Justice at Scottsboro, 82 Years Later

PanAfrican News

The posthumous pardon of three Scottsboro Boys is a symbolic victory in a South still grappling with the legacy of Jim Crow

On March 25, 1931, nine black boys headed west on a Southern Railroad train from Chattanooga, Tennessee. Near the town of Stevenson, Alabama, in the state’s northeastern corner, a fight began with some white youths. A posse – a popular means of dispensing justice in the Jim Crow days – met the train at Paint Rock. The black boys were accused of having raped two women who had been on the train, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates. Because they were indicted in the town of Scottsboro, they would come to be known as the Scottsboro Boys. The youngest of them was thirteen.

At least they were not lynched – that is the best that can be said about what followed. They did not end up like Emmett Till, whose pulped face was to serve, in 1955, as a warning about “what happens to smart niggers.” (His crime was speaking to a white woman, in Money, Mississippi.)

On Thursday the state of Alabama finally pardoned three of the Scottsboro Boys, the last who had any stain of the 1931 trial on their names. The men are long dead. The pardon prods old wounds while trying to heal them.

“This action clears their names for history,” University of Alabama historian Ellen Spears, who sits on an advisory board for the Scottsboro Boys Museum and Cultural Center, tells Newsweek. Justice, like most everything else, moves slowly in the South.

At the trial of one of the Scottsboro Boys, Haywood Patterson, Judge William Callahan instructed the jury, “Where the woman charged to have been raped, as in this case, is a white woman, there is a very strong presumption under the law that she will not and did not yield voluntarily to intercourse with the defendant, a Negro.”

Patterson, who later wrote a memoir called Scottsboro Boy, described an earlier courtroom as “one big smiling white face.”

In fact, it was the Communist Party that wound up sending an attorney, Samuel Leibowitz of its International Labor Defense, to wage the hopeless fight for justice.

Leibowitz capably showed that the two women, Price and Bates, were themselves promiscuous and likely using the gang rape as a way to shield questions about their own sexual behavior.

An opposing lawyer had a rebuttal to that, and to every other sound argument proffered in the Scottsboro Boys’ defense: “[Is] justice in this case…going to be bought and sold with Jew money from New York?”