Part 13

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.”

As far as grand juries were concerned, evidently not one of the more 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.”

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