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    Behind the Scenes at Scottsboro

    By Morris Shapiro

    The Nation
    August 14, 1937
    Vol. 145, No. 7, P. 170

  1. Alabama justice has yielded to expediency in the Scottsboro case. No other explanation is possible for the farcical finale which left the slate in the anomalous position of providing only 50 per cent protection for the "flower of Southern womanhood." Four of the nine Negroes originally arrested on March 25, 1931, for rape still are in prison—one under sentence of death, two for seventy-five years, and one, for some reason inscrutable to all save the members of the jury which convicted him, for ninety-nine years. Four others, with no less evidence against them, have been freed by the state, while the ninth, as though to make things exactly even, was spared a trial on the charge of raping Victoria Price and allowed to plead guilty to assault on a deputy. For that he got a twenty-year sentence in prison, Judge W. W. Callahan explaining that if the rape charge had not been dropped, he would have let him off with fifteen years on the assault charge.

  2. Thus did a self-serving prosecution seek to appease both local and foreign opinion—meaning all opinion outside the borders of Alabama—not that justice might at last be done, but that a case which has become a stench in the nostrils of the more literate minority of Alabamans might be brought to an end. Whether even that objective will be achieved remains to be seen.

  3. The release of four of the defendants, Roy Wright, Olin Montgomery, Eugene Williams, and Willie Roberson, was in no sense the result of a trade or compromise. The state decided what it would do, and informed the defense. The prosecution was tired of prosecuting. It wanted assurances, which it did not get, that there would be no more appeals and no more retrials. However, Alabama still holds as hostages five of the nine originally accused—and their sympathizers and lawyers.

  4. It was no accident that Clarence Norris, the first Negro to be tried since Haywood Patterson was convicted and sentenced to seventy-five years' imprisonment, drew a death sentence from the hands of the jury which tried him. What better warning could have been delivered to a defense which previously had announced its intention of appealing Patterson's conviction to the highest court in the land? With Norris under sentence of death, the state, anxious to forestall further appeals in the cases that twice have been sent back for retrial by the United States Supreme Court, could afford a generous gesture. It came in the form of a waiver of the death penalty in the trials of Andy Wright and Charlie Weems. In exchange, Samuel Leibowitz waived his right to a special venire of sixty-five required by law in capital cases, and agreed to take his chances on the regular panel or thirty-five. "It was like being asked to swap a turkey for a horse," he said at the time.

  5. One week before the trials ended, the state, represented by Thomas S. Lawson, Assistant Attorney-General, and Melvin C. Hutson, the local Circuit Solicitor, had determined on their course and had their minds made up to drop the indictments against four of the Negroes who were identified with the same degree of positiveness as all the others by Victoria Price, the lone complaining witness remaining since Ruby Bates recanted her charges.

  6. Yet in subsequent trials Mr. Lawson and Mr. Hutson prosecuted Wright and Weems as relentlessly as ever. The mellifluous Melvin, clothed in righteousness and a wrinkled seersucker suit, dwelt at length, in his summation, on racial peculiarities which, he said, made it impossible for any Southern white man to believe that a dozen Negroes "flushed with their victory in a fight with white men" could have resisted the temptation offered by two freight-hopping white girls decked out in overalls.

  7. The measure of their hyprocrisy [sic] lies in the comment one of them made in the interval between the time when the jury in the Weems case retired and the time when it rendered its verdict, which was the signal for the wholesale quashing of indictments against the remaining defendants. Victoria Price, repeating her testimony for the eleventh time before a jury, had become hopelessly entangled in her own contradictions. She had squirmed and wriggled for two hours on the stand, even disputing the stenographic record of her testimony at other trials. So palpably was she lying about some points of her story that Mr. Leibowitz, with the jury excused, asked Judge W. W. Callahan to dismiss the indictment against Weems. At the end of that trial a member of the prosecution staff remarked that he was glad he never would have to offer her testimony in another trial. "She was the sorriest witness I ever saw in a courtroom," admitted the harassed lawyer.

  8. That probably is as near as anyone will ever come to getting an honest explanation from any Alabama official regarding the reason for the seemingly irrational outcome of six and a half years of litigation over the lives of the Negroes placed in jeopardy by a white woman's charge of rape. To those who have been closely associated with the case from the start, it is apparent, however, that while juries are as willing as ever to convict the Negroes on her story, the repeated defense assaults upon her often-repeated story have succeeded in shaking the faith of lawyers for the state in the veracity of the woman on whose honesty the whole case stands or falls. After six and a half years the high-pitched, screechy voice of Victoria Price has begun to sound a little hollow and tinny to "Buster" Lawson, whose eyes are on the attorney-generalship of Alabama. If it weren't for that latter fact nine Negroes instead of four might be free today. As long ago as last December the state made a tacit admission of this fact when the late Lieutenant-Governor Thomas E. Knight, Jr., the special prosecutor in earlier trials, came to New York with Attorney-General A. A. Carmichael on their own initiative and of their own volition to propose a face-saving formula to Mr. Leibowitz.

  9. At a meeting in the New Yorker Hotel Mr. Leibowitz and Mr. Carmichael agreed that Patterson's seventy-five-year sentence should be commuted to five years, that four of the Negroes should get off with five-year sentences if they would plead to charges of simple assault, and that the remaining four—the same ones who now have been given their freedom—should go scot-free. Later there was another meeting in the Congressional Library in Washington, after which Mr. Carmichael said it wouldn't take him "more than five minutes to iron out the remaining differences" between himself and Mr. Leibowitz.

  10. It fell to the lot of Mr. Lawson to report the negotiations to Judge Callahan, who ever since he entered the cases has been the ablest member of the prosecution staff. Mr. Lawson visited Judge Callahan at Decatur and was angrily informed that the court never would "agree to accept fifty-dollar fines for rape," which was his method of characterizing the agreement between prosecution and defense.

  11. This apparently was enough for Mr. Carmichael, who without further ado betook himself to North Carolina, while Judge Callahan placed the trials of the Scottsboro Negroes on his calendar for July. The Attorney-General, who by reason of his office is known in Alabama as "General" Carmichael, did not return within the borders of his state until the trials ended, and he remained out of reach of influential members of the bar, editors of powerful Alabama newspapers, and others who sought to make him abide by his agreement, leaving it to Mr. Lawson, a candidate for the attorney-generalship in the next election, to take the rap for him.

  12. His absence at this crucial time prompted a friend of Mr. Lawson's to tell a story about a Negro in the World War. A colored private, ordered over the top with his company, advanced for some distance over no-man's land, when, with machine-gun bullets whistling past his ears, he turned and ran back toward his own goal posts. In the haste of his retreat, he ran over his own trenches, back past the reserve lines, and finally burst out through a thicket miles behind the lines. There he stumbled, panting, upon the figure of a man with stars on his shoulder straps sitting astride a horse.

  13. "Halt!" shouted the horseman.

  14. "Who is you?" asked the Negro soldier.

  15. "I'm the General," replied the officer on the horse.

  16. "Lordy me," gasped the colored soldier. "I didn't know I'd come that far back."

  17. The story-teller added: "They call Mr. Carmichael 'General' here. It's a sort of courtesy title, you know."

  18. Appeals from all the convictions in Decatur have been filed. In each case the basis was laid for a final appeal to the United States Supreme Court.