The Enduring Tragedy of Scottsboro

Clarence Norris leaves his jail cell after being paroled in 1946.

(Library of Congress)

“The trouble began,” Haywood Patterson would write later, “when three or four white boys crossed over the oil tanker that four of us colored fellows from Chattanooga were in. One of the white boys, he stepped on my hand . . .”

It was noon on March 25, 1931—75 years ago today. After that moment, the lives of Patterson and eight other young African-Americans would be forever altered. They were about to become the Scottsboro boys, caught in an inescapable tragedy not of their making.

The Depression had slammed down hard on the South. Freight trains were filled with hoboes, black and white, venturing from place to place in search of work that didn’t exist. The desperation of the times exacerbated racial conflict. “Nigger bastard, this is a white man’s train,” the offender said. Patterson answered back, and a fracas ensued. A dozen blacks set on six or seven whites and threw them off the slow-moving train. The whites complained; authorities sent word up the track to Paint Rock, Alabama; a posse formed. When the train stopped, armed men took off nine black teenagers, some of whom had been riding in rear cars and knew nothing of the earlier scuffle.

A few whites were also taken in, including two young women dressed in ragged overalls. They were Victoria Price, 21, and her friend Ruby Bates, 17, impoverished textile mill workers. Afraid of a vagrancy rap themselves, they charged that the nine blacks had raped them, thereby climbing onto the pedestal reserved in the South for offended white womanhood.

The accused, none more than 19 years old, most of them illiterate or nearly so, two severely ill, one almost blind, had good reason for alarm at the unfounded accusation. The lynch rope was still a common tool of Southern justice. Twenty-one people had been murdered by mobs the year before.

The boys were trucked to Scottsboro, the nearby county seat, and locked in a dingy cell. By evening, hundreds of white farmers armed with pistols and shotguns were threatening to break into the jail and remove them. The governor called out the National Guard, saving the boys’ lives. But few local whites had any doubt about their guilt. They were, a reporter wrote, “beasts unfit to be called human.”

A little more than two weeks after the incident, the boys were put on trial, with no competent counsel. “The courtroom was one big smiling white face,” Patterson remembered. Most of the accused denied even seeing the two girls, but several, in desperation, accused the others. The girls’ stories were filled with contradictions. Yet the jury convicted the defendants of rape and sentenced them to the electric chair.

In 1931 the Communist Party, hoping that economic distress might translate into revolution, was searching for an issue to ignite the masses. Its legal arm, the International Legal Defense, took up the cause of the Scottsboro boys. The convicts, waiting on death row, were astounded when white people descended on them offering cigarettes, advice, and hope. “I had never met white men like them before,” one said.

The more moderate National Association for the Advancement of Colored People approached the situation more gingerly. To NAACP officials, the case was emblematic of Southern racism, while the Communists saw an indictment of all American society. The ILD won over the boys’ parents and gained control of their defense.

The executions were postponed pending appeal. The ILD took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a landmark ruling, Powell v. Alabama, the court overturned the verdicts, based on Alabama’s denial of the defendants’ access to counsel. The decision established that fundamental legal right.

With Alabama set to retry the case, the ILD hired the brilliant defense lawyer Samuel S. Leibowitz. In Alabama he was condemned as a “meddling New York Jew.” A master of courtroom drama, Leibowitz concluded his case by calling none other than Ruby Bates, who had disappeared after the first trial. Bates now denied that any rape had taken place. The sheriff had told her to point the finger at the accused or “I’d be lynched myself.” The jury convicted the defendants regardless and again set death as the punishment. This time, the meticulous trial judge, James E. Horton, Jr., threw out the verdicts on the grounds that Victoria Price’s confused story was quite literally incredible.

Another trial brought the same verdict and the same sentence. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court for a second time in 1935 and was again overturned. The court ruled in Norris v. Alabama that the exclusion of blacks from the jury invalidated the proceedings.

Over the next two years, five of the boys were tried yet again, and they received sentences ranging from 20 years upward. Clarence Norris got a death sentence that was later commuted to life. The charges were dropped against four. This time the Supreme Court declined to intervene.

During their ordeal, the Scottsboro boys had become known around the world. Thousands had rallied to proclaim their innocence. Their mothers had ridden in a New York City May Day parade. Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, and H. G. Wells had all written protests to Alabama officials.

The Scottsboro case helped lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement that would accelerate after World War II. It exposed the scope of racial injustice in the South. The two Supreme Court rulings significantly expanded the rights of all accused persons to a fair trial.

But on a personal level the affair was an unmitigated tragedy. It wasn’t until the mid 1940s, 13 years after the fight on the train, that some of the convicts were able to win parole. Haywood Patterson would finally escape from prison in 1948. Accused in a barroom brawl that ended in homicide, he died in another jail cell in 1952.

Clarence Norris, paroled in 1944, was able to rebuild his life in New York, where he worked as a warehouseman. In 1976 Alabama Governor George Wallace issued him a full pardon. The state’s attorney general affirmed that he had been convicted of “a crime which the overwhelming evidence clearly shows he did not commit.”

It is noteworthy that American Communists, reviled and demonized throughout the twentieth century, were the instigators of one of the nation’s seminal civil rights cases and advocates in two of its most important Supreme Court decisions. It’s also ironic that young men scorned as beasts would become emblems of those most human of aspirations: fairness and justice.

“They had said that I was a nobody, a dog,” Norris declared, “but I stood up and I said the truth. Somebody’s got to do these things in life.”

—Jack Kelly writes often for American Heritage magazine and is the author of Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics—A History of the Explosive That Changed the World.