American Experience (1988–…): Season 13, Episode 13 - Scottsboro: An American Tragedy - full transcript
It began with two women
nine young men,
and a charge of rape...
Who said what, when?
Rising to envelop
a Jewish lawyer from New York
the justice system in Alabama,
the American Communist Party
the United States Supreme Court
the attention of the nation.
It began with two women
and nine young men.
What really happened?
"Scottsboro:
An American Tragedy"
tonight on American Experience.
Hear the rattle of gravel
as it rides whistling
through the day and night.
Not the old or the young on it
nor people with any difference
in their color or shape
not girls or men,
Negroes or white
but people with this in common:
people that no one had use for,
had nothing to give to
no place to offer
but the cars of a freight train
careening through Paint Rock,
through Memphis
through town after town
without halting.
I've had people that knew
that you and I were going
to have this conversation
and some of them said,
"Oh, don't do it.
Don't stir it up again."
I said,
"Well, it's a part of us."
It begins with
a fairly clear-cut issue
of black and white,
of sexuality, of rape.
Then it becomes
increasingly confused.
The image of black men
was that they were
anxious at all times
to rape a white woman.
And it was the Scottsboro case
that met that issue head on.
"Will you let them murder the
nine Negro boys in Scottsboro?
"No!
"Louder: No!
"Organize, demonstrate, protest.
Raise your voices."
What Scottsboro teaches us
is that you cannot underestimate
the power of our history
as it relates to race,
as it relates to poverty
as it relates to sectionalism,
in the struggle for justice.
There are heroes in the story
but that's the footnote
to the story.
The tragedy of this
are nine boys' lives
hopelessly,
eternally interrupted
sent cascading down roads
of terror and imprisonment.
No, I don't think there's
any way to see this story
but as a great tragedy.
On the morning of March 25, 1931
a freight of the
Southern Rail Corporation
left Chattanooga, Tennessee,
bound for points west.
Scattered among the cars
of the freight
were some two dozen hoboes,
black and white.
A few minutes
out of Lookout Mountain
the train dipped into the
northeastern corner of Alabama.
As the train emerged from the
tunnel under Lookout Mountain
a group of whites was moving
along the top of the train
and they stepped on the hand
of one of the blacks
and almost knocked him
off the train.
The hand belonged to an 18-year-
old named Haywood Patterson
who was on his way to Memphis
to look for work.
"We was just minding our own
business, when one of them said
"'This is a white man's train...
All you nigger bastards unload.
"But we weren't going nowhere,
so there was a fight.
We got the best of it
and threw them off."
Haywood Patterson.
Word of the fight reached the
tiny town of Paint Rock, Alabama
where the train was scheduled
to stop and take on water.
In Paint Rock,
news goes out that there is
a gang of blacks,
a gang of Negroes on the train
that beat up a gang of whites.
A posse is organized.
Virtually every man in Paint
Rock with a gun or a rope
shows up.
The train stops, the posse
goes up and down the train
looking in all the cars.
What they thought
they were going to find
is a group of blacks who had
beaten up a group of whites
and thrown them off the train.
Immediately unexpected things
began to happen.
That's what you most fear
in a racial confrontation
is the unexpected.
Suddenly, from
the shadows of a boxcar
emerged two white women,
pale and disheveled.
At first they weren't even
aware that they were women.
They were wearing overalls.
They identified themselves as
Victoria Price and Ruby Bates.
And there are
conflicting accounts
about who said what, when
but one of the young women said,
"We've been raped.
All these colored boys
raped us."
And... that was it.
A bunch of people here
got the guys off the train
marched them up here...
about where this old building...
Right across from where the
white wrecked car is there...
Lined them up
against the wall there.
I saw a lot of people
surrounding those boys
many of them having
guns, of course
and ropes or pieces of rope.
They were intent on mayhem.
For any black man in Alabama
whenever you saw a group
of white men with guns
in the menacing, ominous way
in which people were collected
in Paint Rock, Alabama
you knew you were
in a lot of trouble.
There were
nine prisoners in all.
One of them was
19-year-old Clarence Norris.
The place was
surrounded with a mob.
They had shotguns,
pistols, sticks
pieces of iron, everything.
The crowd commenced to hollering
"Let's take these
black son-of-a-bitches up here
and put them to a tree."
I just thought
that I was going to die.
Mr. Broadway
sent up to the store
and got a skein...
I never heard that word before,
a "skein" of plowline...
And the rope was cut into pieces
that where they could tie
the hands of the ones
that was under arrest.
And then the next thing was
"How we going to get them
to Scottsboro?"
The prisoners were loaded
onto a truck
and driven to
the nearby town of Scottsboro.
On March 25, 1931, a friend
and I were playing basketball
at the side
of the Jackson County jail.
And we noticed
a flatbed stake-body truck
stop in front of the jail
with a guard with rifles
on each corner.
They quickly unloaded
the prisoners.
Crowds were beginning to form
outside the jail.
The rumor was that they were
going to go into the jail.
There was already poles outside
that they were going to break
the door down with.
Cars, trucks, they was coming in
all kinds of ways, the mob was:
"Bring them niggers
out of there.
"If you don't bring them
out of there, goddamn it
we'll come in and get them."
That's all you could hear
all you could hear
all over that little town.
The sheriff goes out
on the front porch
and basically makes the comment
to the growing crowd outside
that the first individual
that puts their foot
on their doorstep...
He's going to kill them.
As the situation
became desperate
my father took his pistol off
and gave it to his deputies.
He walked out the front door
right through
the middle of the mob
and they separated for him;
not a hand touched him.
He went to the courthouse
and called the governor.
By the next morning
the National Guard
had secured the jail
while newspapers identified
what one called
"the nine Negro brutes."
Of the nine, only four had known
each other before their arrest.
Charlie Weems,
the oldest, was 19;
Eugene Williams,
the youngest, 13.
Willie Roberson suffered
from syphilis so severe
he could barely walk.
Olin Montgomery, nearly blind,
had been looking for a job
to pay for a pair of glasses.
Clarence Norris had left behind
ten siblings in rural Georgia.
Ozie Powell had been found
riding alone.
Andy Wright, 19, and his
13-year-old brother Roy
had ridden
from Chattanooga together.
It was Roy's first time
away from home.
Haywood Patterson had been
riding the freight trains
so long, he said he could
light a butt in the wind
from the top of a moving car.
By the time the nine defendants
had taken to the rails
the full brunt of the Depression
had already struck the South
and no state was hurting
worse than Alabama.
Alabama in the 1930s was
literally a world coming apart
with massive unemployment in a
state that had always been poor
with increasing conflict
between both classes and races.
It was a state that was
in calamitous conditions.
Families were disintegrating.
Hoboes were frequenting
the railroads
by the thousands
and tens of thousands.
The two accusers also
had been driven onto the rails
by economic necessity.
Ruby Bates, 17, and
Victoria Price, 21, hailed
from the cotton center
of Huntsville
40 miles from Scottsboro.
They worked together
in the poorest
of the town's textile mills.
At 21, Price was
already twice married
and had served time
in the workhouse
for adultery and vagrancy.
Victoria Price...
was tough...
A survivor in every way.
She hardly fit the stereotype
of the young Southern lady...
Hard-talking, tobacco-chewing...
but a kind of feistiness to her.
Ruby Bates is
totally different...
Very quiet, soft-spoken.
In effect it was
a kind of relationship
in which Victoria
totally dominated Ruby Bates.
The mills in which
the girls worked
employed mostly young women.
They labored up to 14 hours
a day in deafening noise
air choked with cotton lint,
and near complete darkness.
By 1931, wages in the mills
had dropped so low
that Victoria and Ruby
could only afford to live
in the black section
of Huntsville
where they occasionally
traded sex
with both black and white men
for food and clothing.
Their lives are, in fact,
a complete violation
of the ideals of segregation.
But the second that they accuse
a black man of rape
at least for an instant,
they become pure white women.
The trials of the nine
defendants for rape
got under way on Monday, April
6, in the Scottsboro courthouse.
It was a traditional
trading day in town
but the usual crowd
was swelled by thousands more
from hundreds of miles around.
Eventually, the largest crowd
in Scottsboro's history
squeezed into
the courthouse square
as a brass band played "Dixie"
and "Hail, Hail,
the Gang's All Here."
I saw many strangers,
lots of strangers.
There'd be a carload
over here talking
and a carload
over there talking...
Some of them from Tennessee.
I saw Tennessee tags
and Georgia tags.
And some of them were armed,
most of them had shotguns.
200 National Guardsmen
ringed the courthouse
to keep the crowd
from rushing its doors.
They had strings up
so the mob could not get up
beyond the string.
So whenever the guard would pass
the crowd would push
beyond the sting
and the guard would turn on
his heel and throw his gun down
and say, "Get back!"
But as soon as he would turn
his back, they were back again.
The crowds outside
the courthouse were drawn
by what one newspaper called
the "most unspeakable crime
in the history of Alabama."
Since the days
of slavery and before
what was presumed to be
the black man's insatiable
sexual appetite for white women
had struck fear in the hearts
of Southern whites.
The protection
of white womanhood...
It might be the pivot
around all of Southern culture.
The 5,000 people who were
lynched from 1880 to 1940...
Most of those were cases
of black men
accused of raping or sexually
assaulting a white woman.
In the early 1930s
the incidents of lynchings
in the South had spiked upward
tracking the economic misery
of poor whites.
But so, too, had the efforts
of a small but powerful faction
opposed to lynching.
With the Scottsboro trials
the antilynching forces hoped
to prove that in Alabama
the rule of law would prevail
against the passions of the mob.
Here was an example
of their doing it right...
Of showing to the world
that they were capable
of giving equal and fair justice
to prisoners
in the most emotional
and threatening kinds
of conditions.
As the trial began
Victoria Price took the stand
and told a chilling story.
There were six to me
and three to her.
One was holding my legs and the
other had a knife to my throat
while another ravished me.
That one sitting behind
the defendants' counsel
took my overalls off.
Six of them had
intercourse with me.
"Pour it to her, pour it
to her," they hollered.
Ruby Bates corroborated her
friend's story in every detail
though she could not identify
any of her attackers.
Unable to get a lawyer
in Scottsboro
the nine accused rapists
were being represented
by a Chattanooga
real estate attorney
hired with $60 scraped together
by their parents.
The defendants had
just one 20-minute meeting
with their lawyer, during which
he urged them to plead guilty.
Now the boys were
the only witnesses called
to testify in their own defense.
Clarence Norris and Haywood
Patterson were the first two
to take the stand.
The first thing they try to do
is concoct an excuse
for themselves.
Norris says,
"Well, the other eight did it
but I didn't do it."
And Patterson says, "Well,
I didn't do it, but they did it.
And it's the classic reaction
of people trapped
in a world where they know
they're not going to be believed
where they have no resources
and so that's the way
they explode.
The courthouse were
full of people
and they were jumping about
their seats with pistols.
Nothing... wasn't a black person
around nowhere...
Everybody was white
but just us nine.
When they announced the verdict
of guilty, people ran out
and the judge was trying
to bring order.
And as soon
as the word got outside
the crowd outside went crazy.
The trials lasted three days.
All nine Scottsboro defendants
were convicted of rape.
The jury could not decide
whether to sentence
13-year-old Roy Wright
to life in prison or death.
All the others were sentenced
to die
in the Alabama electric chair.
The Scottsboro defendants,
now convicted rapists
were taken to Kilby Prison
near Montgomery...
The pride of the Alabama system.
Two to a cell, the boys looked
out on 50-foot walls
topped by gun turrets
on each corner.
Their first night in Kilby
the boys rioted,
tearing up their bedding
and hurling their food
through the bars.
Guards rushed their cells
and beat them.
"The cell door banged open.
"They beat on us
with their fists;
"they kicked and tramped
on our legs.
"The sheriff said to me,
'See that gallows, nigger?
"'If you don't quieten down
I'll take you around to that
gallows and hang you myself.'"
Haywood Patterson.
Understandably,
they're terrified.
They're in one
of the most brutal prisons
in the United States
they have a death sentence
hanging over them
and they're
like drowning individuals
grasping for a life raft
grasping for a life preserver,
grasping for straws.
When help did come, it was from
the most unlikely of sources
the Communist Party
of the United States.
By 1931, the communists were
a small but dynamic force.
Opportunistic and organized,
they seized on the Depression
as proof of the inevitable
decline of capitalism
and the rise
of a workers' paradise.
The advent of the Depression
had made it possible
for the communists
to gain a hearing
among people who
just a few years before
would have dismissed
their claims.
It did appear to a great
many people in the 1930s
that capitalism was in crisis.
For years, the Communist Party
had devoted special attention
to the American South
and to Southern blacks
in particular.
It is only the Communist Party
which day in and day out
fights for every demand and need
of the Negroes
in the terror-
and lynch-ridden South.
The view was that in the South
we had
an uncompleted revolution.
Abolition of slavery had
not been really fulfilled;
we now had sharecropping.
We had literally
tens of thousands of people
who were bound to the farm
in debt: work all year;
the end of the year,
they would have nothing left.
We felt that the system
was maintained
only in one way... by terror:
If you get out of line,
you're lynched.
But the communists
had found Southern blacks
deeply rooted in the system.
Organizers believed
they needed a striking example
of what they called
"Southern lynch justice"
to rouse blacks to action.
The mass arrests in Scottsboro
were just
what they were waiting for.
Two local communist organizers
are actually in the courtroom
during the trials.
They immediately
send word of this
up to party headquarters
in New York
saying, "This is
a wonderful opportunity
"to publicize all the things
we're trying to publicize
in the South."
The national party agrees.
Only three weeks after
the Scottsboro trials
the communists launched
their first demonstration
on behalf of
the Scottsboro defendants.
"200 communists undertook
to march down Lenox Avenue
"through the center of Harlem
yesterday afternoon
in defiance of the police."
"15 minutes later
"when 20 policemen had replaced
their nightsticks
"and the screams of the women
in the crowd had died down
the sidewalk was strewn
with communist banners."
The New York Times.
But there were
other organizations...
Principally the venerable
NAACP... eager to defend
the Scottsboro boys
for whom the Communist Party's
public demonstrations
seemed self-serving,
even dangerous.
The NAACP's position is "These
people are revolutionaries.
"We can talk all we want to
about the ultimate revolution;
"we've got to defend
these young men in Alabama.
"And the last thing
you want to do
"is enrage and inflame
local juries
"by raising the specter
of communism
and the class struggle
and social equality."
We were propagandizing,
there's just no doubt.
We were using... yes, we were
using the Scottsboro case
to expose what was going on
in the South.
In June, lawyers from the
International Labor Defense...
The legal arm
of the Communist Party...
Visited the boys in Kilby,
trying to raise their spirits
and secure control
of their defense.
The ILD lawyers
dressed as farmers
to elude the suspicions
of Kilby's wardens.
They put on overalls
and straw hats
and put a straw in their mouth
and went down to Alabama
to see the Scottsboro boys.
They had been in very bad
psychological condition.
We brought them
cigarettes, chocolate.
And they were scared
but they were they were
delighted to see us.
But the boys remained
deeply confused
by the appearance
of white men from the North
bearing promises of liberation.
It was not until
a young organizer
visited the parents
of Haywood Patterson
and the mother of Ozie Powell
that the communists finally
secured control of the defense.
I told them if the International
Labor Defense comes
we don't believe
in just having a trial.
We believe in masses of people
being behind the cause
that you're fighting for
and that's how the International
Labor Defense Works.
♪ Workers, farmers,
Negro and white ♪
♪ The lynching forces
we must fight... ♪
With control of the case,
the communists set about
to bring Scottsboro to the
attention of the entire world.
♪ The Scottsboro boys
shall not die ♪
♪ The Scottsboro boys
shall not die ♪
♪ Workers and the ILD will set
them free, set them free! ♪
There was demonstrations
in Germany.
There was demonstrations
in Spain and in Moscow.
The world knew about this case
because of the way the
communists spread the word.
"Attention, attention, comrades.
"Will you let them murder the
nine Negro boys in Scottsboro?
"No!
"Louder: No!
"Organize, demonstrate, protest.
Raise your voices,
raise your fists and scream.
Stop! Stop! Stop!"
I got all excited
all over again.
In November 1932, communists
took their public protests
to the steps of the Capitol
where they were routed
by the police.
But inside, their lawyers were
appealing the Scottsboro verdict
before the Supreme Court
of the United States.
The justices considered
whether in the Scottsboro trials
the boys' legal defense
had been so inadequate
that it violated their rights
to legal due process.
By a vote of seven to two,
they concluded that it had.
The Supreme Court, in
a precedent-setting decision
for the first time held
that poor people, like
the Scottsboro defendants
get effective assistance
from lawyers
and where they were denied
effective assistance
from lawyers
they would be afforded
new trials.
Alabama authorities
immediately resolved
to retry, reconvict and execute
the nine defendants.
The communists realize
at this point
that they've got
to show the world
that these defendants
are actually innocent.
What's the best way to do that?
Get the best
criminal lawyer around.
In the early 1930s
the best-known criminal lawyer
in America...
After Clarence Darrow... was
New York's Samuel L. Leibowitz.
Leibowitz had won
fame and fortune
by defending gangsters...
kidnappers...
rapists...
corrupt cops...
and jealous lovers.
In 15 years, he had won
77 out of 78 murder cases;
the 78th resulted
in a hung jury.
Leibowitz was, first of all, a
remarkably thorough researcher.
He studied
every aspect of a case
never left a stone unturned.
Add to that, he was a showman.
He literally
could have been an actor.
He had a supple baritone
instrument for a voice
which he could use
like a Paderewski
or a Jascha Heifetz,
so to speak.
And he had a sense of timing
that Jack Benny
would have envied.
In January 1933,
Joseph Brodsky...
One of the leaders of the
International Labor Defense...
Asked Leibowitz to take over
as chief defense attorney.
But Leibowitz was wary
of entanglement
with the communists.
Ideologically, he would be
about the last man
to represent
the Scottsboro movement.
He made it clear,
"I don't agree with you guys.
I don't like what you're doing."
But if one thing was
more important to Leibowitz
than political principle,
it was his personal reputation
and the Scottsboro affair
was fast becoming
an international cause célèbre.
He wanted to make
a name for himself
that was larger than
the criminals' lawyer
and he wanted to widen
the circle of his renown.
After my father met with
Brodsky and Patterson of the ILD
and their agreement was
finalized and he said to them
"Look, if I don't
bring these nine boys back
"and dump them in your lap
"I'll buy both of you the
finest hats that Stetson makes.
Take my word on it."
He was he was probably
as provincial
as most New Yorkers were then,
and I think still are
thinking that things would be
the same down there.
He had no idea that it was like
going into a different country.
Rules are different...
Everything is different.
He had no idea.
The second trial of
the Scottsboro defendants
had been moved to Decatur,
a town in northeast Alabama.
As it opened in April 1933
300 spectators crowded
the hallways
waiting to enter the courtroom.
Hundreds more gathered outside.
I went because of history.
I had never seen
anything like that before
and I wanted to know
just how it would be carried on.
When we entered the courtroom,
we were not told the way to go.
We knew the way to go
because it was black on one side
and white on the other.
Leibowitz had won a motion to
try the defendants separately.
To stand trial first, the state
had selected Haywood Patterson.
If the prosecutors were going
to win and win big
Haywood Patterson was
the best person to put on trial
because Haywood Patterson was
the exemplar of the "bad Negro."
He was someone who looked
the closest you can imagine
to a rapist
as far as the white
imagination's concerned.
Patterson was mean.
I looked him in the eye
when we...
first time we brought him
out of jail.
I saw that he'd kill
if he got a chance.
Alabama would entrust
the prosecution of the case
to its highest-ranking lawyer,
Attorney General Thomas Knight.
The 34-year-old Knight had
the demeanor, one reporter wrote
"of a small
and enthusiastic child."
Yet he was Leibowitz's
equal in the courtroom
and like Leibowitz,
he was highly ambitious.
He said, "I'm going
to prosecute these boys
and ride their black asses right
into the governor's mansion."
Presiding over the case
would be the chief judge
of the local circuit court
55-year-old James E. Horton.
The trial judge in Decatur
was a Lincolnesque-type,
thorough Southern gentleman...
Very mannerly
very sober
very conscious of proper
procedure in a courtroom.
Jury selection took place
under heavy security.
The 12 jurors ultimately chosen
to sit in judgment of Patterson
included a shopkeeper, a barber,
a clerk and several farmers.
All of them were white.
As the state prepared to present
its case, newspapers reported
the mysterious disappearance
of Ruby Bates
who was rumored to have been
kidnapped or even killed.
Every effort by the prosecution
and defense to find her
had come up empty.
More than ever, the prosecution
would rise or fall
on the testimony
of Victoria Price alone.
Victoria Price gets on the stand
and in a matter of minutes says
she was riding
on a freight train.
Suddenly a large group of blacks
comes hopping over
onto the car that she is on
quickly dispatches with her
white companions, beats them up
throws them off the train,
and then en masse holds her up
rips her clothes off,
and rapes her.
I hollered for help
until they stopped me
until some of them
knocked me in the head
with the butt end of a gun.
They unfastened my overalls
while I was standing up
and then they threw me down
on the gravel
and finished pulling them
off my feet.
This Negro grabbed me by
the legs and pulled them open
and then one of them
put a knife on my throat
and one got on top of me.
She just pointed
at Patterson and said
"He raped me,"
right there in the courtroom.
Price's direct testimony
lasted just 16 minutes
but made a powerful impression
on the jury
and the audience
in the courtroom.
But Leibowitz was unconcerned.
For months, he had waited
for just this moment:
the chance to confront Victoria
Price in a court of law.
He began his cross-examination
by setting out an exact replica
of the freight train
which he had procured
from the Lionel Toy Corporation.
My father had set up
this train set
in order to demonstrate where
the alleged rape took place
because his own clients
had told him where they were
and it did not coincide
with where she claimed she was.
SAMUEL LEIBOWITZ Just look
at this little replica
and tell me if it
fairly represents
the general appearance
of the box car
you rode on.
It kinda represents one
but it ain't like
the one I was on.
In what way is it different?
Can you say?
I won't say.
If you can't say,
why do you say
it is different?
Because that is not
the train I was on.
It was bigger, lots bigger.
That is a toy.
She just refuses for question
after question after question
to admit the most basic point:
that this in any way resembles
the train
that she was riding on.
I think at that moment,
Sam Leibowitz realized
that she may have been
uneducated
but she was going to be
a hell of a witness
for the prosecution.
Again and again, Leibowitz
attacked Price's story
in every possible detail:
her location on the train,
her physical condition
her movements on the day
before the alleged rape.
But in each case, Price was able
to parry his attacks.
He finds dozens,
scores of inconsistencies.
Yet she has a manner
that makes it difficult
for him to make his points.
It wasn't that he'd never had
a difficult witness before.
It was that he'd never had a
witness that said over and over
"I can't remember."
Usually a witness is
defensive when they say
"I can't remember."
She aggressively said
she couldn't remember
and used it to her advantage.
I feel if you are
really telling the truth
you can look anybody in the eye.
Victoria never looked directly.
It was like...
almost to the floor.
Until she was made angry,
and then she would shout
"I don't know anything!
I told you that before,
and I'll tell it to you again!"
Leibowitz knew
that he had to overcome
one crucial piece
of state's evidence:
An examination of the girls
just hours after they were
brought from the train
had turned up traces of semen
in their bodies.
But Leibowitz believed
he could explain the semen
found in Price and Bates
not by rape on
the day of the train ride
but by consensual sex
the night before.
Price had claimed
that she and Bates
had spent that night in
a boardinghouse in Chattanooga
owned by a Mrs. Callie Brochie.
But Leibowitz
had scoured Chattanooga
and found no
Callie Brochie anywhere.
So he asked her
dozens of questions
about Miss Callie Brochie
and where she lived
and what she looked like
and had she ever met her before.
You went to bed
in the lady's house?
Yes, sir.
Was it one-floor or two-floor?
I don't remember,
four- or a five-room house.
What sort of food?
What did you do in the evening?
What sort of bed or room?
I don't know.
By the way, Mrs. Price,
as a matter of fact
the name of "Mrs.
Callie" you apply
to this boardinghouse lady
is the same name of
a boardinghouse lady
used in the
Saturday Evening
Post stories.
Isn't that where
you got the name?
I never heard of that Callie!
The truth about
Callie Brochie was
that she was
a fictional character
in stories that appeared
in the Saturday Evening Post.
There was no Callie Brochie on
Seventh Street in Chattanooga.
Leibowitz had found a witness,
a drifter named Lester Carter
who claimed that he knew where
Price and Bates had really been
the night before the train ride:
with himself and a friend in a
hobo camp near the train yards.
Now Leibowitz confronted Price
with this story.
Did you tell a man
by the name of Lester Carter
that you would
introduce him to Ruby?
I told you before
I never seen
Lester Carter before.
Isn't it a fact that the night
before you left Chattanooga
you and your boyfriend
and Ruby and Lester Carter
went walking along
the railroad tracks?
No, sir, we never
have been on the
railroad together.
Isn't it a fact,
Mrs. Price
that you had intercourse
with your boyfriend
on the ground
while Ruby had
intercourse with
Lester Carter
right beside you?
We absolutely did not.
Frustrated,
Leibowitz finally shouted
"You're a pretty good
little actress, aren't you?"
And she fired right back
at him immediately;
she said, "You are
a pretty good actor yourself."
I remember that.
Unable to shake her story
Leibowitz resorted to accusing
Price directly of lying.
Isn't the reason
why you're making these charges
you were found hoboing
on a freight train?
I was seeking work
for my mother.
And you saw
the Negroes
had been captured
by the people at Paint Rock
and you thought you
would be arrested
for vagrancy
for being a hobo on a train
in the company of Negroes
and at that time
you determined to
say they raped you
to save yourself!
No, sir, I didn't!
Northern reporters
who had been in the courtroom
wired breathless accounts
of Leibowitz's brilliant
cross-examination.
But to many Southerners,
it had been a deep affront.
"One possessed of that
old Southern chivalry
"cannot read
the transcript of the trial
"and keep within the law.
"The brutal manner
"in which Leibowitz
cross-examines Mrs. Price
makes one feel
like reaching for his gun."
The Sylacauga News.
He thought with each attack
he was strengthening his case.
And what he didn't understand
was that with each attack
on Victoria Price
he was weakening his case
because the audience saw this
not as an attack as he saw it
upon this woman of ill repute,
this prostitute.
They saw it as an attack
on Southern womanhood.
Leibowitz's cross-examination
had stirred deep memories
among Southerners
of humiliations suffered
at the hands of the North.
In the minds of many Alabamans
by the middle of the trial
in Judge Horton's court
this case is not so much
about what happened
on that freight train.
This trial is a replaying
of abolitionism, civil war
and Reconstruction.
"70 years ago, the scalawags
and carpetbaggers
"marched into the South and said
"'The Negro is your equal and
you will accept him as such.'
"Today, the Reds of New York
"march into the South with
a law book and again say
"'The Negro is your equal and
you will accept him as such.'
We will not!"
The Jackson County Sentinel.
While blacks felt they were
oppressed by Southern whites
Southern whites had a strong
sense of their own oppression...
That they were junior partners
in the American experiment;
that they were
not fully accepted
as citizens
of the United States.
And they resented that.
Much of that resentment was
directed at Leibowitz himself.
He didn't like the South
and the South didn't like him
in numbers.
No get.
We didn't ever care for him.
You heard the expressions
from the outside of
the courtroom, so to speak
that... "that Jew lawyer
ought to go back to New York."
Two retired New York City
homicide detectives
began to accompany Leibowitz
everywhere he went.
Cable to the Brooklyn Eagle:
"There's intense feeling here
"because we have brought
the question of Negro rights
"into the open.
"I have received numerous
crank letters
"threatening death
if I don't stop.
"We are sitting
on a mountain of TNT.
Samuel Leibowitz."
I was walking along
on the sidewalk.
A dirt farmer came along
and shoved me off the sidewalk
into the road
and spit his tobacco juice.
And to this day, I can feel
that spit rolling down my cheek.
As the trial resumed, the tense
atmosphere in the courtroom
was heightened
by a spring heat wave.
The state called to the stand
Dr. R.R. Bridges
the Scottsboro physician
who had examined Price and Bates
hours after they'd been taken
from the train.
As expected, he confirmed
that he had found semen
in their bodies.
Leibowitz now cross-examines him
and essentially turns him
into a witness for the defense.
Leibowitz asked the doctor
if the girls had shown
any signs of a struggle...
Bruises or scratches.
He answered, "No."
Had the girls been hysterical,
breathing heavily
with elevated pulses?
"No."
Had the sperm he had seen
in his microscope been moving?
Again: "No."
The spermatozoa were nonmotile;
that means they were dead
and they would not
have been nonmotile
if six Negroes had ejaculated
themselves into her
an hour to an hour and a half
before she was examined
by the doctor.
Leibowitz next called
his star witness
Lester Carter, to the stand.
Carter testified
that he and a friend
had been with the two girls
the night before
the fateful train ride.
Victoria Price said she knew
where we could go and see fun.
Take a walk, for instance.
SAMUEL LEIBOWITZ Go ahead...
What happened?
We walked up the yards
till we come to
the hobo jungles.
What occurred in
the hobo jungles
that night?
We all sat down near
a bending lake of water
where there was
honeysuckles and
a little ditch.
I hung my hat on a little limb
and went to having
intercourse with Ruby.
By firelight, I saw
Victoria's boyfriend had
intercourse with her.
This is what happened.
It wasn't that they were raped.
Victoria Price, Ruby Bates and
their two boyfriends had sex
and that's all it amounts to.
Throughout Patterson's trial
the other eight defendants
had been kept locked away
in the Decatur jail,
unaware of the proceedings.
Now Leibowitz brought them
to the courthouse
under heavy guard.
Inside, Leibowitz called each
to the stand in turn.
Each denied having ever touched
Victoria Price or Ruby Bates.
The last to take the stand
was Haywood Patterson.
SAMUEL LEIBOWITZ Did you have
anything to do
with a white girl?
I didn't see any girls
on the train.
You are a colored boy.
Would you dare rape
a white girl?
No, sir.
Haywood Patterson,
did you rape this girl?
No, sir!
Each time he would say,
"I did not touch any of them.
I had nothing to do
with any of them."
With Patterson's testimony over
many thought Leibowitz
would rest his case.
What Leibowitz does
is pretend that he's
about to rest his case.
And then he quietly
goes up to the judge
and says, "I'm going
to have one more witness."
The crowd is buzzing.
Horton doesn't know
what's going on.
The prosecution doesn't have
the slightest idea
of what's going on.
The door opens in the back
of the courtroom
and in comes Ruby Bates, only
she's coming into the courtroom
not as a witness
for the prosecution
but as a witness
for the defense.
When she made her appearance
the tension in the court
was palpable.
Knight was jittery.
He turned red.
The crowd, they were aghast:
"There's Ruby Bates
testifying for the defense."
Ruby Bates had spent the months
before the trial in hiding
as far from the media glare
and the clutches
of the prosecution and defense
as she could get.
She had made her way to New York
until, finally, representatives
of the ILD tracked her down
and convinced her
to return to Alabama.
SAMUEL LEIBOWITZ You testified
at Scottsboro
that six Negroes raped you
and six Negroes raped Victoria.
Who coached you to say that?
Victoria told it
and I told it just
like she told it.
Did Victoria tell you
what would happen to you
if you didn't follow her story?
She said we might
have to lay out a
sentence in jail.
So Bates essentially says
that she made the whole thing up
because "Victoria told me
to make it up."
She said, "If I didn't
make up the story
then we would have
to go to jail."
But Ruby fell apart
on cross-examination.
Knight pointed out that
either she was lying now
or had lied two years earlier
in Scottsboro.
Ruby became flustered.
Knight hammered away at her.
He asks her where
she got her pocketbook
where she got her hat,
where she got her coat.
What was she doing in New York?
How did she get
from New York to Alabama?
To each question, she answered,
"T communists."
Aha!
The only reason she's doing this
is because she's been bought
and paid for.
She told the truth
the first time.
Now she's lying for the money
and for the clothing.
The jury, one reporter said,
"smelled the North" on Ruby.
By the time she gets down
off the witness stand
what should have been
the most effective witness
for the defense...
As one of the jurors said later
"We never even considered
her testimony."
Summations began the next day.
Wade Wright,
one of Knight's co-prosecutors
opened with an emotional appeal.
He ridiculed Bates's
"fancy New York clothes"
and called Lester Carter
"Carterinsky."
He turns to the jury, points
his finger to the jury and says
"Show them that Alabama justice
can't be bought and sold
with Jew money from New York!"
Of course, immediately,
Leibowitz is on his feet.
He objected.
He wanted... called
for a mistrial immediately.
Of course, it was overruled.
In his closing argument
Leibowitz called Wade Wright's
summation for the prosecution
a "hangman's speech."
What is it but an appeal
to prejudice
to sectionalism, to bigotry?
He was simply saying,
"Come on, boys!
We can lick this Jew
from New York."
The question here is
whether even this poor scrap
of colored humanity
will receive a square deal.
Finally, Leibowitz said
of Price's testimony
"It is the foul,
contemptible lie
of an abandoned, brazen woman."
At 1:00 on Saturday afternoon
Judge Horton gave the case
to the jury.
The 12 men filed
out of the courthouse
less than two weeks after
they had been sworn in.
Haywood Patterson
nearly forgotten
in the courtroom hubbub
passed the time with his mother
on a bench outside.
At 10:00 the next morning
word came that a verdict
had been reached:
guilty.
And the sentence:
death by electrocution.
Patterson conceded no emotion
as he sat at the defense table
but Leibowitz could not hide
his disappointment.
When that jury brought in
that verdict of guilty
everyone said he looked like
someone had struck him.
He just sank back in his seat
with a look of disbelief
on his face.
The verdict had finally made
plain to Leibowitz himself
how naive he had been.
He had carefully considered
how the jury would see every
aspect of the trial but one...
Himself.
They saw the ultimate outsider...
Someone who was Jewish, totally
foreign to their religion.
They saw someone who was
allegedly a communist
totally foreign
to their political values.
They saw someone who was
defending accused black rapists;
someone totally contrary
to their racial values.
The minute a Jewish lawyer from
New York City came to Alabama
that case was lost.
Upon his return to New York
Leibowitz was swamped
by more than 3,000 admirers.
Carried away, he vented
his anger at the verdict.
If you ever saw
those creatures...
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...
You would not ask
how they could do it.
And of course, there are
the reporters writing it down.
And the next morning there
it's in the newspapers
all over Alabama.
In this case,
I think Leibowitz's ego
his anger got the best of him.
Leibowitz's outburst elicited
howls of protest
throughout the South.
Grover Hall, influential editor
of the Montgomery Advertiser
immediately lashed back.
"He left little,
if anything, undone
"to arouse the resentment,
if not the bitterness
"of everyone in the courtroom,
including members of the jury.
"Mr. Leibowitz came into Alabama
"as the voice of bigotry
and arrogance.
What a stupid lawyer
poor Patterson had!"
Grover Hall,
The Montgomery Advertiser.
Whatever Leibowitz had been
when he entered the case
he was now a different man.
I don't think
there's any question
that Leibowitz felt
much more keenly
having gone through this trial...
Seeing what had happened
to these defendants
seeing the attacks on him...
That there was a kind of bond
in which he saw
this is not simply
these defendants
but also, in a sense,
his own Jewishness was on trial.
In the months following
the verdict
he began to appear
at Scottsboro rallies in Harlem
where he promised to carry on
the struggle in the South.
I will fight to my last breath
to send these boys back to their
parents and to their loved ones.
From his home in Brooklyn,
Leibowitz prepared a motion
asking Judge Horton
to overturn the verdict
and order a new trial.
Judge Horton had retreated
to his farm in Limestone County
after the verdict.
But Leibowitz's motion
now forced him to confront
his own doubts about the case.
When that trial began
he thought
the nine boys were guilty.
And Lord knows
there was plenty of evidence:
their own
contradictory testimony;
the allegations
of the two women.
Then all of a sudden, there's
this cascading kind of evidence
that indicates something
has gone terribly wrong.
At one point, I remember,
he arose from his chair
and watched the manner in which
Victoria Price testified.
And, you know, they say
you can tell a lot
by the way a person speaks.
I think he thought, probably
from early on in the trial
that this woman was lying.
But Horton was
a man of the South
and the South was speaking
in a single voice.
Hundreds of letters arrived
at the Horton home
nearly all praising the verdict.
He had all kinds of pressure
from friends...
Both personal
and political friends...
Saying, "Don't do
what we think you may do.
If you do, it will destroy you
politically."
In his colonnaded home
Horton took up Leibowitz's
motion for a new trial.
Working deep into the night
he pored over every word
of the trial transcript.
Why, he wondered, in the
rich cloud of possible witnesses
had none stepped forward
to corroborate Price's story?
After being brutally raped
why would Price show only
minor scrapes and bruises
to an examining doctor,
and only traces of dead semen?
Was it likely
that nine black teenagers
could have raped two white women
in full view
on a slowly moving train
and then made no move to escape?
"Her testimony was
contradictory, often evasive.
"The proof tends
strongly to show
"that she knowingly
testified falsely
"in many material aspects
of the case.
"Deliberate injustice is more
fatal to the one who imposes it
than to the one
on whom it is imposed."
Judge James Horton.
Here is a man that sees himself
as having to go against much
of what has been his life
much of a system
that he's been a part of
that he's benefited from,
that's been good to him
and now he's going to have
to stand up and say, "Uh-uh."
On June 22, 1933,
in a crowded courtroom
Horton set aside
the guilty verdict.
He ordered the Scottsboro
defendants to stand trial
for the third time.
While the trials had been
going on in the South
outrage over the Scottsboro
affair had migrated
from radical circles
to ordinary people.
In Harlem, thousands had closely
followed the events in Alabama.
The verdict shocked
and radicalized many.
Scottsboro helped forge
a new kind of movement.
Whites and blacks marched
side by side
for the first time
since the days of abolition.
The Scottsboro case was
one of the sparks
that rekindled
the movement for equality.
Between the end of
Reconstruction and the 1930s
there was a struggle
for equality
but it was essentially
a black struggle for equality.
Scottsboro is the rekindling
of an interracial movement
of equality.
"Black and white unite
and fight."
That was a standard in
all of the demonstrations...
This concept
of interracial unity.
The communists seized
on Scottsboro's notoriety
to reach a wider audience.
They sponsored the mothers
of the defendants
on a national speaking tour.
Janie Patterson
who had never traveled more
than 100 miles from her home
led a protest march
on the White House.
Ada Wright, mother
of Roy and Andy Wright
embarked on a six-month tour
of Europe ending in Moscow
where she spoke
before crowds of thousands.
On many stages, the mothers
were joined by Ruby Bates.
Cast out of the South
for her testimony in Decatur
Ruby now apologized for her lie
and proudly proclaimed herself
a communist.
She spoke many times
and told of the great wrong
that she had done
and that she was concerned
that these boys' lives should
not be lost on account of her.
But all the speeches and rallies
in the North
did nothing to deter Alabama.
Almost immediately
after Judge Horton's decision
the state announced
that it would retry
the Scottsboro prisoners.
Alabamians have never
backed away from a fight.
There's no state in this union
that has a bigger chip
on its shoulder than Alabama.
And so, in a sense
this national reaction works
against the Scottsboro boys...
Not to back Alabamians off,
but to harden and toughen
the resistance
to any kind of fair trial.
Once again, Patterson would go
first, but this time
Alabama authorities
were taking no chances.
Attorney General Thomas Knight...
Also the state's prosecutor...
Engineered the removal
of Judge Horton from the case
and named in his place 70-year-
old Judge William Callahan.
Judge Callahan was from
the old school in many ways:
I think much less widely read
than Judge Horton
much less sensitive
to these issues
and, in fact,
to an extraordinary degree
a creature of his own prejudices
so that from day one
in the trial
he becomes, in effect,
another prosecutor.
Repeatedly, throughout the trial
in Callahan's courtroom
the judge frustrated
Leibowitz's defense
overruling his objections
and excluding crucial evidence
to his case.
At one point
Attorney General Knight wanted
to voice an objection
and Callahan said, "Sit down.
I'll take care of him."
And he looked at my father
and he pointed his finger.
So after that,
Attorney General Knight knew
that it wasn't necessary
to form any objections;
Callahan would take care of it.
The jury deliberated a day
before reconvicting Patterson
and sentencing him to death
for the third time.
Norris's trial followed quickly
with the same result.
Leibowitz managed to postpone
the trials of the other seven
but with little hope
of a different outcome.
All nine boys were sent back
to Kilby's death house.
By this time,
their hope was fading.
Kilby Prison was closing in
around them like a shroud.
Despite contributions
from around the world
to purchase new clothes, food,
even musical instruments
the boys' international
notoriety singled them out
for continual torment.
The guards who ran
Kilby Prison...
Certainly the death-row unit...
Saw it as their role
to punish you, to torture you,
to beat you
to brutalize you, to break you.
And that's what happened.
When Charlie Weems
was discovered
reading communist literature,
guards dragged him from his cell
and beat him
until he begged for mercy.
At one point
Ozie Powell slashed the throat
of a sheriff's deputy
with a homemade knife.
A second officer then shot him
in the head.
Though he survived,
Powell was never the same.
Patterson and Norris feuded
constantly over gambling debts
Norris once stabbing Patterson
with a prison shank.
They started to turn
on one another.
They started to fight
with one another.
They grew more hopeless
about their situation.
They were literally living
like dying men might live.
The boys' cells were separated
by a thin door
from Kilby's electric chair.
Norris would lay awake listening
to the midnight executions.
Norris can hear the last words.
Every single individual
who was going to be executed
Norris hears the last words.
The switch is thrown.
The lights actually dim
in the death house itself.
Every time it was him
going in there.
It was him dying, over and over
and over and over again.
Back in New York, Mr. Leibowitz
tells of the appeals.
The appeals are now being rushed
to the Alabama Supreme Court.
I have every confidence in the
world that we shall win there.
In the event that we do not,
we are going right on up
to the United States
Supreme Court in Washington
Leibowitz soldiered on
with one last appeal
to stop the scheduled execution
of his clients.
In each of the Scottsboro trials
the boys had faced
an all-white jury...
A clear violation, he believed
of their right to equal
protection under the law.
White Alabamians did not believe
that blacks ought to serve
on juries.
And black Alabamians assumed
that they would not serve
on juries.
They never had.
In February 1935
the Supreme Court of the United
States heard Norris v. Alabama
which would determine
whether Alabama had purposely
excluded blacks
from their juries.
To prove that they had
Leibowitz brought with him the
huge jury rolls from Decatur.
In them, he had made
a startling discovery.
Of the prospective jurors
listed, all were white
except for a handful of blacks
whose names appeared
to have been hastily scrawled
at the bottoms of several pages.
They just took
a whole group of blacks
and added them to the list
as if they had been there
all the time.
And when the judges of the
Supreme Court looked at that
they had no comment.
They just looked, said...
in effect, said, "Oh, my God!"
It was crude.
In a landmark decision,
the Supreme Court ruled
that Alabama had deliberately
excluded blacks
from their juries
and yet again overturned
the guilty verdicts.
Exhausted, embarrassed and near
broke from trial after trial
Alabama's once united front
regarding Scottsboro
finally began to crumble.
A lot of Southerners
began to say
"Look, this thing is more
trouble than it's worth.
"And there really are
serious questions here
and maybe the best thing to do
is to settle this case."
Grover Hall, editor
of the Montgomery Advertiser
once one of the
most ardent defenders
of the Scottsboro verdicts
began to wonder if something
had not gone terribly wrong.
"The Advertiser knows,
all of its readers know
"the whole of this sordid,
sickening story.
"Scottsboro has stigmatized
Alabama
"throughout the civilized world.
"We herewith suggest and urge
"that the state now move for
a decent, dignified compromise.
"Nothing can be gained
"by demanding
the final pound of flesh.
Throw this body of death away
from Alabama."
Grover Hall.
Hall quietly began to lobby
for an end
to the Scottsboro prosecutions
and the parole
of its defendants.
State officials listened
but made clear that one
condition would have to be met:
Samuel Leibowitz
would have to go.
For Leibowitz, the notion
that he shared blame
for the convictions
of his own clients
was almost too bitter
to swallow.
He never believed that
for a moment.
Their blackness convicted them...
Not him, not the ILD
not all the other extraneous
influences in the case.
The fact is they're black,
and that's what convicted them.
But Leibowitz had no choice
but to give in.
As Alabama began
the fourth trial
of the Scottsboro defendants
he stepped aside in favor
of a Southern attorney.
I can't imagine many things
more difficult for Sam Leibowitz
than to sit in a courtroom and
be the second-ranked attorney...
To sit there while another
attorney takes on the case.
But everyone convinced him
that that's what he had to do.
With Leibowitz gone
Alabama quickly convicted
five of the defendants.
But it abruptly dropped the
charges against the other four:
Olin Montgomery,
Willie Roberson, Roy Wright
and Eugene Williams.
Two of them are 13 years old
at the time
the incident took place.
One of them was blind,
one of them had syphilis
and simply couldn't have
had sexual intercourse.
And basically
the state said, "All right
we'll give you those."
♪ We're Alabama
and you better watch out ♪
♪ The landlord get you,
gonna jump and shout ♪
♪ Scottsboro boys,
Scottsboro boys ♪
♪ They can tell you
what it's all about... ♪
The four were spirited out
of Alabama in July 1937
after six years in jail.
♪ Scottsboro boys,
Scottsboro boys ♪
♪ They can tell you
what it's all about... ♪
They arrived in New York
the next day.
Leibowitz was so overcome
that he took off his straw hat
and punched a hole through it.
For a moment
the freed defendants
were celebrated as heroes.
They were taken
on a speaking tour
and booked into the Apollo
Theater, where they sang, danced
and took part in a reenactment
of their trial.
♪ Scottsboro boys,
Scottsboro boys ♪
♪ they can tell you
what it's all about. ♪
But just as suddenly,
the fanfare died down.
The boys drifted back
into obscurity.
Their pleas for help
to their former sponsors
frequently went unanswered.
For the five defendants
remaining in Kilby
the release of the four others
only heightened their despair.
Their supporters continued
to push for their release.
"How," asked Grover Hall, "could
the Scottsboro defendants
be half guilty
and half innocent?"
By 1941, the Alabama Parole
Board had met three times
each time refusing
to free the prisoners.
The boys,
now grown to men in prison
received fewer
and fewer visitors
and watched as the Scottsboro
case began to disappear
from the nation's consciousness.
But world's forgetfulness
proved to be
the Scottsboro prisoners'
greatest ally.
As the rancorous attacks
on Alabama ended
the state at last bowed
to reason and exhaustion.
In the end, it was not letters,
marches or editorials
but time alone that brought
the Scottsboro affair to an end.
In November 1943
the Alabama Parole Board met
for a fourth time.
This time it voted to parole
31-year-old Charlie Weems
after 12 years in Kilby.
Two months later,
Andy Wright was released.
Then Clarence Norris.
In 1946, Ozie Powell, 33,
was let go.
Only Patterson, the man whose
defiant pride had marked him
from the beginning as the
most visible, the most hated
of the Scottsboro defendants,
remained in prison...
"sullen, vicious
and incorrigible"
according to the
Alabama Parole Board.
Patterson had become a creature
of Alabama's prisons.
He was sent
to Atmore Prison Farm
where he worked in the hot sun
for 12 hours a day
chained to other prisoners.
Throughout everything,
he would later write
Scottsboro haunted his dreams.
"I laid on the top bunk
"in a way still feeling
I was on a moving freight.
"Nothing was standing still.
"I was busy living
from minute to minute
"and everything was rumbling.
"I dreamed bad dreams with
freight trains, guards' faces
and courtrooms mixed up with
the look of the sky at night."
Haywood Patterson.
On a hot afternoon in July 1948
Patterson slipped away
from Atmore
with eight other prisoners.
With dogs in pursuit, he waded
through streams for days
and was harbored at night
by sympathetic black families.
Finally, he hopped a freight
north to Detroit
where his sister and her family
were waiting.
The last of the Scottsboro boys
was free.
The town of Scottsboro
has never lived down
the accident of geography
that forged its name
with those of the defendants.
If the train had gone
300 more yards,
I believe it was
it would have been
in Madison County
and we certainly
wouldn't have objected.
That's very true, it would
have been the Huntsville boys
instead of the Scottsboro boys
and we would have been
very glad of that.
The year after Judge James
Horton overturned the verdict
in the Decatur trial,
he was defeated for reelection
and would never again serve
on the bench.
On the top of a campaign speech
he had scrawled
a note to himself:
"Ye shall know the truth, and
the truth shall make you free."
Samuel Leibowitz never won
a victory in an Alabama court
for the Scottsboro defendants,
but he did save their lives.
With the Supreme Court decision
in Norris v. Alabama
he also set in motion the
integration of Southern juries
which would make possible many
of the civil rights victories
in later decades.
In 1941, Leibowitz was appointed
to the bench in New York
where, with a new vantage point
he became a passionate advocate
for capital punishment.
Victoria Price disappeared
after the last Scottsboro trial
and was presumed to have died
sometime in the mid-1950s.
Then in 1976,
she surfaced to sue NBC
for broadcasting
a television movie
that portrayed her
as a prostitute and a liar.
The suit was settled quietly
for what for NBC was a pittance
but for Victoria Price was more
money than she'd ever known.
She died, for real, a few
years later, still insisting
that she had told the truth.
After their release from prison
most of the Scottsboro
defendants led troubled lives
in the North.
Haywood Patterson killed a man
in self-defense in a bar fight
and died in a Michigan
penitentiary at the age of 39.
Andy Wright wound up
in Albany, New York
where he was again falsely
accused of raping a white girl;
this time he was acquitted.
His brother Roy,
youngest of the defendants
served in the army and married.
In 1959, convinced that
his wife was cheating on him
Roy shot and killed her
and then, with his Bible by his
side, shot and killed himself.
He is buried in a neglected
cemetery in Chattanooga.
Beside him, in an unmarked
grave, lies his brother Andy.
I think that's perhaps
an ultimate tragedy...
People pulled into history
who never wanted
to be pulled into history
suddenly put
on a national platform
and tragically paraded out
for everybody's benefit
but their own.
And the question of who
really cared about them
who really defended them...
Almost everyone had an agenda
that involved
the Scottsboro boys.
And I think the courage
of the Scottsboro boys
is just surviving...
just enduring.
Of all the Scottsboro
defendants, only Clarence Norris
made a life for himself
in the North.
He broke parole in 1946
and fled Alabama
making his way to New York.
Assuming his brother's name, he
got a job as a sanitation worker
married twice, raised a family,
and began a fight
to get a full pardon
from the state of Alabama.
He wanted the world to know
that he was an innocent man.
He had a responsibility now
to make sure
that the world understood
that those nine defendants
in 1931 were innocent
and that it was racism,
only racism
that, in fact, forced them to
spend all those years in prison.
On an October day in 1976,
Norris received word
that Governor George Wallace
had pardoned him.
Clarence Norris flies to Alabama
goes and meets the members
of the Pardon and Parole Board
and there goes into
George Wallace's office
and George Wallace
the great defender of the
racial status quo in the South
signs a pardon saying,
"We were wrong"
that Alabama made a mistake
in the 1930s
and Clarence Norris
never raped anybody.
The Scottsboro defendants
never raped anybody.
Mr. Norris, this is
your pardon, full pardon.
He was very emotional
when he received the pardon
at the press conference
because he remembered
getting off that train
with those other eight guys
and here he was, getting
his pardon... he was alone.
And I'm sure
he could feel them around him.
I'm sure he could
feel their presence
and he thought about them,
"Why me?"
I have no hate or prejudice
against any creed or color.
I like all people, and I think
all people accused of things
which they didn't commit
should be free.
I wish these other eight boys
was around.
nine young men,
and a charge of rape...
Who said what, when?
Rising to envelop
a Jewish lawyer from New York
the justice system in Alabama,
the American Communist Party
the United States Supreme Court
the attention of the nation.
It began with two women
and nine young men.
What really happened?
"Scottsboro:
An American Tragedy"
tonight on American Experience.
Hear the rattle of gravel
as it rides whistling
through the day and night.
Not the old or the young on it
nor people with any difference
in their color or shape
not girls or men,
Negroes or white
but people with this in common:
people that no one had use for,
had nothing to give to
no place to offer
but the cars of a freight train
careening through Paint Rock,
through Memphis
through town after town
without halting.
I've had people that knew
that you and I were going
to have this conversation
and some of them said,
"Oh, don't do it.
Don't stir it up again."
I said,
"Well, it's a part of us."
It begins with
a fairly clear-cut issue
of black and white,
of sexuality, of rape.
Then it becomes
increasingly confused.
The image of black men
was that they were
anxious at all times
to rape a white woman.
And it was the Scottsboro case
that met that issue head on.
"Will you let them murder the
nine Negro boys in Scottsboro?
"No!
"Louder: No!
"Organize, demonstrate, protest.
Raise your voices."
What Scottsboro teaches us
is that you cannot underestimate
the power of our history
as it relates to race,
as it relates to poverty
as it relates to sectionalism,
in the struggle for justice.
There are heroes in the story
but that's the footnote
to the story.
The tragedy of this
are nine boys' lives
hopelessly,
eternally interrupted
sent cascading down roads
of terror and imprisonment.
No, I don't think there's
any way to see this story
but as a great tragedy.
On the morning of March 25, 1931
a freight of the
Southern Rail Corporation
left Chattanooga, Tennessee,
bound for points west.
Scattered among the cars
of the freight
were some two dozen hoboes,
black and white.
A few minutes
out of Lookout Mountain
the train dipped into the
northeastern corner of Alabama.
As the train emerged from the
tunnel under Lookout Mountain
a group of whites was moving
along the top of the train
and they stepped on the hand
of one of the blacks
and almost knocked him
off the train.
The hand belonged to an 18-year-
old named Haywood Patterson
who was on his way to Memphis
to look for work.
"We was just minding our own
business, when one of them said
"'This is a white man's train...
All you nigger bastards unload.
"But we weren't going nowhere,
so there was a fight.
We got the best of it
and threw them off."
Haywood Patterson.
Word of the fight reached the
tiny town of Paint Rock, Alabama
where the train was scheduled
to stop and take on water.
In Paint Rock,
news goes out that there is
a gang of blacks,
a gang of Negroes on the train
that beat up a gang of whites.
A posse is organized.
Virtually every man in Paint
Rock with a gun or a rope
shows up.
The train stops, the posse
goes up and down the train
looking in all the cars.
What they thought
they were going to find
is a group of blacks who had
beaten up a group of whites
and thrown them off the train.
Immediately unexpected things
began to happen.
That's what you most fear
in a racial confrontation
is the unexpected.
Suddenly, from
the shadows of a boxcar
emerged two white women,
pale and disheveled.
At first they weren't even
aware that they were women.
They were wearing overalls.
They identified themselves as
Victoria Price and Ruby Bates.
And there are
conflicting accounts
about who said what, when
but one of the young women said,
"We've been raped.
All these colored boys
raped us."
And... that was it.
A bunch of people here
got the guys off the train
marched them up here...
about where this old building...
Right across from where the
white wrecked car is there...
Lined them up
against the wall there.
I saw a lot of people
surrounding those boys
many of them having
guns, of course
and ropes or pieces of rope.
They were intent on mayhem.
For any black man in Alabama
whenever you saw a group
of white men with guns
in the menacing, ominous way
in which people were collected
in Paint Rock, Alabama
you knew you were
in a lot of trouble.
There were
nine prisoners in all.
One of them was
19-year-old Clarence Norris.
The place was
surrounded with a mob.
They had shotguns,
pistols, sticks
pieces of iron, everything.
The crowd commenced to hollering
"Let's take these
black son-of-a-bitches up here
and put them to a tree."
I just thought
that I was going to die.
Mr. Broadway
sent up to the store
and got a skein...
I never heard that word before,
a "skein" of plowline...
And the rope was cut into pieces
that where they could tie
the hands of the ones
that was under arrest.
And then the next thing was
"How we going to get them
to Scottsboro?"
The prisoners were loaded
onto a truck
and driven to
the nearby town of Scottsboro.
On March 25, 1931, a friend
and I were playing basketball
at the side
of the Jackson County jail.
And we noticed
a flatbed stake-body truck
stop in front of the jail
with a guard with rifles
on each corner.
They quickly unloaded
the prisoners.
Crowds were beginning to form
outside the jail.
The rumor was that they were
going to go into the jail.
There was already poles outside
that they were going to break
the door down with.
Cars, trucks, they was coming in
all kinds of ways, the mob was:
"Bring them niggers
out of there.
"If you don't bring them
out of there, goddamn it
we'll come in and get them."
That's all you could hear
all you could hear
all over that little town.
The sheriff goes out
on the front porch
and basically makes the comment
to the growing crowd outside
that the first individual
that puts their foot
on their doorstep...
He's going to kill them.
As the situation
became desperate
my father took his pistol off
and gave it to his deputies.
He walked out the front door
right through
the middle of the mob
and they separated for him;
not a hand touched him.
He went to the courthouse
and called the governor.
By the next morning
the National Guard
had secured the jail
while newspapers identified
what one called
"the nine Negro brutes."
Of the nine, only four had known
each other before their arrest.
Charlie Weems,
the oldest, was 19;
Eugene Williams,
the youngest, 13.
Willie Roberson suffered
from syphilis so severe
he could barely walk.
Olin Montgomery, nearly blind,
had been looking for a job
to pay for a pair of glasses.
Clarence Norris had left behind
ten siblings in rural Georgia.
Ozie Powell had been found
riding alone.
Andy Wright, 19, and his
13-year-old brother Roy
had ridden
from Chattanooga together.
It was Roy's first time
away from home.
Haywood Patterson had been
riding the freight trains
so long, he said he could
light a butt in the wind
from the top of a moving car.
By the time the nine defendants
had taken to the rails
the full brunt of the Depression
had already struck the South
and no state was hurting
worse than Alabama.
Alabama in the 1930s was
literally a world coming apart
with massive unemployment in a
state that had always been poor
with increasing conflict
between both classes and races.
It was a state that was
in calamitous conditions.
Families were disintegrating.
Hoboes were frequenting
the railroads
by the thousands
and tens of thousands.
The two accusers also
had been driven onto the rails
by economic necessity.
Ruby Bates, 17, and
Victoria Price, 21, hailed
from the cotton center
of Huntsville
40 miles from Scottsboro.
They worked together
in the poorest
of the town's textile mills.
At 21, Price was
already twice married
and had served time
in the workhouse
for adultery and vagrancy.
Victoria Price...
was tough...
A survivor in every way.
She hardly fit the stereotype
of the young Southern lady...
Hard-talking, tobacco-chewing...
but a kind of feistiness to her.
Ruby Bates is
totally different...
Very quiet, soft-spoken.
In effect it was
a kind of relationship
in which Victoria
totally dominated Ruby Bates.
The mills in which
the girls worked
employed mostly young women.
They labored up to 14 hours
a day in deafening noise
air choked with cotton lint,
and near complete darkness.
By 1931, wages in the mills
had dropped so low
that Victoria and Ruby
could only afford to live
in the black section
of Huntsville
where they occasionally
traded sex
with both black and white men
for food and clothing.
Their lives are, in fact,
a complete violation
of the ideals of segregation.
But the second that they accuse
a black man of rape
at least for an instant,
they become pure white women.
The trials of the nine
defendants for rape
got under way on Monday, April
6, in the Scottsboro courthouse.
It was a traditional
trading day in town
but the usual crowd
was swelled by thousands more
from hundreds of miles around.
Eventually, the largest crowd
in Scottsboro's history
squeezed into
the courthouse square
as a brass band played "Dixie"
and "Hail, Hail,
the Gang's All Here."
I saw many strangers,
lots of strangers.
There'd be a carload
over here talking
and a carload
over there talking...
Some of them from Tennessee.
I saw Tennessee tags
and Georgia tags.
And some of them were armed,
most of them had shotguns.
200 National Guardsmen
ringed the courthouse
to keep the crowd
from rushing its doors.
They had strings up
so the mob could not get up
beyond the string.
So whenever the guard would pass
the crowd would push
beyond the sting
and the guard would turn on
his heel and throw his gun down
and say, "Get back!"
But as soon as he would turn
his back, they were back again.
The crowds outside
the courthouse were drawn
by what one newspaper called
the "most unspeakable crime
in the history of Alabama."
Since the days
of slavery and before
what was presumed to be
the black man's insatiable
sexual appetite for white women
had struck fear in the hearts
of Southern whites.
The protection
of white womanhood...
It might be the pivot
around all of Southern culture.
The 5,000 people who were
lynched from 1880 to 1940...
Most of those were cases
of black men
accused of raping or sexually
assaulting a white woman.
In the early 1930s
the incidents of lynchings
in the South had spiked upward
tracking the economic misery
of poor whites.
But so, too, had the efforts
of a small but powerful faction
opposed to lynching.
With the Scottsboro trials
the antilynching forces hoped
to prove that in Alabama
the rule of law would prevail
against the passions of the mob.
Here was an example
of their doing it right...
Of showing to the world
that they were capable
of giving equal and fair justice
to prisoners
in the most emotional
and threatening kinds
of conditions.
As the trial began
Victoria Price took the stand
and told a chilling story.
There were six to me
and three to her.
One was holding my legs and the
other had a knife to my throat
while another ravished me.
That one sitting behind
the defendants' counsel
took my overalls off.
Six of them had
intercourse with me.
"Pour it to her, pour it
to her," they hollered.
Ruby Bates corroborated her
friend's story in every detail
though she could not identify
any of her attackers.
Unable to get a lawyer
in Scottsboro
the nine accused rapists
were being represented
by a Chattanooga
real estate attorney
hired with $60 scraped together
by their parents.
The defendants had
just one 20-minute meeting
with their lawyer, during which
he urged them to plead guilty.
Now the boys were
the only witnesses called
to testify in their own defense.
Clarence Norris and Haywood
Patterson were the first two
to take the stand.
The first thing they try to do
is concoct an excuse
for themselves.
Norris says,
"Well, the other eight did it
but I didn't do it."
And Patterson says, "Well,
I didn't do it, but they did it.
And it's the classic reaction
of people trapped
in a world where they know
they're not going to be believed
where they have no resources
and so that's the way
they explode.
The courthouse were
full of people
and they were jumping about
their seats with pistols.
Nothing... wasn't a black person
around nowhere...
Everybody was white
but just us nine.
When they announced the verdict
of guilty, people ran out
and the judge was trying
to bring order.
And as soon
as the word got outside
the crowd outside went crazy.
The trials lasted three days.
All nine Scottsboro defendants
were convicted of rape.
The jury could not decide
whether to sentence
13-year-old Roy Wright
to life in prison or death.
All the others were sentenced
to die
in the Alabama electric chair.
The Scottsboro defendants,
now convicted rapists
were taken to Kilby Prison
near Montgomery...
The pride of the Alabama system.
Two to a cell, the boys looked
out on 50-foot walls
topped by gun turrets
on each corner.
Their first night in Kilby
the boys rioted,
tearing up their bedding
and hurling their food
through the bars.
Guards rushed their cells
and beat them.
"The cell door banged open.
"They beat on us
with their fists;
"they kicked and tramped
on our legs.
"The sheriff said to me,
'See that gallows, nigger?
"'If you don't quieten down
I'll take you around to that
gallows and hang you myself.'"
Haywood Patterson.
Understandably,
they're terrified.
They're in one
of the most brutal prisons
in the United States
they have a death sentence
hanging over them
and they're
like drowning individuals
grasping for a life raft
grasping for a life preserver,
grasping for straws.
When help did come, it was from
the most unlikely of sources
the Communist Party
of the United States.
By 1931, the communists were
a small but dynamic force.
Opportunistic and organized,
they seized on the Depression
as proof of the inevitable
decline of capitalism
and the rise
of a workers' paradise.
The advent of the Depression
had made it possible
for the communists
to gain a hearing
among people who
just a few years before
would have dismissed
their claims.
It did appear to a great
many people in the 1930s
that capitalism was in crisis.
For years, the Communist Party
had devoted special attention
to the American South
and to Southern blacks
in particular.
It is only the Communist Party
which day in and day out
fights for every demand and need
of the Negroes
in the terror-
and lynch-ridden South.
The view was that in the South
we had
an uncompleted revolution.
Abolition of slavery had
not been really fulfilled;
we now had sharecropping.
We had literally
tens of thousands of people
who were bound to the farm
in debt: work all year;
the end of the year,
they would have nothing left.
We felt that the system
was maintained
only in one way... by terror:
If you get out of line,
you're lynched.
But the communists
had found Southern blacks
deeply rooted in the system.
Organizers believed
they needed a striking example
of what they called
"Southern lynch justice"
to rouse blacks to action.
The mass arrests in Scottsboro
were just
what they were waiting for.
Two local communist organizers
are actually in the courtroom
during the trials.
They immediately
send word of this
up to party headquarters
in New York
saying, "This is
a wonderful opportunity
"to publicize all the things
we're trying to publicize
in the South."
The national party agrees.
Only three weeks after
the Scottsboro trials
the communists launched
their first demonstration
on behalf of
the Scottsboro defendants.
"200 communists undertook
to march down Lenox Avenue
"through the center of Harlem
yesterday afternoon
in defiance of the police."
"15 minutes later
"when 20 policemen had replaced
their nightsticks
"and the screams of the women
in the crowd had died down
the sidewalk was strewn
with communist banners."
The New York Times.
But there were
other organizations...
Principally the venerable
NAACP... eager to defend
the Scottsboro boys
for whom the Communist Party's
public demonstrations
seemed self-serving,
even dangerous.
The NAACP's position is "These
people are revolutionaries.
"We can talk all we want to
about the ultimate revolution;
"we've got to defend
these young men in Alabama.
"And the last thing
you want to do
"is enrage and inflame
local juries
"by raising the specter
of communism
and the class struggle
and social equality."
We were propagandizing,
there's just no doubt.
We were using... yes, we were
using the Scottsboro case
to expose what was going on
in the South.
In June, lawyers from the
International Labor Defense...
The legal arm
of the Communist Party...
Visited the boys in Kilby,
trying to raise their spirits
and secure control
of their defense.
The ILD lawyers
dressed as farmers
to elude the suspicions
of Kilby's wardens.
They put on overalls
and straw hats
and put a straw in their mouth
and went down to Alabama
to see the Scottsboro boys.
They had been in very bad
psychological condition.
We brought them
cigarettes, chocolate.
And they were scared
but they were they were
delighted to see us.
But the boys remained
deeply confused
by the appearance
of white men from the North
bearing promises of liberation.
It was not until
a young organizer
visited the parents
of Haywood Patterson
and the mother of Ozie Powell
that the communists finally
secured control of the defense.
I told them if the International
Labor Defense comes
we don't believe
in just having a trial.
We believe in masses of people
being behind the cause
that you're fighting for
and that's how the International
Labor Defense Works.
♪ Workers, farmers,
Negro and white ♪
♪ The lynching forces
we must fight... ♪
With control of the case,
the communists set about
to bring Scottsboro to the
attention of the entire world.
♪ The Scottsboro boys
shall not die ♪
♪ The Scottsboro boys
shall not die ♪
♪ Workers and the ILD will set
them free, set them free! ♪
There was demonstrations
in Germany.
There was demonstrations
in Spain and in Moscow.
The world knew about this case
because of the way the
communists spread the word.
"Attention, attention, comrades.
"Will you let them murder the
nine Negro boys in Scottsboro?
"No!
"Louder: No!
"Organize, demonstrate, protest.
Raise your voices,
raise your fists and scream.
Stop! Stop! Stop!"
I got all excited
all over again.
In November 1932, communists
took their public protests
to the steps of the Capitol
where they were routed
by the police.
But inside, their lawyers were
appealing the Scottsboro verdict
before the Supreme Court
of the United States.
The justices considered
whether in the Scottsboro trials
the boys' legal defense
had been so inadequate
that it violated their rights
to legal due process.
By a vote of seven to two,
they concluded that it had.
The Supreme Court, in
a precedent-setting decision
for the first time held
that poor people, like
the Scottsboro defendants
get effective assistance
from lawyers
and where they were denied
effective assistance
from lawyers
they would be afforded
new trials.
Alabama authorities
immediately resolved
to retry, reconvict and execute
the nine defendants.
The communists realize
at this point
that they've got
to show the world
that these defendants
are actually innocent.
What's the best way to do that?
Get the best
criminal lawyer around.
In the early 1930s
the best-known criminal lawyer
in America...
After Clarence Darrow... was
New York's Samuel L. Leibowitz.
Leibowitz had won
fame and fortune
by defending gangsters...
kidnappers...
rapists...
corrupt cops...
and jealous lovers.
In 15 years, he had won
77 out of 78 murder cases;
the 78th resulted
in a hung jury.
Leibowitz was, first of all, a
remarkably thorough researcher.
He studied
every aspect of a case
never left a stone unturned.
Add to that, he was a showman.
He literally
could have been an actor.
He had a supple baritone
instrument for a voice
which he could use
like a Paderewski
or a Jascha Heifetz,
so to speak.
And he had a sense of timing
that Jack Benny
would have envied.
In January 1933,
Joseph Brodsky...
One of the leaders of the
International Labor Defense...
Asked Leibowitz to take over
as chief defense attorney.
But Leibowitz was wary
of entanglement
with the communists.
Ideologically, he would be
about the last man
to represent
the Scottsboro movement.
He made it clear,
"I don't agree with you guys.
I don't like what you're doing."
But if one thing was
more important to Leibowitz
than political principle,
it was his personal reputation
and the Scottsboro affair
was fast becoming
an international cause célèbre.
He wanted to make
a name for himself
that was larger than
the criminals' lawyer
and he wanted to widen
the circle of his renown.
After my father met with
Brodsky and Patterson of the ILD
and their agreement was
finalized and he said to them
"Look, if I don't
bring these nine boys back
"and dump them in your lap
"I'll buy both of you the
finest hats that Stetson makes.
Take my word on it."
He was he was probably
as provincial
as most New Yorkers were then,
and I think still are
thinking that things would be
the same down there.
He had no idea that it was like
going into a different country.
Rules are different...
Everything is different.
He had no idea.
The second trial of
the Scottsboro defendants
had been moved to Decatur,
a town in northeast Alabama.
As it opened in April 1933
300 spectators crowded
the hallways
waiting to enter the courtroom.
Hundreds more gathered outside.
I went because of history.
I had never seen
anything like that before
and I wanted to know
just how it would be carried on.
When we entered the courtroom,
we were not told the way to go.
We knew the way to go
because it was black on one side
and white on the other.
Leibowitz had won a motion to
try the defendants separately.
To stand trial first, the state
had selected Haywood Patterson.
If the prosecutors were going
to win and win big
Haywood Patterson was
the best person to put on trial
because Haywood Patterson was
the exemplar of the "bad Negro."
He was someone who looked
the closest you can imagine
to a rapist
as far as the white
imagination's concerned.
Patterson was mean.
I looked him in the eye
when we...
first time we brought him
out of jail.
I saw that he'd kill
if he got a chance.
Alabama would entrust
the prosecution of the case
to its highest-ranking lawyer,
Attorney General Thomas Knight.
The 34-year-old Knight had
the demeanor, one reporter wrote
"of a small
and enthusiastic child."
Yet he was Leibowitz's
equal in the courtroom
and like Leibowitz,
he was highly ambitious.
He said, "I'm going
to prosecute these boys
and ride their black asses right
into the governor's mansion."
Presiding over the case
would be the chief judge
of the local circuit court
55-year-old James E. Horton.
The trial judge in Decatur
was a Lincolnesque-type,
thorough Southern gentleman...
Very mannerly
very sober
very conscious of proper
procedure in a courtroom.
Jury selection took place
under heavy security.
The 12 jurors ultimately chosen
to sit in judgment of Patterson
included a shopkeeper, a barber,
a clerk and several farmers.
All of them were white.
As the state prepared to present
its case, newspapers reported
the mysterious disappearance
of Ruby Bates
who was rumored to have been
kidnapped or even killed.
Every effort by the prosecution
and defense to find her
had come up empty.
More than ever, the prosecution
would rise or fall
on the testimony
of Victoria Price alone.
Victoria Price gets on the stand
and in a matter of minutes says
she was riding
on a freight train.
Suddenly a large group of blacks
comes hopping over
onto the car that she is on
quickly dispatches with her
white companions, beats them up
throws them off the train,
and then en masse holds her up
rips her clothes off,
and rapes her.
I hollered for help
until they stopped me
until some of them
knocked me in the head
with the butt end of a gun.
They unfastened my overalls
while I was standing up
and then they threw me down
on the gravel
and finished pulling them
off my feet.
This Negro grabbed me by
the legs and pulled them open
and then one of them
put a knife on my throat
and one got on top of me.
She just pointed
at Patterson and said
"He raped me,"
right there in the courtroom.
Price's direct testimony
lasted just 16 minutes
but made a powerful impression
on the jury
and the audience
in the courtroom.
But Leibowitz was unconcerned.
For months, he had waited
for just this moment:
the chance to confront Victoria
Price in a court of law.
He began his cross-examination
by setting out an exact replica
of the freight train
which he had procured
from the Lionel Toy Corporation.
My father had set up
this train set
in order to demonstrate where
the alleged rape took place
because his own clients
had told him where they were
and it did not coincide
with where she claimed she was.
SAMUEL LEIBOWITZ Just look
at this little replica
and tell me if it
fairly represents
the general appearance
of the box car
you rode on.
It kinda represents one
but it ain't like
the one I was on.
In what way is it different?
Can you say?
I won't say.
If you can't say,
why do you say
it is different?
Because that is not
the train I was on.
It was bigger, lots bigger.
That is a toy.
She just refuses for question
after question after question
to admit the most basic point:
that this in any way resembles
the train
that she was riding on.
I think at that moment,
Sam Leibowitz realized
that she may have been
uneducated
but she was going to be
a hell of a witness
for the prosecution.
Again and again, Leibowitz
attacked Price's story
in every possible detail:
her location on the train,
her physical condition
her movements on the day
before the alleged rape.
But in each case, Price was able
to parry his attacks.
He finds dozens,
scores of inconsistencies.
Yet she has a manner
that makes it difficult
for him to make his points.
It wasn't that he'd never had
a difficult witness before.
It was that he'd never had a
witness that said over and over
"I can't remember."
Usually a witness is
defensive when they say
"I can't remember."
She aggressively said
she couldn't remember
and used it to her advantage.
I feel if you are
really telling the truth
you can look anybody in the eye.
Victoria never looked directly.
It was like...
almost to the floor.
Until she was made angry,
and then she would shout
"I don't know anything!
I told you that before,
and I'll tell it to you again!"
Leibowitz knew
that he had to overcome
one crucial piece
of state's evidence:
An examination of the girls
just hours after they were
brought from the train
had turned up traces of semen
in their bodies.
But Leibowitz believed
he could explain the semen
found in Price and Bates
not by rape on
the day of the train ride
but by consensual sex
the night before.
Price had claimed
that she and Bates
had spent that night in
a boardinghouse in Chattanooga
owned by a Mrs. Callie Brochie.
But Leibowitz
had scoured Chattanooga
and found no
Callie Brochie anywhere.
So he asked her
dozens of questions
about Miss Callie Brochie
and where she lived
and what she looked like
and had she ever met her before.
You went to bed
in the lady's house?
Yes, sir.
Was it one-floor or two-floor?
I don't remember,
four- or a five-room house.
What sort of food?
What did you do in the evening?
What sort of bed or room?
I don't know.
By the way, Mrs. Price,
as a matter of fact
the name of "Mrs.
Callie" you apply
to this boardinghouse lady
is the same name of
a boardinghouse lady
used in the
Saturday Evening
Post stories.
Isn't that where
you got the name?
I never heard of that Callie!
The truth about
Callie Brochie was
that she was
a fictional character
in stories that appeared
in the Saturday Evening Post.
There was no Callie Brochie on
Seventh Street in Chattanooga.
Leibowitz had found a witness,
a drifter named Lester Carter
who claimed that he knew where
Price and Bates had really been
the night before the train ride:
with himself and a friend in a
hobo camp near the train yards.
Now Leibowitz confronted Price
with this story.
Did you tell a man
by the name of Lester Carter
that you would
introduce him to Ruby?
I told you before
I never seen
Lester Carter before.
Isn't it a fact that the night
before you left Chattanooga
you and your boyfriend
and Ruby and Lester Carter
went walking along
the railroad tracks?
No, sir, we never
have been on the
railroad together.
Isn't it a fact,
Mrs. Price
that you had intercourse
with your boyfriend
on the ground
while Ruby had
intercourse with
Lester Carter
right beside you?
We absolutely did not.
Frustrated,
Leibowitz finally shouted
"You're a pretty good
little actress, aren't you?"
And she fired right back
at him immediately;
she said, "You are
a pretty good actor yourself."
I remember that.
Unable to shake her story
Leibowitz resorted to accusing
Price directly of lying.
Isn't the reason
why you're making these charges
you were found hoboing
on a freight train?
I was seeking work
for my mother.
And you saw
the Negroes
had been captured
by the people at Paint Rock
and you thought you
would be arrested
for vagrancy
for being a hobo on a train
in the company of Negroes
and at that time
you determined to
say they raped you
to save yourself!
No, sir, I didn't!
Northern reporters
who had been in the courtroom
wired breathless accounts
of Leibowitz's brilliant
cross-examination.
But to many Southerners,
it had been a deep affront.
"One possessed of that
old Southern chivalry
"cannot read
the transcript of the trial
"and keep within the law.
"The brutal manner
"in which Leibowitz
cross-examines Mrs. Price
makes one feel
like reaching for his gun."
The Sylacauga News.
He thought with each attack
he was strengthening his case.
And what he didn't understand
was that with each attack
on Victoria Price
he was weakening his case
because the audience saw this
not as an attack as he saw it
upon this woman of ill repute,
this prostitute.
They saw it as an attack
on Southern womanhood.
Leibowitz's cross-examination
had stirred deep memories
among Southerners
of humiliations suffered
at the hands of the North.
In the minds of many Alabamans
by the middle of the trial
in Judge Horton's court
this case is not so much
about what happened
on that freight train.
This trial is a replaying
of abolitionism, civil war
and Reconstruction.
"70 years ago, the scalawags
and carpetbaggers
"marched into the South and said
"'The Negro is your equal and
you will accept him as such.'
"Today, the Reds of New York
"march into the South with
a law book and again say
"'The Negro is your equal and
you will accept him as such.'
We will not!"
The Jackson County Sentinel.
While blacks felt they were
oppressed by Southern whites
Southern whites had a strong
sense of their own oppression...
That they were junior partners
in the American experiment;
that they were
not fully accepted
as citizens
of the United States.
And they resented that.
Much of that resentment was
directed at Leibowitz himself.
He didn't like the South
and the South didn't like him
in numbers.
No get.
We didn't ever care for him.
You heard the expressions
from the outside of
the courtroom, so to speak
that... "that Jew lawyer
ought to go back to New York."
Two retired New York City
homicide detectives
began to accompany Leibowitz
everywhere he went.
Cable to the Brooklyn Eagle:
"There's intense feeling here
"because we have brought
the question of Negro rights
"into the open.
"I have received numerous
crank letters
"threatening death
if I don't stop.
"We are sitting
on a mountain of TNT.
Samuel Leibowitz."
I was walking along
on the sidewalk.
A dirt farmer came along
and shoved me off the sidewalk
into the road
and spit his tobacco juice.
And to this day, I can feel
that spit rolling down my cheek.
As the trial resumed, the tense
atmosphere in the courtroom
was heightened
by a spring heat wave.
The state called to the stand
Dr. R.R. Bridges
the Scottsboro physician
who had examined Price and Bates
hours after they'd been taken
from the train.
As expected, he confirmed
that he had found semen
in their bodies.
Leibowitz now cross-examines him
and essentially turns him
into a witness for the defense.
Leibowitz asked the doctor
if the girls had shown
any signs of a struggle...
Bruises or scratches.
He answered, "No."
Had the girls been hysterical,
breathing heavily
with elevated pulses?
"No."
Had the sperm he had seen
in his microscope been moving?
Again: "No."
The spermatozoa were nonmotile;
that means they were dead
and they would not
have been nonmotile
if six Negroes had ejaculated
themselves into her
an hour to an hour and a half
before she was examined
by the doctor.
Leibowitz next called
his star witness
Lester Carter, to the stand.
Carter testified
that he and a friend
had been with the two girls
the night before
the fateful train ride.
Victoria Price said she knew
where we could go and see fun.
Take a walk, for instance.
SAMUEL LEIBOWITZ Go ahead...
What happened?
We walked up the yards
till we come to
the hobo jungles.
What occurred in
the hobo jungles
that night?
We all sat down near
a bending lake of water
where there was
honeysuckles and
a little ditch.
I hung my hat on a little limb
and went to having
intercourse with Ruby.
By firelight, I saw
Victoria's boyfriend had
intercourse with her.
This is what happened.
It wasn't that they were raped.
Victoria Price, Ruby Bates and
their two boyfriends had sex
and that's all it amounts to.
Throughout Patterson's trial
the other eight defendants
had been kept locked away
in the Decatur jail,
unaware of the proceedings.
Now Leibowitz brought them
to the courthouse
under heavy guard.
Inside, Leibowitz called each
to the stand in turn.
Each denied having ever touched
Victoria Price or Ruby Bates.
The last to take the stand
was Haywood Patterson.
SAMUEL LEIBOWITZ Did you have
anything to do
with a white girl?
I didn't see any girls
on the train.
You are a colored boy.
Would you dare rape
a white girl?
No, sir.
Haywood Patterson,
did you rape this girl?
No, sir!
Each time he would say,
"I did not touch any of them.
I had nothing to do
with any of them."
With Patterson's testimony over
many thought Leibowitz
would rest his case.
What Leibowitz does
is pretend that he's
about to rest his case.
And then he quietly
goes up to the judge
and says, "I'm going
to have one more witness."
The crowd is buzzing.
Horton doesn't know
what's going on.
The prosecution doesn't have
the slightest idea
of what's going on.
The door opens in the back
of the courtroom
and in comes Ruby Bates, only
she's coming into the courtroom
not as a witness
for the prosecution
but as a witness
for the defense.
When she made her appearance
the tension in the court
was palpable.
Knight was jittery.
He turned red.
The crowd, they were aghast:
"There's Ruby Bates
testifying for the defense."
Ruby Bates had spent the months
before the trial in hiding
as far from the media glare
and the clutches
of the prosecution and defense
as she could get.
She had made her way to New York
until, finally, representatives
of the ILD tracked her down
and convinced her
to return to Alabama.
SAMUEL LEIBOWITZ You testified
at Scottsboro
that six Negroes raped you
and six Negroes raped Victoria.
Who coached you to say that?
Victoria told it
and I told it just
like she told it.
Did Victoria tell you
what would happen to you
if you didn't follow her story?
She said we might
have to lay out a
sentence in jail.
So Bates essentially says
that she made the whole thing up
because "Victoria told me
to make it up."
She said, "If I didn't
make up the story
then we would have
to go to jail."
But Ruby fell apart
on cross-examination.
Knight pointed out that
either she was lying now
or had lied two years earlier
in Scottsboro.
Ruby became flustered.
Knight hammered away at her.
He asks her where
she got her pocketbook
where she got her hat,
where she got her coat.
What was she doing in New York?
How did she get
from New York to Alabama?
To each question, she answered,
"T communists."
Aha!
The only reason she's doing this
is because she's been bought
and paid for.
She told the truth
the first time.
Now she's lying for the money
and for the clothing.
The jury, one reporter said,
"smelled the North" on Ruby.
By the time she gets down
off the witness stand
what should have been
the most effective witness
for the defense...
As one of the jurors said later
"We never even considered
her testimony."
Summations began the next day.
Wade Wright,
one of Knight's co-prosecutors
opened with an emotional appeal.
He ridiculed Bates's
"fancy New York clothes"
and called Lester Carter
"Carterinsky."
He turns to the jury, points
his finger to the jury and says
"Show them that Alabama justice
can't be bought and sold
with Jew money from New York!"
Of course, immediately,
Leibowitz is on his feet.
He objected.
He wanted... called
for a mistrial immediately.
Of course, it was overruled.
In his closing argument
Leibowitz called Wade Wright's
summation for the prosecution
a "hangman's speech."
What is it but an appeal
to prejudice
to sectionalism, to bigotry?
He was simply saying,
"Come on, boys!
We can lick this Jew
from New York."
The question here is
whether even this poor scrap
of colored humanity
will receive a square deal.
Finally, Leibowitz said
of Price's testimony
"It is the foul,
contemptible lie
of an abandoned, brazen woman."
At 1:00 on Saturday afternoon
Judge Horton gave the case
to the jury.
The 12 men filed
out of the courthouse
less than two weeks after
they had been sworn in.
Haywood Patterson
nearly forgotten
in the courtroom hubbub
passed the time with his mother
on a bench outside.
At 10:00 the next morning
word came that a verdict
had been reached:
guilty.
And the sentence:
death by electrocution.
Patterson conceded no emotion
as he sat at the defense table
but Leibowitz could not hide
his disappointment.
When that jury brought in
that verdict of guilty
everyone said he looked like
someone had struck him.
He just sank back in his seat
with a look of disbelief
on his face.
The verdict had finally made
plain to Leibowitz himself
how naive he had been.
He had carefully considered
how the jury would see every
aspect of the trial but one...
Himself.
They saw the ultimate outsider...
Someone who was Jewish, totally
foreign to their religion.
They saw someone who was
allegedly a communist
totally foreign
to their political values.
They saw someone who was
defending accused black rapists;
someone totally contrary
to their racial values.
The minute a Jewish lawyer from
New York City came to Alabama
that case was lost.
Upon his return to New York
Leibowitz was swamped
by more than 3,000 admirers.
Carried away, he vented
his anger at the verdict.
If you ever saw
those creatures...
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...
You would not ask
how they could do it.
And of course, there are
the reporters writing it down.
And the next morning there
it's in the newspapers
all over Alabama.
In this case,
I think Leibowitz's ego
his anger got the best of him.
Leibowitz's outburst elicited
howls of protest
throughout the South.
Grover Hall, influential editor
of the Montgomery Advertiser
immediately lashed back.
"He left little,
if anything, undone
"to arouse the resentment,
if not the bitterness
"of everyone in the courtroom,
including members of the jury.
"Mr. Leibowitz came into Alabama
"as the voice of bigotry
and arrogance.
What a stupid lawyer
poor Patterson had!"
Grover Hall,
The Montgomery Advertiser.
Whatever Leibowitz had been
when he entered the case
he was now a different man.
I don't think
there's any question
that Leibowitz felt
much more keenly
having gone through this trial...
Seeing what had happened
to these defendants
seeing the attacks on him...
That there was a kind of bond
in which he saw
this is not simply
these defendants
but also, in a sense,
his own Jewishness was on trial.
In the months following
the verdict
he began to appear
at Scottsboro rallies in Harlem
where he promised to carry on
the struggle in the South.
I will fight to my last breath
to send these boys back to their
parents and to their loved ones.
From his home in Brooklyn,
Leibowitz prepared a motion
asking Judge Horton
to overturn the verdict
and order a new trial.
Judge Horton had retreated
to his farm in Limestone County
after the verdict.
But Leibowitz's motion
now forced him to confront
his own doubts about the case.
When that trial began
he thought
the nine boys were guilty.
And Lord knows
there was plenty of evidence:
their own
contradictory testimony;
the allegations
of the two women.
Then all of a sudden, there's
this cascading kind of evidence
that indicates something
has gone terribly wrong.
At one point, I remember,
he arose from his chair
and watched the manner in which
Victoria Price testified.
And, you know, they say
you can tell a lot
by the way a person speaks.
I think he thought, probably
from early on in the trial
that this woman was lying.
But Horton was
a man of the South
and the South was speaking
in a single voice.
Hundreds of letters arrived
at the Horton home
nearly all praising the verdict.
He had all kinds of pressure
from friends...
Both personal
and political friends...
Saying, "Don't do
what we think you may do.
If you do, it will destroy you
politically."
In his colonnaded home
Horton took up Leibowitz's
motion for a new trial.
Working deep into the night
he pored over every word
of the trial transcript.
Why, he wondered, in the
rich cloud of possible witnesses
had none stepped forward
to corroborate Price's story?
After being brutally raped
why would Price show only
minor scrapes and bruises
to an examining doctor,
and only traces of dead semen?
Was it likely
that nine black teenagers
could have raped two white women
in full view
on a slowly moving train
and then made no move to escape?
"Her testimony was
contradictory, often evasive.
"The proof tends
strongly to show
"that she knowingly
testified falsely
"in many material aspects
of the case.
"Deliberate injustice is more
fatal to the one who imposes it
than to the one
on whom it is imposed."
Judge James Horton.
Here is a man that sees himself
as having to go against much
of what has been his life
much of a system
that he's been a part of
that he's benefited from,
that's been good to him
and now he's going to have
to stand up and say, "Uh-uh."
On June 22, 1933,
in a crowded courtroom
Horton set aside
the guilty verdict.
He ordered the Scottsboro
defendants to stand trial
for the third time.
While the trials had been
going on in the South
outrage over the Scottsboro
affair had migrated
from radical circles
to ordinary people.
In Harlem, thousands had closely
followed the events in Alabama.
The verdict shocked
and radicalized many.
Scottsboro helped forge
a new kind of movement.
Whites and blacks marched
side by side
for the first time
since the days of abolition.
The Scottsboro case was
one of the sparks
that rekindled
the movement for equality.
Between the end of
Reconstruction and the 1930s
there was a struggle
for equality
but it was essentially
a black struggle for equality.
Scottsboro is the rekindling
of an interracial movement
of equality.
"Black and white unite
and fight."
That was a standard in
all of the demonstrations...
This concept
of interracial unity.
The communists seized
on Scottsboro's notoriety
to reach a wider audience.
They sponsored the mothers
of the defendants
on a national speaking tour.
Janie Patterson
who had never traveled more
than 100 miles from her home
led a protest march
on the White House.
Ada Wright, mother
of Roy and Andy Wright
embarked on a six-month tour
of Europe ending in Moscow
where she spoke
before crowds of thousands.
On many stages, the mothers
were joined by Ruby Bates.
Cast out of the South
for her testimony in Decatur
Ruby now apologized for her lie
and proudly proclaimed herself
a communist.
She spoke many times
and told of the great wrong
that she had done
and that she was concerned
that these boys' lives should
not be lost on account of her.
But all the speeches and rallies
in the North
did nothing to deter Alabama.
Almost immediately
after Judge Horton's decision
the state announced
that it would retry
the Scottsboro prisoners.
Alabamians have never
backed away from a fight.
There's no state in this union
that has a bigger chip
on its shoulder than Alabama.
And so, in a sense
this national reaction works
against the Scottsboro boys...
Not to back Alabamians off,
but to harden and toughen
the resistance
to any kind of fair trial.
Once again, Patterson would go
first, but this time
Alabama authorities
were taking no chances.
Attorney General Thomas Knight...
Also the state's prosecutor...
Engineered the removal
of Judge Horton from the case
and named in his place 70-year-
old Judge William Callahan.
Judge Callahan was from
the old school in many ways:
I think much less widely read
than Judge Horton
much less sensitive
to these issues
and, in fact,
to an extraordinary degree
a creature of his own prejudices
so that from day one
in the trial
he becomes, in effect,
another prosecutor.
Repeatedly, throughout the trial
in Callahan's courtroom
the judge frustrated
Leibowitz's defense
overruling his objections
and excluding crucial evidence
to his case.
At one point
Attorney General Knight wanted
to voice an objection
and Callahan said, "Sit down.
I'll take care of him."
And he looked at my father
and he pointed his finger.
So after that,
Attorney General Knight knew
that it wasn't necessary
to form any objections;
Callahan would take care of it.
The jury deliberated a day
before reconvicting Patterson
and sentencing him to death
for the third time.
Norris's trial followed quickly
with the same result.
Leibowitz managed to postpone
the trials of the other seven
but with little hope
of a different outcome.
All nine boys were sent back
to Kilby's death house.
By this time,
their hope was fading.
Kilby Prison was closing in
around them like a shroud.
Despite contributions
from around the world
to purchase new clothes, food,
even musical instruments
the boys' international
notoriety singled them out
for continual torment.
The guards who ran
Kilby Prison...
Certainly the death-row unit...
Saw it as their role
to punish you, to torture you,
to beat you
to brutalize you, to break you.
And that's what happened.
When Charlie Weems
was discovered
reading communist literature,
guards dragged him from his cell
and beat him
until he begged for mercy.
At one point
Ozie Powell slashed the throat
of a sheriff's deputy
with a homemade knife.
A second officer then shot him
in the head.
Though he survived,
Powell was never the same.
Patterson and Norris feuded
constantly over gambling debts
Norris once stabbing Patterson
with a prison shank.
They started to turn
on one another.
They started to fight
with one another.
They grew more hopeless
about their situation.
They were literally living
like dying men might live.
The boys' cells were separated
by a thin door
from Kilby's electric chair.
Norris would lay awake listening
to the midnight executions.
Norris can hear the last words.
Every single individual
who was going to be executed
Norris hears the last words.
The switch is thrown.
The lights actually dim
in the death house itself.
Every time it was him
going in there.
It was him dying, over and over
and over and over again.
Back in New York, Mr. Leibowitz
tells of the appeals.
The appeals are now being rushed
to the Alabama Supreme Court.
I have every confidence in the
world that we shall win there.
In the event that we do not,
we are going right on up
to the United States
Supreme Court in Washington
Leibowitz soldiered on
with one last appeal
to stop the scheduled execution
of his clients.
In each of the Scottsboro trials
the boys had faced
an all-white jury...
A clear violation, he believed
of their right to equal
protection under the law.
White Alabamians did not believe
that blacks ought to serve
on juries.
And black Alabamians assumed
that they would not serve
on juries.
They never had.
In February 1935
the Supreme Court of the United
States heard Norris v. Alabama
which would determine
whether Alabama had purposely
excluded blacks
from their juries.
To prove that they had
Leibowitz brought with him the
huge jury rolls from Decatur.
In them, he had made
a startling discovery.
Of the prospective jurors
listed, all were white
except for a handful of blacks
whose names appeared
to have been hastily scrawled
at the bottoms of several pages.
They just took
a whole group of blacks
and added them to the list
as if they had been there
all the time.
And when the judges of the
Supreme Court looked at that
they had no comment.
They just looked, said...
in effect, said, "Oh, my God!"
It was crude.
In a landmark decision,
the Supreme Court ruled
that Alabama had deliberately
excluded blacks
from their juries
and yet again overturned
the guilty verdicts.
Exhausted, embarrassed and near
broke from trial after trial
Alabama's once united front
regarding Scottsboro
finally began to crumble.
A lot of Southerners
began to say
"Look, this thing is more
trouble than it's worth.
"And there really are
serious questions here
and maybe the best thing to do
is to settle this case."
Grover Hall, editor
of the Montgomery Advertiser
once one of the
most ardent defenders
of the Scottsboro verdicts
began to wonder if something
had not gone terribly wrong.
"The Advertiser knows,
all of its readers know
"the whole of this sordid,
sickening story.
"Scottsboro has stigmatized
Alabama
"throughout the civilized world.
"We herewith suggest and urge
"that the state now move for
a decent, dignified compromise.
"Nothing can be gained
"by demanding
the final pound of flesh.
Throw this body of death away
from Alabama."
Grover Hall.
Hall quietly began to lobby
for an end
to the Scottsboro prosecutions
and the parole
of its defendants.
State officials listened
but made clear that one
condition would have to be met:
Samuel Leibowitz
would have to go.
For Leibowitz, the notion
that he shared blame
for the convictions
of his own clients
was almost too bitter
to swallow.
He never believed that
for a moment.
Their blackness convicted them...
Not him, not the ILD
not all the other extraneous
influences in the case.
The fact is they're black,
and that's what convicted them.
But Leibowitz had no choice
but to give in.
As Alabama began
the fourth trial
of the Scottsboro defendants
he stepped aside in favor
of a Southern attorney.
I can't imagine many things
more difficult for Sam Leibowitz
than to sit in a courtroom and
be the second-ranked attorney...
To sit there while another
attorney takes on the case.
But everyone convinced him
that that's what he had to do.
With Leibowitz gone
Alabama quickly convicted
five of the defendants.
But it abruptly dropped the
charges against the other four:
Olin Montgomery,
Willie Roberson, Roy Wright
and Eugene Williams.
Two of them are 13 years old
at the time
the incident took place.
One of them was blind,
one of them had syphilis
and simply couldn't have
had sexual intercourse.
And basically
the state said, "All right
we'll give you those."
♪ We're Alabama
and you better watch out ♪
♪ The landlord get you,
gonna jump and shout ♪
♪ Scottsboro boys,
Scottsboro boys ♪
♪ They can tell you
what it's all about... ♪
The four were spirited out
of Alabama in July 1937
after six years in jail.
♪ Scottsboro boys,
Scottsboro boys ♪
♪ They can tell you
what it's all about... ♪
They arrived in New York
the next day.
Leibowitz was so overcome
that he took off his straw hat
and punched a hole through it.
For a moment
the freed defendants
were celebrated as heroes.
They were taken
on a speaking tour
and booked into the Apollo
Theater, where they sang, danced
and took part in a reenactment
of their trial.
♪ Scottsboro boys,
Scottsboro boys ♪
♪ they can tell you
what it's all about. ♪
But just as suddenly,
the fanfare died down.
The boys drifted back
into obscurity.
Their pleas for help
to their former sponsors
frequently went unanswered.
For the five defendants
remaining in Kilby
the release of the four others
only heightened their despair.
Their supporters continued
to push for their release.
"How," asked Grover Hall, "could
the Scottsboro defendants
be half guilty
and half innocent?"
By 1941, the Alabama Parole
Board had met three times
each time refusing
to free the prisoners.
The boys,
now grown to men in prison
received fewer
and fewer visitors
and watched as the Scottsboro
case began to disappear
from the nation's consciousness.
But world's forgetfulness
proved to be
the Scottsboro prisoners'
greatest ally.
As the rancorous attacks
on Alabama ended
the state at last bowed
to reason and exhaustion.
In the end, it was not letters,
marches or editorials
but time alone that brought
the Scottsboro affair to an end.
In November 1943
the Alabama Parole Board met
for a fourth time.
This time it voted to parole
31-year-old Charlie Weems
after 12 years in Kilby.
Two months later,
Andy Wright was released.
Then Clarence Norris.
In 1946, Ozie Powell, 33,
was let go.
Only Patterson, the man whose
defiant pride had marked him
from the beginning as the
most visible, the most hated
of the Scottsboro defendants,
remained in prison...
"sullen, vicious
and incorrigible"
according to the
Alabama Parole Board.
Patterson had become a creature
of Alabama's prisons.
He was sent
to Atmore Prison Farm
where he worked in the hot sun
for 12 hours a day
chained to other prisoners.
Throughout everything,
he would later write
Scottsboro haunted his dreams.
"I laid on the top bunk
"in a way still feeling
I was on a moving freight.
"Nothing was standing still.
"I was busy living
from minute to minute
"and everything was rumbling.
"I dreamed bad dreams with
freight trains, guards' faces
and courtrooms mixed up with
the look of the sky at night."
Haywood Patterson.
On a hot afternoon in July 1948
Patterson slipped away
from Atmore
with eight other prisoners.
With dogs in pursuit, he waded
through streams for days
and was harbored at night
by sympathetic black families.
Finally, he hopped a freight
north to Detroit
where his sister and her family
were waiting.
The last of the Scottsboro boys
was free.
The town of Scottsboro
has never lived down
the accident of geography
that forged its name
with those of the defendants.
If the train had gone
300 more yards,
I believe it was
it would have been
in Madison County
and we certainly
wouldn't have objected.
That's very true, it would
have been the Huntsville boys
instead of the Scottsboro boys
and we would have been
very glad of that.
The year after Judge James
Horton overturned the verdict
in the Decatur trial,
he was defeated for reelection
and would never again serve
on the bench.
On the top of a campaign speech
he had scrawled
a note to himself:
"Ye shall know the truth, and
the truth shall make you free."
Samuel Leibowitz never won
a victory in an Alabama court
for the Scottsboro defendants,
but he did save their lives.
With the Supreme Court decision
in Norris v. Alabama
he also set in motion the
integration of Southern juries
which would make possible many
of the civil rights victories
in later decades.
In 1941, Leibowitz was appointed
to the bench in New York
where, with a new vantage point
he became a passionate advocate
for capital punishment.
Victoria Price disappeared
after the last Scottsboro trial
and was presumed to have died
sometime in the mid-1950s.
Then in 1976,
she surfaced to sue NBC
for broadcasting
a television movie
that portrayed her
as a prostitute and a liar.
The suit was settled quietly
for what for NBC was a pittance
but for Victoria Price was more
money than she'd ever known.
She died, for real, a few
years later, still insisting
that she had told the truth.
After their release from prison
most of the Scottsboro
defendants led troubled lives
in the North.
Haywood Patterson killed a man
in self-defense in a bar fight
and died in a Michigan
penitentiary at the age of 39.
Andy Wright wound up
in Albany, New York
where he was again falsely
accused of raping a white girl;
this time he was acquitted.
His brother Roy,
youngest of the defendants
served in the army and married.
In 1959, convinced that
his wife was cheating on him
Roy shot and killed her
and then, with his Bible by his
side, shot and killed himself.
He is buried in a neglected
cemetery in Chattanooga.
Beside him, in an unmarked
grave, lies his brother Andy.
I think that's perhaps
an ultimate tragedy...
People pulled into history
who never wanted
to be pulled into history
suddenly put
on a national platform
and tragically paraded out
for everybody's benefit
but their own.
And the question of who
really cared about them
who really defended them...
Almost everyone had an agenda
that involved
the Scottsboro boys.
And I think the courage
of the Scottsboro boys
is just surviving...
just enduring.
Of all the Scottsboro
defendants, only Clarence Norris
made a life for himself
in the North.
He broke parole in 1946
and fled Alabama
making his way to New York.
Assuming his brother's name, he
got a job as a sanitation worker
married twice, raised a family,
and began a fight
to get a full pardon
from the state of Alabama.
He wanted the world to know
that he was an innocent man.
He had a responsibility now
to make sure
that the world understood
that those nine defendants
in 1931 were innocent
and that it was racism,
only racism
that, in fact, forced them to
spend all those years in prison.
On an October day in 1976,
Norris received word
that Governor George Wallace
had pardoned him.
Clarence Norris flies to Alabama
goes and meets the members
of the Pardon and Parole Board
and there goes into
George Wallace's office
and George Wallace
the great defender of the
racial status quo in the South
signs a pardon saying,
"We were wrong"
that Alabama made a mistake
in the 1930s
and Clarence Norris
never raped anybody.
The Scottsboro defendants
never raped anybody.
Mr. Norris, this is
your pardon, full pardon.
He was very emotional
when he received the pardon
at the press conference
because he remembered
getting off that train
with those other eight guys
and here he was, getting
his pardon... he was alone.
And I'm sure
he could feel them around him.
I'm sure he could
feel their presence
and he thought about them,
"Why me?"
I have no hate or prejudice
against any creed or color.
I like all people, and I think
all people accused of things
which they didn't commit
should be free.
I wish these other eight boys
was around.