By BRIAN CRAWFORD
“No crime in American history—let alone a crime that never occurred—produced as many trials, convictions, reversals and retrials” as the case of the Scottsboro Boys,” wrote Douglas Linder in “Famous Trials.” Nine young Black men boarded a freight train in Chattanooga, Tenn., bound for Memphis. Accusations of rape would be the catalyst for a legal odyssey that lasted years. It also spawned a defense campaign organized by the International Labor Defense, the legal arm of the Communist Party.
In the 1930s, justice for African Americans in the southern United States did not exist. In cases involving Black defendants and white accusers, invariably the defendant was presumed guilty. The only question was whether the defendant would live to see the trial date. In this context, nine young African American men in Alabama faced certain death.
On March 25, 1931, about two dozen Black and white young men boarded a Southern Railway freight train. Freights served as transportation for the poor during the Depression years. Many went from town to town or across state lines looking for work. Also on this train were two young white women, Victoria Price and Ruby Butler, who had traveled from Huntsville, Ala., to Chattanooga Tennessee looking for work—unsuccessfully as it turned out. On March 25, they were returning home.
A fight broke out between the Blacks and whites. Most of the young white males were forced off the train by the Black men. They reported the incident at one of the stations, and the train was stopped at Paint Rock, Ala. A posse met the train and took the remaining Black passengers (some had deboarded along the way) into custody and then to Scottsboro, Ala.
Bates and Price also exited the train, and to avoid arrest themselves, they accused the young Black men of rape. (Bates would later recant and join the movement to free the Scottsboro Boys.) The accused were: Haywood Patterson, Clarence Norris, Charles Weems, Olen Montgomery, Ozie Powell, Willie Roberson, Eugene Williams, Andy Wright, and Roy Wright. Patterson would be convicted four times in five years.
On April 6, 1931, eight of the nine were convicted and sentenced to death. During the period of 1931 through 1937 there were six trials resulting in convictions. The case appeared before the Alabama Supreme Court on three different occasions; each time, the conviction and the death sentence were upheld. The case was brought before the U.S. Supreme Court twice. It overturned both convictions. The first ruling was on the grounds that the defendants did not have adequate council, and in 1935, in Patterson v. State of Alabama and Norris v. State of Alabama, the Court overturned the convictions based on the exclusion of African Americans from the jury.
Mark Naison wrote in “Communists in Harlem” (p. 57) that the “Communist Party made the details of the Scottsboro case a part of the daily consciousness of the community until Scottsboro became synonymous with southern racism.” The International Labor Defense was created principally by James P. Cannon, then a member of the CP who later would lead the (Trotskyist) Socialist Workers’ Party. The ILD was established as a non-sectarian defense organization; it had previously represented the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti and was also involved in anti-lynching campaigns. Once the ILD took the case, it became the center of the defense campaign. It placed the Scottsboro Boys on the front page of the party newspaper.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) initially refused to accept the case. They feared that a rape case in the South might tarnish its reputation. When the International Labor Defense took the case, the NAACP decided it couldn’t have these young Black men represented by Communists.
The conflict between the NAACP and the CP continued until the end of 1931. The CP attempted to secure support from leaders in Harlem, from ministers to organizations. Meanwhile, the NAACP thwarted its rivals by convincing some ministers to cancel scheduled meetings and journalists to repudiate their favorable opinion pieces. But the ILD by the middle of 1931 represented all nine of the Scottsboro defendants. By the January 1932 they gained control of the case. The ILD combined legal work with the defense campaign, in contrast with the NAACP, which relied on a legalistic approach.
Persuading the defendant’s parents to allow the organization to be their legal representatives was critical. It became a deciding factor in the ILD’s battle with the NAACP. The presence of family members on a national tour, speaking to large crowds across the country, made an impact.
The Amsterdam News appealed to the Black community to support “the defense through the Communist dominated National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners” (Naison, p. 71). Eventually, according to the publisher of the Amsterdam News, Harlem residents believed “that the Scottsboro fight is his fight, and that no sacrifice is too great to make in saving the lives of these defendants.” After Patterson’s second conviction, a Communist Party member stated: “I have never seen such anger and indignation before or since [. . .] Everywhere you went, you saw anger on people’s faces [. . .] If there were ever a revolutionary situation, I imagine that’s what it would look like” (Naison, p. 82).
Some protests in Harlem proceeded downtown. They brought many organizations together, including Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association and churches, the ACLU, and even the NAACP. A march on Washington of 3000 demanded to see President Roosevelt. The defense campaign would spread to cities across the country and around the world.
The ILD was also engaged in the case of Angelo Herndon, a Black Communist Party member. He was arrested and charged with insurrection, a remnant of the old Georgia slave codes. Herndon toured the country speaking about his case. He was convicted, but his conviction was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that the insurrection statute was unconstitutional.
It must be noted that the Scottsboro campaign was carried out in a manner contrary to the practices of the Communist International at the time. The International, dominated by the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR, was sectarian and adverse to working with liberal organizations—often to the detriment of the tasks at hand. The ILD in this case managed to work with some independence, which mattered greatly. In 1935, the ILD, the NAACP, and other organizations joined together in a united Scottsboro Defense Committee.
Legal assistance was extremely important, but it was the Harlem organizing and extending the campaign nationally and internationally that made the difference. The nine young men spent years in prison but for only a fraction of the 75 or 99-year sentences frequently handed down by Alabama courts. Importantly, none were executed. All were eventually pardoned in 2013.
This case illustrates that effective defense campaigns can often succeed against overwhelming odds. Working on multiple fronts, the International Labor Defense managed to prevent the executions by mobilizing a movement to bolster its legal efforts. In this moment, we can utilize this strategy to defend our movements. We must build forces capable of putting this into practice, now and in the future.
