Criminal
03-04-2003, 01:21 PM
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/FTrials/scottsboro/SCOTTS.JPG
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/FTrials/scottsboro/scottsb.htm
No crime in American history-- let alone a crime that never occurred-- produced as many trials, convictions, reversals, and retrials as did an alleged gang rape of two white girls by nine black teenagers on the Southern Railroad freight run from Chattanooga to Memphis on March 25, 1931. Over the course of the next two decades, the struggle for justice of the "Scottsboro Boys," as the black teens were called, made celebrities out of anonymities, launched and ended careers, wasted lives and produced heroes, opened southern juries to blacks, exacerbated sectional strife, and divided America's political.
HISTORY OF THE CASE
Two Huntsville Mill Girls Hobo to Chattanooga
On March 24, 1931, two mill girls from Huntsville in Madison County, northern Alabama, dressed up in overalls and hoboed their way by freight train to Chattanooga, Tenn., about 97 miles away. The older of the two, Victoria Price, who said she was born in Fayettesville, Tenn. and gave her age as 21, planned the trip, urging the younger one, Ruby Bates, 17 years old, to go with her.
All that is in known so far of this trip is what Victoria Price later told concerning it on the witness stand. No check on the truth of her story was made at the trial. According to this story, the two girls arrived in Chattanooga late Tuesday, March 24, and went to spend the night at the home of Mrs. Callie Brochie, who lived, according to Victoria, several blocks off Market Street on North Seventh. Victoria said she did not know the number of the house, but found the place by asking a boy on the street where Mrs. Brochie lived. He pointed it out to the two girls, she said, and all she could say was that it was the fourth house in the block.
A thorough investigation of the neighborhood later by the attorney for the defense failed to discover either Mrs. Brochie or the house she was said to live in.
The Return to Huntsville
As the story of Victoria Price goes, the two girls spent the night with Mrs. Brochie, and set out the next morning with her to look for work in the mills. Victoria was not clear in her trial testimony as to the number and location of these mills where she said they tried to get work. Finding no jobs open, they decided to return home to Huntsville. This was around ten o'clock on the morning of March 25. Boarding an oil tanker at first, they later climbed over into a gondola, or open topped freight car used for carrying gravel. The car was partly filled with gravel. Here they met seven white boys and began talking to them Ruby declared in a private interview later that she did not speak to them but stayed in one end of the car by herself, while Victoria was talking, laughing and singing with the white boys in the other end of the car. Victoria, however, said that both she and Ruby had talked to the boys.
As the freight neared Stevenson, less than half the way to Huntsville, Victoria testified that the 12 Negroes climbed into the gondola in which the two girls were riding with the seven white youths, walking over the top of a box car in front and jumping into the gondola. Ruby said in a personal interview later that she did not know how many colored boys were in the crowd. She said she was too frightened to count them. The Negroes gave the number of their gang as 15. Victoria maintained emphatically that there were 12.
The Alleged Rape
According to Victoria's testimony, a Negro identified at the trial as Charlie Weems came first waving a pistol, followed by the others in the crowd. A mile or two past Stevenson, Victoria said that the Negroes began fighting with the white boys, shouting "unload, you white sons-of-bitches" and forcing the white boys to jump from the freight which was moving at a fast rate of speed. One of the white boys, Orvil Gilley, who said he was afraid to jump for fear he would be killed, was allowed by the Negroes to remain. One of the Negroes testified that he pulled Gilley back upon the car as he was hanging over the edge for fear he might fall between the cars and be killed. The local papers reporting the trial, however, claimed that he was forced to remain out of viciousness to witness the alleged assault.
Victoria's story continued that while the freight was moving rapidly between Stevenson and Paint Rock, a distance of approximately 38 miles, the Negroes having driven the seven white boys from the train, attacked the two girls. Victoria Price testified that six raped her and six, Ruby Bates. Three of the ones who attacked Ruby got off before the train stopped at Paint Rock, Victoria said. She alleged that Charlie Weems was the leader and carried a pistol, but that Clarence Norris was the first one to attack her. He was followed by four others who took turns holding, she claimed, and then the leader, Weems, as the last one, was in the process of raping her when the train stopped at Paint Rock and the Negroes were captured by the posse who had been notified by telegraph from Stevenson that the Negroes were on the train.
The white gang, after having been put off the train, had informed the station master at Stevenson that the Negroes and the two white girls were on the freight. The station agent telegraphed ahead to Scottsboro, a station about 18 miles west of Stevenson, to have the train stopped, but the freight had already passed there, so Paint Rock, some 20 miles farther, was notified by telegraph.
Here nine of the Negroes were seized by an armed posse of officers and men. The other Negroes had left the train before it arrived at Paint Rock and nothing more has been heard from them. A report appeared in the press some days after the trial that two Negroes were captured and an attempt made to identify them as members of the crowd of nine Negroes in the Scottsboro case. Nothing more was said about it, so the attempt apparently fell through.
Plausibility of the Charges Questioned
The International Labor Defense, which had representatives on the scene at the time of the trial in Scottsboro, and whose attorney, George Chamlee, of Chattanooga, later made investigations of various phases of the case not brought out at the trial, claims that when the two girls were taken from the train at Paint Rock, they made no charges against the Negroes, until after they were taken into custody; that their charges were made after they had found out the spirit of the armed men that came to meet the train and catch the Negroes, and that they were swept into making their wholesale accusation against the Negroes merely by assenting to the charges as presented by the men who seized the nine Negroes.
There is no way of proving this conclusively, but from the interview I had with the two girls separately several weeks after the trial, I would say that there is a strong possibility of truth in this statement. The talk with Victoria Price, particularly, convinced me that she was the type who welcomes attention and publicity at any price. The price in this case meant little to her, as she has no notions of shame connected with sexual intercourse in any form and was quite unbothered in alleging that she went through such an experience as the charges against the nine Negro lads imply. Having been in direct contact from the cradle with the institution of prostitution as a side-line necessary to make the meager wages of a mill worker pay the rent and buy the groceries, she has no feeling of revulsion against promiscuous sexual intercourse such as women of easier lives might suffer. It is very much a matter of the ordinary routine of life to her, known in both Huntsville and Chattanooga as a prostitute herself.
The younger girl, Ruby Bates, found herself from the beginning pushed into the background by the more bubbling, pert personality of Victoria. She was given little chance to do anything but follow the lead of Victoria, so much quicker and garrulous. When I talked with her alone she showed resentment against the position into which Victoria had forced her, but did not seem to know what to do except to keep silent and let Victoria do the talking. The general opinion of the authorities at the trial was that Ruby was slow and stupid, but that Victoria was a shrewd young woman whose testimony amounted to something because she got the point at once of what was needed to hurry the trial through so that sentence of death could be pronounced quickly. From my many talks with Judge Hawkins, who presided at the trial; with Dr. Bridges who examined the girls, and with other officials, I believe any unbiased person would have come to the conclusion that this was the basis of their judgment of the two girls as witnesses.
The Trial
About 5:45 in the morning on April 6, a picked detachment of the 167th infantry under Major Joe Stearnes, made up of 118 members of five national guard companies of Gadsden, Albertville and Guntersville, Alabama, brought the nine negroes from Gadsden and locked them in the county jail at Scottsboro until the hour of their trial. People from surrounding counties and states began arriving by car and train with the coming of dawn. Thousands had gathered by the time the trial opened at 8:30 o'clock. By ten o'clock it was estimated that a crowd of 8,000 to 10,000 swarmed in the narrow village streets of the little county seat of Scottsboro, packing the outside rim of the Square around the Courthouse with a solid mass of humanity. Armed soldiers formed a picket line to keep the mass of people out of the Square, and no one was admitted into the Courthouse without a special permit.
A Lynching Spirit
Officials and residents of Scottsboro maintained that the crowd was peaceful and showed no evidence of lynching spirit. Mrs. Ben Davis, local reporter for the Chattanooga Times, wrote that the crowd was "curious not furious" and was so pleased with her phrase that she continued to repeat it innumerable times when interviewed. Judge Hawkins, Dr. Bridges, Hamlin Caldwell, the court stenographer; Sheriff Wann and many others were emphatic in their statements that the crowd had poured into Scottsboro in the spirit of going to a circus and wanted to see the show, but were without malicious intent toward the defendants.
Chance conversation with residents of the town, however, did not tend to substantiate this view of the officials. A kind-faced, elderly woman selling tickets at the railroad station, for instance, said to me that if they re-tried the Negroes in Scottsboro, she hoped they would leave the soldiers home next time. When I asked why, she replied that the next time they would finish off the "black fiends" and save the bother of a second trial. Then she told me a lurid story of the mistreatment suffered by the two white girls at the hands of those "horrible black brutes" one of whom had had her breast chewed of by one of the Negroes.
When I called to her attention that the doctor's testimony for the prosecution was to the effect that neither of the girls showed signs of any rough handling on their bodies, it made not impression upon her. Her faith in her atrocity story which had been told to her "by one who ought to know what he was talking about," remained unshaken.
If, as the town authorities claimed, there was no lynching spirit, Major Stearnes, in charge of the soldiers called to Scottsboro, certainly did not go on this supposition. The town looked like an armed camp in war time. Armed soldiers were on guard both inside and outside the courthouse, and before Court opened, the Major gave orders to have persons in attendance at the trial searched.
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/FTrials/scottsboro/scottsb.htm
No crime in American history-- let alone a crime that never occurred-- produced as many trials, convictions, reversals, and retrials as did an alleged gang rape of two white girls by nine black teenagers on the Southern Railroad freight run from Chattanooga to Memphis on March 25, 1931. Over the course of the next two decades, the struggle for justice of the "Scottsboro Boys," as the black teens were called, made celebrities out of anonymities, launched and ended careers, wasted lives and produced heroes, opened southern juries to blacks, exacerbated sectional strife, and divided America's political.
HISTORY OF THE CASE
Two Huntsville Mill Girls Hobo to Chattanooga
On March 24, 1931, two mill girls from Huntsville in Madison County, northern Alabama, dressed up in overalls and hoboed their way by freight train to Chattanooga, Tenn., about 97 miles away. The older of the two, Victoria Price, who said she was born in Fayettesville, Tenn. and gave her age as 21, planned the trip, urging the younger one, Ruby Bates, 17 years old, to go with her.
All that is in known so far of this trip is what Victoria Price later told concerning it on the witness stand. No check on the truth of her story was made at the trial. According to this story, the two girls arrived in Chattanooga late Tuesday, March 24, and went to spend the night at the home of Mrs. Callie Brochie, who lived, according to Victoria, several blocks off Market Street on North Seventh. Victoria said she did not know the number of the house, but found the place by asking a boy on the street where Mrs. Brochie lived. He pointed it out to the two girls, she said, and all she could say was that it was the fourth house in the block.
A thorough investigation of the neighborhood later by the attorney for the defense failed to discover either Mrs. Brochie or the house she was said to live in.
The Return to Huntsville
As the story of Victoria Price goes, the two girls spent the night with Mrs. Brochie, and set out the next morning with her to look for work in the mills. Victoria was not clear in her trial testimony as to the number and location of these mills where she said they tried to get work. Finding no jobs open, they decided to return home to Huntsville. This was around ten o'clock on the morning of March 25. Boarding an oil tanker at first, they later climbed over into a gondola, or open topped freight car used for carrying gravel. The car was partly filled with gravel. Here they met seven white boys and began talking to them Ruby declared in a private interview later that she did not speak to them but stayed in one end of the car by herself, while Victoria was talking, laughing and singing with the white boys in the other end of the car. Victoria, however, said that both she and Ruby had talked to the boys.
As the freight neared Stevenson, less than half the way to Huntsville, Victoria testified that the 12 Negroes climbed into the gondola in which the two girls were riding with the seven white youths, walking over the top of a box car in front and jumping into the gondola. Ruby said in a personal interview later that she did not know how many colored boys were in the crowd. She said she was too frightened to count them. The Negroes gave the number of their gang as 15. Victoria maintained emphatically that there were 12.
The Alleged Rape
According to Victoria's testimony, a Negro identified at the trial as Charlie Weems came first waving a pistol, followed by the others in the crowd. A mile or two past Stevenson, Victoria said that the Negroes began fighting with the white boys, shouting "unload, you white sons-of-bitches" and forcing the white boys to jump from the freight which was moving at a fast rate of speed. One of the white boys, Orvil Gilley, who said he was afraid to jump for fear he would be killed, was allowed by the Negroes to remain. One of the Negroes testified that he pulled Gilley back upon the car as he was hanging over the edge for fear he might fall between the cars and be killed. The local papers reporting the trial, however, claimed that he was forced to remain out of viciousness to witness the alleged assault.
Victoria's story continued that while the freight was moving rapidly between Stevenson and Paint Rock, a distance of approximately 38 miles, the Negroes having driven the seven white boys from the train, attacked the two girls. Victoria Price testified that six raped her and six, Ruby Bates. Three of the ones who attacked Ruby got off before the train stopped at Paint Rock, Victoria said. She alleged that Charlie Weems was the leader and carried a pistol, but that Clarence Norris was the first one to attack her. He was followed by four others who took turns holding, she claimed, and then the leader, Weems, as the last one, was in the process of raping her when the train stopped at Paint Rock and the Negroes were captured by the posse who had been notified by telegraph from Stevenson that the Negroes were on the train.
The white gang, after having been put off the train, had informed the station master at Stevenson that the Negroes and the two white girls were on the freight. The station agent telegraphed ahead to Scottsboro, a station about 18 miles west of Stevenson, to have the train stopped, but the freight had already passed there, so Paint Rock, some 20 miles farther, was notified by telegraph.
Here nine of the Negroes were seized by an armed posse of officers and men. The other Negroes had left the train before it arrived at Paint Rock and nothing more has been heard from them. A report appeared in the press some days after the trial that two Negroes were captured and an attempt made to identify them as members of the crowd of nine Negroes in the Scottsboro case. Nothing more was said about it, so the attempt apparently fell through.
Plausibility of the Charges Questioned
The International Labor Defense, which had representatives on the scene at the time of the trial in Scottsboro, and whose attorney, George Chamlee, of Chattanooga, later made investigations of various phases of the case not brought out at the trial, claims that when the two girls were taken from the train at Paint Rock, they made no charges against the Negroes, until after they were taken into custody; that their charges were made after they had found out the spirit of the armed men that came to meet the train and catch the Negroes, and that they were swept into making their wholesale accusation against the Negroes merely by assenting to the charges as presented by the men who seized the nine Negroes.
There is no way of proving this conclusively, but from the interview I had with the two girls separately several weeks after the trial, I would say that there is a strong possibility of truth in this statement. The talk with Victoria Price, particularly, convinced me that she was the type who welcomes attention and publicity at any price. The price in this case meant little to her, as she has no notions of shame connected with sexual intercourse in any form and was quite unbothered in alleging that she went through such an experience as the charges against the nine Negro lads imply. Having been in direct contact from the cradle with the institution of prostitution as a side-line necessary to make the meager wages of a mill worker pay the rent and buy the groceries, she has no feeling of revulsion against promiscuous sexual intercourse such as women of easier lives might suffer. It is very much a matter of the ordinary routine of life to her, known in both Huntsville and Chattanooga as a prostitute herself.
The younger girl, Ruby Bates, found herself from the beginning pushed into the background by the more bubbling, pert personality of Victoria. She was given little chance to do anything but follow the lead of Victoria, so much quicker and garrulous. When I talked with her alone she showed resentment against the position into which Victoria had forced her, but did not seem to know what to do except to keep silent and let Victoria do the talking. The general opinion of the authorities at the trial was that Ruby was slow and stupid, but that Victoria was a shrewd young woman whose testimony amounted to something because she got the point at once of what was needed to hurry the trial through so that sentence of death could be pronounced quickly. From my many talks with Judge Hawkins, who presided at the trial; with Dr. Bridges who examined the girls, and with other officials, I believe any unbiased person would have come to the conclusion that this was the basis of their judgment of the two girls as witnesses.
The Trial
About 5:45 in the morning on April 6, a picked detachment of the 167th infantry under Major Joe Stearnes, made up of 118 members of five national guard companies of Gadsden, Albertville and Guntersville, Alabama, brought the nine negroes from Gadsden and locked them in the county jail at Scottsboro until the hour of their trial. People from surrounding counties and states began arriving by car and train with the coming of dawn. Thousands had gathered by the time the trial opened at 8:30 o'clock. By ten o'clock it was estimated that a crowd of 8,000 to 10,000 swarmed in the narrow village streets of the little county seat of Scottsboro, packing the outside rim of the Square around the Courthouse with a solid mass of humanity. Armed soldiers formed a picket line to keep the mass of people out of the Square, and no one was admitted into the Courthouse without a special permit.
A Lynching Spirit
Officials and residents of Scottsboro maintained that the crowd was peaceful and showed no evidence of lynching spirit. Mrs. Ben Davis, local reporter for the Chattanooga Times, wrote that the crowd was "curious not furious" and was so pleased with her phrase that she continued to repeat it innumerable times when interviewed. Judge Hawkins, Dr. Bridges, Hamlin Caldwell, the court stenographer; Sheriff Wann and many others were emphatic in their statements that the crowd had poured into Scottsboro in the spirit of going to a circus and wanted to see the show, but were without malicious intent toward the defendants.
Chance conversation with residents of the town, however, did not tend to substantiate this view of the officials. A kind-faced, elderly woman selling tickets at the railroad station, for instance, said to me that if they re-tried the Negroes in Scottsboro, she hoped they would leave the soldiers home next time. When I asked why, she replied that the next time they would finish off the "black fiends" and save the bother of a second trial. Then she told me a lurid story of the mistreatment suffered by the two white girls at the hands of those "horrible black brutes" one of whom had had her breast chewed of by one of the Negroes.
When I called to her attention that the doctor's testimony for the prosecution was to the effect that neither of the girls showed signs of any rough handling on their bodies, it made not impression upon her. Her faith in her atrocity story which had been told to her "by one who ought to know what he was talking about," remained unshaken.
If, as the town authorities claimed, there was no lynching spirit, Major Stearnes, in charge of the soldiers called to Scottsboro, certainly did not go on this supposition. The town looked like an armed camp in war time. Armed soldiers were on guard both inside and outside the courthouse, and before Court opened, the Major gave orders to have persons in attendance at the trial searched.