Scottsboro trials of 1931

The novel has been praised for its outstanding literature since its publication. The boys were arrested on March 25, All but Roy Wright were sentenced to the death penalty. They were all convicted on very little evidence.

Philadelphia: Warner, Ling, P. The Great Gatsby. New York, NY: Scribner, To Kill a Mocking Bird. New York: Time Warner, Linder, Douglas O. A Trial Account. Open Document. Essay Sample Check Writing Quality. Harper Lee was influenced by court cases that were based on the racial prejudice of blacks.

One of those cases was the Scottsboro Trial of , in which nine African American males were falsely accused of raping two white women while on a train to Memphis.

The trial began on April 6, , and lasted just three days. Eight of the nine boys were found guilty and sentenced to death. The Court ordered new trials because the Scottsboro defendants had not had adequate legal representation.

Foner and Herbert Shapiro, eds. Republished with permission from: BlackPast. Scottsboro Boys Trial. Social Welfare History Project. Comments for this site have been disabled. Please use our contact form for any research questions. Collection of African American Literature The American Communist Party CP , in this period at the height of its organizing focus in the American South against racism and economic exploitation, immediately took the case on, and largely through activist efforts, sparked a mass defense movement.

The house in which the Bateses lived when I visited them on May 12, several weeks after the trial, had been vacated recently by a colored family. The social service worker who accompanied me on the visit sniffed when she came in and said to Mrs.

Bates: "Niggers lived here before you, I smell them. You can't get rid of that Nigger smell. Bates looked apologetic and murmured that she had scrubbed the place down with soap and water. The house looked clean and orderly to me.

I smelled nothing, but then I have only a northern nose. Out in front while we talked, the younger Bates children were playing with the neighboring Negro youngsters. Here was another one of those ironic touches which life, oblivious of man's ways, gives so often. If the nine youths on the freight car had been white, there would have been no Scottsboro case.

The issue at stake was that of the inviolable separation of black men from white women. No chance to remind negroes in terrible fashion that white women are farther away from them than the stars must be allowed to slip past. The challenge flung to the Negro race in the Scottsboro case was Ruby Bates, and another like her. Ruby, a girl whom life had forced down to equality with Negroes in violation of all the upholders of white supremacy were shouting. The Ruby who lived among the Negroes, whose family mixed with them; a daughter of what respectable Whites call "the lowest of the low," that is a White whom economic scarcity has forced across the great color barrier.

All the things made the respectable people of Scottsboro insist that the Negro boys must die, had meant nothing in the life of Ruby Bates. Yet here was Ruby saying earnestly, as she sat in a Negro house, surrounded by Negro families, while the younger members of her family played in the street with Negro children, that the Scottsboro authorities had promised her she could see the execution of the "Niggers" - the nine black lads who were to be killed merely for being Negroes.

Ruby's mother, Mrs. Emma Bates, clean and neat in a cheap cotton dress, talked with a mixture of embarrassment and off-handed disregard for her visitors' attitude toward her. She has worked in the mills for many years. She was employed by the Lincoln textile mill, the largest one in Huntsville, some time before the trial. When I saw her she was out of a job, but the neighbors reported that she had a "boarder" living with her, a man named Maynard.

They also gossiped that she frequently got drunk, and took men for money whenever she got the chance. Neither mother nor daughter showed signs of regarding the experience Ruby is alleged to have been through as anything to be deplored especially. They both discussed the case quite matter-of-factly, with no notion apparently, that it had marred or blighted Ruby's life at all. The publicity which the case has brought to them, however, has impressed them greatly. They humbly accept the opinion of respectable white people; it never occurs to them, of course to analyze the inconsistencies it makes with their own way of life.

Accustomed to seeing Negroes all around them on equal status with themselves for all practical purposes, and looking upon sexual intercourse as part of the common and inescapable routine of life, they have no basis in their own lives for any intense feeling on the subject of intimate relations between whites and blacks. They have just fallen in with "respectable" opinion because that seems to be what is expected of them, and they want to do the proper thing.

There are so few times when they can. The only strong feeling that Ruby showed about the case was not directed against the Negroes. It was against Victoria Price that Ruby expressed deep and bitter resentment. For Victoria captured the show for herself and pushed Ruby into the background, causing people at the trial to say that Victoria was a quick clever girl, but Ruby was slow and stupid.

It was easier for Victoria to talk than to breathe. Words came hard to Ruby. Victoria identified the six Negroes she claimed attacked her with a cock-sure, emphatic manner that much impressed the jurors and the trial spectators.

She caught on at once to what was wanted of her -- identifications without any confusing hesitations to slow up the death sentences. Ruby, on the other hand, was annoying from the start because she could not say which ones attacked her. So Victoria with pert, condescending manner, passing looks with the prosecuting officials at such stupidity, told Ruby which ones she must say attacked her, in order not to get mixed up and identify some of those Victoria had previously said were "her six Niggers," as she put it.

Both Ruby and Victoria told me this, in their own words, when I interviewed them personally. Neither one had the slightest notion of the seriousness of what they were saying.

The only opinion they had run across so far was that which said the "Niggers" must get the death sentence at once or be lynched. Never having met any other attitude on the Negro question, they both assumed that this was my attitude, and therefore spoke to me as they thought all respectable white people speak. Victoria Price was born in Fayetteville, Tennessee. She has been married but says she is separated from her husband. She left him because he "lay around on me drunk with canned heat," she said.

She was known at the trial as Mrs. Price, though this is her mother's name, not her husband's. Her age was variously reported in Scottsboro as 19, 20, and Her mother gave it as 24, and neighbors and social workers said she was Victoria lives in a little, unpainted shack at Arms Street, Huntsville, with her old, decrepit mother, Mrs.

Ella Price, for whom she insistently professes such flamboyant devotion, that one immediately distrusts her sincerity. This impression is strengthened by little side looks her mother gives her.

Price fell down the steps while washing clothes, and injured her arm, which is now stiff and of little use. Victoria says her mother is entirely dependent upon her for support. Miss Price is a lively, talkative young woman, cocky in manner and not bad to look at.

She appears to be in very good health. The attention which has come to her from the case has clearly delighted her. She talks of it with zest, slipping an many vivid and earthy phrases. Details spoken of in the local press as "unprintable" or "unspeakable" she gives off-hand in her usual chatty manner, quite unabashed by their significance.

Like Ruby, Victoria spits snuff with wonderful aim. Victoria and her mother, after some warm argument on the subject, agreed finally to the number of years that Victoria had worked in the mills as being ten.

Eight of these years were spent doing night work, they said, on a twelve-hour shift. Victoria is a spinner, and used to run from 12 to 14 sides, she said with pride. She gets 18 cents a side now, where she used to get 22 cents. Every other week we are laid off altogether. You know nobody can't live on wages like that. Although Victoria with a sly eye on me to see if I had heard of her record and would scoff, assured me that in spite of her low wage she never made a cent outside the wall of the mill, her reputation as a prostitute is widely established in Huntsville, and according to the investigation of the International Labor Defense, also in Chattanooga.

One of the social workers reported that Walter Sanders, chief deputy sheriff in Huntsville, said that he didn't bother Victoria, although he knew her trade, because she was a "quiet prostitute, and didn't go rarin' around cuttin' up in public and walkin' the streets solicitin' but just took men quiet-like.

Sheriff Giles, of Huntsville, said he had information that she was running a speak-easy on the side with a married man named Teller, who lived in the Lincoln mill village and had several small children, but was now running around with Mrs. Price and leaving his wife. The sheriff said he had been trying to catch them with liquor on them, but had not succeeded so far. He said that he had caught the Teller man in her house, however, and had given both of them a warning.

Russell, a neighbor of the Prices, claims that Victoria is a "bad one" and has been in no end of scrapes with married men. She was reported to be the cause of the separation of a Mr.

Luther Bentrum, and was rumoured to have received the attentions of a man named George Whitworth, until his wife threatened to kill her, and Victoria hurriedly moved out of the neighborhood. One morning after the Scottsboro trial, Mrs.

Russell said she saw her lying drunk out in the back yard with a man asleep on her lap. Russell is also authority for the statement that Victoria's mother was as notorious for her promiscuity in her day as Victoria is now. These stories are typical of the sort that circulate continually among the mill workers of the group from which both Ruby and Victoria come. Whether true or exaggerated, they give some idea of the social background of both the plaintiffs in the Scottsboro case. Leaving out of consideration the matter of the conflicting and untested evidence upon which the Negro boys were convicted, and assuming what has by no means been proved, that the Negroes are guilty of the worst that has been charged against them, the question of whether a monstrous penalty has not been exacted for an offense which the girls themselves feel to be slight, can certainly be raised.

Scottsboro, the county seat of Jackson county in northern Alabama, is a charming southern village with some 2, inhabitants situated in the midst of pleasant rolling hills. Neat, well-tended farms lie all around, the deep red of their soil making a striking contrast with the rich green of the hills.

The cottages of the town stand back on soft lawns, shaded with handsome trees. A feeling of peace and leisure is in the air. The people on the streets have easy kind faces and greet strangers as well as each other cordially. In the Courthouse Square in the center of town, the village celebrities, such as the mayor, the sheriff, the lawyers, lounge and chat democratically with the town eccentrics and plain citizens.

Strolling around observing these things, it is hard to conceive that anything but kindly feelings and gentle manners toward all mankind can stir the hearts of the citizens of Scottsboro. It came as a shock, therefore, to see these pleasant faces stiffen, these laughing mouths grow narrow and sinister, those soft eyes become cold and heard because the question was mentioned of a fair trial for nine young Negroes terrified and quite alone.

Suddenly these kindly-looking mouths were saying the most frightful things. To see people who ordinarily would be gentle and compassionate at the thought ot a child - a white one - in the least trouble, who would wince at the sight of a suffering dog - to see these men and women transformed by blind, unreasoning antipathy so that their lips parted and their eyes glowed with lust for the blood of black children, was a sight to make one untouched by the spell of violent prejudice shrink.

The trial judge, A. Hawkins, a dignified, fine-looking, gray-haired Southern gentleman, who was absolutely convinced in his own mind that he had done everything to give the Negroes a fair trial, gave himself away so obviously at every other sentence he uttered, that any person with mind unclouded by the prejudice which infected him could have pointed it out. The other officials and citizens with whom I discussed the case also made it disconcertingly clear that they regarded the trial of the Negroes and the testimony given at it, not as an honest attempt to get at the truth, but as a game where shrewd tricks were to be used to bring about a result already decided upon in the minds of every one of them.

They all wanted the Negroes killed as quickly as possible in a way that would not bring disrepute upon the town. They therefore preferred a sentence of death by a judge, to a sentence of death by a mob, but they desired the same result, and were impatient with anything that slowed up the conviction and death sentence which they all knew was coming regardless of any testimony.

They said that all negroes were brutes and had to be held down by stern repressive measures or the number of rapes on white women would be larger than it is. Their point seemed to be that it was only by ruthless oppression of the Negro that any white woman was able to escape raping at Negro hands. Starting with this notion, it followed that they could not conceive that two white girls found riding with a crowd of Negroes could possibly have escaped raping.