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 a Southern Railroad freight run on March 25, 1931. Over the course of the two decades that followed, 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, produced heroes, opened southern juries to blacks, exacerbated sectional strife, and divided America's political left.

Hoboeing was a common pastime in the Depression year of 1931. For some, riding freights was an appealing adventure compared to the drudgery and dreariness of their daily lives. Others hopped rail cars to move from one fruitless job search to the next. Two dozen or so mainly male--and mainly young--whites and blacks rode the Southern Railroad's Chattanooga to Memphis freight on March 25, 1931. Among them were four black Chattanooga teenagers hoping to investigate a rumor of government jobs in Memphis hauling logs on the river and five other black teens from various parts of Georgia. Four young whites, two males and two females dressed in overalls, also rode the train, returning to Huntsville from unsuccessful job searches in the cotton mills of Chattanooga.

Soon after the train crossed the Alabama border, a white youth walked across the top of a tank car. He stepped on the hand of a black youth named Haywood Patterson, who was hanging on to its side. Patterson had friends aboard the train. A stone-throwing fight erupted between white youths and a larger group of black youths. Eventually, the blacks succeeded in forcing all but one of the members of the white gang off the train. Patterson pulled the one remaining white youth, Orville Gilley, back onto the train after it had accelerated to a life-endangering speed. Some of the whites forced off the train went to the stationmaster in Stevenson to report what they described as an assault by a gang of blacks. The stationmaster wired ahead. A posse in Paint Rock, Alabama stopped the train. Dozens of men with guns rushed at the train as it ground to a halt. The armed men rounded up every black youth they could find. Nine captured blacks, soon to be called The Scottsboro Boys, were tied together with plow line, loaded on a flatback truck, and taken to a jail in Scottsboro.

Also greeted by the posse in Paint Rock were two millworkers from Huntsville, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates. One or the other of the girls, either in response to a question or on their own initiative, told one of the posse members that they had been raped by a gang of twelve blacks with pistols and knives. In the jail that March 25th, Price pointed out six of the nine boys and said that they were the ones who raped her. The guard reportedly replied, If those six had Miss Price, it stands to reason that the others had Miss Bates. When one of the accused, Clarence Norris, called the girls liars he was struck by a bayonet. A crowd of several hundred men, hoping for a good old-fashioned lynching, surrounded the Scottsboro jail the night of their arrest for rape. Their plans were foiled, however, when Alabama's governor, B. M. Miller, ordered the National Guard to Scottsboro to protect the suspects.

Trials of the Scottsboro Boys began twelve days after their arrest in the courtroom of Judge A. E. Hawkins. Haywood Patterson described the scene as one big smiling white face. Many local newspapers had made their conclusions about the defendants before the trials began. One headline read: ALL NEGROES POSITIVELY IDENTIFIED BY GIRLS AND ONE WHITE BOY WHO WAS HELD PRISONER WITH PISTOL AND KNIVES WHILE NINE BLACK FIENDS COMMITTED REVOLTING CRIME. Representing the Boys in their uphill legal battle were Stephe

n Roddy and Milo Moody. They were no Dream Team. Roddy was an unpaid and unprepared Chattanooga real estate attorney who, on the first day of trial, was so stewed he could hardly walk straight. Moody was a forgetful seventy-year old local attorney who hadn't tried a case in decades.

The defense lawyers demonstrated their incompetence in many ways. They expressed a willingness to have all nine defendants tried together, despite the prejudice such a trial might cause to Roy Wright, for example, who at age twelve was the youngest of the nine Scottsboro Boys. (The prosecution, fearing that a single trial might constitute reversible error, decided to try the defendants in groups of two or three.) The cross-examination of Victoria Price lasted only minutes, while examining doctors R. R. Bridges and John Lynch were not cross-examined at all. Ruby Bates was not asked about contradictions between her testimony and that of Price. The defense offered only the defendants themselves as witnesses, and their testimony was rambling, sometimes incoherent, and riddled with obvious misstatements. Six of the boys (Andy Wright, Willie Roberson, Charles Weems, Ozie Powell, Olen Montgomery, and Eugene Williams) denied raping or even having seen the two girls. But three others, all who later claimed they did so because of beatings and threats, said that a gang rape by other defendants did occur. Clarence Norris provided what one paper called the highlight of the trial when he said of the other blacks, They all raped her, everyone of them. No closing argument was offered by defense attorneys. A local editorialist described the state's case as so conclusive as to be almost perfect.

Guilty verdicts in the first trial were announced while the second trial was underway. The large crowd outside the courthouse let out a roar of approval that was clearly heard by the second jury inside. When the four trials were over, eight of the nine Scottsboro Boys had been convicted and sentenced to death. A mistrial was declared in the case of twelve-year old Roy Wright, when eleven of the jurors held out for death despite the request of the prosecution for only a life sentence in view of his tender age.

The NAACP, which might have been expected to rush to the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, did not. Rape was a politically explosive charge in the South, and the NAACP was concerned about damage to its effectiveness that might result if it turned out some or all of the Boys were guilty. Instead, it was the Communist Party that moved aggressively to make the Scottsboro case their own. The Party saw the case as providing a great recruiting tool among southern blacks and northern liberals. The Communist Party, through its legal arm, the International Labor Defense (ILD), pronounced the case against the Boys a murderous frame-up and began efforts, ultimately successful, to be named as their attorneys. The NAACP, a slow-moving bureaucracy, finally came to the realization that the Scottsboro Boys were most likely innocent and that leadership in the case would have large public relations benefits. As a last-ditch effort to beat back the ILD in the battle over representation, NAACP officials persuaded renowned defense attorney Clarence Darrow to take their case to Alabama. But it was by then too late. The Scottsboro Boys, for better or worse, cast their lots with the Communists who, in the South, were treated with only slightly more courtesy than a gang of rapists.

In January, 1932, the Alabama Supreme Court, by a 6 - 1 vote, affirmed all but one of the eight convictions and death sentences. (The court ruled that Eugene Williams, age thirteen, should have not been tried as an adult.) The cases were appealed to the United States Supreme Court which overturned the convictions in the landmark case ofPowell vs Alabama. The Court, 7 - 2, ruled that the right of the

defendants under the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause to competent legal counsel had been denied by Alabama. There would have to be new trials.

The prosecutor in the retrials was Alabama's newly elected attorney general, Thomas Knight, Jr. Knight's father, Thomas Knight, Sr., had authored the Alabama Supreme Court decision upholding the original convictions.

The ILD selected two attorneys to represent the Scottsboro Boys in the retrials. The ILD quieted skeptics who saw the organization caring more about the benefits it could derive from the case than the Boys' welfare by asking Samuel Liebowitzto serve as the lead defense attorney. Liebowitz was a New York criminal attorney who had secured an astonishing record of seventy-seven acquittals and one hung jury in seventy-eight murder trials. Liebowitz was often described as the next Clarence Darrow. Liebowitz was a mainline Democrat with no connections with or sympathies toward the Communist Party. Joseph Brodsky, the ILD's chief attorney, was selected to assist Liebowitz.

The Scottsboro Boys spent the two years between their first trials and the second round, scheduled to begin in March, 1933 in Decatur, in the deplorable conditions of Depression-era Alabama prisons. While on death row at Kilby prison, on the very date originally set for their own executions, they watched as another inmate was carried off to unsoundproofed death chamber adjacent to their cells, then listened to the sounds of his electrocution. Once or twice a week they were allowed to leave their tiny cells, as they were handcuffed and walked a few yards down the hall to a shower. An early visitor found them terrified, bewildered like scared little mice, caught in a trap. They fought, they wrote letters if they could write at all, they thought about girls and life on the outside, they dreamed of their executions. As their trial date approached, they were moved to the Deca

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