The Tragedy of the Scottsboro Boys & the Long March of New Black Freedom

[El Prezidente Kaboom]

The Tragedy of the Scottsboro Boys

& the Long March of New Black Freedom

By El Prezidente Kaboom

For contemporary minds, that this nation founded itself on the principle that “All Men Are Created Equal,” while instituting slavery; and that the author of those words, Thomas Jefferson, owned and kept slaves, is beyond all comprehension. Naive college students ask, did the Founders not read their own words? Of course they did, the problem is what they understood the words to mean. Given the lack of scientific knowledge, in regards to the human family tree, the White Europeans, who invaded this continent, drank heavily from the bottle of suspicion, and concluded, rather conveniently, that the 'savages' they had encountered around the globe were sub-human. Lacking a capacity for self-rule, they could not be equal partners in organized civil life. They were not Men, they were creatures—and Man has domain over the entire Animal and Wildlife kingdom below Him. Come to find out, this self-serving excuse for cruelty led to the abuse of more than just full-blooded human beings, but planet Earth, itself.

By dehumanizing Africans, separate rules for them were justified, and chasing profits, based on the misconception of the efficiency of a slave supported economy, the White Man fell for a Great Evil disguised as Capitalism. Like a pyramid scheme, the slave system self-perpetuated the continuous need for more and more slaves, and the need for more and more force and supervision to keep the slaves productive and submissive. The system ran risks and the slave owners, murdered by their own property, ended up with more than they bargained for. One does not have to accept equality, or disapprove of brutality, to recognize the problems created by slavery in society. In fact, recognizing that the system, inevitably promoted white and black sexual relations, modern White Supremacists might argue, that even if the system were to have never collapsed, enslaving Africans and bringing them to the States, was not optimal, in the first place. So in fact, there are racist reasons for opposing slavery, just as their were indifferent, non-racial reasons why even racist Northerners, felt the time had come to end it, especially when it had become apparent, that it would help end the War, and prevent the issue from becoming a political football from hell, ever again.

Fundamentally, secession troubled the North more than the maltreatment of blacks. Even Lincoln, ever the presidential pragmatist, sought to save the Union first, with whatever was required to do that, including selling out abolition, if that were to end the War and Secession. However, the War was more than anyone thought it would be. The South's spirit of independence, fiercer than the North expected, with the desire for separation going beyond just protecting slave-holders' rights from the abolitionists, but defending the entire regional trading power of the South from the perceived handcuffs of Yankee commercial interests.



Reconstruction was a wild time, and no way for a country to enjoy the peace dividend of the end of the formal Civil War. There was counterfeit currency everywhere, a French Emperor in Mexico, and widespread civic disorder throughout the South, where anarchy reigned following the collapse of the local and state governments of the Confederacy. Fortunately, for the Freedmen, caught in the middle of it all, they had won the heart of Gen. Grant, a wartime converter to the abolitionist cause, who leaned on his friend and fellow soldier, Gen. Sherman, who had his doubts. Believing blacks only useful for manual labor, Sherman had dallied when ordered to train and arm black units, and spoke harshly of the naïveté he perceived in the president, in a public manner, not so unlike the recent dismissal of Gen. McChrystal by another president, whose journey began in Springfield. Nevertheless, Lincoln needed true Warrior-Generals; he did not need any more controversy with the military spilling out into the political arena, as it did with George McClellan, who ended up as his opponent in the 1864 election. So, with the deep shit that Lincoln was already up to his neck in, trying to win a war, before he was run out of office—which looked highly likely, given the downward trajectory of the war, in the winter of 1863, following the jubilation of a summer of decisive Union victories—Sherman’s criticism were ignored. Yet, it paid off for Lincoln in the end, as Sherman would go on to save Lincoln's re-election, capturing Atlanta on September 2, sixty-seven days out from the election. Marching to the Sea that winter, mobs of weeping Freedmen greeted him as a Messiah Prophet. Despite his cynicism, the reception ‘moved’ him, and, he recognized a Union obligation to help the people that Lincoln had freed. Apparently, even the most hardened of Indian killers could still have an abolitionist soft spot.

The war changed everything, but as the French observed, "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose”—“the more it changes, the more it is the same thing.” The succession of Johnson reset the political stage of Reconstruction, as it brought the political differences between the Unionists and the Radicals to a full head, dividing the North on the very question of why they fought the South. While the Radical Republicans managed to outflank the incorrigible President Johnson, with guerrilla parliamentarian maneuvers, never before seen on the floor of Congress, the assassination of President Lincoln inevitably ruined “a New Birth of Freedom” for another hundred years.

As far as many opponents of Lincoln were concerned, north and south, alike, John Wilkes Boothe ended the nation's real problem. To many Northern cynics, the North would not have had to fight to save the Union, if the abolitionists had not provoked the south in the first place. Tit-for-tat, the abolitionists and slaveholders had upped the ante in the preceding decade before the War. Believing justice blind, the abolitionists had forced the issue in the courts. But in the Dred Scott decision of 1857, they were handed a situation that was even worse than where they started from—with the North now threatened by the legal right of slave-owners to move freely anywhere in the Union with the right of their slave-property protected by law. With popular sovereignty still prevailing in Congress, despite that it did not completely square with the Dred Scott decision, Kansas continue to bleed, as anti-slavery forces defended themselves from marauding bands of slaveholders. Two years, after Scott, John Brown would lead his October 1859 raid on the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, as part of his plan to instigate slave insurrections across the South.

10 months after Brown's execution, which abolitionists commemorated as if it was the crucifixion of Jesus, Lincoln won the presidency by a plurality vote; and seven Southern States saw fit to secede before the inauguration. The Northern abolitionist cause had come to make the hair stand up on the back of the necks of the slave-holding South. Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry spread fear of the slaveholders' worst nightmare—a Yankee led slave revolt—and come March of 1864, an abolitionist would be in office. That Lincoln pledged to respect the law as it stood, gave the South little pause. It was all too close for comfort; under the terms that the South could imagine, slave-freedom meant the guillotine for their former owners. Outnumbered on their own property, the wealthy slave-owning planters decided to take no chances and opted out for secession, believing fully in the power of the Southern States to do so. That the North resisted secession, only fueled the South's suspicions, which snowballed into an armed confrontation at Ft. Sumter—where the Confederacy spilled first blood, a little more than a month after Lincoln took office.

To end the War, Lincoln freed the Slaves and armed blacks. Following the Confederate surrender, it was the worst fears of the South proving true, all at once, as Union troops started pouring into the South. With their defeat, intolerable fear and loathing took on new meaning for the White South, and raw and aggressive killers soon roamed the countryside seeking their revenge. Slavery may have been defeated, the Confederacy may have been defeated, but White Supremacy was just getting started. While the American people would rally to support Grant's war on the KKK, allegations of corruption ruined his administration, and with the violent backlash to the vast social change forced upon the South, the North grew tired of the occupation and lost faith in those who were administering it. When Pres. Hayes lost the popular vote in 1878, the Republicans agreed to remove the troops—who had protected the law and order that had made it possible for Black Republicans to vote—in exchange for control of electoral college votes, disputed in the House, which allowed the Republicans to retain the presidency. New Black Freedom was over. Racist propaganda, depicting blacks as apes and savages, was everywhere; and with all the chaos consuming the previous two decades, Northerners outgrew their desire to see through Lincoln's “New Birth of Freedom.” Slavery was over, that was enough. The price of the South's existence in the Union was its horrible attitudes on race; and in order for any sort of real Union between the North and the South to work out, the North would have had to respect the White South's racist ways, as far as the North had not already changed them by liberating their slave-property. The political situation that the Republicans faced in 1878 made this clear. They did not have the votes to support an equal rights agenda. While the Supreme Court shut it down, all together, first in the Civil Rights Cases (1883), and then in the convoluted perversion of justice that is Plessy v. Ferguson (1893).

Darwin had published his theory on The Origin of Species in 1859, and by the end of the century, the racist had a widely regarded scientific theory that seemed to back their position in regards to the inherent supremacy of whites over blacks. But the Progressives, found inspiration in the most electrifying athlete in sports-history ever, Jack Johnson—who became the first black Heavyweight Boxing Champion of the World in 1908, and challenged every social convention, regarding the black man's supposed place in the White Man's world, and deliciously enjoyed deliberately pissing the racists off. Flaunting his insatiable sexual appetite for white women, Jack Johnson crossed every line imaginable in time when Lynch Mobs attacked black males for merely looking at white women. And eventually, after five years as champion—with Race-Riots erupting, more and more, with each Great White Hope smashed—the authorities stepped in with trumped-up, retroactive charges, and the 20th Century Civil Rights movement had its first international cause célèbre. However, it was not until the 1930's, that the Civil Rights Movement started to pick up steam, over the outcry concerned with the fate of the Scottsboro Boys, in the most politically charged rape case of 20th century.



On March 25, 1931, a fight broke out between white and black youths fashionably train hopping on the Southern Railway line, running from Chattanooga, Tennessee through North Alabama, on the way to Memphis. After blacks succeeded in ejecting the whites, the whites reported the incident to the railway authorities at Stevenson, Alabama. Word spread ahead of the train, and the local Sheriff at Paint Rock deputized a posse to help him board and search the train upon its arrival. On board, they found nine male black youths, and two females dressed in men's clothes, frantically trying to run and hide, with one of them, Victoria Price, semi-fainting. Twenty minutes after the train had took off, with the black youths already shackled together and on their way to the county jail on a flatbed truck for attempted murder of the white youths and vagrancy, the authorities started asking the girls questions, having allotted Price some time in the shade first, allowing her to recuperate. When asked by railway officials, if they were bothered by the black youths, Victoria claimed rape, which Ruby Bates confirmed. Word of the accusation immediately passed to the Sheriff, who ordered the women examined by doctors, who found semen in the women, but no evidence of physical attack. While the police held the women for a few days, as they investigated the rape allegations, they ended up releasing the women without pressing vagrancy charges. Meanwhile, all hell in Alabama subsequently broke loose on the first night, as a mob quickly formed outside the county jail in Scottsboro, threatening to break-in and lynch the black youths, right there in the middle of the street—leaving the Governor no choice but to call out the National Guard, in-order to prevent any violence.

Assuaged by the local authorities calls for speedy trials, and promises of guaranteed capital convictions, cooler heads prevailed, relatively speaking. Yet, with the guilt of the defendants not in doubt, the pump was primed for fast-moving show trials that mocked due process. In groups of two and three, the trials of the Scottsboro boys began. The outburst of joy by the courtroom crowd in the first trial, after the handing out of guilty verdicts, quickly spilled outside to the thousands of people encircling the building. This heavily tainted the jury in the second trial already underway. From their seats in the courtroom, the jurors of the second trial could plainly hear the cheering outside for the guilty verdicts handed out in the first. With little time to prepare their case, the defendant’s attorneys offered a scant cross-examination of the victims' testimony, and none at all of the physicians who examined them. Instead, council called upon the ‘Boys to testify on their own behalf, and with the pressure on, and the certainty of death, a conviction away, four of the boys begged off their own foul fate, by implicating the others. The shocking testimony in each of the three trials, damned all their fates, as it confirmed the rapes did in fact take place, and the Jury was not going to take any chances, as far as determining the real guilt and innocence of the individual black defendants. Clearly, they were willing to risk punishing an innocent black man for the sake of insuring the punishment of the guilty among them. The most important thing as far as the jury was concerned was upholding the honor and womanhood of Southern White women. Gang raping blacks scared the living shit out of them. They convicted and sentenced all of them to die, with time to spare, except in the case of Roy Wright. The prosecution did not ask for the death sentence in Roy's case, considering he was only thirteen years old; but seven out of his twelve all white jurors held out for his death, forcing a hung jury, and for the judge to declare a mistrial.



Fear mongering over black sexuality was a highly explosive, latent political tool effectively used for over half a century to rally White Southerners to neutralize attempts to change their way of life, and simultaneously co-opt Northerners against assuming those pressures. Nazi Germany would learn a lot from the South, in developing its plan to power by exploiting fears of the Other. And these fears helped mobilize the active defense of Southern apartheid—who's various citizen-advocates remained on guard, ready to respond to events, as they happened, and disperse their version of justice, which involved hanging Negroes from trees, and smiling about it for the photographs appearing in the local Sunday paper. And with this self-perpetuated brainwashing carrying on into the Great Depression, which hit Alabama especially hard, when word spread on a Wednesday afternoon in spring of a black gang attacking white youths, there were plenty of angry, under-employed white people looking for something to do, or for someone to take-out their frustrations on. All they needed was a good reason, as far as any of their consciences were concerned, and the Scottsboro rape case gave them more than enough, justified in reality, or not.

Violence in the south upset the tenuous internal balance of power within the Democratic Party, as its liberal wing, increasingly stood at odds with the racist Southern Dixiecrats over their mistreatment of blacks. However, as the Democratic electoral path to power, went through the South, the Democrats had no choice but to forge a compromise to allow the political party to function, despite ever widening divisions on race and equality. Increasingly out-Lincolned in the north by liberal Democrats, the Republicans fell upon their post-Reconstruction ideological impairments, and together with Southern Democrats, they constituted the conservative-coalition in Congress—an ever-shifting and changing, bi-partisan sub-party detente-alliance, not yet transferable to the ballot box, due to the Republicans still being hated as a brand-name by White Southern voters for obvious reasons. Come the Depression, the South would find its Democratic representatives entertaining national leaders, who were actively courting black voters, and there was an extreme sense of betrayal amongst the diehards—who had a long record and history of acting out, like men trying to break out of a box.



Resisting the urge to allow the mob to lynch the defendants, the authorities knew damn well, that there would be major consequences, if they did not uphold the appearance of a civilized justice system in Alabama. The Press would have a field day damaging the state's national reputation, and in a time, when there was an expressed need for the federal government to support Alabamians through the onslaught of the depression. Lynching the defendants would have political repercussions, and whatever their personal opinions, as leaders trying to maximize the position of their people, local and state authorities knew better than to side with the mob. But having no practice at equal-justice, or providing due process to blacks, against their natural white supremacist instincts, Alabama's diseased institutional racism was exposed for national review, as the trials of the defendant's proved to be an orchestrated mockery of justice. The defendants did not have access to council until immediately before the start of the trials. Their poor parents could only afford to pay for an out of state litigator who was not a criminal defense attorney to meet with them—after nobody from the Alabama Bar had bothered to visit with defendants, prior to their case, per the judge's instructions for them to do so. When they arrived in court, Judge Watkins hastily assigned the only criminal defense lawyer who would volunteer to help with the case, but unfortunately, the man had not tried a case in decades. Without any real idea what the hell was going on, the defendants' attorneys managed only a brief cross examination of Price, which only provided her more opportunity for theatrics, and none at all of the examining physicians. The 'Boys were called as the only defense witnesses, as their attorneys had no time to put together a case, and they started cracking under the pressure, blaming each other, in each of the successive group trials. Sent to Kilby State Prison's Death Row in Montgomery, Alabama, the Scottsboro Boys awaited their death, scheduled for the week after the Forth of July.

In this episode of history, it would be the Communist Party, who would fight for Lady Liberty. Sensing the opportunity to expand recruitment amongst blacks and intellectuals, Communist Reds stepped up to the plate to manage the appeals process for the 'Boys—helping to drive home their vision of a classless society, and exploit America's great weakness for Communist political gain. Maneuvering appeal, after appeal, after appeal in the State of Alabama, the Communist Party's attorneys, finally in front of the United States Supreme Court, won a new trial for the 'Boys, in Powell v. Alabama (1932). According to the Cardozo Court, access to counsel upon request and effective legal assistance in criminal trials are fundamental Civil Rights, as part of due process of law, under the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments. In a new Alabama courtroom in Decatur, the Communists would field, as lead counsel for the defense, the great New York criminal defense attorney Samuel Leibowitz, who had never been defeated in a murder trial. The Attorney General of the State of Alabama, Thomas Knight, hoping to gain the notoriety and stardom necessary for a run at the Governor's Mansion, decided to serve as lead prosecutor, himself. Convinced of the 'Boys innocence, Leibowitz saw this as an opportunity to do real good, while make his name even bigger, too—and with this heavyweight in the courtroom, facing down a rising Southern political star, the press ate the drama up.

In a pretrial motion to throw out the indictments, Leibowitz proved that the blacks had been defacto discriminated from service on the jury pools, but the Alabama Supreme Court, had already ruled that they could do this, and the U.S. Supreme Court had not, so there was nothing the Judge could do. Although, Leibowitz would lose in front of another all-white jury—despite producing Ruby Bates as a witness for the defense, who testified that Victoria Price had made the whole thing up, and pressured her to go along, so that they could avoid vagrancy charges—he won an ally for the defense in Judge James Edwin Horton. Leibowitz' brilliant tactical breakdown of the facts of the case, and hours spent questioning, the evasive and theatrical, Price, who's story just did not add up, may not have persuaded the jury, but it convinced Horton. Moved by his own conscience, Horton signed his own political death warrant, by ordering a retrial, despite knowing that it would cost him re-election. With friends in high places, the AG had Horton removed from the case, replaced with a classic southern racist, Judge Bill Callahan. And Callahan, famously, made life miserable for the 'Yankee Jew-York Lawyer' Leibowitz, who was considered the ultimate outsider by White Alabamians, and like Jack Johnson, seemed to relish in trying to piss these people off.

Another two convictions later, the defense team was back in front of the Supreme Court, this time with Leibowitz personally showing evidence of jury rolls with the names of blacks handwritten on the ends of the lists, as if they were put there after-the-fact. Disturbed, the High Court ruled again in favor of the defendants, in Norris v. Alabama (1935). Ordering new trials over the systematic exclusion of blacks from Alabama's jury roles, the Cardozo Court found this in clear violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. Systematically, Alabama courts had violated the rule of law emerging from Strauder v. West Virginia (1880), which held that blacks could not be discriminated against from serving on juries solely on account of their race.

Now removing himself from lead defense, Leibowitz sought to assuage the controversy created by his rather outspoken disdain for the racists in Alabama. Nevertheless, this did not lead to any not-guilty verdicts, as five of the 'Boys were convicted of rape again. However, the Attorney General's office, following through with an oral agreement between Knight and Leibowitz—rejected by the vicious Callahan, when Knight died—agreed to drop the charges against four of the 'Boys. Unfortunately, the system would hold out for convictions and prison sentences for the other five—but two of them would escape, only to receive parole and pardon later in life, while the other three were paroled after another decade in prison. America and Alabama would change, and equality would come, but only after the Darkness of Hitler had shown America it too had sponsored great evil. However, it would not be until the post-War peace, briefly following Korea, that enough political oxygen was available to sponsor a full-turn inward, bringing the Civil Rights Movement to America's full attention, following the assassination of another president succeeded by a Johnson.