SCOTTSBORO SCOTTSBOROI believe the spotlight the Reds put on Alabama saved all our lives.
—Clarence Norris, The Last of the Scottsboro Boys
On March 25, 1931, seven months after Esau Robinson’s lynching in Emelle, four black teens, riding on a Memphis-bound freight train, were jumped by seven white boys who declared that “this is a white man’s car.” During the ensuing struggle, most of the whites either jumped or were pushed off the train. One ran to the Stevenson depot to report the fight, despite the fact that he too was illegally hoboing. The station master wired the Jackson County sheriff’s office, and two deputies and a posse met the train in Paint Rock.
The four black teens involved in the fight, along with five others discovered riding in other cars, were arrested for assault and vagrancy. Several white males and two white females, Ruby Bates, age eighteen, and Victoria Price, age twenty-three, were also questioned.
When the young women were asked if the black boys had “bothered them,” Victoria Price made a fateful decision. Already on probation for prostitution, she knew that if she was charged with vagrancy she would go to jail. In a similar fix, Ruby was ready to agree with whatever Price decided. Yes, they’d been “bothered.”
All nine black teens were brought to the Jackson County Jail in Scottsboro. Word of their arrests spread quickly, and more than one hundred locals gathered on the court square. Newly elected sheriff Matt Wann threatened to shoot any one who attempted to take his prisoners. He wired the new governor, Benjamin Meek Miller, to send national guardsmen to prevent nine lynchings. The guard arrived at four in the morning and took the prisoners to a secure facility in Gadsden: Charlie Weems (nineteen), Ozie Powell (sixteen), Olen Montgomery (seventeen), Clarence Norris (eighteen), Willie Roberson (seventeen), Haywood Patterson (eighteen), Eugene Williams (fourteen), and brothers Andy Wright (nineteen) and Roy Wright (thirteen). Olin Montgomery was legally blind, and Willie Roberson was likely developmentally disabled. Ruby Bates and Victoria Price were detained as material witnesses.
Judge Alfred E. Hawkins asked the Scottsboro Bar Association to provide a public defender. Seven of its eight members refused, leaving only the semiretired Milo Mooney, who’d never handled a capital case.1 If anyone needed good legal advice, it was these young men. The late edition of the Huntsville Times reported that they’d “deliberately tossed the white occupants out of the [ freight] car and held the girls prisoner.”2
Lowell Wakefield, Doug McKenzie, and Isabelle Allen all headed to Scottsboro. While James Allen was a seasoned editor and political analyst, Isabelle was the journalist. Writing as Helen Marcy, she covered the story for the Southern Worker. As the white southern press referred to the defendants as monsters and animals, she humanized them through her interviews with their parents. Her articles were reprinted in the Daily Worker, published in New York City, and her first-person perspective reached a wide audience. Marcy was one of the first journalists to publicly question the veracity of the rape charges. Her partner, Doug McKenzie, broke the news that the teens’ accusers had been engaging in prostitution.
Haywood Patterson, Eugene Williams, and the Wright brothers all lived in Chattanooga, and that city’s Colored Ministers’ Alliance petitioned the NAACP for more experienced counsel. Ada Wright (Roy and Andy’s mother) hired Stephen Roddy, a white lawyer rumored to have Klan connections and known to have a drinking problem. He was the only white attorney who would take the case.3 Roddy wasn’t licensed to practice in Alabama, so he could only assist the bungling Milo Mooney. When the young men were returned from Gadsden for their arraignments, Mooney was given half an hour to prepare them.
Moody appeared confused as the teens were being charged with “forcefully ravaging and debasing Victoria Price and Ruby Bates.” Roddy counseled them to plead guilty, explaining that it would put him in a better position to negotiate life sentences. But they refused to plead guilty.
Neither Moody nor Roddy requested a postponement, nor did they attempt to locate any character witnesses. Lowell Wakefield wired New York to send a legal team. Allan Taub, a white ILD attorney representing striking miners in Kentucky, immediately drove to Chattanooga.
Beginning on April 6, 1931, the Scottsboro defendants (only four of whom had ever previously met) appeared before Judge Hawkins two at a time. Since it was the first Monday of the month—fair day—Scottsboro’s downtown was crowded with farmers buying supplies and provisions, looking at farm equipment, trading horses, and generally seeking a good time. They found it on the town square. As the prisoners were marched back and forth between the jail and the Jackson County Courthouse, Isabelle Allen reported that security was so lax that, if the National Guard had not been visible, lynchers might have had their way.
Prosecutor H. G. Bailey began with Clarence Norris and Charlie Weems, the two oldest defendants at age nineteen. Four trials were subsequently held in as many days. Defense attorney Roddy finally moved for a change of venue, pointing out the number of national guardsmen required to protect his clients. He looked to Major Joe Starnes and to Sheriff Matt Wann for support, but neither offered it. Incredibly, Sheriff Wann swore under oath that he could not recall any attempts to take his prisoners by force—the very reason he’d requested the guard. Both he and Major Starnes testified that they had no reason to believe that the defendants could not get fair trials in Jackson County.4 When Sheriff Wann was murdered a year later (May 3, 1932), many said it was because he’d initially snubbed Judge Lynch.
After Roddy’s request for a change of venue was denied, everything fell apart. On cross-examination Clarence Norris and Charlie Weems accused each other of raping the women. Neither Roddy nor Moody addressed this, nor did they provide closing arguments.5 In the end, eight of the nine defendants were convicted of rape and sentenced to death. Thirteen-year-old Roy Wright was sentenced to life in prison. The executions were scheduled for July 10, 1931, at Kilby State Prison, where “Yellow Mama,” the electric chair, was housed.
Lowell Wakefield wired Governor Miller requesting a stay of execution so he could prepare for an appeal. He asked for Allan Taub to be approved as defense counsel and be granted the right to interview the defendants. After the governor authorized the stay, Taub traveled to Kilby, met with the teens and offered to represent them. By April 10 most had signed on with him.
In the meantime, the ILD, under the leadership of William Patterson, who was black, began a massive national campaign to expose “the Alabama frame-up.” Patterson’s team organized demonstrations and rallies in major cities to protest the death sentences. Wakefield arranged for the mothers of Andy and Roy Wright, Eugene Williams, Olin Montgomery, and Haywood Patterson to appear at several of these rallies, to speak in their sons’ defense, and to raise funds for their legal expenses. The “Scottsboro Mothers tours” proved to be one of the most effective ways of publicizing the case. Janie Patterson, Ada Wright, Mamie Williams Wilcox, Viola Montgomery, and Ida Norris kept the nation apprised of how their sons were faring.
William Patterson, a successful attorney, operated from Harlem. A member of its renaissance jet set, he socialized with artists, writers, musicians, and activists. He’d joined the party in 1926 after the execution of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. Recognizing his potential, CPUSA sent him to the International Lenin School in Moscow in 1927, where he met Harry Haywood and James Ford. When he returned to the States in December 1929, he was dispatched to Pittsburgh to organize. In April 1931 he was called back to Harlem to lead the ILD’s Scottsboro campaign.
The NAACP national secretary, Walter White, was also new to his assignment and unlike Patterson was unsure about how to proceed. Should he try to wrest control of the appeal from the ILD? It would be difficult, as many of the members of his biracial executive board were not comfortable supporting young black men accused of raping white women.6 What if they were guilty? Even the radical W. E. B. Du Bois, editor of the organization’s Crisis, urged the condemned teens to put their faith in the “fairness and justice” of the court, to ignore the ILD campaigns, and to tie themselves to “intelligent whites.”7
When the NAACP Executive Board finally voted to pursue the Scottsboro appeal, White became locked in a battle with William Patterson that lasted the rest of 1931. His initial delay had proved costly—the Scottsboro teens chose to stay with their ILD attorneys.
Chief Counsel Joseph Brodsky replaced Stephen Roddy with Allan Taub, and Milo Moody with George Chamlee, the white former Hamilton County attorney general who’d recently defended three TUUL organizers in Chattanooga. Lastly, Brodsky reached out to Clarence Darrow, the nation’s most celebrated defense attorney, but, disapproving of the ILD’s mass defense tactics, Darrow refused to join the team.
Brodsky appealed to the Alabama Supreme Court for a new trial, citing incompetent counsel, a hostile courtroom environment, and the state’s practice of excluding Negroes from juries as factors in the teens’ inability to receive fair hearings. His filing automatically triggered eight stays of execution.8
The ILD’s mass campaign focused national and international attention on Scottsboro, and Patterson insured that every major U.S. radio station and daily newspaper carried the story. Blacks followed it in the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh (PA) Courier, the Baltimore Afro American, and the Southern Worker. Only the Courier counseled the teens to break with the communists and put their trust in the NAACP.9
In the meantime, the white Birmingham Age Herald assured its readers that “no reasonable fault can be found with the fairness or the legality of the trials,” and the Montgomery Advertiser maintained that “Jackson County . . . as a citizenry composed of people who hold inviolate its women, offers no apology to the rest of the country for the penalty imposed upon the blacks who would, according to the evidence, be a dangerous menace to any section of any country in the world.”10
White southerners were by and large convinced that the young men were guilty and lucky to have escaped lynching. The Advertiser dismissed the ILD attorneys as “buzzards and carpet baggers seeking publicity and political power.” Even Arthur Raper, director of the Southern Commission on the Study of Lynching, concluded that, although the teens were “likely innocent,” the ILD was exploiting them as “pawns in a propaganda war.”11
The Reds, for their part, acknowledged that nine physical lynchings had been averted, but that the four sham trials conducted at the Jackson County Courthouse amounted to legal lynchings.12 They made this distinction in the April 10, 1931, issue of the Daily Worker.
On May Day, an occasion usually reserved for celebrating workers’ rights, Scottsboro demonstrations were coordinated in 110 cities from coast to coast. After photos of the teens ran in both the national and international newspapers (courtesy of the ILD), Alabama governor Benjamin Meek Miller received two thousand letters protesting the eight impending executions. The overwhelming success of Patterson’s massive protest enraged white Alabamians who bitterly resented his outside interference in what they considered to be a local matter.
On June 22, 1931, ILD attorneys Chamlee and Brodsky brought their appeal before the Alabama Supreme Court. Attorney General Thomas E. Knight Jr., who three months earlier had introduced a bill to the Alabama Legislature outlawing the Communist Party, represented the state before a panel of judges that included his father, Justice Thomas E. Knight Sr.
As the teens awaited the court’s decision, the NAACP pressed them to break with the ILD “before the Reds’ antics send all of you to the electric chair.” Walter White offered the services of Clarence Darrow, a NAACP board member, but the teens understandably chose to remain with the Reds who’d stopped their executions and who had not, as some NAACP officials had, referred to them and their parents as “ignorant and stupid.” Walter White had made a major, and apparently irreparable blunder on that account.13 Six months later, when the Alabama Supreme Court Justices had still not announced their decision, Brodsky approached Darrow a second time. But they could not agree on the terms for working together, and in January 1932 both Darrow and the NAACP withdrew their interest in the case.
A bit of Old White South folklore alleges that “only white men and black women have sexual freedom.” Victoria Price and Ruby Bates knew better. Hollace Ransdell, a young midwestern journalist, would soon discover why.
In April 1931, Ransdell, an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) southern field agent, was asked by the organization’s national executive, Roger Baldwin, to look into the case. Baldwin had been called on to mediate between the NAACP and the ILD attorneys over representation of the Scottsboro teens. While he was a personal friend of Walter White, Baldwin also respected William Patterson. He asked Ransdell to provide more background information.
Ransdell initially delved into the “fundamental differences over principles and tactics” of these organizations. Whereas the NAACP shunned publicity in order to avoid antagonizing southern white prejudices, the ILD appealed bluntly and directly to the public, agitating on the streets and in the press. In Ransdell’s opinion, there was no basis on which to expect that they could ever work together.
She visited the young men in Kilby Prison, spoke at length with both sets of attorneys, with law enforcement officers, judges, residents of Scottsboro, Chattanooga, and Huntsville, politicians, and members of the clergy—anyone who would agree to meet with her, even briefly. She was determined to collect as much information for Baldwin as possible. George Chamlee told Ransdell that Bates and Price had not accused the teens of raping them until they were detained as material witnesses themselves. He claimed that the Scottsboro police had “swept up” the young women into making their accusations. After interviewing the women herself, Ransdell concluded that there was a good chance that Chamlee was right. She described Victoria Price as “the type who welcomes attention and publicity at any price.”14
Finally, she met with Victoria and Ruby together with their mothers—not once, but several times. Ransdell understood that, under ordinary circumstances, the word of either Price or Bates would not have counted for much. Hardly flowers of white southern womanhood, both had failed to measure up to female standards of honesty, virtue, honor and chastity—but in 1931, they would have to do. Their testimonies were crucial to the execution of eight black rapists.
Both women lived in Huntsville and alleged that they had been riding home in the freight car that afternoon after several unsuccessful attempts to find work. Their shifts at Huntsville’s Margaret Spinning Mill had been cut back to every other week, and their pay was averaging only about $1.20 a day. Victoria had worked in the mills since she was ten; Ruby, who was from a sharecropping family, started at sixteen. Both fathers had left the families, and Ruby and Victoria helped to support their mothers and younger siblings. They subsidized their limited incomes with irregular support from local charities, by volunteering for extra shifts whenever possible, and by taking in boarders. Male borders were sometimes willing to pay for special favors, and mill families headed by single women often accommodated them.15
Prostitution was a fact of life—one of the few avenues available for women abandoned by their husbands to provide for their children. The coming of the Depression had made it even more necessary.
Ransdell wrote that Ruby Bates “lived in a bare but clean unpainted shack in the Negro section of Huntsville and mixed with [blacks]”; she was what respectable whites described as “the lowest of the low, that is, a white woman whom economic insecurity has forced across the great color barrier.”16
Victoria Price, older, tougher, and more resilient, had a far worse reputation. She ran a speakeasy in Huntsville and engaged in prostitution there and in Chattanooga. Ruby, while also known to be of uneasy virtue, was more reserved. She took her cues from Victoria, which led authorities to initially assume that she was slow—an assessment that Ruby deeply resented.
The Daily Worker, the Southern Worker, and the Labor Defender expressed little sympathy for Price and Bates. They described them as cheap hookers and portrayed the Scottsboro teens as victims of an unjust social and economic system.
The white Montgomery Advertiser, Huntsville Times, and Birmingham News, on the other hand, viewed the two as poor, fatherless, defenseless victims of nine black predators who’d thrown six white boys from a train in order to have their way with them. Price and Bates were white women, and more to the point, southern white women who were entitled to male protection. It was their misfortune to have been abandoned by their men.17
Ransdell described Victoria and Ruby as “victims themselves,” who in turn were “mercilessly cruel to other victims.” The young journalist produced a comprehensive study of the Scottsboro case for her boss in just a few weeks. In the end, however, she could not get the twenty-two-page report published, not even by the commissioning ACLU. It was judged to be too volatile and too provocative. Ransdell had come to the incendiary conclusion that “if the nine youths on that freight car had been white there would be no Scottsboro Case. The issue at stake was the inviolable separation of black men from white women.”18
She and Roger Baldwin distributed the report widely, but only the New York Graphic and the Daily Worker published it, and the NAACP’s Walter White repeatedly quoted from it. Ransdell had asked: “How could anyone look at the eight terrified, bewildered young Negroes in their death cells, and these two girls, enjoying excellent health and delighting in their fame—and still maintain that the boys deserved to die?”19
Forty years later, Anne Braden, a white Alabama journalist, provided a bit of insight. In a 1972 brochure that she prepared for the Southern Conference Education Fund, Braden offered the following observation:
For me the awareness began in 1946 in a courtroom in Birmingham, Alabama. I was 22, a young newspaper reporter, covering the courthouse. That day a young black man was being tried—not for rape, but for something called “assault with intent to ravish.” A young white woman testified that he passed her on the opposite side of a country road and looked at her in an “insulting” way. He was sentenced to twenty years.
I was appalled by the case. Torn by what was happening to the black man. But torn too, as I watched the white woman. She appeared to be very poor, but she had obviously dressed in her best—and for that day she was queen in the courtroom. The judge, the prosecutor, her father who told of her fright when she came in from that walk—all rallied round to defend her honor. . . . I realized the horror of what she was doing to herself. Tomorrow, after her day as a queen, she would go back to a life of poverty and boredom; waiting on her father, on her brothers, and someday on a husband—paying with a lifetime of drudgery for those magic moments when she could achieve the status of a wronged white woman.20
Driven by their own fear of arrest and seduced by the attention they received, Bates and Price unwittingly became celebrities. After Scottsboro, the same people who’d ignored them all their lives began listening to them, protecting them, and even fawning over them. It was too good to last, and of course it didn’t.
Ruby recanted her testimony in 1933 and was vilified throughout Alabama. She was accused of accepting a bribe from the communists. The Huntsville Times referred to her as Harlem’s Darling and petitioned the state attorney general to charge “the former Huntsville guttersnipe” with perjury. After Ruby left Huntsville, she toured with the Scottsboro Mothers and campaigned on behalf of the ILD for the teens’ release. In 1940, she married Elmer Shut, moved to Yakima, Washington, and lived out her life as Lucille Shut.
Victoria, who never recanted, bitterly resented the fact that Ruby had done so. In later years Victoria no doubt convinced herself that she had been raped. After several divorces, she married sharecropper Walter Street when she was fifty. They lived on a tobacco farm in Flintville, Tennessee, for twenty-seven years, where she was known as Katharine Street.
In 1976 when NBC-TV released the docudrama Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Case, Victoria brought a $6 million libel suit for her portrayal in the film. The producers believed that both she and Ruby had long since died. After NBC settled with Victoria, she was able to buy her first home. Ruby subsequently filed a lawsuit but didn’t live long enough to see it through. She died on October 27, 1976, in Yakima at the age of sixty-three. Victoria died in Flintville on October 19, 1982, at the age of seventy-seven. Neither ever had children.