Chapter VII: Preface: XI (6)

Bryan’s observation that he was “more interested in the Rock of Ages than the age of rocks” set the tone of the entire interrogation. For example, when Darrow took up the subject of Eve’s temptation, the witness was certain that labor pains had originated with God’s wrath at apple larceny.

Q. And for that reason, every woman born of woman who has to carry on the race, has childbirth pains because Eve tempted Adam in the Garden of Eden?

A. I will believe just what the Bible says. I ask you to put that in the language of the Bible, for I prefer that to your language. Read the Bible and I will answer.

Q. All right, I will do that: “‘And I will put enmity between thee and the woman’”--that is referring to the serpent?

A. The serpent.

Q. “‘... and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.’ Unto the woman he said, ‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee.’” That is right, is it?

A. I accept it as it is.

Q. And you believe that came about because Eve tempted Adam to eat the fruit?

A. Just as it says.

As for the serpent, he had to “crawl upon his belly” for his nefarious part in the episode.

Q. Do you think that is why the serpent is compelled to crawl on his belly?

A. I believe that.

Q. Have you any idea how the snake went before that time?

A. No, sir.

Q. Do you know whether he walked on his tail or not?

A. No, sir. I have no way to know.

The laughter that accompanied Darrow’s last question about the earthbound snake marked the beginning of the end. A few minutes earlier Bryan had admitted that the six days of Creation did not amount to “six days of twenty-four hours.” His impression was that “they were periods” but he had no idea as to their length. The defender of the Word, who had refused to question Joshua’s sun-stopping maneuver or Jonah’s sojourn in the alimentary canal of a whale, knew that it took more than a week to build a makeshift barn, and somehow couldn’t swallow a six-day Creation. But as far as the fundamentalists on the courthouse lawn were concerned, he had betrayed them all. When he walked home later that afternoon, only one man accompanied him. The rest of the crowd followed Darrow all the way to the Morgan house.

The next morning dawned cool and rainy, and Raulston ordered the circus back into the courthouse, cracks or not. After expunging Bryan’s testimony, because he felt it could “shed no light upon any issues that will be pending before the higher courts,” he ordered the jury, which had been cooling its collective heels for more than a week just inside loudspeaker range, to get back to work. Darrow said that he thought it would save a great deal of time if the judge would instruct it to bring back a verdict of guilty so that the case could “get to a higher court.” At 11:14 on the morning of Wednesday, July 22nd, Captain Thompson led his colleagues down the stairs to the courthouse lawn where, after some eight minutes of palavar and one ballot, they found Scopes guilty of violating the Butler Act. As to the fine, they were willing to leave that to Raulston, who had told them in advance that he intended to fix it at one hundred dollars, the minimum under the statute.

The judge was as good as his word. He asked Scopes to stand up and informed him that he was indebted to the State of Tennessee in the sum of one hundred singles. When Neal reminded Raulston that he had forgotten to ask the defendant whether he had anything to say before being sentenced, the judge was all apologies. The thin, balding teacher, who had been silent for twelve sweltering days, didn’t take very long to say what he had to say. “Your Honor, I feel that I have been convicted of violating an unjust statute. I will continue in the future, as I have in the past, to oppose the law in any way I can. Any other action would be in violation of my ideal of academic freedom--that is, to teach the truth--as guaranteed in our constitution, of personal and religious freedom. I think the fine is unjust.”

Not to be outdone, his Honor, after imposing the fine again, told Scopes that “it sometimes takes courage to search diligently for a truth that may destroy our preconceived notions and ideas. It sometimes takes courage to declare a truth or stand for an act that is in contravention to the public sentiment. A man who is big enough to search for the truth and find it and declare it in the face of all opposition is a big man.” While Darrow, Hays and Malone were digesting that one, the _Baltimore Sun_ posted the five-hundred-dollar bond required as a condition of appeal and everyone began to congratulate everyone else. After Hays had promised to send the judge a copy of the _Origin of Species_, Raulston said, “We will adjourn and Brother Jones will pronounce the benediction.” The first stage of the State of Tennessee _versus_ John Thomas Scopes was over.

For weeks before the trial, Bryan had been busy writing an anti-evolution speech which he looked forward to delivering in the courtroom. But Darrow’s carefully planned capitulation on the trial’s last day had deprived him of his national forum. Such a speech, however, could not remain locked up in the frustrated soul of a veteran Chautauquian who was not in the habit of keeping his thoughts to himself. After trying excerpts out on roadside audiences in Jasper and Winchester, Tennessee, he persuaded the _Chattanooga News_ to publish it. But he was never to see it in print. On Sunday, July 26th, he died of what Darrow, with more candor than good taste, termed “indigestion caused by over-eating.” As for the great oration, Mrs. Bryan released it for general publication two days after her husband’s death. It went largely unnoticed.

Everything else was anti-climatic. A year and a half later, the Tennessee Supreme Court sustained the constitutionality of the Butler Act. But its four members reversed Scopes’ conviction because Raulston had violated the state constitution when he, and not the jury, had fixed the fine. Unless the prosecution insisted on bringing Scopes to trial again, the case was cold turkey, and Chief Justice Green did his best to keep it that way. “We see nothing to be gained,” he urged, “by prolonging the life of this bizarre case.” The Attorney General took the rather broad hint Green had dropped, and immediately nolle prossed the indictment.

Although the school board offered to reinstate Scopes, he decided to take advantage of his notoriety and accepted a graduate scholarship. As for the Butler Act, it was never to be enforced again--in Tennessee or anywhere else for that matter. In 1951, a bill proposing its repeal was introduced by, of all people, Rhea County’s representative in the Tennessee Legislature, but it was soundly defeated. Another attempt, ten years later, was voted down, 69 to 17, in the House of Representatives. Today, it still lurks in the statute books, a remembrance of things past. But as far as the “victorious defeat” that clipped its wings was concerned, Darrow never grew tired of saying that “I believed that the cause was worth while, and was always glad that I helped.”

6

_Their Skin was Black_

The State of Alabama

_versus_

Haywood Patterson

In 1931, Huntsville was a rickety industrial town in the northern reaches of Alabama. Most of its 30,000 inhabitants depended on one or another of the seven mills that were just beginning to be hit by the depression that had already paralyzed other parts of the country. By March, Margaret Mill, for example, had cut its work week to two days and its average daily wage to $1.20.

One of Margaret’s employees was a seventeen-year-old girl named Ruby Bates whose nomadic family lived in a shack on Depot Street, Huntsville’s Negro section. The only whites on the block, the Bateses had migrated to Huntsville from the cotton fields of central Alabama. Sharecropping had not brought in enough to feed five mouths and, after Mr. Bates had deserted his brood and left for parts unknown, Ruby and her mother decided to move into a town where both women could work at one of the mills. First it was Athens and then Huntsville.

Monday, March 23, 1931, was a sunny day on the cool side. Ruby, who hadn’t worked for more than a week, was standing near her front window, watching her brother and sister playing with the Negro children on Depot Street, when Victoria Price, a Margaret co-worker, strolled up the front walk. Twenty-five-year-old Victoria, who lived with her mother on Arms Street, supplemented her meager mill earnings with some slack-time prostitution. By 1931, she had a sizable arrest record even though Walter Sanders, Huntsville’s deputy sheriff, described her as “a quiet prostitute [who] don’t go rarin’ around cuttin’ up in public.”

Victoria had an idea. Jack Tiller, her current boy friend, had run into Lester Carter who had just been released from a Huntsville chain gang. The two men had suggested that Victoria find a girl for Lester and then they would shake the Alabama dust from their feet. Ruby was more than willing and, after packing her few belongings, hurried over to the Price’s two-room shack where Tiller and Carter were waiting. Both girls had on overalls, under which they were wearing their entire wardrobes. The two couples spent the night in a nearby hobo jungle where, between some semi-public lovemaking, they made plans to go West and “hustle the towns.”

But, in the cold light of dawn, Tiller suddenly realized that he had a wife who might not take too kindly to his proposed cross-country tour with Victoria, and decided to give up the venture and go home. Carter and the girls jumped a freight for Chattanooga, almost one hundred miles away, where they bedded down in some woods just outside of the city. There, they were joined by a street poet named Orville Gilley, otherwise known as “Carolina Slim,” who was swiftly enlisted as a replacement for Tiller. At eleven o’clock the next morning, the quartet boarded a forty-car freight which was bound for Memphis. They settled down in an open gondola car which was almost filled to the gunwales with crushed rock. Five other white boys were sitting at the opposite end of the car.

The freight, which was following the tracks of the Southern Railroad, crossed into Alabama at Bridgeport, and passed through Stevenson, Fackler, Hollywood, Scottsboro, Lim Rock and Woodville before it came to a stop at Paint Rock, less than thirty miles east of Huntsville. Shortly after Gilley, Carter and the two girls had boarded the gondola, the train stopped for water at a siding in Stevenson. Seconds later, a dozen or so colored boys climbed into the gondola from an adjoining box car. A fight immediately ensued between the invaders and the seven white boys in the gondola, the net result of which was the forcible eviction of all the whites with the exception of Gilley.

The boys who had been thrown off the slowly moving train limped back into Stevenson where they reported the incident to the stationmaster. He telephoned ahead to Paint Rock, some thirty-eight miles west of Stevenson, and, when the train pulled into that northern Alabama hamlet at 2:30 p.m., a posse of seventy-five armed white men was waiting for it. Nine Negro boys between thirteen and twenty years of age, as well as Ruby Bates, Victoria Price and Orville Gilley, were removed from the gondola. The girls were taken to a doctor’s office for a physical examination while the Negroes were locked up in Scottsboro’s tiny jailhouse. When an ugly crowd began to gather, Sheriff M. L. Wann asked Governor B. M. Miller to send in the National Guard. The troops arrived at four the next morning and escorted the nine suspects to Gadsden, Alabama. Four days later, they were returned to Scottsboro where they were all indicted on the charge that they “forcibly ravished ... a woman against the peace and dignity of the State of Alabama.”

Their trials started on Monday, April 6, 1931, in the Jackson County Circuit Court. H. G. Bailey, the State Solicitor, asked Judge Alf E. Hawkins to sever the trials, a request that was promptly granted. Charlie Weems and Clarence Norris, who were twenty and nineteen respectively, were first tried; their trial was followed by that of eighteen-year-old Haywood Patterson. The third involved five boys--Andy Wright (19), Willie Roberson (17), Olen Montgomery (17), Ozie Powell (16) and Eugene Williams (15). The youngest defendant, thirteen-year-old Roy Wright, was to stand trial by himself.

The boys’ pedigrees were much the same. They were all destitute, illiterate and unskilled southern Negroes who came from Tennessee and Georgia. Roberson was suffering from both gonorrhea and syphilis while Montgomery was practically blind. According to Patterson, “All nine of us were riding the freight for the same reason, to go somewhere and find work.” These were the “nine black fiends” who, according to the _Jackson County Sentinel_ of March 26, 1931, had “committed [the] revolting crime.”

When the trials started, none of the defendants was in any position to retain an attorney. Judge Hawkins had appointed “all members of the bar for the purpose of arraigning the defendants, and then, of course, I anticipated them to continue to help if no counsel appears.” A Stephen W. Roddy, a Chattanooga lawyer, who had been approached by members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, told Hawkins that, although he had not been paid and would not “appear as counsel,” he was willing to do what he could on the defendants’ behalf. He was joined by Milo Moody, a member of the Scottsboro bar, who expressed his willingness “to help Mr. Roddy in anything I can do about it under the circumstances.” The judge was quite obviously relieved that the niceties of justice would be scrupulously observed.

Roddy’s first step was to present a petition signed with nine X’s asking for a change of venue. In view of the hostile crowd which filled the courthouse lawn, he insisted that a fair trial was impossible in Scottsboro. Bailey made it quite clear that he considered Roddy’s suggestion impertinent and called Major Joe Starnes, the commanding officer of the National Guard, to rebut it. Starnes assured the court that “the crowd here was here out of curiosity and not as a hostile demonstration toward these defendants.” The major’s opinion was enough for Hawkins and he overruled Roddy’s motion.

The four trials were over by Thursday morning. On Friday, eight of the Negroes were sentenced to die in the Kilby Prison electric chair early the following July. Because one juror refused to vote for Roy Wright’s execution, his trial resulted in a hung jury. But eight out of nine was a good batting average in anybody’s league and the crowd outside the courthouse, which sang “There’ll be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” as each guilty verdict was announced, was more than satisfied with the week’s work.

In all four trials, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates were the witnesses-in-chief for the prosecution. Their stories left little to be desired as far as the State Solicitor was concerned. After the Negroes had invaded the gondola car, they had cowed the white boys by “telling them that they would kill them, that it was their car and we were their women from now on.” Victoria accused Norris of having “sexual intercourse with me” while Weems threatened her with a .45 pistol and a knife. Norris had “pulled my overalls over me” and “the little one, the smallest one, was holding my legs.” To add insult to injury, Norris had not only raped her but stolen her knife, $1.50 of her money, and a pocket handkerchief. Twelve Negroes had entered the gondola car but “three got off.” She denied that she was travelling with any of the seven white boys who had been involved in the fight at Stevenson. In all, she and Ruby had each been raped by six boys but “three of hers got away.”

Ruby said that the Negroes had ordered the white boys in the gondola car “to unload” before the rapes took place. Then, while some of the defendants threatened her with knives and pistols, she had been thrown to the gravel-covered floor of the car and attacked. “There were three Negroes to each girl,” she told the spellbound jury, “one for intercourse, one for holding the knife and one for holding the pistol. They never did remove the knife or pistol.”

Two physicians--Drs. R. R. Bridges and M. H. Lynch--had examined both girls a little more than an hour after they had been removed from the train. Although he had found no “recent lacerations” on either woman, Bridges said that he had “found semen in the vagina of each one.” Two years later, he was to state that “the semen did not move and we don’t swear as to whether it is dead or alive unless we see it move.” No lacerations, tears or bruises were found in the genital region of either girl. Both Victoria and Ruby had seemed quite calm during Bridge’s first examination but when he visited them in jail the next day they were somewhat hysterical. Lynch, who was the head of the Jackson County Health Department, confirmed his colleague’s observations.

Hawkins, who was determined to get the trials over with as soon as possible, refused to let Roddy and Moody do more than present a token defense. Nowhere was this more apparent than in their cross-examination of the two physicians. When they tried to show that Victoria and Ruby were far from virgins, the judge said such evidence was irrelevant. While Dr. Bridges was on the stand, Roddy asked him whether either girl showed any indications of gonorrhea or syphilis. Hawkins refused to let the physician answer the question despite the fact that Willie Roberson was suffering from both diseases. Although Bridges confirmed that Roberson had “a bad case of it,” he was sure that “it is possible for him to have intercourse.”

Lynch and Bridges were followed by a number of Stevenson residents who had seen the fight on the gondola car. Luther Morris had been in a barn loft, some thirty yards away from the Southern roadbed, when the train passed. He had seen a “bunch of Negroes put off five white men and take charge of two white girls. The two white girls were doing their best to jump and the Negroes got the two white girls and they were pulled back down in the car.” Two of the boys who had been thrown off the train by the Negroes passed by Morris’s barn on their way to Stevenson but were too stunned to talk to him. “They just said: ‘I am dying’ ... they were badly hurt.”

Orry Robbins had been standing near a woodpile, a hundred yards away from the tracks, when the train passed. He said that “I saw two girls and these colored people ... one of the colored men grabbed a woman and threw her down.” T. L. Dobbins, who was only a few feet away from the train, had observed the scuffling in the gondola car but, as far as the participants were concerned, he “could not tell whether they were white or black.” Lee Adams, who was two hundred yards away, had watched “a bunch of people in a car ... striking and about that time I saw someone go over the top of the car.” Later, he saw two of the boys who had been thrown off the train running toward Stevenson and “the blood was running down their faces.” By the time the train passed Sam Mitchell, it was going between thirty and forty miles per hour. As for the fight, “we see’d them wrestlin’, ’peared like. That’s all I seen; the train was going pretty fast.”

When the train stopped at Paint Rock, the armed posse was waiting for it. Bailey used some of its members to add what little they could to the case against the defendants. Tom Taylor Rousseau was certain that Victoria “was unconscious” when “they toted her off the train. She had her eyes closed and was lying over this way ... she was in no condition to walk.” Victoria had previously testified that “I was unconscious after I got off the train ... I became unconscious when I fell off the stirrup on the side of the gondola.” T. M. Latham, a deputy sheriff, testified that the girl “could not walk” when he first saw her. Jim Broadway said, “The Bates girl seemed to be in fairly good shape but the other could not hardly talk and couldn’t walk.”

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.”

7

_A Traitor from Harvard_

The United States of America

_versus_

Alger Hiss

A few minutes after eleven o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, August 3, 1948, a portly little man walked slowly to the front of the Ways and Means Committee Room in which the House Committee on Un-American Activities was holding an open session. After he had been sworn, he sat down gingerly in a wooden chair that was perched directly in front of a raised platform behind which acting Chairman Karl Mundt and five of his colleagues were ensconced. Robert Stripling, the Committee’s counsel, began the hearing.

Q. Will you state your full name?

A. My name is David Whittaker Chambers.

Q. Where and when were you born?

A. I was born April 1, 1901, in Philadelphia.

Q. How long have you been associated with _Time Magazine_?

A. Nine years.

Q. Prior to that time, what was your occupation?

A. I was a member of the Communist Party and a paid functionary of the party.

The witness asked if he might read a prepared statement. In a voice that was barely audible at the press table, he told of his fifteen years’ service as a Soviet espionage agent. In 1939, two years after he said that he had “repudiated Marx’ doctrines and Lenin’s tactics,” he had gone to Washington to report what he knew “about the infiltration of the United States Government by Communists.” At that time, he had told Assistant Secretary of State Adolph A. Berle, Jr., that there was an underground Communist movement in the government. “The head of the underground group at the time I knew it was Nathan Witt, an attorney for the National Labor Relations Board. Later, John Abt became the leader. Lee Pressman was also a member of this group, as was Alger Hiss, who, as a member of the State Department, later organized the conferences at Dumbarton Oaks, San Francisco, and the United States side of the Yalta Conference.”

In New York City, Alger Hiss, who was in the middle of his second year as the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, had just returned from a month’s vacation in Vermont. As soon as he heard of Chambers’ charges, he sent a telegram to Chairman Mundt in which he stated, “I do not know Mr. Chambers and insofar as I am aware have never laid eyes on him.” He requested permission to “appear before your Committee to make these statements formally and under oath.” Hiss suggested Thursday, August 5th, and hoped that “that will be a convenient time from the Committee’s point of view for me to appear.” Mundt immediately wired back that it was.

On Thursday morning, Hiss had his chance. In the large Caucus Room in the Old House Office Building, he told the Committee that he had never heard of Whittaker Chambers until 1947 “when two representatives of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had asked me if I knew him.... I said I did not know Chambers. So far as I know, I have never laid eyes on him, and I should like to have the opportunity to do so.” As far as Chambers’ accusations were concerned, they were all “complete fabrications.” The witness was willing to let his Government service speak for itself.

On Tuesday, Chambers had testified that, before he had broken with the underground, he had tried to persuade Alger Hiss to do the same. In a tearful scene at the Hiss home, his friend had “absolutely refused to break.” Hiss denied that any such incident had ever occurred and repeated his statement that, as far as he knew, the name Chambers “means absolutely nothing to me.” When he was shown a recent photograph of Chambers, the witness insisted that he “would much rather see the individual.... I would not want to take an oath that I had never seen that man. I would like to see him and then I think that I would be better able to tell whether I had ever seen him.” When Mundt told him that Chambers was not present in the hearing room, Hiss replied, somewhat sharply, that “I hoped he would be.”

Even though the acting chairman wondered publicly “what possible motive a man who edits _Time Magazine_ could have for mentioning Alger Hiss in the same breath as Nathan Witt, Lee Pressman, John Abt and Harold Ware, he thanked Mr. Hiss for his “very cooperative attitude” and “forthright statements.” Furthermore, he stated that he had been impressed by the fact that the witness was the first of all the people named by Elizabeth Bentley and the other apostates to come forward voluntarily and deny his guilt. Even Mississippi’s Rankin, who was not known for his kinship with intellectuals, congratulated Hiss for not taking advantage of the Fifth Amendment and for appearing without a lawyer “to tell him what to say.” All in all, it had not been a bad day for the gentleman from New York.

After Hiss had denied knowing Chambers, Stripling informed Mundt that “there is a very sharp contradiction here in the testimony. I certainly suggest Mr. Chambers be brought back before the Committee and clear this up.” The chairman agreed and appointed a sub-committee composed of California’s Nixon, Louisiana’s Hébert and Pennsylvania’s McDowell to question Chambers in executive session. Two days later, the sub-committee met in Room 101 of New York’s United States Courthouse. With Nixon taking the lead, Chambers was questioned closely about his claimed acquaintance with Alger Hiss and his family. The witness’ answers revealed such an intimate knowledge of the Hisses that it was apparent that he had either known them extremely well or done considerable homework.

First of all, Hiss had known him only as Carl, his party name. They had been the best of friends and he had spent a great deal of time at the various Hiss homes in Baltimore and Washington. The witness’ knowledge of what Hiss later referred to as “petty housekeeping details” was apparently inexhaustible. He knew that Mrs. Hiss called her husband “Hilly,” that the Hisses had a cocker spaniel, and that “they both had the same hobby--amateur ornithologists, bird observers.” In fact, he remembered that “once, they saw, to their great excitement, a prothonotary warbler.”

MR. McDOWELL: A very rare specimen?

MR. CHAMBERS: I never saw one. I am also fond of birds.

When he had first met the Hisses, they owned a Ford roadster which, he remembered, “was black and it was very dilapidated.” In 1936, they had purchased a new Plymouth, and J. Peters, the head of the underground organization, had helped them dispose of the Ford through a Communist service station in Washington. He described Hiss as a slender man, “about 5 feet 8 or 9,” who walked with “a slight mince;” Priscilla Hiss was “a short, highly nervous, little woman” who had “a habit of blushing red when she is excited or angry, fiery red.” Timmy Hobson, Mrs. Hiss’ son by a previous marriage, “was a puny little boy, also rather nervous.” The boy’s father was paying for his education but the Hisses were diverting “a large part of that money to the Communist Party.”

MR. NIXON: Hiss told you that?

MR. CHAMBERS: Yes, sir.

MR. NIXON: Did he name the Communist Party as the recipient?

MR. CHAMBERS: Certainly.

MR. NIXON: He might have said simply “the party.” Could it have been the Democratic Party or Socialist Party?

MR. CHAMBERS: No.