Race and Racism in the Scottsboro Era (1930's)
William Loren Katz
(Page 2 of 4)

Political change was in the air. In 1929 Oscar De Priest of Chicago was elected the first Black Congressman from a Northern state. Two weeks before the Scottsboro arrests in March 1931, Communists, hoping to turn public misery into a movement toward American socialism, launched "International Unemployment Day" the first major protest against the baleful impact on average Americans of hunger and joblessness. Black and white men and women marched into New York's Union Square in an electrifying demonstration of "we're in the same boat brother" solidarity. In segregated Oklahoma mothers and fathers of both races charged into grocery stores to seize food for their families. In Alabama's dirt-poor Tallapoosa County, Communists from Birmingham started a union of Black tenant farmers, and it had begun to wring concessions from an entrenched, white landlord class. (Kelley, 1990, p. 38-43)

The arrest of the nine Scottsboro youths on March 25, 1931 has to be seen against this background of mounting grass-roots actions against economic woes, and resistance to Jim Crow.  By April 9th four trials that lasted four days convicted the nine youths, and death sentences were mandated for all but one. As Alabama seethed and armed white men began to mass, the Governor summoned state troops to prevent a lynching.

On April 20th the nine defendants suddenly found they were not alone. Two men dressed in overalls to disguise themselves as slick lawyers out of Tuscaloosa whispered to the Nine they came to represent them. One was Joseph Brodsky, chief attorney for the International Labor Defense [ILD], the other his assistant. (Lewis, 2000, p. 257)

By the time the youths were transferred to Kilby prison's death row, Brodsky, the ILD and the American Communist Party were publicizing the case. By April 25th the ILD had organized a massive black and white protest rally in Harlem that was addressed by defendant Haywood Patterson's mother. [Lewis, 2000, P 258]. On May Day 1931 the New York Times reported another Scottsboro protest by 400 black and white men and women on 140th street and Lenox Avenue. 20 police who made four arrests and left "five Communists recovering from battered heads", reported the Times, attacked the peaceful meeting. (Kinshasa, 1997, pp. 44-45)

The New York protests began a worldwide ILD-led campaign to carry the Scottsboro case to major northern cities. To tell the Scottsboro story, the ILD relied not on the usual white attorneys or political figurers to speak for African Americans, but mobilized the defendants' parents. By July first the Times reported on massive Scottsboro rallies in Berlin and other large German cities, and a week later it reported on a protest rally in Havana, Cuba. (Kinshasa, 1997, pp. 44-46)

By July 1931 the Scottsboro case had ignited a local class and race war in Tallapoosa County, Alabama where Black and white Communists from Birmingham had organized a Croppers' and Farm Workers Union [CFWU] and white lawmen became panicky. CFWU members opened and closed their meetings with a prayer and a hymn, and knew little and talked less about Lenin or the USSR. But on the night of July 15th when 150 CFWU members met with their Black organizer, Max Coad, to discuss the Scottsboro case, sheriff Kyle Young and gun-wielding deputies attacked the meeting. The next night Young and his posse set fire to a CFWU church, opened fire on the assembled CFWU members, killing five and arresting 35. This time Young was seriously wounded by gunfire. (Kelley 1990, passim.)

The struggle to save the lives of the Scottsboro youths and later Angelo Herndon, also began to open another, more sophisticated front. As the Negro Theater marchers of 1936 knew, saving the Scottsboro defendants and Herndon also meant attacking the racist stereotypes promoted by Birth of A Nation and Amos and Andy.  It meant a sustained cultural campaign, a battle for American hearts and minds, one that would enlist poets, playwrights, actors, painters, dancers, stagehands, novelists, sculptors, and artists of all kinds.

Leading cultural figures rushed to add their celebrity to the Scottsboro defense, and one of the first was the dynamic actor, singer and activist, Paul Robeson. (Boyle & Bunie, 2001, pp. 409-410) By August 1931, and through the efforts of legendary American novelist Theodore Dreiser, protests against the Alabama frame-up were pouring in from leading intellectuals such as Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann in Germany, Maxim Gorki in the USSR, and Romain Rolland in France. A literary world that would  soon rise to condemn the fascist aggressions of the 1930s - George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos and others - first rose to condemn the fascist justice system in Alabama and Georgia.

Two budding American cultural icons, who were among the first to visit the Scottsboro Nine, quickly joined the fight. Langston Hughes was a young poet touring Black college campuses when in December 1931 he visited the defendants at Kilby Prison. Upon leaving he was moved to write “Scottsboro Unlimited” a collection of four poems and a play. He wrote these words: 

THE DEATH HOUSE. Dark faces peering from behind bars like animals when the keeper comes. All Negro faces, men and young men in this death house at Kilby. . . .
For eight brown boys in Alabama the stars have fallen. In the death house I heard no song at all. Only a silence more ominous than song. All of Brown America locked up there. And no song.
Even as ye do unto the least of these, ye do it unto Me.
White Guard.
The door the leads to DEATH.
Electric chair.
No song. (Berry, 1973, pp. 50-51)

After that visit, Langston Hughes's lectures informed his audiences in prose and poetry about Scottsboro, and told of his visit to their cells as a confrontation with inhumanity.

John Howard Lawson, a young white New York playwright born to immigrant parents, was also moved to action and political commitment by the arrest of the Scottsboro Nine and Angelo Hendon. Bearing letters from The New Republic and The Nation magazines, Lawson visited Alabama and Georgia in 1934 to personally investigate racial matters and southern justice. Taken in custody by Alabama police, he was subjected to questioning for hours, and asked, among other things, "whether I was a Jew." Lawson saw his experiences as "the turning point of my life: I was confronted, suddenly and irrevocably, with the reality of class relations in the United States; I saw the heroism of the Negro people, and I saw the faces of their oppressors...I had never witnessed anything like the open terror, supported by the police power of the state, that was practiced..."

Warned to get out of town, Lawson fled but returned a few weeks later with a team of other investigators. In July 1934 in Birmingham he was arrested for the third time in two months, and concluded that his rights to "freedom of speech and the press" had been nullified. In a series of articles for the New York Post Lawson was able not only to stir national interest in the Scottsboro case, but his articles led to a formal protest by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and civil liberties activists. By the end of that year Lawson became a member of the U.S. Communist party. Later he became one of the most famous Hollywood writers, and then a victim of the anti-Communist witch-hunt Congress unleashed on Hollywood in 1947. (Horne, 2007, pp. 86-87)

The Scottsboro case forced issues of race and racism onto the American stage. I still remember as a young boy being taken to a potent 1930s play that about a violent strike by working people of both races. It was too long ago for me to remember the name of the play or playwright, but I do recall that in the angst-ridden final scene striking white workers have to grapple with tormenting issues of race, class and union leadership. At the play's climax a white anti-union mob first seizes two black strikers and then threatens they will be lynched unless the white union leader surrenders to the mob. After heated and tearful discussion with his members the union leader decides to surrender to the mob in order to win the hostages release. This play did more than challenge racial stereotypes: it made clear that white American workers and union leaders had to commit themselves to fighting racial wrongs in order to keep American workers unified in their struggle for a better life.

The Scottsboro protest movement found its way into the earliest nationwide protest against the deepening economic depression. In December 1931 the country's first National Hunger March of the century rolled into Washington, D.C. demanding federal help for the starving with "no discrimination." Communist-led marchers arrived to music provided by their Unemployed Workers Martini Horn Band. The press describes the group as "of several races, mostly whites and negroes." The protestors assembled to name their “honorary presiding committee” and chose two framed and imprisoned labor leaders and the framed Scottsboro youths. (Folsom, 1991, pp. 293-294)

After fleeing a lynching in his native Mississippi, another young Black man, James Yates, arrived in Chicago around this time and heard Communist speakers in a park denounce Scottsboro, and call for relief for starving people of both races. Yates joined a march of working people to the legislature in Springfield to seek economic relief. The integrated march left Chicago, thousands join along the way, and Yates finds himself shivering with pleasure. He is caught up in the "fever and found myself singing with a passion I had not felt for years."

I was part of their hopes, their dreams, and they were part of mine. And we were part of an even larger world of marching poor people... We were millions. We couldn't lose. My throat swelled with price. I sang loud enough for all Chicago to hear.

Farmers along the way offer marchers their barns and fields to rest and sleep and food and water to drink.  But as the protest force nears Springfield, National Guard troops fire tear gas and then attack man, women and children.

Tear gas clawed at my eyes. All about me men, women and children screamed and sought to evade the clubs that swung at us indiscriminately. The Guardsmen on horse attempted to ride us down.

Yates sees Black people helping white people, and white people helping Black people. Then, blinded by tear gas, he is clubbed and clubbed again, and looks up to see a guardsman who “slams his booted foot into his right eye, then another foot lands on my back and head... I had now experienced the power of the state. (Yates, 1989, pp. 72-75)

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