1938: Scottsboro Case

Of the nine Negro boys originally tried in 1931 for the alleged rape of two white girls while riding on an Alabama freight train, five were still fighting for their freedom in 1938. On June 16 the Alabama Supreme Court affirmed the death sentence decreed for the third time for Clarence Norris. In July this sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by Governor Graves. In prison with Norris were Andy Wright, serving a 99-year sentence, Weems and Patterson, serving sentences of 75 years each, and Ozzie Powell, serving a 20-year sentence, not for the original charge, but for slashing the throat of a deputy sheriff in an attempt to escape in 1937. Four of the defendants were released in 1937 after the indictment against them had been nol prossed.

Dr. Alan Knight Chalmers of New York, Chairman of the Scottsboro Defense Committee, went before the Alabama State Board of Pardons to request that Norris, Weems, Patterson and Wright be liberated in the custody of his committee. The Board denied Dr. Chalmers' plea, and Governor Graves acquiesced in its findings.

This, then, was the status in 1938 of nine defendants who have been the center of the most fiercely-debated and most-tried case in the history of American criminal law. In the years between 1931 and 1938 the boys have stood trial together or individually three or four times each. There have been two appeals to the Supreme Court of the United States. In the second series of trials, one of the two complaining witnesses, Ruby Bates, disappeared for several days, and when she reappeared in the custody of Henry Emerson Fosdick, minister of the Riverside Church of New York City, she denied all her previous testimony and asserted that the whole story against the defendants had been fabricated by her companion, Mrs. Victoria Price, on the ill-fated ride. Despite this testimony of Ruby Bates, the jury returned a verdict of guilty, only to have this verdict set aside by Judge Horton as against the 'weight of the evidence.' So the case has gone on, jockeyed from one change of venue to another, from jury to appellate court, from appellate court to the United States Supreme Court, and back again to local juries.

The legal battle has been made more furious by the extraneous issues involved in this case, namely, the question of white supremacy, the issue of Northern interference in Southern affairs, and the more recent issue of Communism, due to the political color of some of the forces aligned on the side of the accused Negroes.

The Scottsboro Case has provoked protest meetings not only throughout this country, but in many European countries. Four of the nine defendants spent six years in jail before their cases were finally thrown out. The other five seem doomed to remain in prison for some years to come. The Scottsboro Defense Committee, however, still functions, and the Governor of Alabama has the unrestricted right of pardon. On this account, although all legalistic procedures for obtaining the freedom of the five defendants appear exhausted, the Committee still hopes to persuade the Governor of Alabama to use this right of pardon on behalf of the Negroes still imprisoned.