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The Scottsboro Boys case was among the most important cases in the history of American Jurisprudence. It went to the United States Supreme Court twice and established forever the principles that, in the United States, criminal defendants are entitled to effective assistance of counsel¹ and that people may not be de facto excluded from juries due to their race². The case was, in reality, many cases that were tried only in the first instance in Scottsboro, Alabama. However, the Scottsboro defendants benefitted from their two landmark triumphs in the United States Supreme Court mostly from the fact that they were all relieved from their death sentences they received at their first trial in Scottsboro. However, the Supreme Court ruled both times only that the way their convictions were obtained was improper and not that they were innocent. The Scottsboro Boys served long prison sentences and it is one of history's great ironies that it was arch segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace who eventually cured this blatant injustice, after the United States Supreme Court had failed to do so twice, by issuing a pardon many long years after the trial.

The nine (Haywood Patterson, Roy Wright, Clarence Norris, Andy Wright, Willie Roberson, Charlie Weems, Ozzie Powell, Olen Montgomery, and Eugene Williams) were accused of the rapes of Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, which were alleged to have occurred on March 25, 1931,³ on the railroad line from Chattanooga to Memphis. On the train that day, catching an illegal (but common) ride on the freight train were the nine black youths, two white women, and a number of white youths. A fight occurred between the white youths and the black youths, resulting in most of the white youths being ejected from the train by the black youths. Several of the white youths then told the nearest stationmaster that they had had a fight with a gang of black youths. The stationmaster at the next stop, Paint Rock, Alabama, prepared for their arrival, and a posse of white men armed with guns grabbed all black youths they could find on the train and took them to jail in Scottsboro, Alabama.

Two women on the train, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, then claimed they had been raped by several of the black youths (Bates would later recant claiming that they had lied so that they would not be arrested for vagrancy.) Word quickly spread and a lynch mob gathered, prepared to storm the jail and murder 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.

The first round of trials

On March 30, 1931, the so-called Scottsboro Boys were indicted by an all-white jury, and the trial began several days later. The boys were defended by the only lawyers the parents could afford: a drunk real estate lawyer, Stephen Roddy, and Milo Moody, an aged lawyer who had not defended a case at trial in decades. The boys were divided into several groups, each of which was to be tried separately. Six of the boys denied the charges, two confessed (but later recanted, saying they had been beaten into confessing), and one claimed that all of the others were guilty. In April, all were convicted and sentenced to death, except for 12 year old Roy Wright. The prosecution had asked for life in prison for Wright due to his age, but the jury voted for execution, causing a mistrial to be declared for him. Private investigations took place, and revealed that Price and Bates had been prostitutes in Tennessee. Hearing this the southern newspapers used it for slander, and asked for an appeal for the court. The court denied it, and because of all the pressure from the media, Bates disappeared.

The jury sentenced Haywood Patterson to death. The defense moved for a retrial, and Judge James Edwin Horton, privately believing the defendants to be innocent, agreed to set aside the guilty verdict, despite knowing it meant the loss of his job when he ran for re-election.

Horton was then taken off the case by the Alabama Supreme Court. In his place, the State put Judge William Washington Callahan.

The United States Supreme Court, in a landmark decision, which still has many far reaching applications, reversed the convictions on the ground that the due process clause of the United States Constitution guarantees not only the assistance of counsel at a criminal trial, but that such assistance must be effective. That is, a criminal attorney must put up a competent defense for his or her client, which the attorneys for these defendants clearly had not - mostly out of patent incompetence in criminal defense work and likely also at least partially as a result of the community intimidation against them for having to defend those defendants, in that community for that charge. Thus, the Supreme Court found that the these defendants had been denied the effective assistance of counsel at their trial. As a result, it sent that cases back to Alabama for retrial.

The second round of trials

The case was moved to Decatur, Alabama for the second round of trials. By this time the case was a cause celbre and the American Communist Party had taken an unfortunate interest in the case. They approached and convinced the defendants to let them handle the defense of their cases. Their interest was less the benefit of the defendants than to create a propaganda bonanza by highlighting the shortcomings of justice in the American capitalist legal system. They retained famed defense attorney Samuel Leibowitz to be the lead attorney in the case. Leibowitz, a New York criminal attorney, had won an impressive seventy-seven acquittals and one hung jury in the seventy-eight murder trials he had defended. Liebowitz was a registered Democrat, who had no involvement or shared beliefs with the Communist Party. They choose their own chief attorney, Joseph Brodsky, to serve in the second chair for the trial.

Leibowitz very throughly prepared for trial. He began by making a pretrial motion to quash the indictment against the defendants on the ground that blacks were systematically excluded from the grand jury that had brought the indictment against his clients. He put on proof to that effect by showing that the local list of those called as jurors contained no blacks. He then put on local black professionals as witnesses to show that there were many qualified black candidates for jury service in the community who were among those who were being systematically excluded. While the motion was denied, this brillant strategy turned out to be the ticket for the case to eventually return to the United States Supreme Court to bring about an astonishing second landmark decision -- considering how few cases the Supreme Court even accepts for consideration.

Leibowitz then proceeded to put on an equally brillant defense. He even had a model of the train built to illustrate the various points of his defense. He destroyed, with his cross examination, the testimony of the only eye witness to the events, by showing that he could not have seen what he reported. He called one of the alleged victims, Ruby Bates, to testify that neither of the women had been raped. Unfortunately, the Communist Party had dressed her up in fancy New York garb, which the prosecution was quick to point out. It was said she "reeked of the North", which entirely destroyed her credibility with the all white, all male jury. Thus, the appearance of the defense's final and most dramatic witness, Ruby Bates fell surprisingly flat. In the months before the trial, Bates' whereabouts were a mystery. Leibowitz announced that he was resting his case, then approached the bench and asked for a short recess. Minutes later National Guardsmen opened the back doors of the courtroom, and, to the astonished gasps of spectators and the dismay of Knight, in walked Ruby Bates. Under direct examination, Bates said a troubled conscience and the advice of famous New York minister Harry Emerson Fosdick prompted her to return to Alabama to tell the truth about what happened on March 25, 1931. Bates said that there was no rape, that none of the defendants touched her or even spoke to her, and that the accusations of rape were made after Price told her "to frame up a story" to avoid morals charges. On cross-examination, Knight ripped into Bates, confronting her both with her conflicting testimony in the first trials and accusations that her new versions of events had been bought with new clothes and other Communist Party gifts. He demanded to know whether he hadn't told her months before in his office that he would "punish anyone who made her swear falsely" and that he "did not want to burn any person that wasn't guilty." "I think you did," Bates answered.

While Leibowitz's defense could not have been better as a technical masterpiece, to the jury, he was just another of those detested "damnyankees", who just kept descending on the South to preach to them as to the errors of their deeply cherished ways.⁴ The involvement of the Communist party in the defense of the case was also anything but a secret. In short, both Leibowitz and the Communist Party gave every sign of being totally "tone deaf" to local sensitivies -- perhaps badly misplaced local sensitivies, but all too real in terms of the true goal of the defense, which was to obtain the acquital of those hapless defendants.⁵ The jury quickly returned convictions for the second time.

The case went back to the United States Supreme Court for a second time, which reversed the convictions for a second time on the basis that people had been excluded from the jury pool because of their race. It remanded the case for yet another retrial in Alabama.

The third and final round of trials

Leibowitz reluctantly recognized that he was viewed by Southerners as an outsider, and allowed local attorney Charles Watts to be the lead attorney, while Leibowitz assisted from the sidelines.

Governor Graves had planned to pardon all of the defendants before he left office in 1938. However, during the customary pre-pardon interview, Graves was angered by the mens' hostility towards him and refusal to admit their guilt, so he did not issue pardons.

In the media

Literature

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 a fight with a man and stabbed him. Patterson was arrested, convicted, and died in prison from emphysema two years later.

While it has sometimes been suggested that the case inspired Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize winning To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee denied this, claiming it was a far less sensational case that moved her to write the novel.^{citation needed}

Allen Ginsberg in his poem "America", written at Berkeley on January 17, 1956, mentioned the Scottsboro boys. Author Kelly Covin published a book about the case in 1972 titled "Hear That Train Blow." In 2008, Ellen Feldman wrote Scottsboro: A Novel, based on the events of the Scottsboro trial.

Regino Pedraso (Cuban mestizo poet, b. 1896, of African and Chinese lineages) in his poem "Hermano Negro" (Black Brother) published in Antología Poética (1938) makes a direct reference to the Scottsboro trials in two instances. The poetic voice urges the black individuals to "hush the 'maracas' so that they can learn, look and listen in Scottsboro to the clamoring of enslaved anguish".

Music

Leadbelly commemorated the incident in his song The Scottsboro Boys⁶. In the song, he warns colored people to watch out if they go to Alabama, saying that "the man gonna get ya", and that the "Scottsboro boys [will] tell ya what it's all about".

Film and television

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.

In 1998, Court TV produced a television documentary on the Scottsboro trials for its Greatest Trials of All Time series.⁷ Daniel Anker and Barak Goodman produced the story of the Scottsboro Boys in the 2001 documentary Scottsboro: An American Tragedy, which received an Oscar nomination. Timothy Hutton starred in a 2006 film adaptation titled Heavens Fall.⁸

Footnotes

^ Powell v. Alabama, 287 U.S. 45 (1932)
^ Norris v. Alabama, 294 U.S. 587 (1935)
^ Powell, 287 U.S. at 49
^ “The International Labor Defense [legal arm of the American Communist Party] won the right to defend the youths and hired a well known New York lawyer, Samuel S. Liebowitz, who in the course of the trials was reviled publicly by some as a ‘meddling New York Jew.’ He received so many threats on his life that at one point Mayor Fiorello La Guardia sent two New York city detectives to Alabama to guard him.”, Clarence Norris, The Last Survivor of 'Scottsboro Boys', Dies at 76, New York Times, article by Albin Krebs, Published: January 26, 1989.
^ Judi Weaver, Director of the Scottsboro Jackson Heritage Center, said in a telephone interview with the New York Times in 1989 that she “attributes the trouble to outsiders who came from the mountains of Jackson County ‘and gave Scottsboro, Alabama, a black eye.’”, ‘’Scottsboro 70 Years Later, Still Notorious, Still Painful’’, New York Times, article by Dinitia Smith, Published, March 29, 2001.
^ Leadbelly - Let It Shine on Me: The Scottsboro Boys - Free Song Clips, ARTISTdirect Network
^ Crime Stories: "The Scottsboro Boys" (1998) at IMDb
^ Heavens Fall (2006) at IMDb

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