee in the sum of one hundred singles. When Neal reminded Raulston that he had forgotten to ask the defendant whether he had anything to say before being sentenced, the judge was all apologies. The thin, balding teacher, who had been silent for twelve sweltering days, didn’t take very long to say what he had to say. “Your Honor, I feel that I have been convicted of violating an unjust statute. I will continue in the future, as I have in the past, to oppose the law in any way I can. Any other action would be in violation of my ideal of academic freedom--that is, to teach the truth--as guaranteed in our constitution, of personal and religious freedom. I think the fine is unjust.”

Not to be outdone, his Honor, after imposing the fine again, told Scopes that “it sometimes takes courage to search diligently for a truth that may destroy our preconceived notions and ideas. It sometimes takes courage to declare a truth or stand for an act that is in contravention to the public sentiment. A man who is big enough to search for the truth and find it and declare it in the face of all opposition is a big man.” While Darrow, Hays and Malone were digesting that one, the _Baltimore Sun_ posted the five-hundred-dollar bond required as a condition of appeal and everyone began to congratulate everyone else. After Hays had promised to send the judge a copy of the _Origin of Species_, Raulston said, “We will adjourn and Brother Jones will pronounce the benediction.” The first stage of the State of Tennessee _versus_ John Thomas Scopes was over.

For weeks before the trial, Bryan had been busy writing an 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.”