REAPING THE WHIRLWIND REAPING THE WHIRLWINDFor they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind; it hath no stalk: the bud shall yield no meal: if so be it yield, the strangers shall swallow it up.
—Hosea 8:7
In December 1934, Al Murphy sailed for Moscow as a delegate to the Seventh World Congress. He and Nat Ross had reached the point of no return over the issue of integrating the Alabama Share Croppers’ Union. Ross had pushed to integrate, Murphy had resisted, Murphy left. He remained in the Soviet Union for three years, married a Russian woman, and returned to the States in 1937.
Early in 1935 Ross had replaced Murphy with Clyde Johnson, the white organizer who’d assumed leadership of Atlanta’s unemployed worker movement after Angelo Herndon’s arrest. Ross tasked him with fashioning a mainstream biracial union from Murphy’s black underground resistance movement. Collaboration with socialists and progressives was becoming a priority for CPUSA general secretary Earl Browder. Ross and Sid Benson were planning an All Southern Conference for Civil and Trade Union Rights for May 1935 in partnership with Tennessee socialists Myles Horton and James Dombrowski, who ran the Highlander Folk School.
Horton and Dombrowski also hoped that this conference would increase enthusiasm for a unified progressive southern labor movement. Since 1932 their adult school had trained hundreds of workers of both races for union leadership positions. Highlander supported organizing drives, demonstrations, and strikes. Ross believed that he and Horton shared enough similarity of purpose to make such a joint venture possible.
Their conference announcement called for building “a common front of urban workers, rural sharecroppers and the unemployed.” It encouraged liberals and progressives to unite against the ruling class in the South. “This conference,” it proclaimed, “is the first great step in that action.”1
On May 26, 1935, two hundred delegates from labor, religious, social service, and political organizations arrived in Chattanooga for the three-day event. As they made their way to the Negro Pythian Temple, the police barred their entry. Apparently, the commander of the local American Legion Post had alerted the authorities that an integrated “Communist convention” was being held.2 After several unsuccessful attempts to find a venue to accommodate them, they decided to use the Highlander School in Monteagle. Only seventy-five of the two hundred delegates drove the nearly fifty miles to get there. Hardly an auspicious beginning.
Over the two remaining days, the delegates focused on three issues: repeal of sedition and antilabor laws, support for labor’s right to organize unions, and joining the national campaign to secure a federal death penalty for lynchers. They discussed whether or not they could rely on the AFL for support since William Mitch, president of the Alabama Federation of Labor, had been interested enough to come to Chattanooga, but he had not followed them to Monteagle.3
In the end, the conference generated more hope than results. It was not a question of bad faith—everyone wanted similar outcomes. Rather, the problem was a classic clash of political philosophies. Economic freedom was a higher priority for socialists than black social equality. Socialists considered blacks just another sector of the working class. As trade unionists, socialists often aligned with segregated unions. The Reds, however, agreed with W. E. B. Du Bois (who was not yet a party member), that black workers considered their greatest enemies not necessarily the bosses, but their white fellow workers. Eliminating racism in the ranks was a priority for communists. The conference, therefore, experienced some difficulty getting off the ground.
Shortly before Al Murphy left Alabama in December 1934, the ASCU’s cotton pickers and choppers had submitted a list of demands to planters in Tallapoosa, Lowndes, Lee, Chambers, Dallas, and Montgomery Counties. They wanted to be paid a minimum rate of $1 per hundred pounds of picked cotton. The going rate was 40 cents, and a young picker in a ripe field could handpick about two hundred pounds a day. That would yield him exactly 80 cents for twelve hours of work.
In Tallapoosa and Montgomery, the union negotiated an increase to 65 cents per hundred pounds, a raise in croppers’ monthly credit allowances from $10 to $15, and on a few plantations the right to independently gin their cotton. But in Lowndes and Dallas Counties, the planters refused to bargain. By the spring of 1935, the pickers and choppers there were talking about striking.
On August 19, 1935, during the height of picking season, fifteen hundred men and women dropped their sacks and walked off Lowndes’s massive Bell and Bates plantations. Clyde Johnson, the new union president with just six months on the job, requested solidarity from the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, whose members were also threatening to strike. He hoped to spark a general action, but the STFU refused to join them.4
The planters were beside themselves. A delay of just a few days could mean loss of the entire crop. Dallas County sheriff R. E. Woodruff drove out to the Bell Plantation to “talk some sense” into the strikers. He cornered one of the organizers, Willie Witcher, who told him “I don’t care to listen to strike-breaking talk” and walked away. Woodruff ordered him to stop. When Witcher stopped and turned around, the sheriff shot him. His deputy also fired. They put Witcher in the back seat of their police car and drove him to the Haynesville jail. Willie Witcher died there.5
Woodruff subsequently deputized landlords and overseers to raid six of the strikers’ cabins. They beat some of the croppers and drove others miles into the country and left them there so they had to walk back. J. W. Davis, a white tenant farmer believed to have assisted the black croppers, was flogged.6
Jim Press Merriweather, another Bell Plantation strike leader, was murdered two days later. His widow, Annie Mae, a captain in Capitola Tasker’s ASCU Sewing Club network, described what Vaughn Ryles and Ralph McQuire, two posse members, did to her while her husband was being killed.
They started tearing up the place looking for leaflets and found some under a mattress. . . . I said I didn’t know about the meeting because I had been working. Ryles started doubling a rope and told me to pull off all my clothes. He said, “Lay down across the chair, I want naked meat this morning.” I lay down across the chair and Ralph McQuire held my head for Ryles to beat me. . . . He was beating me from my hips on down, and [then] he hit me across the head. They said, “Now see if you can tell us what you know.” They were all cussing. . . . Ryles put a loop in the rope. . . .He threw the rope over the rafters . . . drew me up about two feet from the floor. . . . I heard a gun firing. . . . They told me about my husband being shot . . . They were lynching him then.7
The last thing she remembered was losing consciousness.
Blaine Owen went to Dallas County to cover the story for the Federated Press. After his foray in Memphis, he’d been organizing steelworkers in Birmingham and made the mistake of meeting with a few of them in one of the company housing units. Afterward, he was followed, kidnapped, thrown into the back seat of a black sedan, and beaten unmercifully. Two men demanded the names of his comrades, and when he refused, they pulled out fistfuls of his hair and drove him into the countryside, where they flogged him and left him.8
Owen’s luck wasn’t much better in Dallas County. An angry deputy sheriff arrested him as soon as he arrived, bellowing, “we got eight niggers to every white man here . . . we got a hard-enough time keeping down trouble without you coming around and stirring things up.” The following day, the sheriff released him to two men who took him outside Selma, stripped him, beat him, and left him on a deserted road. They swore he would be lynched if he ever returned.9
On September 2, 1935, Fort Deposit deputy sheriff Ed Arrant’s posse killed Ed Bracy, the Hope Hull ASCU chapter president. That week sixteen strikers, including organizer Robert Washington, were arrested in Selma. Washington was released to a white mob who beat him nearly to death.10 Joe Spinner Johnson, a leader of Hale County’s Greensboro chapter, was arrested and taken to the Dallas County jail. His landlord, B. J. Young, bailed him out and turned him over to a mob who killed him. Johnson’s battered body was later found in a Greensboro field. Al Murphy’s friend Charles Tasker was also arrested for leading striking WPA workers who’d refused to provide scab labor for the fields.11
When the Montgomery Advertiser called the strike a “communist rebellion,” a desperate Governor Miller called on Tallapoosa sheriff J. Kyle Young who had some experience with cropper uprisings. Young came to Lowndes, bringing the Wetumpka State Prison bloodhounds with him to ferret out strikers hiding in the swamps. His intervention apparently made a difference. The strike ended that fall.12
Although strikers in Tallapoosa and Lee Counties won some minor financial concessions, the 1935 pickers and choppers strike was crushed in Dallas and Lowndes. In December the newly widowed Annie Mae Merriweather told Clyde Johnson, “this terror we suffered lately didn’t give strength to the landlords. It only showed us that they’d rather see us die at the point of lynchers guns than give us a living wage.”13
By the time the ASCU’s pickers and choppers struck, most of the members of union locals in Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Louisiana were displaced croppers who’d become hourly workers or day laborers. This was the result of Texas farmer John Rust’s invention of a mechanical cotton harvester that could do the work of fifty to a hundred hand pickers 75 percent cheaper. Rust boasted that “the sharecropper system of the Old South will soon be abandoned,” and he wasn’t wrong.14
Thanks to their land furlough stipends, planters could afford to experiment with new technologies. Intensive cropper labor was required for only about ten weeks a year, yet croppers needed year-round shelter. Sharecropping was a wasteful system, created and maintained basically to protect white privilege. Now that it was unraveling what did the future hold for the displaced?
Nat Ross’s failure to achieve collaboration with socialists on his antilabor violence campaign, Johnson’s failure (after several attempts) to achieve solidarity with the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, and the crushing defeat of the ASCU strike precipitated a second district 17 reorganization. Ross and Benson left. Johnson stayed.
Early in 1936 Rob Hall, a white native Alabamian, replaced Ross. A 1932 graduate of Columbia University he had a degree in agricultural economics and his first Party assignment was organizing farmers in Nebraska and editing the Farmers’ National Weekly. He was the first white Southerner to head the District. Born in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and raised in Mobile, Alabama, Hall was a tall, stocky extrovert—a great storyteller and an obsessive pipe smoker. More approachable than Ross, he seemed truly interested in getting to know his comrades.15
Attorney Robert Wood subsequently replaced Donald Burke as ILD secretary, and Sid Benson went to Chattanooga to edit and publish the Southern Worker.16
The ILD’s national leadership also changed. In the summer of 1934, William Patterson had passed out in his New York City home and was diagnosed with a collapsed lung. On July 21 he sailed to the Soviet Union for treatment and rehabilitation at a sanitarium on the Black Sea. In the interim, Anna Damon was appointed acting ILD national director. Patterson did not return in 1935. He would not come back to the States until 1937, and Damon would ultimately succeed him.17
In Alabama, Rob Hall got to work reconfiguring district 17. He chose to keep Clyde Johnson. They’d studied together at Columbia University and had worked with the National Students League there. In May 1936, Hall approved Johnson’s request to relocate ASCU headquarters from Montgomery to New Orleans, where the Louisiana Farmers’ Union (originally an ASCU chapter) had an interracial membership of almost a thousand. Johnson wrote an article for the Southern Farm Leader that summer encouraging a merger of the black Alabama Share Croppers’ Union with the integrated Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and the white National Farmers’ Union—which would create an organization with sixty thousand members. The NFU expressed interest, but STFU once again declined. Its Socialist president, J. R. Butler, had recently been denied a seat at the Arkansas Federation of Labor convention because of his radical politics. Merging with the Reds could only bring more rejection. By 1936 unionism, integration, atheism, and communism were virtually interchangeable terms in the South.
Hall was pleased when Johnson completed the merger of the Alabama Share Croppers’ Union and the National Farmers’ Unions, which was celebrated at ASCU’s October 1936 convention. Leaders of the new alliance pledged to fight for the right of croppers to sell their own cotton; to inspect and review their accounts; to apply for federal relief without the landlords’ authorization; and to abolish the southern wage differential, the commissary system, and the poll tax.18
By 1937, all the former scu chapters in Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana were operating as National Farmers’ Union locals. The membership participated in a massive march on Washington, D.C., to demand an emergency relief bill for farmers and to repeal the Bankhead Cotton Control Act. This 1935 legislation had further restricted cotton production by taxing planters who refused to participate in the land furlough program. It triggered evictions of thousands more croppers and made them hourly workers overnight. Unemployment, poverty, and hunger increased.
In 1936 Franklin Roosevelt created the President’s Commission on Farm Tenancy to study the situation. In April 1937, Clyde Johnson and Annie Mae Merriweather testified before that commission, requesting that the members consider creating a land purchasing program and settling former tenant farmer on small plots of land. They also proposed graduated land taxes to keep large landholders, banks, and insurance companies from co-opting the program.
The final report of the Commission on Farm Tenancy to President Roosevelt advised him that no existing federal agency had adequate power to cope with the massive rural poverty in the South in a comprehensive, unified and integrated way.19 The president’s acceptance of their conclusions directly led to creation of the Farm Security Administration and passage of the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenancy Act, which authorized the federal government to buy up vacant land, rehabilitate it, and relocate farm tenants. A welcomed improvement, but still not a long-term solution.
The 1935 wave of change that washed over the nation, the South, the party, and district 17 did not spare the Scottsboro defense team.
In October 1934, the ILD’s Ben Davis, who’d defended Angelo Herndon, met with the Scottsboro teens in Kilby Prison to inform them that the Leibowitz-Brodsky partnership was over. While all nine initially chose to remain with Brodsky, some would eventually return to Leibowitz.
After Haywood Patterson and Clarence Norris signed affidavits naming Leibowitz as their counsel, Leibowitz ramped up his public criticism of Brodsky, accusing him of making a deal with Lieutenant Governor Thomas Knight Jr. to accept life sentences for the teens in return for their repudiating the ILD. Brodsky vehemently denied this and countercharged that Leibowitz and the NAACP had joined forces to bargain over jail time instead of fighting for the young men’s freedom.
On January 7, 1935, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Norris and Patterson’s appeals. Knowing that this was the teens’ last chance and that continuing their feud would seriously damage it, they called a truce. Leibowitz agreed to represent Norris, and Brodsky to represent Patterson.
On April 1, 1935, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned both Norris and Patterson’s convictions in Norris v. Alabama. The justices confirmed that they had been denied trials by juries of their peers, since blacks were systematically excluded from serving on juries in Alabama. That ruling made U.S. constitutional history.
Leibowitz and Brodsky completed the last rounds of Scottsboro trials under the watchful eye of a Scottsboro Defense Committee, organized (in good Popular Front fashion) in December 1935 by the NAACP, the ILD, the ACLU, the League for Industrial Democracy (LID), and the Methodist Federation for Social Services. Both attorneys agreed not to make any decisions or to devise any strategies without consulting the committee.
By the end of 1936, Alabama officials were sick and tired of the cycles of trials and retrials and all the wretched publicity that Scottsboro brought them. Although Leibowitz had never gotten his acquittal, he’d finally broken the prosecution’s will and Alabama was ready to negotiate. After relying on Victoria Price’s testimony sixteen times, prosecutors approached her with an offer of immunity from perjury if she would drop the charges. She wasn’t interested. In the end, Alabama would parole four of the nine despite their rape convictions. What kind of future could these men, raised to adulthood in prison, expect? By the time the last one was released in 1950, they each had lost between six and nineteen years of their lives.
Haywood Patterson, who’d been tried and convicted four times, broke out of Kilby Prison in 1948 and fled to Detroit, where within a year he was arrested for killing a man in a bar fight. He was convicted of manslaughter and sent to an Illinois prison, where he died of cancer in 1952. Clarence Norris, paroled in 1944, also fled Alabama, was captured, returned to prison, and paroled again in 1946. He assumed his brother’s identity and began to rebuild his life. Norris was pardoned by Governor George Wallace in 1976; he died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease in 1989. Andy Wright, paroled in 1943, also left Alabama, was arrested for breaking parole, and finally released in 1950. He moved to New York City. His younger brother, Roy, acquitted in 1937, joined the army and later the merchant marines. Roy married and appeared to have made a new life, until he came home on leave in 1959 to find his wife with another man. He killed her and then himself. Ozie Powell, paroled in 1946, went home to his sharecropping family in Georgia. Charlie Weems, paroled in 1943, married, moved to Atlanta. and found steady employment in an industrial laundry. Eugene Williams, paroled in 1937, moved to St. Louis, where his surviving relatives welcomed him. Olin Montgomery, also paroled in 1937, attempted to make a career in vaudeville but was not successful. He began drinking heavily, lived for a time in New York City, and finally returned to Atlanta, where he’d been raised. Willie Roberson, who had an IQ of 64 and no known living relatives, was also paroled in 1937. There is apparently no record of what happened to him after that.
In 2013 Powell, Patterson, Weems, and Andy Wright—the four who were all either paroled or released in 1936 with rape convictions hanging over them—were issued posthumous pardons by the State of Alabama.
Historian Douglas Linder maintains that Scottsboro “launched and ended careers, wasted lives, divided America’s left, created sectional strife, and fueled a fledging civil rights movement. Nine lives were saved, thanks in large measure to the Reds, but nine young men still languished in prison, living with fear, suffering and bitterness. The Reds made plenty of mistakes in their defense, but they did not make martyrs of the Boys to further their own cause. The judicial system martyred them, the communists were right on that issue, and the judicial system gave them what legacy they have.”20